A whitepaper was published earlier this year by five researchers from five universities called “A Framework for Evaluating and Reforming School Vouchers.” It’s fair to ask critical questions about recent private-school choice bills. But this paper misses the point of the current moment in school choice, and of education broadly.

Transparency, at a minimum, should remain a cornerstone for improving educational outcomes. We get little data, and almost no traditional accountability, in the private-school choice programs now in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Utah, Ohio, and other states. But public education serves too many children poorly. If we’re to have a high bar for the viability of new ideas, we should also have a high bar for the effectiveness of the existing system. In fact, we get little data and almost no accountability for public K–12 education right now, either. With the vast majority of U.S. students still educated in public schools, that’s a much bigger problem.

The whitepaper, written by Bruce D. Baker of the University of Miami and four co-authors, suggests that taxpayer dollars should be spent according to four guidelines. In the authors’ view, expenditures with public dollars should:

1. advance equity goals.
2. be done as efficiently as possible.
3. include accountability and transparency.
4. advance the public interest in preparing students for citizenship and participation in democracy.

This is a good list! The problem is that the authors seek to apply it only to private-school choice programs. American children and families would be better served if such guidelines were applied to all schools. If the ultimate goal of education, public or private, is for American children to become thriving American adults with the skills and opportunities to have fulfilling jobs and fulfilling lives while serving as active participants in our democratic society, we should want a framework for evaluating schools and educational programs that applies across sectors and school types.

Advance Equity Goals

Access to quality education in this country is, and always has been, based on wealth. When you buy a house in the best school district, you buy yourself the best public education. Families who can’t afford to live in that district will never have access to the best schools. The education reform movement was created to address this disparity, to ask whether it’s possible to make mediocre schools better or even just make failing schools mediocre. (Spoiler: it turns out this is doable, but hard!) But wealth determining access remains a central feature of public education. If this is also the case in new private-school choice programs, we should talk about that. But let’s start by acknowledging how the existing system operates.

At least 17 examples exist of two schools that share an attendance-zone boundary but look nothing alike in terms of demographics or performance. Tim DeRoche wrote about these examples in his 2020 book A Fine Line, which makes clear that educational redlining is alive and well throughout the United States. If you can afford a house on the right side of the boundary line, your child will go to a school full of affluent kids with massive advantages to achieve the best outcomes. If you live even one block over the line, where rents are lower and homes are cheaper, your child is relegated to a school where, in some cases, nobody reads at grade level. It seems fair to ask whether these standard policies advance equity goals before pointing the same lens at private-school choice. Indeed, the authors write that “the question herein is whether taxpayer dollars should be made accessible to institutions that refuse to provide equal, non-discriminatory protections to all who might arrive at their doorstep.” Yet public schools discriminate based on residential geography by design. One analysis comparing enrollment diversity within school types, as reported through a nationally representative parent survey, found that traditional public schools have less racial diversity than private schools, public charter schools, or public magnet schools.

Public schools also chose to be more exclusionary than private schools when faced with reopening during the pandemic. In November 2020, 60 percent of private schools were open to in-person attendance compared to 36 percent of public schools. If you think parents didn’t notice what kinds of schools were open in 2020 and 2021, then you likely don’t understand the rapid rise of parental support for private-school choice programs. Evaluating private schools for equity concerns while failing to demand such an evaluation for public schools reveals a bias towards the existing education system.

Efficient Spending

The United States spends just over $850 billion on public K–12 education each year. During the 2023–24 school year, states spent about $6 billion on private-school choice. That number will certainly go up as existing programs expand and new programs launch. Any expenditure of taxpayer dollars in the billions deserves public scrutiny. But nobody is questioning whether the $850B spent on public education is efficiently spent.

It would be simpler if education was more like a factory, and students were the widgets reliably and regularly produced at a fixed cost. But the reality is more complex, with competing interests, conflicting policies, and disagreements over spending on things that are either silly or supported by statistics, depending on who you ask. A lack of efficiency doesn’t always imply a lack of strategy, purpose, or impact, but it’s also true that we apply no framework for efficient spending within public K–12 education.

If you want to propose efficiency as a framework for evaluating public tax dollars on private education, as Baker and his co-authors do, then you should use it to evaluate all public education spending. One area of spending that has little evidence to suggest it is efficient or impactful, for example, is the significant increase in administrative positions in school districts. A 2020 analysis found that school district administrative staff had increased 75 percent between 2000 and 2017, compared to an increase in classroom teachers of only 8 percent. More recently, Baltimore City increased the number of administrative staff from 744 in 2022 to 891 in 2024, all while the number of teachers held steady and the number of students declined by 2,000. This disparity seems worthy of discussion for the sake of efficiency.

Baker et al. also selectively present high tuition rates as their hypotheticals, implying a rate of inefficiency that may not exist. They write, “Assume a private school operating cost per pupil is $20,000” and then lay out an argument by which the schools simply absorb more profit rather than providing access to new families when public subsidies become available. While Fontana and Jennings’s 2024 paper does suggest that Iowa private schools are raising tuition in response to the state’s ESA program, average tuition remained under $7,000. Catholic elementary schools, one of the largest providers of private education across the country, have an average annual tuition of less than $5,000. Stewardship of public funds is important, and government programs should ensure appropriate use of those funds. But to purposefully paint the private-school sector as operating at tuition levels closer to those associated with expensive prep schools is to willfully ignore the true private-school landscape and thus mischaracterize any potential inefficiencies.

Accountability

The proposed framework demands accountability for financial transactions, student outcomes, and teaching standards. Again, this would only apply to private-school choice programs, even as federal education accountability for public schools was neutered with the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. Reporting and testing requirements changed as states were allowed to propose their own systems. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was imperfect, perhaps in design and certainly in implementation, but it meant that every school in every district in every state was asked to meet the same goals.

Look at Oregon, a reliably blue state that has a near-zero probability of ever passing private-school choice legislation. Oregon also ranks last among all states in demographically-adjusted math and reading scores on the 4th-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress. Just one-quarter of Oregon’s 4th-grade students scored proficient on the national reading test, a statistic that hasn’t changed appreciably since at least 1998. I’m a proud product of Portland Public Schools, but Oregon is failing miserably to educate most of its students.

Under NCLB, failing to meet a test-score target for even one subgroup of students would require a school to take action. What does Oregon’s latest accountability plan say? “In Oregon’s new accountability model, a school or student group must be low in multiple indicators in order to be identified for . . . support.” In other words, Oregon made it easier for schools to continue serving students poorly. Even more astoundingly, Oregon’s 2017 ESSA plan states, “students who achieve Level 3 or Level 4 [on the state assessment] are considered on track to being college and career ready,” and on the same page also states, “attaining Level 3 or Level 4 on statewide assessments is not a requirement for graduation.” Oregon graduates students from high school who, by their own standards, are not college or career ready. Nobody is being held accountable for the performance of those students. And Oregon is not alone.

Ironically, the states carrying the torch for “old-school” accountability are some of the states now adopting private-school choice programs: Louisiana, whose newest private-school choice program will launch in 2025–26; and Tennessee and Texas, both of which have recently signed new choice programs into law. Louisiana’s accountability system includes all students in grades K–12. The state’s FAQ document reads, “Is it realistic to expect every student to reach proficiency? We believe that the answer is ‘yes.’” It goes on to tell parents that “if your child typically struggles in a subject, he or she may receive more individualized instruction during the school day.” This strikes a different tone than Oregon’s “an anomalously low result in a single indicator will not identify a school [as needing support].”

It’s true that private schools in Louisiana won’t be beholden to the state’s accountability system. But with a high level of transparency and the state’s commitment to every student growing every year, it’s possible parents will be satisfied with their public option and won’t want to look for an alternative. Part of a robust choice system is the freedom of parents to choose public schools when they are right for their child. More crucially, demanding that states apply an accountability frame to private-school choice while accepting that they lower the bar on what public schools are expected to achieve is a double standard that serves nobody.

Baker et al. assert that “parents should have access to [private-school curricular] information to allow them to make appropriate choices on behalf of their children.” Yet in recent years, parents requesting information on curricula from public schools have been denied access (in Maryland, Michigan, and California, for example). Parents should be able to see the materials being used to teach their children, regardless of whether the school is private or public.

The authors also begin the description of their accountability framework with a bizarre jab at public charter schools. “We address issues that have arisen regarding accountability in state voucher and charter school systems,” they write, but then neglect to mention a single charter school accountability issue. Public charter schools arguably have much stronger accountability than traditional public schools, since their charter may be revoked and their authorizer can demand an array of requirements, metrics, and expectations. “Charter school leaders accept greater accountability in exchange for greater autonomy,” explains the Brookings Institution. Accountability is important both for ensuring public funds are well spent and learning how to help more students succeed. Implying that public charter schools have unresolved accountability “issues” in a paper focused on private-school choice is odd. It bears repeating: American children, families, and the taxpaying public are best served by a single standard of accountability that all schools receiving public dollars must meet.

Participation in Democracy

Baker and his co-authors thoroughly conflate the ability to participate in and “sustain our pluralistic constitutional democracy” with the type of school students attend. AEI’s Robert Pondiscio recently wrote about how “naturalized citizens consistently outperform native-born Americans” on tests of civic education, and that “the disparity underscores a deep failure in civics education in U.S. schools, where fundamental knowledge about democracy, governance and history is clearly neglected.” The sad truth is that nobody expects public schools to teach civics or democratic values—at least not in the sense of taking steps to ensure that it takes place. It’s not measured in any accountability system nor reported to parents.

All schools receiving taxpayer dollars could be asked to teach civic values and “prepare students for citizenship”, using a test like the one Pondiscio describes. In this moment of deep political division, uniting children over the fundamentals of American democracy might be a good thing. But only if we demand this of all schools, including public schools.

Missing the Point

The white paper’s authors miss the point: Parents are not satisfied with their children’s education. Public schools, in too many cases, don’t deliver—not on substance, not on safety, not on preparedness. In the absence of wholesale reform, or perhaps as a catalyst to that reform, offering options is important. The U.S. public education system has proven itself to be anti-fragile, something that not only withstands chaos but benefits from it. Whether the use of public funds to pay for private education will serve as the elusive disruptor that reformers have sought for decades is unknown, but it remains a viable hypothesis. Robust debate about what it should mean for a child to be educated in the United States, and who funds it, is also important. Those debates will demand curiosity, humility, and good faith from all sides. Offering a framework in the guise of research that only holds one policy option to a high bar but allows the public school behemoth to skirt serious review is as limiting as the authors believe private-school choice programs are. Advancing equity, improving efficiency, implementing accountability, and promoting democracy should frame how we evaluate all schools.

Liz Cohen is vice president of policy at 50CAN, a research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy, and the author of The Future of Tutoring: Lessons from 10,000 School District Tutoring Initiatives.