Does school choice hurt public schools? The research says, “It helps!”

While school choice detractors often say that voucher, tax credit, and education savings account programs harm their surrounding public schools, 20 years of research make clear that this is not the case. Here at AFC, we believe in the power of competitive effects – when there are great schools in an education system, they incentivize the schools around them to be great too, in order to keep their students. And we are happy to see this theory of competitive effects bearing out in the research discussed in our new research summary, which shows that when parents have more school options outside of their zoned public school, this leads to improvement in those public schools.