Educational choice

School choice is a term for K–12 public education options in the United States, describing a wide array of programs offering students and their families alternatives to publicly provided schools, to which students are generally assigned by the location of their family residence. In the United States, the most common—both by number of programs and by number of participating students—school choice programs are scholarship tax credit programs, which allow individuals or corporations to receive tax credits toward their state taxes in exchange for donations made to non-profit organizations that grant private school scholarships. In other cases, a similar subsidy may be provided by the state through a school voucher program. Other school choice options include open enrollment laws (which allow students to attend public schools outside of the district in which the students live), charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, homeschooling, education savings accounts (ESAs), and individual tax credits or deductions for educational expenses.

States with scholarship tax credit programs grant individuals and/or businesses a credit, whether full or partial, toward their taxes for donations made to scholarship granting organizations (also called school tuition organizations). SGOs/STOs use the donations to create scholarships that are then given to help pay for the cost of tuition for students. These scholarships allow students to attend private schools or out-of-district public schools that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for many families. These programs currently exist in fourteen states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia in the United States.

In a traditional public education system, schools receive funding from the state on a per student basis. Under a voucher system, eligible students receive state funding ("vouchers") which can be spent at whatever eligible private schools the parents choose for their children. The two most common voucher designs are universal vouchers and means-tested vouchers. Means-tested vouchers are directed towards low-income families and constitute the bulk of voucher plans in the United States.

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