Seven School Choice Myths Your Neighbor Believes and What the Record Shows

Every neighborhood has a man at the fence line who knows everything about school choice. He knows it is a scheme. He knows who is behind it. He knows how it ends. He has never read a word of a statute, and he has never been wrong for a single second of his life.

You can love him and still fact-check him. The trouble is that his side of the fence is not the only one with legends. Supporters of choice have a few tall tales of their own, and I intend to deal with those too, because a movement that wins on myths loses the day somebody checks. So here are seven claims you will hear at the barbecue, each tested against the record, each with a verdict. Where the neighbor is right, I will say so.

Myth 1: "Charter schools are private schools"

This is the first one out of the gate and the easiest to knock over. A charter school is a public school. It charges no tuition. It is funded with public money. It must be open to any child in its area, and when applications outnumber seats it generally has to hold a lottery. It is held to the state's testing and civil-rights rules. What makes it different is how it is run: under a contract with an authorizer, rather than under assignment by a district. The 1991 Minnesota law that started the movement said exactly that, and I tell the story in The 1991 Minnesota Law That Gave America the Charter School.

Where the neighbor has a sliver of a point: some charter schools are run day to day by management organizations, a few of them for-profit, depending on the state. And a charter is not run by the local district. If "private" means "not controlled by the school board," that is true of a charter in a narrow sense. But a school you cannot be charged tuition to attend, and that the state can close for poor performance, is not a private school by any ordinary meaning of the word.

Verdict: False. Public, tuition-free, open by lottery, held to a contract.

Myth 2: "School choice is only for the wealthy"

Look at the first modern program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, enacted in 1989 and operating from 1990, was limited to low-income families and, at the start, to a small number of participating students. Its champion was a Democratic legislator from Milwaukee. Cleveland's scholarship program, launched in 1995, scaled its tuition aid to need, giving low-income families a larger share of the cost. Arizona's education savings accounts, first created in 2011, started with children with disabilities. A tax-credit scholarship in many states is aimed at low-income families by design.

That is the record of the original programs. The honest complication comes with the newer, universal programs, which are open to every family regardless of income. In those, a wealthier family can use the benefit too, including a family that already had a child in private school. That raises a legitimate fairness question and a cost question, which I walk through with numbers in Vouchers Drain the Public Schools, and the Answer Is in the Arithmetic. But a program open to everyone is not a program only for the rich. It is the same logic as public school itself, which is also open to everyone, including the rich.

Think about who already has choice in America. A family with money picks a school by picking a house. It buys in the suburb with the good district, or it writes the tuition check to the private school down the road. Nobody calls that a scheme. The question school choice asks is whether a family without the money should get the same freedom to move a child out of a school that is not working. Put that way, the "only for the wealthy" charge has the logic backwards: the wealthy are the ones who never needed the program.

Verdict: Mostly false. The first generation was aimed at the poor. The universal programs are open to all, and the cost debate is a real one.

Myth 3: "Vouchers are unconstitutional"

This is the myth that kept the movement in courtrooms for years, and the answer is a matter of record. In 2002 the Supreme Court decided Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, a challenge to Cleveland's program, and held 5 to 4 that a program of true private choice, neutral toward religion, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, even if most of the money ends up at religious schools through the independent choices of parents. Later rulings, in Espinoza in 2020 and Carson v. Makin in 2022, went further and held that excluding religious schools from a program is itself a problem. The whole line is in From Everson to Carson, the Court Cases That Opened the Door to Choice.

Now the part the neighbor may genuinely have in his pocket. Federal law is one thing, and state law is another. State constitutions have their own clauses, and some state courts have struck down programs under them. The Arizona Supreme Court did so in 2009 in Cain v. Horne and the Florida Supreme Court did in 2006 in Bush v. Holmes, on different provisions. So "unconstitutional" depends on which constitution you are asking. Federal: no. State: depends on the state, and the old Blaine-type clauses are the main reason, which is the subject of The Blaine Amendments and the Old Bigotry Still Sitting in State Constitutions.

Verdict: False as a federal claim; check your state.

Myth 4: "Choice means no accountability"

This one deserves respect, because it is wrong in some places and right in others.

Start with charters. A charter school is the most explicitly accountable school in the public system, because its contract has an expiration date. If it fails to meet its terms, the authorizer can decline to renew it or close it. That is a stronger consequence than anything a district school normally faces.

Vouchers and accounts are more varied. Some programs require students to take state tests and publish the results. Some require a financial audit. Some require the school to be accredited or to have operated for a minimum period. Some require very little. And the families themselves are a form of accountability: a parent can walk out the door, taking the money with her, which is a faster signal than any annual report.

Picture a hypothetical charter school in the fifth year of a five-year contract. The authorizer sits down with the school's test results, its financial audits, its enrollment records and its compliance with the civil-rights rules, and decides whether to renew. If the school has missed the targets in its charter, the authorizer can let the contract expire. The families get notice, the students return to other schools, and the school is gone. That process is not painless. Closing a school disrupts children, which is why good authorizers try to catch problems early rather than wait for year five. But it is a real consequence with a real date, and it is hard to find an equivalent in the ordinary district system.

So the claim "choice means no accountability" is false as a rule and true of poorly written programs. The fix is not to abandon choice. It is to write the accountability into the statute and enforce it. If you are reading a bill and cannot find the sections on testing, audits and what happens to a school that fails, ask the sponsor why.

Verdict: False as a blanket claim. Accountability depends on the statute, so read it.

Myth 5: "School choice is a recent invention"

Tell that to Maine. Many small Maine towns, with too few students to run their own high schools, have paid tuition for their teenagers to attend a school of the family's choosing since the 1870s. Vermont has a similar tradition, with roots in the nineteenth century. The practice was so ordinary that nobody thought to call it a movement.

The modern intellectual case dates to 1955, when the economist Milton Friedman published an essay on the government's role in education that proposed paying for schooling through vouchers that parents could redeem at approved schools. The first modern urban program followed in Milwaukee in 1990, and Minnesota passed the first charter law in 1991. Arizona's tax-credit scholarship law dates from 1997, and its education savings account from 2011.

So the full timeline runs from the 1870s to the 2010s, and at no point is it an invention of this decade. There are new details, like the digital account and the debit card. The principle is old. What is recent is the scale and the heat.

Verdict: False. The oldest version is about 150 years old, and the modern argument is seventy years old.

Myth 6: "School choice is a Republican scheme"

Republicans have been among its strongest supporters, and I am proud of that. But look at who built the early scaffolding.

• Milwaukee's program was championed by a Democratic state representative from Milwaukee, Annie Polly Williams, working alongside Republican Governor Tommy Thompson.
• Minnesota's charter law was carried by a Democratic-Farmer-Labor state senator and signed by a DFL governor.
• The head of a national teachers' union, Albert Shanker, helped popularize the idea of teacher-led schools in a 1988 speech.
• The first federal support for charter schools was signed into law in 1994 by a Democratic president.

Why does that matter beyond bragging rights? Because a policy that is treated as the property of one party gets treated as a threat by the other, and a policy that carries both parties' fingerprints is harder to demonize. A parent with a child in a struggling school is not likely to start by asking which party sponsored the bill. She wants to know whether it will help her child.

None of that means the parties agree today. They do not, and the fight has hardened. But the claim that choice was invented by Republican strategists is simply false as history. It began as a cross-party idea and became a partisan one.

I raise this partly out of fairness and partly out of strategy. A cause that was once bipartisan can be bipartisan again, and the families who benefit are not asking for your party registration.

Verdict: False as history. True that today the two parties mostly line up on opposite sides.

Myth 7: "Education savings accounts let parents spend taxpayer money on anything"

This is the myth you hear when the newest tool shows up, and it makes a good picture: a family buying a hot tub with the school fund. The reality is that ESA statutes list what the money may buy. Typical categories include tuition, tutoring, curriculum, testing fees, educational therapies and, in some states, a share that can be saved for later education costs. The list is written into the law or the rules of the state agency that administers the program.

Many programs also require families to sign an agreement to provide an education in core subjects, and the state or a vendor typically reviews spending, with consequences for misuse, which can include repayment and removal from the program. Whether those controls are strong enough is a fair question, and states have tightened the rules after finding problems. If you are going to defend accounts, defend them with the audit provisions in your hand.

On the other side of the ledger, the neighbor is right that an ESA is more flexible than a voucher. That is the point. The flexibility has to come with receipts.

Verdict: False as stated. The statute lists the allowed expenses. Whether the audits are tough enough is a fair question to put to your legislature.

How to check any claim at the next barbecue

You do not need a law degree to defend yourself against a confident fence-line expert. You need three habits.

1. Ask which tool. Vouchers, accounts, tax-credit scholarships and charters are not the same, and about half the arguments collapse when you ask. The sorting table is in Vouchers, ESAs, Tax Credits and Charters Sorted Out in One Table.
2. Ask which state. A federal ruling and a state constitution can point in different directions, and every program has its own statute.
3. Ask for the text. Your state legislature's website posts the statute for free. Read the section on eligibility, the section on school requirements and the section on audits. Ten minutes will put you ahead of the fence.

Notice also that the best answer to a myth is often a date. The year 1991, the year 2002, the year 1955: each one is a small hammer.

The bottom line

• Charter schools are public schools run under a contract. Vouchers were first aimed at low-income families. The Supreme Court upheld vouchers under the federal Constitution in 2002. Choice is more than a century old in places, and it was bipartisan from the start.
• The neighbor does have two points. State constitutions can still block a program, and accountability varies from statute to statute. Concede both and then show him the text.
• Our side has a duty here too. Defend accounts with audits, defend universal programs with honest cost numbers, and do not claim that every study favors choice.
• Check any claim with three questions: which tool, which state, and where is the text?
• Pass the list along. A neighborhood that argues from the record is a better neighborhood than one that argues from the fence.