The Michigan Legislature passed legislation in October 2021 to create the Student Opportunity Scholarship Program, which would give thousands of families across the state more spending power to help meet their children's educational needs. This report unpacks this proposed education savings account program and analyzes its potential fiscal impacts.

For more than two decades, tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policies have helped American families provide their children with the learning environment that meets their individual needs. Now available in 19 states, nearly 300,000 students nationwide use tax-credit scholarships to attend the school of their family's choice. TCS policies create an…

This resource is designed to be a one-stop shop for all the existing research on private school choice in the United States. This year's edition is updated with the research published since the last edition. Since the first modern-day voucher program launched in Milwaukee in 1990, researchers have studied private school choice programs. Few…

The rate of students switching from public schools to private schools because they received a scholarship and would not have switched without the subsidy ("switcher rate") is an integral factor for reliably estimating the net fiscal impact of private school choice programs. Switcher rates observed among students in control groups in…

The goal of "The 123s" is to present the increasingly large body of private school choice research in a clear and easy-to-read format and cite the relevant studies so that anyone who is interested in the individual results can easily find them and read in more detail. This report is divided into 11 sections. The first section summarizes…

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K-12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was…

Tax credit scholarship (TCS) programs offer state tax credits to individuals or businesses that donate to scholarship funds for students to attend private elementary and secondary schools. Through these credits, donors may reduce the amount they owe in state taxes by the full or a partial amount of their donation, depending on each program's…

This paper reports results from a fiscal analysis of Pennsylvania SB 299, a proposal to expand the state's two tax-credit scholarship programs. Pennsylvania currently has two programs in operation, the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) Program and the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) Program. This paper is organized as follows.…

The role of political factors, specifically of public opinion, in the relatively low penetration of charter schools into rural America remains unclear. We use 8 years of national survey data to demonstrate that rural residents express less support for charter schools than residents of other locales do. We attribute this gap to differences in…

This annual publication is designed to be a one-stop shop for all the existing research on private school choice in the United States. This year's edition is updated with the research published since the last edition. Since the first modern-day voucher program launched in Milwaukee in 1990, researchers have studied private school choice programs.…

In the past few years, four states have established programs that provide public financial support to students who choose to attend a private school. These programs--a tax-credit-funded scholarship initiative in Florida and voucher programs in Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio--offer a glimpse of what expansive statewide choice might look like. What…

This report asserts that tax credit scholarship programs, that distribute scholarships to students via Scholarship Tuition Organizations (STOs), have saved state treasuries between $1.7 and $3.4 billion dollars since 1998. The report argues that these programs are able to realize fiscal savings as a result of students leaving public schools and…

This report follows up on previous work that examined the fiscal effects of private school voucher programs. It estimates the total fiscal effects of tax-credit scholarship programs--another type of private school choice program--on state governments, state and local taxpayers, and school districts combined. Based on a range of assumptions, these…

Giving parents and students the ability to choose their school is promoted by supporters as the key to improving American education overall. On the surface, the idea has great appeal. Who, after all, opposes having choices? Indeed, both Democratic and Republican policymakers, including President Trump, have embraced school choice as a reform…

In this report, a school choice advocacy group presents results from its survey of K-12 parents within and across the public and private sectors. They report that parents are highly satisfied with voucher and tax credit scholarship programs and suggest that the findings support the expansion of school choice programs. However, these and other…