School Choice Isn’t Moving the Goal Posts. It’s Advancing the Frontier.

In a recent post, Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and executive editor of Education Next, argued that school choice supporters “keep moving the goal posts.” The claim is wrong and rests on a misreading of both the history of the school choice movement and what today’s debates about funding parity are actually about.

As my friend and colleague, the inimitable Mike McShane, likes to say, Petrilli’s piece is a bit like a piñata: there’s so much to address that it’s hard to decide which angle to hit it from. In this piece, I’ll focus on Petrilli’s central contention—and the article’s headline—that school choice supporters are “moving the goal posts.”

They aren’t.

Petrilli misreads what funding parity is and why it’s being discussed now

Petrilli takes aim at recent arguments that funding parity is “the next frontier” for school choice, interpreting them as evidence that choice supporters are constantly changing their demands. But that misunderstands both the argument and the moment.

Choice supporters are not moving the goal posts. We’re moving the ball down the field.

The reason funding parity is being discussed more openly today is simple: school choice is working and scaling. Programs are larger. Participation is broader. And as choice moves from the margins toward the mainstream, long-standing tensions in school finance become harder to ignore.

Frontiers aren’t goal posts

A better way to think about this is in terms of frontiers, not goal posts.

In the mid-20th century, the United States set an audacious goal: put a human on the moon. Before we could do that, our goal was to get a person into space. Then to get them to orbit the earth. Then to orbit the moon. Then, finally, we were able to put actual boots on the lunar surface. Were the engineers at NASA moving the goalposts? No, the ultimate goal was always there, but interim goals had to be met in order to get there.

The same is true for school choice.

Early programs proved that public education dollars could follow students at all. As those programs have grown, the next logical question is whether states are willing to align funding more consistently with students and differentiate on need or continue to prioritize systems over students.

At the end of the day, advancing the frontier isn’t redefining the destination. It’s acknowledging that you’ve made it further than before.

Funding parity isn’t new, and it isn’t a reversal

Petrilli’s critique also assumes that funding parity represents some novel shift in the choice movement’s philosophy. It doesn’t.

From the beginning, school choice supporters have argued that education dollars should follow students, not institutions. That language, and the logic behind it, has been remarkably consistent for decades.

The notion of all dollars following the student goes all the way back at least to Milton Friedman’s 1955 seminal paper The Role of Government in Education, where he wrote:

“The  arrangement  that  perhaps  comes  closest  to  being  justified  by  these considerations—at  least  for  primary  and  secondary  education—is  a  mixed  one under  which  governments  would  continue  to  administer  some  schools  but parents who chose to send their children to other schools would be paid a sum equal  to  the  estimated  cost  of  educating  a  child  in  a  government  school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school.” [emphasis added]

As Friedman’s legacy foundation, EdChoice has supported universal choice and funding parity from its inception in 1996. As my colleague and EdChoice President Robert Enlow often says, Milton and Rose Friedman and their legacy foundation have pushed for universal choice since day one. He should know because he was there with the Friedmans at the beginning.

I could give you dozens of examples of other choice advocates over the years. Here is Clint Bolick during the Bush Administration telling Frontline:

“Ultimately, this is about funding, and placing funding at the disposal of parents. I think that every child should have an equal amount of money behind that child’s education. That money should go to wherever the child obtains education, whether it’s in a public school, a private school, or in front of a computer screen …” [Emphasis added]

What has changed isn’t the principle, it’s the scale. When only a small share of students participate in choice programs, disparities in funding are easier to paper over. When participation grows, those disparities become central policy questions.

That doesn’t mean the movement has changed its goals. It means it’s grappling with the implications of its success.

Who’s really moving the goal posts?

Ironically, if there’s goal-post movement in Petrilli’s piece, it’s not on funding parity, it’s on testing and accountability.

In his article, Petrilli laments that private schools in choice programs often do not administer state standardized tests, noting that only a handful of states require them. But in a separate comment on X, he concedes that nationally norm-referenced tests are “a reasonable compromise” for private school choice programs.

So which is it?

A note on funding levels and why this debate exists at all

One more clarification is important.

Nationally, the average per-pupil funding for private school choice programs is roughly one-third of average total per-pupil spending in public schools. Petrilli suggests private schools are receiving something closer to two-thirds. That may be true in a handful of states, but it is not representative of the broader landscape.

That gap is substantial. Reasonable people can, and do, disagree about what dollars should follow students in different educational settings. Should capital funding follow a student into a homeschool or microschool, where facilities costs are much lower? Should it follow students to private schools at all? Should transportation funding look different across sectors?

Those are legitimate questions, and Petrilli’s broader concerns about accountability and program design deserve careful discussion. I’ll leave those issues for a future post.

But as far as his central contention goes—that arguing for funding parity represents moving the goal posts—that claim simply doesn’t hold up.