2024 EdChoice Share: Exploring Where America’s Students Are Educated 

By now, it’s little secret 2023 was a transformative year for education. Eight new states joined Arizona and West Virginia in making school choice available to all or nearly all students within their borders. Today, approximately 36% of students have access to educational choice. While there is plenty of work left to do to ensure all children have these same opportunities, it’s worth taking a moment to celebrate how far we came in the past year.

To help understand how these changes are changing the educational landscape in different states, we measure the EdChoice Share. The EdChoice Share tracks states’ proportion of K-12 students enrolled in an education savings account (ESA), voucher, tax-credit ESA, or tax-credit scholarship program. It provides rankings to states to understand where choice is being utilized most.

States with the highest proportion of K-12 students enrolled in one of the above program types will be towards the top of the EdChoice Share. States without programs are ranked from those with the highest shares of students outside of a traditional public school to those with the least.

On a national level, based on most recent data:

• 1.9% of students are utilizing an educational choice program.
• 6.8% attend private school by other means.
• 74.6% attend a traditional public school.
• 4.9% attend a magnet school.
• 6.6% attend a charter school.
• 4.7% are homeschooled.

On a state level (click state name to jump to its chart – best done on computer)

To calculate EdChoice Share, we divide the total number of students participating in a state’s educational choice program by the total number of K-12 students in that state, regardless of sector. Unfortunately, not all data are reported for the most recent school year, so we use carry-forward and projection-based data for programs or schooling sectors that don’t have up to date data.

In addition to capturing the number of students participating in a state’s educational choice program, we also provide data on the number of students accessing schooling through other methods. This includes enrollment in traditional public schools (inter-district data is split out from residential district, when available), charter schools, magnet schools, private schools (in cases when students are attending private schools, but not utilizing a choice program to do so), and homeschools.

The public-school data reflect the 2021-2022 school year. The same is true for the private school and charter school enrollment data. Homeschool estimates are variable, with some states having up-to-date data while others are lagging behind by a year or two.

Our data is sourced from the following:

• Public school enrollment: NCES
• Private school enrollment: Private School Survey via NCES
• Charter school enrollment: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
• Magnet school enrollment: NCES
• Homeschool estimates: Johns Hopkins University
• Educational Choice Share: ABCs of School Choice

CAVEATS: Our data are only as good as what are made available, and in many cases, the data are incomplete. Even if we were able to perfectly segment all the K-12 students in America, it still would not be a complete picture of all of the ways K-12 students are educated in America. For instance, we may be missing counts of hybrid homeschoolers and microschoolers because states and schools differ in how they classify these students.

• We are unable to capture counts of families who choose to move into a specific school district so their student could attend a specific public school versus those for whom that option is not affordable.
• In order to have a positive enrollment count of other private school students in Arizona, we assume that 47.5% of tax-credit scholarships went to multi-year scholarship students and used NCES’s standard error. This creates an upper bound of their private school enrollment estimate in order not to have any years of negative enrollment for the Other Private School segment.
• Though we have current school year homeschooling data for some states, we were forced to use prior years’ data for others, so we did not capture any increase in homeschooling in those states at this time.

Feel free to play with the table and charts. Sort by column and segment the data differently. Also, all the data is downloadable (click the “Download data” button on the bottom left of the rankings chart). We hope you enjoy!