School Choice Is Expanding. Will Public Support Follow?
Charters and school vouchers could create their own constituency, a recent study argues. But partisanship plays a role as well.
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With new state-level programs quickly redrawing the map of school choice over the last few years, a central question may determine the movement’s continued success: Does greater familiarity with charter schools, vouchers, or education savings accounts actually make people view them more positively?
Two recent studies seek to provide an answer, assembling compelling evidence of public opinion but arriving at separate conclusions. One shows that firsthand experience with school choice makes people more likely to support its expansion, particularly if they were skeptical of the policy at first. Another indicates that greater proximity to charter schools once made Democrats more likely to favor them, but that the relatively good feelings disappeared over the last decade.
While not diametrically opposed, the two findings heighten the ambiguity surrounding the public’s reception of K–12 education. Parents continue to rate their community’s schools highly, while eagerly making use of alternative options when given the chance. Meanwhile, Democrats have shown early signs of a split on federal initiatives to bolster parental choices, including by directing federal funds to private schools.
Michael Henderson, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, said his paper on charter schools pointed to the challenge of attracting buy-in for new programs or services. This is doubly true when most voters and taxpayers do not directly access them.
“It’s either going to mean that you need to get the vast majority of people directly participating in the policy — something like Social Security — or you have to build a broad base of support in response to the policy,” he observed.
Henderson’s study gathers data on charter enrollment in U.S. school districts from 2005 to 2021 — a period marked, especially at the outset, by rapid growth in the sector. He then added nearly a decade’s worth of geographically targeted responses from the Education Next poll, which ran continuously through 2022, to determine whether subjects tended to like charters more as their enrollment grew in the surrounding areas.
Overall, he finds, proximity to higher numbers of charter schools and students did not have an impact on public views. But that average masked an interesting partisan trend. Democrats’ opinions of charters slightly improved as their student enrollment rose, while Republicans’ views headed downward. As a town or city’s share of students attending charter schools rose from 0 percent to 20 percent, average Democratic support rose from a 3.2 (on a five-point scale) to a 3.4. Average Republican support dipped from 3.4 to 3.1 during the same period.
In other words, charter schools have the potential to be a depolarizing issue, bringing the views of left and right into closer alignment.
Henderson added a caveat, however. The partisan gap decreased during the earlier part of the period, from 2014 to 2016, while seeing no change from 2020 to 2021. In other words, whatever lifted Democrats’ favorability toward public schools of choice appears to have petered out toward the end of the 2010s.
Henderson said the changing views might reveal something about how people form political assessments generally. Most people are only hazy on the details of charter schooling, meaning that they are somewhat more likely to take their cues from leaders of their political party. As each side hardened their stances on school choice during the first Trump administration, with elected Democrats voicing more hesitancy around charters, a message was likely sent to voters as well.
“On the whole, we don’t see expanding polarization,” Henderson said. “But we do see the earlier depolarization going away, which is consistent with the idea that people are attuned more to the political discourse than to the policy itself.”
David Houston, a professor of education policy at George Mason University, has studied the ways in which parties sometimes inadvertently divide the public simply by discussing K–12 questions. In an interview, he noted that the shift in opinion coincided with the Democratic Party’s Trump-era pivot away from charter schools and toward priorities like universal pre-K, which carry less divisive potential.
During the Biden presidency, Houston remarked, “you don’t have a whole lot of elite opinion leadership on K–12 education issues, at least on the ones that had united leaders of both parties for a couple of decades beforehand. And in the absence of that elite consensus, you start to see partisan polarization among the general public as well.”
The power of precedent
But a different piece of research, also released this spring, points to positive and lasting results from more direct contact with school choice.
James Shuls, a professor at Florida State University, examined survey responses from families that had experienced choice in a variety of forms — including charter schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, homeschooling, and open enrollment — and compared them with those of respondents who had not. He and his co-authors discovered that participants with personal experience expressed greater support for expanding educational choice. The effect was statistically significant for all types of choice except ESAs.
“The paper confirms what school choice advocates have long thought intuitively,” Shuls wrote in an email. “School choice is the type of reform that builds a constituency over time.”
The researchers also conducted a separate experiment, randomly prompting some survey participants with the information that various school choice policies already existed in places familiar to them — open enrollment in Colorado, as well as voucher-like programs in Florida, Arizona, Sweden, and Ireland.
Those “real-world” cues led to increased support, particularly among those who initially said they opposed the spread of school choice. Self-described liberals’ likelihood of approving more choice measures increased by 14 percentage points after hearing about Sweden’s national subsidy for private school tuition.
But an opposing pattern emerged at the same time. Conservatives actually became six points less favorable toward choice after receiving the same information. And both liberals and Democrats notably soured on the idea (by eight points and five points, respectively) after hearing it couched in the example of Florida.
Shuls said the experiment showed the power of precedent. The Democratic governors of Colorado and New York have said they will opt into a newly passed federal school choice tax credit, which will provide money for parents to spend on a variety of educational expenses — including private school tuition. More blue and purple states could follow once the Trump administration releases guidelines on how the funds can be used.
If people in Democratic-leaning states could be shown that vouchers or ESAs are not “some crazy right-wing plot,” Shuls said, it might generate a groundswell.
“If choice begets more choice, as our study suggests,” he wrote, “the expansion of choice programs in blue states will likely lead to greater support for school choice among blue voters.”
A note of caution
Yet there is reason to interpret the results of each paper with a degree of caution.
Families who make the decision to apply for a voucher are likely more open to private school choice than those who don’t take the opportunity; their rising appreciation for the policy may have been baked in already. A similar point might be made of the subjects in Henderson’s study, since they were living in a community that elected to permit charter schools to begin with.
“It’s not altogether surprising that you would see higher rates of support among folks who opted into these programs,” said Houston. “If you had asked me that research question, what they found is what I would have expected them to find.”
What’s more, polling on education has proven to be highly sensitive to the details of individual programs, and even the wording used to describe them. A 2025 experiment by Paul DiPerna, a researcher at the advocacy group EdChoice, showed that education savings accounts attracted much greater backing when they were characterized as universal. Support for “school vouchers” specifically fell among Democrats and independents after 2023.
Shuls and his collaborators stipulate that their study does not establish that school choice caused parents to become more supportive. But neither does it support the idea that families generally become disillusioned after using such programs, he added.
Henderson sees the two papers as complementary, with his own research focusing on the indirect political consequences of policy expansion. Even if someone living in a charter-dense community never visits the campus, for example, she might hear about it from neighbors or view its billboards along the side of the highway. Political signals from each party clearly influence their response even further.
“They’re related projects,” Henderson said. “You’re going to be concerned about people who directly participate, but you’re also going to be concerned about people who don’t directly participate, but might be exposed in other ways.”
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This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.”