At the core of the school choice movement is the aspiration that every family obtain the freedom to pursue educational excellence for their children—regardless of their geographic location or socioeconomic background. Yet opponents have cast this movement as providing aid to the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
This claim has been used to galvanize parents and public school advocates to condemn choice options as harmful to both equity and the educational system at large, and it was among the leading arguments used to defeat the expansion of Arizona's education savings account program in the state's 2018 ballot measure, Proposition 305.
Despite its political potency, however, this narrative against school choice is increasingly faltering under the weight of empirical evidence. As the left-leaning Urban Institute found in 2019, for example, “the country's largest private school choice program [the Florida Tax Credit scholarship program], which enrolls largely low-income students from low-income schools, has a positive effect on college-going and graduation rates.”
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