School Choice Exploded During The Pandemic. It’s Still Going Strong.

This year marks EdChoice’s 30th anniversary. As we celebrate three decades of advancing educational freedom, it’s worth looking back at one of the most remarkable developments in the movement’s history: the explosion of school choice participation over the last decade, especially since 2020.

For years, school choice programs grew steadily but slowly. Then something changed.

The momentum for school choice was ramping up before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the pandemic “strapped Saturn V-sized rockets onto it,” according to EdChoice Director of National Research Michael McShane. Ultimately, the pandemic fundamentally reshaped how many Americans think about education. Families across the political spectrum, from religious conservatives to liberal progressives suddenly found themselves paying closer attention to what, how, and where their children were learning. Parents who had never questioned their educational options began exploring alternatives that better fit their children’s needs.

The result was a surge in interest unlike anything the school choice movement had seen before.

States created new programs and expanded existing ones. Participation skyrocketed.

Arizona offers one of the clearest examples of this transformation. The state pioneered the nation’s first Education Savings Account (ESA) program in 2011. A little over a decade later, lawmakers expanded the program to all K–12 students, making Arizona a national leader in educational freedom. Participation has grown dramatically to over 100,000 students as families embrace the flexibility ESAs provide, whether for private school tuition, tutoring, online learning, textbooks, transportation, or other educational expenses.

West Virginia also broke new ground. In 2021, it enacted the Hope Scholarship, becoming the first state to create a universally eligible ESA program. At the time, the idea that a state could offer to fund every single student in a school choice program seemed ambitious. Today, it looks increasingly like the future. States across the country have followed West Virginia’s lead, expanding eligibility and moving toward programs that are open to all families rather than limited to specific student populations, such as low-income or special needs students.

Florida’s story may be the most striking. Long a leader in educational choice, the Sunshine State now has more students participating in private school choice programs than any other state. More than one in ten Florida K–12 students participate in a private school choice program, demonstrating just how mainstream educational choice has become. Participation levels that once seemed unimaginable are now a reality.

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,” Milton Friedman wrote in 1982.

“When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable,” Friedman wrote.

In the wake of the crisis of the pandemic, school choice momentum shows no signs of slowing.

In 2025, Texas enacted its first ESA program after decades of debate. When the program launches in fall 2026, it is expected to become the largest first-year school choice program in the nation. For a state that EdChoice has worked in since our founding in 1996, the achievement represents both a milestone for us and a reminder of how far the movement has come.

Thirty years ago when EdChoice was founded, only a handful of private educational choice programs existed nationwide. Educational freedom was often viewed as a distant aspiration.

Today, for millions of families, it is an everyday reality. More than 1.5 million students participate in private school choice programs, and dozens of states offer families access to ESAs, vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and other forms of educational choice. The past decade especially has shown what happens when families finally get to choose.

The most important story is the families. Behind every participation statistic is a parent searching for the right fit and a student finding an environment where they can thrive.

As EdChoice enters its next 30 years, you will find us pushing ever forward in the fight to achieve Milton and Rose Friedman’s vision of universal educational choice:

All students. All options. All dollars.