By Bekah Congdon and Audrey Grayson,
from CATO Institute,
Spring, 2024:
Fighting for the freedom to choose the education that best fits their children’s needs is a relentless pursuit for families facing the constraints of a one‐size‐fits‐all system.
The Long Road to Educational Freedom
School Choice Stats
Families across the country are taking advantage of new school choice programs that fund students and help them access education that fits their needs.
- Over 850,000 students enrolled in private schools through school choice programs in 2023.
- Roughly 3.7 million children attend charter schools in the United States.
- Following the pandemic, private school enrollment increased by 4 percent and homeschool enrollment increased by 30 percent.
- As of 2020, the national average per pupil spending in public schools was $14,789. The national average private school tuition in 2023 was $12,686 per year.
Cato has long been a leading source for research on educational choice. As far back as 1981, Cato published studies on the problems with the monopoly school system and the opportunities for competition.
Cato’s work has powered school choice to grow by leaps and bounds. As of 1989, there were no private school choice programs or charter schools in the United States. In 2023, there were more than 1.3 million students utilizing alternative education, including private schools and homeschooling, through tax credit scholarship, voucher, or education savings account (ESA) programs and roughly 3.7 million children in publicly funded, privately run charter schools.
In 1996, Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke urged his city’s school board to experiment with parental choice. The Baltimore Sun reported that Schmoke said he repeatedly came back to the work of the Cato Institute. In particular, Schmoke said he was influenced by Cato’s book Liberating Schools—Education in the Inner City, edited by David Boaz, then Cato’s executive vice president.
“That one I kept coming back to,” Schmoke told the Baltimore Sun, saying that he found himself underlining phrases such as “competitive market economy” and “tax credits or tax refunds for parents who want alternatives to the public school monopoly.”
In January 2004, Congress passed the first federally funded voucher program for low‐income residents of Washington, DC. Many in Washington attributed the political dynamics that made it possible to Cato’s work in making the case for school choice.
Cato scholars have been a powerful voice for truly free markets in education and have been arguing for low regulation and embracing profit to take excellence to scale. That was largely the premise of the late senior fellow and former Center for Educational Freedom director Andrew Coulson’s PBS documentary, School Inc. Apparently the film’s message was so powerful that it inspired the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association, to pass an “official position of objection to the ‘documentary’ called School, Inc.” at its 2017 national convention.
Victories had been piecemeal throughout Cato’s decades of research, testimony, and advocacy. Then the combination of COVID-19 closures and educational culture wars shined a spotlight on the inability of public schools to serve diverse people equally and created an explosion in school choice within a few short years. More than 40 years of Cato’s foundational research and discourse helped guide the course.
“That’s what think tank work is often about: laying the groundwork for the day when political stars align,” McCluskey says.
An Explosion in School Choice
Arizona was the first state to pass universal school choice in 2022. The program applies to everyone, not only to families below a certain income level or students assigned to low‐performing schools. For Cato’s education scholars, this was a long time coming.
More From CATO Institute: