By Charles Barone, Ph.D.
The two political ideas that have dominated policy discourse in the past year are “abundance” and “affordability.” From housing to energy, many politicians, thinkers, and advocates embraced these goals as guiding principles for progress. It may make sense in those and other sectors. Yet nowhere is the tension between these aspirations more evident than in the rapid expansion of school vouchers and education savings accounts—programs now serving over a million students nationwide. While proponents tout these initiatives as pathways to educational abundance, the fiscal reality reveals they often achieve neither true choice nor genuine affordability.
The numbers tell a sobering story. Tennessee’s newly enacted Education Freedom Act provides families with about $7,300 per student through its universal ESA program. Texas offers about $10,800 annually. Florida’s Family Empowerment Scholarship delivers approximately $8,000 as does Iowa’s Students First program. These figures sound substantial until confronted with an inconvenient truth: the national average private school tuition for 2025-26 stands at approximately $15,000 per year.
This gap, between $5,000 and $8,000 annually per child, fundamentally undermines both the abundance and affordability narratives. For elementary students, even the most generous vouchers cover only 50-70% of costs. For high school students, the shortfall grows even deeper. Moreover, most of the lower cost options are religious schools; for families who desire a non-sectarian education, the cost may be 2-3 times the average.
The affordability promise rings particularly hollow for working and middle-class families. In our most recent NPU poll, 37% of parents said “I am just able to pay for basic necessities” and an additional 25% said they “struggle to pay for basic necessities.” Does anyone think that among that 62% of parents, there are very many who have the capacity to fork out the thousands of additional dollars it would take to avail themselves of a voucher or ESA? Even among the remaining 38% how many could actually afford it?
This dynamic explains why research consistently finds that universal voucher programs disproportionately benefit higher-income families. Arizona’s experience proves instructive: a 2025 Rand analysis showed that more than 70% of universal vouchers go to students already enrolled in private school or homeschool, predominantly from districts with the highest median incomes. That is not abundance. It’s hoarding.
The private school choice movement began with laudable goals: rescuing students from failing schools and empowering families with genuine alternatives. Yet, at least at present, there is overwhelming evidence that these programs deliver neither.
One solution to make vouchers genuinely affordable for most families would be to significantly increase the maximum voucher or ESA amount offered per-student., But the Arizona example shows how quickly totals scale: pushing awards from the common $7k–$8k range toward even average tuition implies hundreds of millions more in recurring cost. The “affordability” problem doesn’t disappear—it just migrates from household budgets to state budgets, where it competes with everything else (including public-school funding).
One could also increase the per-student amount and make it more publicly affordable by restricting eligibility through income eligibility caps or other means of targeting these programs to lower and middle class families. But stripping this benefit away from the families now enjoying it would seem to be a very politically fraught endeavor.
There is another solution to make school choice both abundant and affordable. If “abundance” is about expanding real options and “affordability” is about making those options usable for ordinary families, then public school choice—public charter schools, magnet programs, career academies, early college, and open intra- and inter-district enrollment —fits both principles more cleanly than any alternative in education policy.
One of the strengths of public choice is that it expands options without sorting families by income. Charter school lotteries are imperfect, but they are blind to wealth. Open enrollment does not ask for tax returns and blurs redlining based on property values. Charter and magnet schools cannot legally charge tuition or selectively price their seats. Dual enrollment, early college, and apprenticeship and internship programs actually save parents money as postsecondary credits are subsidized by the public K-12 system.
This matters for system-wide affordability too. When middle-class families have attractive public options, political support for public funding remains broad. The system does not fracture into a publicly funded safety net and a privately financed escape hatch. That cohesion is a precondition for long-term affordability and accountability at the taxpayer level.
Unfortunately, neither party is championing public school choice. Republican leaders in a subset of red states are laudably pursuing evidence-based reforms in math and reading but the much bigger action taking place in red states is expanding vouchers and ESA’s. Democrats are at best laggards and at worst opponents on public school choice, even in instances where it is clearly working to better serve a diverse array of public school students.
In the House Education and Workforce Committee last week, every Democrat voted against two charter bills which, it should be noted, have Democratic support outside the Committee. We’re not begrudging those Democrats’ policy differences on the details but they just did not seem to be trying very hard to get to yes. At a school choice hearing in the Senate HELP Committee today, the Democratic witness, head of the state teachers union, eschewed choice and touted the benefits of “neighborhood schools” which we know restrict enrollment by zip code and household income. Even nationally prominent Democratic education reformers like Rahm Emanuel aren’t making public school choice a central part of their policy agendas.
If both parties want to own the future of abundance and affordability in education, they cannot do so by advancing systems that exclude so many families who desperately need new options whether those are monopolistic, one size fits all public education models or cost-prohibitive and privilege-hoarding private ones. Supporting high-quality public school choice is not a concession to the right or the left—it is a recommitment to public education that actually works for the people it is meant to serve.
###
ABOUT THE NATIONAL PARENTS UNION
With more than 1,800 affiliated parent organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, the National Parents Union is the united, independent voice of modern American families. We channel the power of parents into powerful policies that improve the lives of children, families and communities across the United States. https://nationalparentsunion.org/