Recent expansion of state school-choice laws, along with steep drops in student achievement during the Covid-19 pandemic, could translate into a reversal of the long downward trend in private school enrollments, Paul E. Peterson writes in an opinion piece for The Hill.

“Is a Great Awakening for private schools at hand? Perhaps,” Peterson writes. The catch is that tuition, which can put private school out of reach. “Unless governments offer larger subsidies to every family that wishes to attend private school, major expansion of the private sector is unlikely,” Peterson concludes. Peterson is a senior editor of Education Next and director of the Harvard Program in Education Policy and Governance. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard.

The full article is available at The Hill.

Education Next looked at private school enrollment and tuition trends in “Who Goes To Private School?” (Fall 2018) and in “In Pandemic, Private Schools Face Peril” (Fall 2020).