“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Education choice policies have won victory after victory over the last 30 years and especially in the last five. Since 2021, 18 states have signed universal programs into law, and now more than half of all American schoolchildren are eligible to participate in a private-school choice program.

When our organization was founded in 1996 to advocate for school choice, only around 10,000 students participated in choice programs in select areas of Maine, Vermont, Ohio, and Wisconsin. During the 2024–25 academic year, more than 1.2 million students across the country did.

We’ve come a long way, and it feels like the road couldn’t be any smoother. But, there are major potholes ahead. The choice movement has had great success vanquishing its enemies. Unfortunately, the new threats are now coming from within.

We see two roads forward for education choice. Down the well-travelled road, we see the potential “charter-ization” of private school choice. Down the other, the less-traveled road of Frost’s imagining, we see a truly decentralized education system. It’s worth sketching out what each road portends.

Charter schools have been a school choice success but a limited one, facing increasing challenges through the years with overregulation and limited growth. Hailed initially as a way to dramatically remake education, particularly urban education, charter schools have been stymied in their impact by an authorizing and regulatory framework that has buried potential operators in the very bureaucratic structures charter schools were created to avoid. The sector has empowered a limited set of unelected functionaries to say no for arbitrary and capricious reasons. And, it has curtailed ways in which schools can experiment and try to educate children differently.

There are many great charter schools. The world of American education is much better for having them, and for having charter schools in general. But there should be more—so many more—and thousands of charter schools never came into existence because of risk aversion, turf protecting, and regulators with a circumscribed view of what makes a good school. The worst of it is that much of this was the charter sector committing an own goal, kicked into the wrong net by the very reformers that passionately advocate for charters.

This exact same regulatory creep is encroaching like brambles on the edges of the road that private-school choice is traveling. During this spring’s legislative season, at least five states introduced measures to limit existing programs in some fashion. Oklahoma tried to limit the types of accreditors for private schools, which would have led to more than a thousand students losing access to the school of their choice. Arkansas passed SB 625, a bill that increased restrictions on how funds in the state’s education savings account program could be spent by families. (To be clear, there has been, to our knowledge, no evidence that families are misspending funds, or that any problems with poor use of funds have cropped up whatsoever.)

Earlier, the state of Utah passed a bill that increased restrictions on their new choice program, and we have seen bills and efforts to increase regulations on programs in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, and Florida. On a much grander scale, states like Iowa and Texas have required that private schools participating in their voucher programs be accredited, which sets an expensive and onerous barrier to entry into their program.

Sledgehammers-in-search-of-a-tack legislation and policy like this evince a charter-like ethos in regulating private-school choice. Protectionism is bad, regardless of where it is done.

If private-school choice simply becomes the next charter school movement, there will be signs of success. We’ll see many great private schools doing great things for students. Conferences will be held lauding their efforts. But privately run education will remain what Rick Hess termed many years ago “a revolution at the margins.” Private schools will basically look like public schools, though performing marginally better and sprinkling in some religion, but not too much. They’ll top out at 10–15 percent of U.S. students.

This scenario is better than the status quo but far worse than what could be. To achieve that, we’ll have to be brave and take the road less traveled. True education freedom requires not just parental choice but also a supply side that is freer to take risks unburdened by needless restrictions that protect the status quo.

If we look at our polling of parents on where they want to send their children, we can get an idea of what that future might look like. If money and logistics were no issue, around half of parents tell us they would like to send their child to a private school (36 percent of the total population) or homeschool (14 percent).

In a system where half of families choose to educate their children outside of public schools in a mix of private and homeschooling, lines can blur, and education can be rethought. We’re already seeing growth in microschooling, hybrid schooling, homeschooling co-ops, and other innovative forms of organizing and delivering education.

Sure, many traditional private schools would remain: Catholic and Lutheran parochial schools, Jewish day schools, classical schools built around Socratic seminars and great books, progressive Montessori and Waldorf schools, and the like. These are school models that are decades or even centuries old, and they have stuck around for a reason. But there would also be opportunities for new schools and school models aligned with and responsive to student and family needs.

We know what path we want to take. We want to diversify the options available to families. We want to create space for new entrants to come in and rethink how education is delivered. We want experimentation. We want schools that are rediscovering old ways of learning and schools that are pioneering new ones. We want big schools and small schools, formal schools and informal schools, and we want parents to make the decisions about where their child ends up.

Broader, innovative, decentralized school options may be the road less traveled, but it is the one that we should take. And that will make all the difference.

Robert Enlow is the President and CEO of EdChoice, where Michael McShane is director of national research.