2026 EdChoice Share 

We are pleased to announce the 2026 EdChoice Share, the most comprehensive breakdown of student enrollment by schooling sector.  

On a national level, based on the most recent data: 

• 2.8 percent of students are utilizing an educational choice program 
• 6.1 percent attend private school by other means 
• 74.0 percent attend a traditional public school 
• 5.0 percent attend a magnet school 
• 7.2 percent attend a charter school, and  
• 4.8 percent are homeschooled 

Around this time last year, we highlighted the fact that multiple states, for the first time in history, had more than 10% of their K-12 student population participating in a private school choice program. These two states, Florida and Arizona, might soon have company.  

Arkansas, Indiana, and Iowa have already reached the 8% threshold. Growth across these states is the result of robust choice programs, passed or expanded in the last 5 years, being implemented and attracting thousands of families who desire educational freedom.  

Several other states passed large ESA or refundable tax credit programs in 2025. Most notably included in the list of states is Texas. While Texas’ program has yet to launch (starting in fall 2026), analysis of the program indicates there will be funding for nearly 100,000 students in just the first year. This would place Texas’ program among the top in terms of raw volume of participants. However, Texas is a large state with over 5 million K-12 students. This is where the EdChoice Share comes into play.   

In order to help understand how these changes are manifesting across different states, we introduced the EdChoice Share. The EdChoice Share tracks the proportion of a state’s K-12 students enrolled in an education savings account (ESA), voucher, tax-credit ESA, or tax-credit scholarship program.  

The EdChoice Share then assigns a ranking to states. States with the highest proportion of K-12 students enrolled in private school choice programs will be at the top of the EdChoice Share. States without programs are ranked from those with the highest shares of students outside of a traditional public school to those with the least. 

In 2001-2002, the first year of data we have, 86% of Florida students attended a traditional public school. This year, the share of FL students attending a traditional public school has plummeted to 51%.  

Arizona’s changes to traditional public school enrollment over time are less extreme than Florida’s, but still notable nonetheless (89% in 2001-2002 to 68% in 2025-2026). This is especially notable, given that raw public school enrollment in both states has increased over the course of the last two decades (per NCES).  

Why does this matter? Each month EdChoice, via the EdChoice Monthly Public Opinion Tracker, surveys school parents and asks the following question: “If given the option, what type of school would you select in order to obtain the best education for your child?” Below is the visualization of parents’ responses to the above question, comparing their preferences to the most recent enrollment data. The massive gap between parents’ schooling preferences and current enrollment trends is the elephant in the room. In states like Florida and Arizona, that elephant is slowly but surely being shown the door. 

NOTES: Getting into the nitty gritty of the EdChoice Share, we divide the total number of students participating in a state’s educational choice program by the total number of K-12 students in that state, regardless of sector. Unfortunately, not all data are reported for the most recent school year, so we use carry-forward and projection-based data for programs or schooling sectors that don’t have up to date data.  

The EdChoice Share also provides state-by-state breakdowns of traditional public school share (inter-district data is split out from residential district when available), charter school share, magnet school share, tuition-paying private school share (in other words, students attending private school but not participating in a private choice program), and homeschool share.  

The public school data reflect the 2023-2024 school year. The same is true for charter school enrollment data. Private school enrollment data reflect the 2021-2022 school year. Homeschool estimates are variable, with some states having up to date data while others lag by a year or two.  

While some lag is expected in this type of work, this year has been especially slow. Due to layoffs and funding cuts, most notably at the U.S. Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has been unable to refresh key data points related to public and private school enrollment, as well as magnet school data. For more information on this, my colleague Paul DiPerna wrote a great piece on our Substack earlier this year.  

Our data is sourced from the following: 

• Public school enrollment: NCES 
• Private school enrollment: Private School Survey via NCES  
• Charter school enrollment: National Alliance for Public Charter Schools 
• Magnet school enrollment: NCES 
• Homeschool estimates: The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Hub 
• Educational Choice Share: EdChoice 

CAVEATS: Our data are only as good as what is made available, and in many cases, the data are incomplete and imperfect. And even if we were able to perfectly segment all the K-12 students in America, it still would not be a complete picture of all the ways K-12 students are educated in America. For instance, we are missing counts of hybrid homeschoolers and microschoolers. Some states and some schools differ in their classification of microschool students.  

We also are unable to capture counts of families who choose to move into a specific school district so their student could attend a specific public school versus those for whom that option is not affordable. In order to have a positive enrollment count of other private school students in Arizona, we had to assume that 47.5 percent of tax-credit scholarships went to students who received multiple scholarships via the state’s tax-credit scholarship programs and used NCES’s standard error to create an upper bound of their private school enrollment estimate in order not to have any years of negative enrollment for the “Tuition-Paying Private School” segment. Additionally, even though we have current school year homeschooling data for some states, we were forced to use carryforward data for others. 

Reminder: All the data are downloadable. 

On a state level (click state name to jump to its chart – best done on computer)