Does School Choice Funding Help or Harm Private Schools?
Many school choice advocates argue that redirecting public money to private institutions gives those schools the resources they need to thrive. Families are already paying taxes that fund a government school system, but many have chosen not to use it. School choice funding, the argument goes, returns that money to parents and allows it to follow the child to a private school that better reflects the family’s values and educational goals. But the evidence reveals that public dollars flowing into the private education market do not benefit private schools—they harm them in two concrete, documented ways.
Harm 1: School Choice Funding Draws Private Schools into the Government Education System
The promise of school choice is that it introduces competition into a monopolized market, giving private schools the opportunity to prove their worth against government alternatives. What it actually does is the opposite. Government education operates as a single-payer system, and single-payer systems do not merely distribute money. They establish an ownership claim over the institutions they sustain. In a single-payer system, the public, acting collectively through government, determines how resources will be stewarded because those who fund, sustain, and underwrite an institution necessarily claim governing authority over it.
For this reason, when public dollars enter a private institution, they do not simply transfer money. They also transfer governing authority away from the institution and toward the collective authority represented by the government. Public funding carries with it the accountability structures, regulatory expectations, reporting requirements, and oversight mechanisms that define government-funded education because stewardship, ownership, and authority are inseparable realities, not arbitrary policy choices.
Connection: Funding and Governance
This is not speculation. It is the consistent pattern seen whenever government funding enters a previously independent sector. Funding and governance cannot be separated because sustaining an institution necessarily creates both an ownership claim and the asserted authority to direct, supervise, and regulate it.
In the K–12 context, this has taken the form of curriculum oversight requirements, standardized testing mandates, nondiscrimination compliance obligations, and open-enrollment pressure—each gradually reshaping the identity and independence of the receiving institution. Private schools that build their enrollment around education savings accounts (ESAs) become financially dependent on continued government participation, which makes resistance to new requirements increasingly costly. The private school does not simply receive money. It receives new obligations it did not previously have and a new master it did not previously answer to. What begins as financial support becomes institutional pressure, and what begins as institutional pressure becomes structural transformation. The private school that entered the program as an independent institution does not remain one for long.
This is precisely the dynamic that “Public Education Expansionism: The Result of School Choice” documents in detail. School choice funding does not challenge the government education monopoly—it extends it.
Harm 2: School Choice Funding Makes Private Schools More Expensive
The second harm is the one most school choice advocates least expect. If public money flows to private schools, the assumption is that tuition becomes more accessible: families who could not previously afford a private education now can. The research says the opposite is true.
A 2024 Brown University study examined Iowa’s ESA program and found that private school tuition increased by 10–16% following the program’s implementation. Nebraska, a neighboring state that passed comparable legislation but had not yet implemented it, saw no such increase during the same period—isolating the ESA program as the variable driving Iowa’s tuition spike.
When the government subsidizes demand for a product, sellers respond by raising prices to capture the new purchasing power. This pattern has played out in higher education over decades of federal student aid expansion, and the Iowa data confirms it is now happening in K–12 private education as well.
The consequence is that the school choice funding program designed to help families who could not otherwise access private education prices those same families out of reach. Private schools that participate in ESA programs are not becoming more accessible. They are becoming more expensive, and the public subsidy is the reason why. The full findings and their implications for families are covered in “Study Finds: School Choice Prices Families Out of Private Schools.”
The overall cost of education has still increased, even if some families feel less personally impacted because the expense has been redistributed through public subsidy. The burden is not removed. It is transferred from the individual family to the collective taxpayer while simultaneously driving tuition prices higher across the market. As this occurs, fewer families are able to remain independently funded, and dependence upon government programs becomes increasingly normalized.
The Plan: Private School Independence
The solution is not a better-designed school choice program. It is the rejection of the premise that public funding is what private education needs to survive and flourish. Private schools do not need a government subsidy. They need the freedom to operate without one.
Parents already possess the legal authority to direct their children’s education. Their authority is God-given and does not derive from the state. It has never required a government program to be valid, and it does not require one now. No school choice program creates new educational options for families; it only publicly funds options they already have, and in doing so, hands the state a degree of ownership over those options it never previously held. The private school that remains outside the public funding system remains answerable only to the families it serves. That accountability is what makes private school independence worth choosing and worth protecting. “Does School Choice Give Parents Choice?” makes this case in full.
If you are working through the school choice debate and want to understand the full picture, the Education Independence Network exists to equip families and advocates with the information they need. Explore our resources page, read our weekly articles, and consider joining the network to stay informed as education legislation moves in your state.
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