Why 2025 Should Be a Year of Freedom and Progress in Education

2024 closed with more news about widespread problems in American education. An international test of students’ science and math achievement revealed sharp declines in 4th and 8th grade students’ test scores since 2019. Another international test showed adults’ literacy and numeracy scores dropped the last test in 2017. Twenty-eight percent of American adults achieved the lowest score in literacy.

But there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of American education thanks to the historic progress of expanding choice in education over the past several years, including 11 states creating or expanding choice programs last year alone. More than 1 million American students are now benefiting from private education choice programs and more than 22 million are eligible.

These options give families the freedom to choose the right learning environment for their children, which has the potential to spur widespread progress and improvement.

Texas poised to enact education savings accounts

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has pledged to enact a broad education savings account (ESA) program, which could provide new options to more than five million children. The Lone Star state came close to enacting an ESA program 2023, but was narrowly defeated in the state house of representatives. But observers expect the governor to have more support for his signature initiative in the state house following the recent elections.

In 2023, I explained why ESAs would be a lifeline for at-risk children in Texas. At the time, more than half of Texas’s low-income children scored below basic on the NAEP 4th grade reading exam. In Austin, Houston, and Fort Worth, more than six out of ten low-income students scored in that range.

More Potential Progress in the States

Education reformers are optimistic that lawmakers will expand options in other states.

• In New Hampshire, they will consider legislation to make the state’s education freedom account program universal.
• In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee has made establishing education savings accounts a top priority of his administration. After enacting Tennessee’s ESA program in 2019, Governor Lee is now backing the Education Freedom Act to make education choice more broadly available to families across the state.
• According to EdChoice, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Carolina are also expected to consider expanding choice programs in 2025.

Congress May Enact Sweeping Education Choice Initiatives

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have an opportunity to enact the Education Choice for Children Act or similar legislation that would provide a federal tax credit to encourage donations to fund scholarships for students across the country. With the 2017 tax law expiring and a budget reconciliation package on the agenda for 2025, a federal school choice tax credit may soon become a reality.

Executive Actions by the New Trump Administration

We should also expect to see the new administration use executive authority to expand parental choice options, from reversing the Biden administration’s recent regulations of the public charter school sector—which are stifling innovation—to using existing authority to grant states and localities more flexibility to use federal funds to expand parental choice.

One important change that I hope to see is for the Treasury Department to provide guidance clarifying that the federal employer-provided child care tax credit can be used to provide educational services along with child care. This could encourage more employers to provide new schooling options as a means for offering child care.

A New Approach to Analyzing Return-on-Investment in Education

In November, FREOPP published a new report, Establishing a Practical, Return-on-Investment Framework for Education and Skills Development to Expand Economic Opportunity, which I coauthored with Matthew Barry and Arushi Mathavan of Learn Capital.

The report describes our work, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin’s Salem Center for Public Policy, to create a learning impact index to measure the social and economic value created by education ventures to enhance lifetime earnings and achieve economic cost savings.

Based on existing academic literature about human capital development and economic impacts, the index provides a new way to evaluate return-on-investment (ROI) in education. The broader application of this index or other ROI frameworks will expand equal opportunity by elevating the education interventions that provide students with the most value. Our paper includes recommendations for how federal policymakers, researchers, and even the private sector can further develop and apply ROI frameworks.

Freedom and Progress 2024

I hope you didn’t miss our annual Freedom and Progress conference in November. But if you did, be sure to check out the session recordings here.

I was honored to host several of the panel discussions:

• During our education session, Rep. Candice Pierucci, who sponsored Utah’s groundbreaking ESA program, provided insight about the ongoing work to implement and expand that program, which is proving to be very popular.
• Robert Enlow, President and CEO of EdChoice, described the historic progress that has been made expanding parental choice options, which are now available to 40 percent of American students. But he explained that the new challenge for reform advocates is to ensure that there is the supply of high-quality education options to meet this rising demand.
• Learn Capital’s Arushi Mathavan shared her perspective from the venture capital community and discussed why education stakeholders need to focus on return-on-investment.

I also hosted lively panel discussions on whether AI will advance or hinder equal opportunity and using technology to improve program integrity and benefit delivery in government social welfare programs.

These sessions were all part of FREOPP’s broader mission to improve the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder using freedom, innovation, and pluralism. Thank you for your interest in our work to expand opportunity—in education and beyond.

FREOPP’s work is made possible by people like you, who share our belief that equal opportunity is central to the American Dream. Please join them by making a donation today.

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