The 13 States Where Charter Schools Have More to Gain than Private Schools If They Opt-In to the Federal Tax-Credit Scholarship Program

Well, here we are again with another list-driven post. This time I’m coming armed with more data than the last one, where I made some assumptions to tell you the seven states least likely to participate in the Federal Tax Credits for Scholarships (FTCS) Program (plus two honorable mentions).

As I said the other week, I see the FTCS program as the most sector-agnostic approach to school choice since Nevada’s ESA that never got off the ground.

This is a program open to students in private, religious, or public schools, including charter schools. As long as a student is (1) eligible for public school, (2) lives in a household under the income cut-off, and (3) lives in a state that decides to opt-in to participate, the only barriers to participating in the program will be the amount of donations raised and whether or not their schools is covered by participating SGOs.

It doesn’t matter if they attend their zip-code assigned public school or choose to attend a different traditional public school in their district or a different district, a magnet school, a charter school, a private school, or any other type of educational environment that meets the letter of the law. The FTCS program has the potential to benefit students in all schooling sectors in all states!

I initially leaned on the 2025 EdChoice Share data and am proclaiming the below list as the 13 states, plus Washington, D.C., where charter schools currently have more to benefit from participation in the USTCS program than private schools do, including all education savings account (ESA) students (bolded states are also on the list of seven states least likely to participate):

1. Washington, D.C. (+26 percentage points)

2. Colorado (+10 percentage points)

3. Nevada (+9 percentage points)

4. Utah (+9 percentage points)

5. Arizona (+8 percentage points)

6. Idaho (+4 percentage points)

7. New Mexico (+3 percentage points)

8. Texas (+3 percentage points) – 2.9

9. California (+3 percentage points)

10. Michigan (+2 percentage points)

11. Oklahoma (+2 percentage points)

12. Alaska (+2 percentage points)

13. North Carolina (+1 percentage points)

14. Arkansas (+<1 percentage points)

Oregon should get honorable mention, because based on most recent data they have only 615 fewer charter school students than private school students. Wyoming should also get honorable mention because based on most recent data they have only 678 fewer charter school students than private school students.

To get the above numbers, did the following…

I went into the 2025 EdChoice Share table and sorted by Public Charter School Share (%) to get the below table.

(click here for an interactive version)

I then downloaded the data, created a column summing “Private Educational Choice Program Share” and “Other Private School Share” and then subtracted that from “Public Charter School Share” and sorted to get a list of 14 positive numbers (meaning there are more charter school students in the state than the combination of private school students and ESA students not attending a private school) and 12 states with a result greater than negative five.

I then reran the analysis in a copy of the EdChoice Share data file that my colleagues use and recalculated the numbers for all 26 locations to make sure I wasn’t encountering any rounding error and to incorporate the most recent data available. Also, why sort with one digit after the decimal when you can sort a list with six digits after the decimal?

One of my favorite things that I started at EdChoice when I was on the Research and Thought Leadership team was the EdChoice Share, initially released in 2017. I am extremely grateful to have colleagues continuing to plug away at the data collection.[1]

Hopefully the public officials in those above-listed states deciding whether or not to opt-in their state to the FTCS program (and those in Oregon and New Mexico who said they would not opt in) listen to charter school advocates who tell them how valuable this program could be for the charter school sector in their state, let alone supplementing learning for public school students.

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[1] As someone who studied and researched cross-sector collaboration in grad school, I think it is important to look at all schooling sectors. This is one of many reasons I was drawn to work at an organization founded as a culmination of Milton and Rose D. Friedman’s interest in “improvement in the quality of the education available to children of all income and social classes in this nation, whether that education is provided in government or private schools or at home.” (emphasis mine)

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Federal Tax Credits for Scholarships (FTCS) Program

Starting January 1, 2027, every individual taxpayer in America can donate to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receive up to a $1,700 dollar-for-dollar tax credit on their federal taxes. SGOs must them spend at least 90 percent of income on scholarships for eligible students – those who are eligible to enroll in a public elementary or secondary school and are members of a household making less than 300 percent of the area median gross income the prior year to participate. Qualifying scholarship expenses include elementary and secondary school.

This post was originally published to our Substack.