Private school choice—using public funds to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling—figures prominently into Republican education priorities this election cycle.
Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation, and the GOP’s official 2024 platform both call for “universal school choice,” painting school choice that’s available to all families regardless of income and other factors as a long-term goal that would ultimately have “schools serve parents, not the other way around,” as Project 2025 puts it.
Twelve states have at least one private school choice program—whether vouchers, education savings accounts, or tax-credit scholarships—that is accessible to all K-12 students or on track to be, according to Education Week’s school choice tracker.
But the momentum in favor of universal choice in recent years has all happened at the state level. And education is a policy area governed mostly at the state and local levels, with the federal government typically supplying less than 10 percent of education funding nationally.
So what would a federal universal school choice look like?
A federal program directly helping families cover tuition to private schools would be unheard of and politically unlikely, but not impossible, school choice policy researchers say. If it happened, they said, it would likely be most feasible through new provisions in the tax code or through funding incentives.
What Project 2025 says about school choice
Both Project 2025 and the GOP platform call for universal school choice, but the pathways they propose differ.
The authors of Project 2025, many of whom served in the first Trump administration and are allies of the former president, argue that the next president should eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, and that existing federal education funding streams should be restructured so they flow to parents for use toward education expenses outside of the public school system.
Title I, which supports districts and schools with high populations of low-income families, would become a “no-strings-attached” block grant to states before it’s eliminated after 10 years, according to the policy agenda.
Project 2025 argues that “parents should be allowed to use their child’s Title I resources to help pay for private learning options including tutoring services and curricular materials.” The policy agenda also calls on lawmakers to structure special education funding through the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act in a similar way, so families could use IDEA funds to cover the costs of educational materials and services, like textbooks and therapy, outside of the public school system.
Under IDEA, some students with disabilities already receive placements in private schools if public schools determine they can’t provide them with the services they need, according to the Education Department.
While the Project 2025 proposals would radically change the nature of Title I and IDEA, the agenda still doesn’t lay out a specific proposal for a federal, universal school choice program.
And the proposals it does put forward are far-fetched and would require unified Republican control of the federal government to realize, said Douglas Harris, director of the Center for Research on Education Access and Choice at Tulane University.
“That’s not going to happen,” Harris said. “This has been going on for many, many decades, the idea of block-granting federal funds in education and other programs, that never really got very far. So there isn’t any reason to think it will go anywhere this time either.”
Others have noted that it’s doubtful even all Republicans would be on board with Project 2025’s proposals for Title I, for which a majority of the nation’s schools—in Republican and Democratic areas—are eligible.
Project 2025 also calls on lawmakers to pass the Educational Choice for Children Act, a Senate bill that would create a tax credit for individuals and businesses who donate to nonprofits that provide private school scholarships. Twenty-one states already have similarly structured tax-credit scholarship programs, according to EdWeek’s school choice tracker.
The scholarships would be available to families making 300 percent of the area’s median income or less. They would be a realistic way for the federal government to make school choice available to more families, including those who live in states without state-level choice policies, said Patrick Wolf, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas’ College of Education and Health Professions.
The bill “would augment the resources of states that are already providing private school choice,” Wolf said. “For states that don’t currently have private school choice programs, it would allow parents to access scholarships through nonprofit organizations.”
The Senate bill—and any federal universal school choice proposal, for that matter—wouldn’t become law without Republican control of Congress and the White House, Wolf said.
What the GOP platform says about school choice
Former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, but the official Republican Party platform, which he has endorsed, also calls for universal school choice, though with substantially less detail.
The platform says Republicans should expand the potential uses of 529 education savings accounts, which families typically use to save for college tuition, so families can also use them to cover homeschooling expenses. (The 2017 tax cut bill that Trump signed in his first administration allowed families to start using 529 accounts for K-12 private school tuition.)
Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would expand 529’s for homeschooling. The bill advanced through the House’s Ways and Means committee before Congress went on recess in July, but it’s unlikely to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate.
The 529 accounts wouldn’t be exactly the same as a universal school choice policy, as they don’t outright provide families with federal funds to cover tuition. Instead, they allow money that families put into the accounts to grow in value tax-free. That means the impact of allowing families to use the accounts to pay for homeschooling would be minimal, Harris said.
“That’s a tax-advantaged account, so that’s not nearly as much money, as much savings, as you would get from an actual voucher or [education savings accounts],” he said.
How Republicans could use the ‘bully pulpit’ to advance private school choice
The Trump administration could also advocate for universal school choice through incentive programs, said Huriya Jabbar, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who has studied school choice.
“The federal government can use incentives or inducements to encourage states to take up policies that are a priority for the president,” Jabbar said.
For example, the Obama administration provided states with incentive grants through Race to The Top, which helped states fund and expand charter schools as well as implement other policies the Democratic president favored. Some states changed policies simply to be able to apply for the money.
A second Trump administration could try to provide similar incentives to expand private school choice.
Such incentive programs are also unlikely to make a massive impact, however, unless there’s unified Republican control of the federal government with support for allocating significant funding. And states controlled by Democratic governors and other leaders who oppose school choice would likely not apply for the grants.
Rhetoric could be another way to expand school choice, albeit indirectly.
If Trump wins, “they’ve got the bully pulpit back,” Harris said. “They’ll pick a secretary of education who’s very pro-voucher and will be talking about this all the time, will be bashing public schools on a regular basis, and will be pushing that policy, which generates energy in the states. ... That’s not trivial.”
How a federal universal school choice policy could affect public schools
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, public schools have been required to accept all students living within their zone. If families have greater access to private schools with the help of federal or state funds, public schools will ultimately lose enrollment, Harris said.
“Over time, it will whittle away and public schools will become like what public hospitals used to be—the schools that people go to when they can’t get anything else,” he said.
But Wolf argues that fears of a national private school choice program damaging public schools are overblown. Ultimately, private school choice will force public schools to be more competitive, he said.
“Any claim that a universal school voucher program, a private school choice program, or a national universal school choice program is going to destroy the public schools is fear-mongering with no real foundation in fact,” Wolf said.
School choice critics also share concerns that private schools aren’t held to the same standardized testing and accountability requirements as public schools. Multiple studies of Louisiana’s private school voucher program found that participating students’ reading and math scores declined in the first few years after using the program to transfer to private schools.
The Educational Choice for Children Act, for example, doesn’t include any accountability requirements related to academic performance, only about how the funding is used. School choice critics have pushed for state-level private school choice programs to include accountability requirements for private schools receiving public funds, but those pushes haven’t been successful.
“It’s a Republican initiative and they’re concerned about federal government power and authority and regulation,” Wolf said, referring to the Senate bill. “We shouldn’t be surprised that it’s light on the regulatory side.”
Private schools also aren’t held to the same anti-discrimination laws as public schools, which cannot deny students admission based on gender, race, or disability status.
It’s hard to believe that proponents of a federal universal school choice policy would push for such an anti-discrimination provision, Jabbar said.
“From decades of research, we know that access to high-quality schools is unequal, and it varies by race, by social class,” she said. “Any policy that is universal will likely just reproduce those inequities or exacerbate them.”
