Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, took to X on July 1 to cheer the passing of the Educational Choice for Children Act. The measure, part of President Donald Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, establishes a federal school voucher program, and Cassidy introduced it along with South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott. Cassidy proclaimed:
“No child should be trapped in a failing school. This is the FIRST federal school choice program in AMERICAN HISTORY, and it will finally give parents the freedom to choose the best education for their children.”
The rescue of poor children “trapped in failing schools” has long been a rallying cry for fans of taxpayer-funded school vouchers and charter schools. But that’s not happening. It’s time to ask the pro-school choice crowd if they have a Plan B.
Very little escaping is happening in states that already have voucher programs.
In 2022, former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said, after signing the state’s voucher program into law, that “kids are trapped in failing public schools . . . . It’s time to set these families free.” But a 2025 study by 12News showed that the majority of voucher users had never attended public schools in the first place. And among those who had left public schools with the help of vouchers, the vast majority had “escaped” from some of the top-rated schools in the state.
Other states with well-established voucher programs have similar results. A North Carolina Department of Public Instruction study found that more than 85 percent of new school voucher recipients were not previously in public school. The study also noted that the universal taxpayer-funded voucher program in that state was disproportionately used by wealthy families.
Central Florida Public Media reported that in 2023, 69 percent of new voucher recipients already attended private school. In 2024, Iowa Starting Line reported that two-thirds of Iowa students receiving taxpayer-funded vouchers already attended private school.
This is not a new trend. Back in 2014, Edgar Mendez at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that 75 percent of students applying for taxpayer-funded vouchers in Wisconsin were already private school students.
Tennessee’s new voucher program plans to obfuscate this trend by deliberately not tracking where voucher students are coming from, so that the state will never know how many students are “escaping” public schools. Pennsylvania also allows for very little data collection on who exactly is using its voucher program.
Charter schools also use a variety of techniques to control which students they will choose to serve. They can establish bureaucratic obstacles that filter out families that lack the resources to jump such hurdles. They can limit their applicants by limiting their services in areas such as special education. Robert Pondiscio’s 2019 book How The Other Half Learns details how New York’s Success Academy filters out families that don’t meet their preferred profile. A demanding application process, repeated meetings that lay out the demands of the charter, measuring sessions for school uniforms, and pre-school orientation meetings all help Success Academy filter out the parents who are unable or unwilling to meet their requirements For charter schools, student success is a critical piece of marketing; also, in some cases, their program is only geared toward a specific sector of students.
In most state voucher programs, private schools are explicitly protected from any government regulation or influence on how they conduct their business—including which students they will reject or expel. So, despite Cassidy’s claim, it is the schools, not the parents, that have the power to choose.
At the same time, after Iowa and North Carolina opened up their voucher programs to nearly all families, even the very wealthy, private schools in both states increased tuition. New Hampshire is the latest state to follow this trajectory. The legislature passed vouchers in 2021, with Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut arguing that providing more options to low-income families would close the achievement gap by lifting up those students. Now, just four years later, the state has lifted all income caps on voucher use, making them available to wealthy families and dropping any claim that the taxpayer-funded vouchers are aimed at “rescuing” poor students.
The evidence is clear: Vouchers are being used primarily by wealthy families that did not enroll their children in the public school system to begin with. At the same time, top private schools remain financially out of reach for many despite the voucher program, and these schools can pick and choose which students they will accept. And charter schools, while legally classified as public schools, are also selective and serve only a small portion of students in a community.
Meanwhile, 83 percent of U.S. students are still in traditional public schools. Too many students who are not in the public system have found themselves in substandard pop-up private schools or in troubled charter schools. And in too many districts, school choice is draining resources from the public schools, leaving students “trapped” in schools that face mounting obstacles in effectively serving students.
If the idea behind school choice—an initiative that several recent Presidents have called the “civil rights issue of our time”—was supposed to be that students from low-income families attending low-achieving schools would be rescued, that plan has failed. So what is Plan B?
It would involve providing more resources for public schools so that they could better serve students. The good news is that plenty of research has been done on how much funding would be required to approach educational equity. Plan B would also involve new regulations that require schools of choice to stop picking and choosing which students to “rescue,” and instead require them to be open to all students, just like public schools. Plan B would involve focusing on new, proven approaches such as the community schools model, in which public schools provide a wide range of services and seek to improve student well-being both within and beyond the classroom.
If they really believe there is a crisis, then reformers need to come up with a Plan B. If there isn’t really a crisis, they need to stop trying to manufacture one.