In this episode of EdChoice Chats, host Mike McShane talks with Colyn Ritter and Robert Enlow about the 2025 EdChoice Share which tracks the proportion of K-12 students in every state that are enrolled in a private school choice program.
Mike McShane: Welcome back to another edition of EdChoice Chats. This is Mike McShane, Director of National Research at EdChoice, and I am joined today by two of my colleagues, Colyn Ritter and Robert Enlow. And we’re going to be spending today talking about a new statistic.
That’s not exactly new, but maybe it’s new to you. The new statistic that we have calculated called the EdChoice Share. I think it’s actually an important number, as so many things are taking place across the country right now.
So many changes in school choice policies, so much growth that we’re seeing, to actually be able to measure and compare over time, measure states. But this big picture, when people have this question of like, how much school choice is there in America? This is a way that we can help answer that question.
So Robert, Colyn, so great to be here with you today.
Robert Enlow: Happy to be here, looking forward to the conversation.
Colyn Ritter: Ditto. This is one of my favorites every year.
Mike: So Colyn, I might just go ahead and start with you. What is the EdChoice Share?
Colyn: Yes, the EdChoice Share basically tracks the proportion of K-12 students in every state that are enrolled in a private school choice program, whether that’s an education savings account, a school voucher, a tax credit ESA, or a tax credit scholarship program. And then, based on how each state’s share plays out, then we rank those states. So one thing that I like to think of, nationally, we also track enrollment trends, and with over a million students now, which was a huge accomplishment, recently surpassed, over 1.2 million students participating in a private school choice program. That equates to about 2%, a little more than 2% of students nationwide participating in a private school choice program. And talking with some of the people who have been in the movement longer, have been working at EdChoice longer, they said that they used to celebrate surpassing .5%, 1% was a massive accomplishment for EdChoice, and now that jumped to 2%, happened pretty quickly after that. And so, with the EdChoice share, we look at specific states, but I just wanted to give some of that context nationally, we are now over 2% of students nationwide participating in a private school choice program.
Mike: And do you know how that compares to something like how many kids are in charter schools, or how many kids are homeschooled, or any other sort of frame of reference that people might be able to give some context for that?
Colyn:Yeah, absolutely. So with charter school, we’re at roughly 7% of students nationwide are attending a charter school. And give or, you know, this is not exact, this is give or take, you know, a lot of the data is not perfectly aligned, you know, private school, national private school data comes out every other year, public school data is a little bit more regular, homeschool data is especially spotty.
So I just want to caveat all that and say this is not a hard and fast number, this is an estimate. So roughly 7% of students attend a charter school, a little less than 5% are homeschooled, and that that is a significant increase from in years past. So that’s just to keep in mind with, you know, the 2% of students participating in a private school choice program, and then private school participation, tuition paying private school is about 7% as well.
Mike: So 2% plus 7% plus 5% plus 7% is that basically the number we’re looking at for sort of students that are outside of the kind of what we would call traditional public schools, which again, is in some ways, can be kind of an undercount of school choice in general, because within the public school system, you might have open enrollment programs, you might have magnet schools or others or people that are in there. But that gives us some understanding of the percentage of students that are exercising school choice, or at least policy driven.
So Robert, I might kick it over to you. As you look at this state of affairs, what do you see? Like we see now 2% of students participating in private school choice programs, other means of school choice being used, what do you see?
Robert: So I, thanks Mike for asking that and Colyn and the team for putting this together. Actually the number of people in percentage of kids utilizing private school choice programs, as I understand is closer to two and a half percent, I think it’s 2.43% based on the data Colyn’s got. And I think what’s really important here is, look, what we’re trying to do at EdChoice is track all of the options that families are choosing outside of their traditional assigned system, because we’re sector agnostic.
The goal here is to try and drive more families to more options. And we started off tracking just private school choice, how many families are getting public money to attend private schools. Now we’re tracking all of these programs.
And what you’re beginning to see is a set of robust options that is changing a state. Florida, for example, when we started tracking this 20 years ago, was around 80% of the kids in their assigned traditional public school. Now they’re down to like 58%, right, in their assigned.
What’s happening is magnet schools are coming along, open enrollment’s coming along, 13% of the kids in Florida are now on the choice program. You’re seeing growth in homeschooling. What you’re doing is you’re seeing a robust set of options where we’re really trying to change the dynamics of educational delivery.
And it’s happening in states like Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and Indiana. Those are our top four that we see these kind of programs. And the theory is the more choice you have, the better it will be, the better for families, the better for the state.
Mike: So maybe Colyn, can you let us know, Robert kind of gave away what the states were. Can you give us some numbers around the sort of top states in our EdChoice Share?
Colyn: Yeah, just to detail what we’re talking about with the EdChoice Share. So like Robert alluded to, Florida is the cream of the crop at 13%. It’s an absolutely massive proportion, especially given the amount of students in Florida.
They are really the gold standard currently. Arizona is at 10%. This is the first time in our tracking that multiple states have hit the double digit mark in terms of their EdChoice Share.
Again, just an absolutely incredible feat by Arizona and Florida. You know, Ohio and Indiana are also not far behind, 7.8% for Ohio, 7.4% for Indiana. And then there are a couple of other states I want to highlight, some newer states that are really rising up the ranking.
Iowa at 7%, which increased from, I think it was 2.2% last year. And obviously they’ve made waves with their new ESA program and all the great work of lawmakers, advocates, parents, making that happen in Iowa. Another state I want to highlight is Oklahoma, who went from less than half a percent to now they’re at 4.5% with their universal refundable tax credit. Really great work in Oklahoma. And then the other state I want to highlight is Arkansas. The growth is a little less substantial.
It went from less than half a percent to nearly 3%. But we expect Arkansas to rise high up the ranking, closer to the Oklahomas and the Iowas. Their ESA is a phase in, and I believe next year is the first year that it is truly universal for every student in the state to participate.
So that’s something to look forward to there. And then one other point that I want to make, and sort of to complement what Robert was saying, every year in our polling we ask parents, if given the option, where would you send your child to school? And without fail, give or take five percentage points or so, it’s roughly 40% of parents would choose a public school.
36 to 40% would choose a private school. Around 10% would choose charter. And then another, actually pretty substantial, 12 or 15% would choose home school.
So when we’re looking at states like Florida and Arizona, and sort of what has occurred over the last 20 years with the robust choice in those two states, in our world, like Robert said, we’re sector agnostic. We want these enrollment patterns in these states to reflect what parents want. And while it’s not perfectly aligned in Florida and Arizona to what we’re seeing in the polling, it’s far closer to what we’re seeing than the national enrollment trends.
And so those states are really trying their hardest to do their best by their parents. And we can only really applaud them, and we hope more states are joining them.
Mike: So Robert, I have a big picture question for you here. And I think some of this comes off like what Colyn just closed with there. So we’ve been asking in Schooling in America every year, if you could send your child anywhere, where would you send them to school?
And as he mentioned, it could be anywhere from a third to almost a half of parents would say that they would send their children to private schools. Now look, it’s easy to say stuff to a pollster, right? Like actually doing things is more challenging.
So my question to you is, what do you think is the ceiling here? Like, do you think in these states that are creating these, and as you’ve mentioned before, sort of truly universal programs, so these are programs with substantial funding that all students are eligible for, that they’re able to choose from a wide variety of options. If you’re just, if we were going to have this conversation in like 10 years when these things have been in existence for a while, if you’re guessing, throwing a dart up on the wall, what do you think the number is?
Do you think it’s 15%, 20%? Do you think it’s all the way up to 35 or 40%? Do you think that maybe is an undercount?
And as more people find out about it, we’re going to see 50 or 60% of people taking advantage of these programs. What do you think?
Robert: So we know actually, if you look at our data, we have some sense of history on this. So let me talk about what I think we know and what I’m hoping we’ll see, right? So what I think we know based on the data and what we’ve said is our goal at EdChoice is to basically get, match what parents say they want, which is this vibrant, robust set of options with what states offer.
A state like Florida, a state like Arizona, again, Ohio, Indiana, now Arkansas, some of the others, are offering all of those options now. And what we’ve seen in Florida, again, is a massive sort of increase in the number of options, meeting more and matching more what parents say they want. We’re seeing that in Indiana as well.
So when we started tracking this data, I think it’s 88% were in traditional assigned schools, now only 73%. So you’re beginning to see these families get what they want. We’re beginning to see the delta between what parents want and what parents get reduced.
So that’s great. We know that. What I’m hoping we’ll see is nothing like we see now.
And that’s what I mean. What I mean by that is as we truly open up the options for families to choose all options, not just school-based options, we begin to open up mix and matching, it’s going to get even harder to get this data because the reality is parents are being delivered an education system that’s much different looking than it does today. If I’m hoping for something, it’s we’re not even looking at schools the way we look at them anymore in 20 years.
And in 10 years, basically we’re 100% matched, at the very least, with what parents want. So I think we’re on our way to a more vibrant system of educational options. We’re really seeing a beginning renaissance of public education.
Because look, the way we look at it, Mike, and I hope our readers get this, we want an education for the public. So we truly want an educated public. We don’t care where that’s delivered.
And I think we’re redefining the nature of public education through parents getting their options met.
Mike: So I have another potentially challenging question for you. So I’m just prefacing my remarks that I want to. But it’s not often that you and I are actually on a podcast together.
So I’m taking my host prerogative to pepper you with questions. In some other work that we’re working on at EdChoice right now, we’re looking at private school regulations. Last year, we had this publication come out called the School Starter Checklist.
It’s a compendium of all of the private school regulations in all 50 states across the country. We’re doing, again, teaser. I’m just sprinkling teasers all throughout this podcast.
But we’re going to have some more work coming out really digging into those regulations and some that we think are smarter than others. And I’ll leave it at that. But in doing some of that work, we recognize that there are some states that don’t have private school choice.
And actually, when you look at their private school regulations, they’re quite onerous. And yet, some of them have a lot of kids enrolled in private schools. These are mostly Northeastern states, but Hawaii stands out to me as well.
I’m wondering how you look at the kind of landscape of private schooling, the landscape of options that are available to people. So if someone says, hey, I don’t know what the big deal is, like New York, 18% of kids or whatever the number is, like 15% of kids or 18% of kids. I think in DC, it’s like 20% of kids are already in private schools.
What are you guys all getting worked up about? I’m wondering how you think about that.
Robert: I think I would think three things about that. That’s a really good job to pepper. There’s so many comments I want to make to that.
First, the regulatory environment for non-public schools and for us thinking about what a marketplace of education looks like needs to change. And the conversation about what makes and constitutes a regulation that we can all agree with versus not are real questions. You mentioned to me in Missouri, they’re required to have a tornado drill once a month with a fire chief on staff to give them feedback on, are they getting the kids out the door in the correct order and fashion?
And my comment back to you, or your comment to me, I can’t remember which was, what it was, but was, you know where they aren’t in a tornado? At school. You know what the Florida requirement is to have every school to have a hurricane capability, hurricane resistant capability?
You know where kids aren’t in preparation for a hurricane? At school. So there’s a lot of these regulations that are in place that are reasonable, it sounds, but are challenging.
So that’s the first point. I think the second point is, it should tell you something in states without private school choice programs where funds can go to families who are low income, that that level of people, that number of people are exiting the system. That must tell you that the options that they’re seeing are so bad where they’re assigned that they’re going to beg, borrow, and steal, and particularly a lot of them, not steal, no, I wouldn’t say steal, but beg and borrow to get their kids into a school that works, right?
And so if you look at a place like Massachusetts, you look at a place like New York, you know, it is a higher percentage of kids in private schools because they know every day how bad those schools are, right? And charter laws are capped. So the problem with that is the lack, the reason you need school choice is to eliminate the fact that it’s unfair for low income families who can’t afford to move houses, right?
So I would say two things to your conversation. One, we have a regulatory environment we really need to rethink. And two, in states that have a lot of people attending private schools, that’s telling you, that’s a market signal that tells you that our traditional schools are not doing a very good job.
And that’s particularly true for higher income families. And we need to figure out what to do for all families.
Mike: Well, and I’ll throw one out here. Can you tell me what you think about this? Because it’s something I’ve been sort of mulling around in my mind.
And again, if not on a podcast, where are we allowed to have these types of conversations? But one of the things too, and I’ve been influenced by your thoughts on like how we think about universal programs, you know, that a universal school choice program isn’t just one for which students are universally eligible, and frankly, isn’t just one where all the eligible students are funded. But there’s also that universality of access, that you have different school models that you can choose from.
So another way that I’ve thought about up there, I mean, you know, kind of pertaining to our conversation today and how many people would join things, is that I feel like in some of these highly regulated states, sure, you have a lot of private schools, but a lot of private schools that probably aren’t doing that different of stuff. They may be doing the kind of same stuff as public schools and just doing it better. And so comparatively speaking, people want to go to those schools.
But because of that regulatory environment, you can’t really see truly like different private schools. I mean, they may be different religiously, or there may be some wiggling wiggle room around the pedagogy, but I don’t think you’re really seeing people kind of radically rethink like what a school could look like, a schedule, a calendar, a curriculum, any of that sort of stuff. So one of the things I’m really excited about in a lot of these states that, you know, where Colin is seeing these numbers is not only do we get to see more kids involved, not only do we get to see more low-income kids involved, but hopefully we can see new models emerge where people are going to try and do different stuff.
And I feel on one side, I’m hopeful for them, but I also feel bad for kids in some of these other states that wouldn’t have access to that same kind of diversity.
Robert: For me, this is one of the reasons why I love what’s going on in micro-schooling and what I could see in the ESA movement, right? This divergency of model development, right? I talk about surf, skate, sand all the time, right, or surf, skate all the time because, you know, they’re learning physics and geometry out surfing and skating.
Now that’s a really cool model. The other thing, I think the way that people who are younger than me, which is basically everyone now, digest information and digest and consume goods is very different than when I was in school, right? And so I’m thinking about families who are going to be demanding multiplicity of options and multiplicity of delivery and not just having it in a single building all the time, but looking for a different set of customization.
So I’m excited about the future because of that. And you’re seeing a lot of options. And in those states right now, like New York, you’re seeing a ton of these micro-schools start up where they’re one to two days low cost.
And so I really think there’s a huge opportunity. But if we deliver education through the public funding system, the way we deliver education now, then we’re not going to be successful in 10 years, in my opinion. So I’d be interested in Colin’s opinion on this, frankly.
Colyn: What I’d say is New York, Florida, Georgia, these states that do really well with alternative learning environments like hybrid homeschools, micro-schools, they are really ahead of the curve. And I’d push any state that’s considering or even thinking about, you know, what the future of education looks like. And Mike has done a ton of great work on hybrid homeschooling and sort of, you know, what the next 20, 30 years can hold for us.
Look to those states. And I’ve done a lot of polling work looking at, you know, teenagers and their opinions on K-12 education. And what’s abundantly clear from that is we need to start, as policy people and education policy people, we need to start thinking outside the box.
And there are some states who are doing so. And it’s, you know, it’s worthy of applause. And I say that in the future, states need to really think of it as there’s, you know, they need to start thinking of this stuff yesterday.
There’s really no time to waste here. And every day that we waste trying to think of, you know, whether or not we should double down in the traditional public school model or should they get more money, you know, reinvest in public schools and things like that, we need to start thinking of new ways and think how can we meet the demands of today’s, you know, K-12 students because it is radically different than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago.
So yeah, Robert nailed it on the head. I just wanted to throw that out there as well.
Robert: I think there’s something really important what Colyn just said that we all need to realize. The scale of this problem is incredibly big. Like I keep saying this and there have been, and correct me if I’m wrong, Colyn, you’re the data guy, but last time I checked, there’s been over a million kids dropping out of school this year and last year.
And frankly, as far as I understand, there’s been a million kids dropping out of school every year since I got back to this country in 1996. Now if that’s the case, right, there are literally almost 30 million kids or more that have dropped out that are now adults that are not prepared, that are not effective. So now that’s not always the case, but the reality is we have this fairly systemic giant problem and until we recognize that the traditional structure of, and I’m going to use this word, a monopoly provision of education, right, is no longer capable of solving that problem, we’re going to keep baring our heads in this hand, which is why I’m so encouraged by the choice movement.
Mike: Well, and I’m glad you brought that up, Robert, because I was going to say something I think kind of similar, which is, as much as we want to think about this as a kid’s these days problem, you know, I find myself probably because I can’t turn off this part of my brain as the kind of education researcher, you know, when I meet people, when I meet other adults or whatever and chat about their lives and chat about what they do, a question I really love to ask is like, did you like school?
Like, do you do well in school? And I’m shocked. Well, I’m not shocked anymore, I used to be more shocked.
The number of like adults that I encounter, who I think are quite clever people, like smart folks, capable people or others that like had a horrible time in school, or, you know, a lot of them left school probably earlier than they otherwise would have if they had been able to find an educational model that better fit what was going on with them. And I just think of, you know, if we use the round number of the million people that dropped out and some magnitude above that of people who just sort of under achieved what they are capable of, because that model just like didn’t work for them, they were in a more traditional system. And I always have to kind of check myself because I consider myself kind of an educational traditionalist like I love like the classical school movement, all of those sorts of things.
But I also have to recognize that like, I did well in school, like school was great for me. So it’s like, of course, I like like the traditional model, because it’s like, I’m like the old football coach is just like run the ball because I don’t know where it worked for me when in my playing days, when you have to recognize that like, oh, wait, that doesn’t actually work for everyone depends on what who’s on your team, it depends on what what what the sort of situation is, it depends on who you’re playing against.
So I just think that this is, you know, I’m it’s such an exciting time. And Colyn, thank you so much for helping put together these numbers. Robert, thank you so much for helping giving us some analysis.
And everyone who’s listening, thank all of you for listening, please check out you can continue to check out our resources, you head to our website, www.edchoice.org, you can find us on the social media channels, etc. And I’m actually really looking forward to talking to you, those of you that are subscribed to these podcasts know that we’ve taken a bit of a hiatus, we’re retooling some things. But we’re going to have a few come out here that are going to break down some of these new data that we’re putting out there and some of these new studies that we’re doing.
So until then, Colyn, Robert, thank you so much. And I look forward to chatting with all of you again on the next edition of EdChoice Chats.