Five years after the Covid-19 pandemic triggered prolonged school closures and mask mandates, the educational-choice movement’s momentum is showing no signs of diminishing.

Its latest victory came in the form of a federal tax credit for donors who give up to $1,700 per year to scholarship-granting nonprofit organizations. The legislation allows states to opt out of receiving the scholarships, but they cannot opt out of the tax credit, which is now permanent because of the GOP’s landmark budget-reconciliation package passed in July.

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) secured the school choice provision in the GOP megabill after the Senate parliamentarian was on the verge of axing it. It should surprise nobody that a Republican in solidly red territory is leading the fight for educational freedom. For the typical Republican politician, backing school choice has become almost mandatory in the way that protecting the Second Amendment and opposing abortion have been for the past four or five decades.

“I think it’s now certainly becoming a litmus test in many ways for Republicans,” said Adam Peshek, vice president of education at Stand Together, the Koch-backed libertarian network. “I mean, if you listen to conservative talk radio” or other discussions on the right, “when education comes up, the solution, nine times out of ten, is talking about school choice and really parental rights and putting power back into the hands of families,” he said.

Before Covid, educational freedom was a policy movement with long-standing institutional footing and a history of legal fights. The cause was not limited to Republicans. Some Democrats, including former President Barack Obama and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (earlier in his career), backed forms of school choice that would be unacceptable to party leaders today.

But the pandemic — and the moment it represented — turned educational freedom into a partisan issue that Republicans were glad to embrace. Widespread school closures and mask mandates kept kids at home and glued to their screens — a policy decision that proved to be a long-term disaster for children’s attention spans and learning outcomes. Parents working remotely had more access to their children’s K–12 curricula and experiences than ever before — and were alarmed by what their kids were learning and the quality of instruction.

As a result, Republicans became galvanized around school choice, and Democrats lost the enduring political advantage they had with the American people on the education issue. Existing institutions and ideas combined with social and political forces to create an explosion of interest in school choice once Covid hit.

“So we’ve been at this for a while, but you had a lot of programs that were much more limited in scope. And then 2020 hits, and you’ve got a combination of things. Parents had a front-row seat to the fact that their public schools were not working in a number of ways,” said Shaka Mitchell, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, a pro-school-choice group.

“You’ve got just this massive political movement in statehouses, with state legislatures and governors sort of saying, ‘All right, we’ve got to do something different,’ and passing a wave of laws. And that started in 2020, but it really continues throughout 2025,” he said.

Since 2020, numerous Republican states have passed school choice legislation thanks in large part to effective political leadership. Governors Ron DeSantis (Fla.), Kim Reynolds (Iowa), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Ark.), and Greg Abbott (Texas) were among the GOP executives who fought hard and successfully in favor of educational freedom.

A poll conducted in January by the Trump-aligned firm Fabrizio, Lee & Associates found that nearly three-quarters of voters support programs that allow parents to choose whether to send their kids to public, private, or trade school. By a two-to-one margin, voters believe that parents, rather than school boards, teachers’ unions, or government, should decide on the best education for their children.

The same survey tested the tax-credit program that ended up in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Close to two-thirds of voters, 65 percent, approved of the program, and respondents were far more likely to vote for someone who supported it.

Moreover, two recent Supreme Court rulings have ensured that parents are able to use school choice programs to send their children to private religious schools.

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that states’ school choice programs could not discriminate against religious institutions. The decision effectively nullified the impact of the Blaine amendments, 19th-century provisions added to state constitutions to bar state funds from going to “sectarian” institutions.

The amendments originally were the product of anti-Catholic bigotry, and secularists and opponents of school choice co-opted them to limit the scope of voucher programs and other policies. Two years after Espinoza, the Supreme Court upheld the decision in Carson v. Makin, a ruling that allowed Maine parents to use tuition assistance for religious education. Those decisions followed the enormously consequential Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case, a 2002 Supreme Court ruling upholding a voucher program in Ohio targeting low-income parts of Cleveland.

In recent years, most of the school choice programs have come in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts that parents can use for various education purposes including homeschooling expenses. ESAs are flexible programs typically funded on a per-pupil basis with a formula based on a school system’s budget and total student enrollment.

Overall, there are 25 ESA programs across 19 states out of 74 school choice programs nationwide, including those in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Last year, EdChoice, a nonprofit advocacy group, tracked 136 school choice bills in 38 states; 71 percent of them were ESA-related. In 2025, EdChoice has been monitoring 93 educational choice bills in 39 states, and 69 percent of them are ESA proposals.

“ESAs fit into that new model for younger families of customization,” said EdChoice president and CEO Robert Enlow, who compared ESAs to ordering a product from Amazon or DoorDash. As he explained it, “Your message becomes families, not schools.” He added, “On the policymaker side, it is a more effective and appropriate message.” He thinks these bills are passing because policymakers and states understand the value of emphasizing the role of parents and families.

The ideological aspect of the school choice moment tells only part of the story. Parents may decide to take control of their child’s education for a variety of reasons, with the most common being the child’s suffering from bullying or another type of social crisis.

Polling conducted by Morning Consult and EdChoice earlier this year found that 31 percent of parents selected bullying as one of the reasons for switching their child’s school. Likewise, 30 percent said excessive stress was a factor, and 28 percent stated that their child’s academic needs were not being met. A quarter of parents cited difficulties with teachers, and 21 percent said depression was an issue. Only 17 percent of parents said concerns about values were a reason for moving their child to another school.

The imperative for school choice goes beyond ideological and political brawls. It gets to the heart of what it means for parents to do what is best for their children, especially because the needs of every child are different.

“Some kids, it’s all about academics. Some kids, it’s going to be about what other extracurriculars and other health and medical supports they can have. So it’s just very personal,” said Mitchell, of the American Federation for Children, citing his experience with his three daughters.

A significant body of research shows that giving parents the ability to put their kids in the ideal academic environment has produced better outcomes for children.

A Stanford University study on New York City charter schools, released in 2017, found a significant academic advantage for black and Hispanic students enrolled in charter schools. Across the board, charter school students gained an extra 23 days of learning in reading and 63 days in math in a 180-day school year. The study tracked nearly 100,000 charter school students from the 2011–12 school year to the 2015–16 school year.

EdChoice’s updated 2025 research review of school choice literature similarly finds positive results. Of the 203 studies it analyzed, 175 showed some kind of positive result from school choice, with only 15 finding any negative effects. The studies were separated and broken down further into different topics and results within each topic. For all the topics, the number of positive studies is an overwhelming portion of the total.

The next frontiers of the school choice movement involve answering the kinds of questions that come up for any political coalition with victories to show for its efforts. Proponents of educational freedom will have to figure out how to properly implement their programs with necessary oversight but without creating a new education bureaucracy.

“If your customer is parents, then you really are going to try and open up the types of learning environments that families can have. You’re going to try to deregulate schooling,” Enlow said. “You’re going to try to get rid of the idea of all the barriers to create a new private school in order to get a voucher.”

He described the decision whether to regulate or deregulate schooling as a “fork in the road” for the movement for educational freedom.

Another possibility is that states could increase direct funding to families without the involvement of any school choice bureaucracy or scholarship-granting organizations.

Stand Together’s Peshek thinks the next battles or internal discussions will be over the extent of “funding families directly versus more government accountability programs.”

Beyond that, educational choice activists will have to decide whether it is worth expending precious time and resources on pushing for school choice victories in Democratic states. Although polling shows school choice to be broadly popular, Democratic politicians are deeply beholden to progressive teachers’ unions, which oppose any policy that might challenge their power, even if it means improved student outcomes. On the flip side, failing to engage in Democratic areas could limit the future growth of school choice programs beyond the approximately 50 percent of the nation’s pupils now eligible to benefit from them.

There is always the possibility that Republicans will get more school choice policies passed at the federal level. With the political and legal currents going their way, advocates for educational freedom have reasons to be optimistic that their most recent victory won’t be their last.