School choice has made historic strides since the start of the pandemic, with states adopting (or expanding) education savings accounts (ESAs) and school vouchers at a head-spinning pace. This has been cause in some quarters for celebration and in others for fury. But I wanted to set aside the back-and-forth for a moment to go deeper into what we’re seeing in legislation and what we’re seeing in the research. For that kind of conversation, one of the first people I’m inclined to turn to is Patrick Wolf, the 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas. Wolf has authored scores of scholarly articles on school choice and has led multimillion-dollar school choice research teams in places like Milwaukee and the District of Columbia. Here’s what he had to say.
–Rick Hess
Rick Hess: As someone who’s been studying school choice for nearly three decades, what do you make of the legislative activity we’ve seen the past few years?
Patrick Wolf: I’m surprised and impressed with the speed and scope of the school choice wave since 2020. I think many members of the education establishment—the teachers’ unions, National School Boards Association, etc.—underestimated the level of disappointment parents had with long school closures and low-quality remote instruction during the pandemic. The establishment seemed to be caught flat-footed by the expansive private school choice bills proposed and enacted in the pandemic’s wake. In June, the advocacy group EdChoice announced that more than 1 million students are enrolled in a private school choice program. That’s a doubling of private school choice enrollments in less than four years. Amazing!
Hess: How much of what we’re seeing is a gradual evolution and how much is a fundamental shift in the political firmament?
Wolf: It’s a combination of both factors. Some states, like Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, have gradually and persistently expanded their school choice enrollments over the past decade. Other states have gone from zero to 60 in mere seconds. For example, West Virginia went from having no private school choice to enacting a universal education savings account program in 2021. Arkansas had a disability voucher program that enrolled 600 students and a tax-credit scholarship program that supported an additional 300 before it enacted a universal ESA program in 2023. The first fundamental shift was moving from narrowly targeted programs to universal eligibility, and the second shift was transitioning from vouchers or private school tuition scholarships to ESAs that allow parents to fully customize their child’s education with services from multiple vendors.
Hess: You mentioned that one reason for the increased demand for choice programs was pandemic-era school closures and low-quality remote instruction. Now that the pandemic is behind us, do you expect this demand to persist?
Wolf: I think it will. Parents can’t unsee what they saw on their children’s screens during the remote learning debacle. In some cases, it was unchallenging material. In other cases, it was objectionable material. Parents of over a million students decided that their children deserved better than that and opted for private schooling or some variant of home schooling, such as “pandemic pods.” Many public school leaders naively assumed that those students would return to the public school fold after the pandemic, but that hasn’t happened to the extent those leaders expected. District-run public schools remain over a million students short compared with their 2019 enrollment level, which is certain to be a high-water mark for them. I don’t think those levels will ever be reached again.
Hess: Let’s talk about what we’re learning. For starters, what do we know about school choice today that we didn’t know 10 or 20 years ago?
Wolf: We know that the educational attainment benefits of school choice are larger and more consistent than the educational achievement benefits. In other words, choice programs boost how far a student goes more than how much they know. We don’t know why that is the case, but we suspect it is because private schools of choice are highly responsive to parents and because most parents want schools to help them instill good habits in their children such as grit, persistence, and conscientiousness. Better character development would also explain recent findings that school choice has some positive effects on reducing criminal behavior and student mental health problems. We also know conclusively that competitive pressure from choice programs improves the performance of public schools.
Hess: I suspect that choice skeptics would disagree with your assertion that school choice boosts outcomes in public schools. Can you expand on that a bit?
Wolf: The basic theory of markets holds that pressure from competing organizations drives existing organizations to improve their performance. Some choice skeptics claim that isn’t true in K–12 education because, um, children! Thirty-seven different scholars have conducted 31 separate studies of the competitive effects of private school choice programs on the test-score outcomes of students who remain in affected public schools. Twenty-seven of those studies conclude there are at least some positive effects. These are rigorous evaluations from prominent social scientists at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Rochester, and even the University of Arkansas! Three studies conclude there are no significant effects either way. Only one study, done by a doctoral student at Indiana University, concludes that the effect of competition from school choice on public schools is negative. The record of the school choice competitive effects hypothesis is 27 wins, 3 ties, and 1 loss. That’s a wipe out. A separate group of scholars recently combined all the findings in a statistical meta-analysis, or a “study of all the studies.” Unsurprisingly, they concluded that private school choice programs have a positive competitive effect on the performance of public schools.
Hess: What are some of the research findings that you think are most relevant to the public debate about school choice today?
Wolf: The ones from my research, obviously! Seriously, though, the consistent findings that public schools respond to choice-based competition in positive ways are vital because, even with the expansion of private school choice programs, most students will attend public schools. Polls consistently show that around 70 percent of Americans favor private school choice programs. Support is strongest among African American parents of school-age children. We see that most parents are comfortable sending their child to a public school but want private school choice programs to be available to them in case they need to pivot to that alternative. We’ve also learned that intrusive government regulations scare away good schools from choice programs, so light-touch regulation is the way to go.
Hess: Especially in an era of polarization, there’s much interest in how choice may affect the ability of schools to promote democratic virtues. This is a question you’ve examined. What’s your take on what the research says about this?
Wolf: I’ve heard many claims that private schooling is a threat to our democracy. My research team recently set out to test those claims by conducting a meta-analysis. We identified 57 studies with 531 statistical findings about the relationship between private schooling or private school choice and four general types of civic outcomes. Throughout these studies, private schooling was associated with higher levels of political tolerance, political knowledge, and community engagement, and levels of political participation among private school students and graduates were comparable to public school students and graduates. Private schooling is a boost, not a bane, to the vibrancy of our democratic republic. The benefits of private schooling in boosting political tolerance are especially vital, as we need to be able to disagree with others without being disagreeable—or, in the extreme, committing political violence.
Hess: It seems to me that the breadth and rigor of school choice research has grown over time. Is that a fair characterization?
Wolf: The days of the big field studies that Paul Peterson and I conducted might be over. Most of those studies relied on over-subscription lotteries to produce “gold standard” findings on the participant effects of school choice. Over-subscription is rare in this latest wave of universal choice programs, so recent evaluations have settled for complicated “silver standard” methods that involve matching students on key background factors. More researchers are studying an increasingly broad set of school choice questions, including “Who participates in choice programs?,” “Why and how do families choose private schools?,” “How are these programs best regulated?,” “What are the effects of school choice programs on the funding of public schools?,” and “How do public schools respond to competition from choice?” Researchers are producing evidence about more aspects of school choice, but much of that evidence is coming from studies with less rigorous research designs than the previous school choice experiments.
Hess: One of the things I’ve always admired about your work is your utter willingness to report negative findings even though you’re broadly supportive of choice. Can you talk about a few of those negative findings and the reception they received?
Wolf: I’m the only scholar of private school choice to report positive, neutral, and negative effects of choice programs. I am an evaluator at heart. I apply the most rigorous study designs possible under the circumstances and simply go where the data lead me. The real world is complicated and messy, rarely yielding absolutely consistent results. Usually, the data point to a mix of neutral and positive effects of choice. My team’s evaluation of the Louisiana Scholarship Program was an exception. Policymakers built heavy government regulations into that program because they expected that mostly low-performing private schools would participate. That became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Higher-performing private schools looked at the deal being offered to them and said, “No thanks.” The program was launched in 60 days in a mad scramble, and the students who switched to the few participating private schools experienced large test-score drops in the first year, which narrowed somewhat but persisted after four years. That study is heavily cited by school choice opponents, even though it is an atypical case. The Louisiana program was replaced by a better-designed universal ESA program in June.
Hess: More generally, as a scholar who’s seen as broadly supportive of school choice, what kind of reception do you get in the research community? Has that changed over time?
Wolf: A decade ago, the American Educational Research Association, no friend to school choice, included an essay about me in their newsletter. They said, “Wolf is a well-known advocate for school vouchers. He bases his advocacy on the research.” Well, yes, I do! Recently, as education policy debates have become more politically charged, some people in the field have reverted to baseless claims that my research is biased. Increasingly, anonymous peer reviews of my studies have little to do with the quality of the research methods and data. Instead, they betray a strong political bias against school choice. That simply means that it takes longer to find a journal with a responsible set of editors and reviewers. Then, the article gets improved, accepted, published, and heavily cited.
Hess: OK, final question. For educators, whatever their views on school choice, what’s one takeaway that’s really useful to keep in mind as they engage with parents and public officials?
Wolf: I’m greatly impressed by public school leaders and educators who say, “School choice is the new reality. We strive to be the school of choice for parents and students in our community.” That’s the spirit! Those highly responsive public schools view parents as allies and see education as a team sport. Public schools that are responsive to parents tend to hold onto their enrollments and, in some cases, grow them. We all should want the children of our country to be in schools that effectively serve their needs. That’s what public education, whether provided by a public or private school, should be all about.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.
