Universal Education Savings Accounts are granting families extraordinary flexibility in choosing how to learn. It’s time to empower charter schools to keep pace with a rapidly evolving marketplace.
During a 2001 conversation, economist Milton Friedman was asked to revisit his vision for a universal school-voucher framework, a notion he had championed 46 years earlier. At that moment, progress toward that objective was modest. Some states or districts operated limited, means-tested voucher programs, and only about 1 percent of public school students were enrolled in charter schools. “Charter schools are a halfway house,” Friedman remarked. “They remain public schools.”
Twenty-five years later, Friedman’s dream of educational freedom is closer to become a reality than ever before. Twelve states now administer education savings accounts (ESAs) with universal eligibility. Unlike traditional vouchers, ESA funds are not restricted to private-school tuition. Families can deploy them for a broader set of educational expenses, including tutoring, textbooks and curriculum, online courses, educational therapies, and technology.
Strikingly, there has been relatively little focus on what this new era of educational freedom signifies—or ought to signify—for the older school-choice model of charter schools. That lack of focus is notable given that after 35 years of charters being nearly the sole publicly funded option for families seeking an alternative to district schools, the array of options now available is almost limitless.
To begin addressing this question, I, together with Auburn professor David Marshall, surveyed 285 charter school leaders across Arizona, Florida, and Utah—three states with vibrant charter sectors that introduced universal ESA programs in 2022, 2023, and 2024, respectively. Among other things, we asked whether changes are needed in the charter sector because of the ESA and whether they might have opened a nonpublic school, such as a private or microschool, if universal ESA had existed when their charter opened.
Roughly two-thirds of respondents indicated that the charter sector should respond to ESAs by reducing bureaucracy and granting schools greater autonomy. In a related finding, 36 percent of respondents overall said they would have contemplated launching a nonpublic school, such as a private or microschool, if the universal ESA had been available at the time. The results are especially noteworthy in Arizona, where 42 percent said they would have considered starting a nonpublic school, slightly higher than the 38 percent who said they would not have.
Arizona hosts the longest-running universal ESA program and has recorded the largest documented shift from traditional public schools to ESAs. As of March 2026, the number of students who joined the universal ESA program directly from public schools equaled roughly 3 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment. In other words, the responses from Arizona could foreshadow attitudes in other states with universal ESAs as participation climbs.
Second-guessing among charter leaders highlights a problem policymakers have largely overlooked. Universal ESAs have broadened the options available to families and would-be founders, but they have offered little direct benefit to schools created before those choices existed. Charter operators shaped their organizations under a policy regime where becoming a charter was often the only realistic path to operate a publicly funded school outside the traditional district system. Today, an entrepreneur aiming to open the same school might reasonably choose to run it privately and finance it through ESA payments instead. Yet existing charter schools are effectively locked into choices made years or even decades earlier.
Charter schools bear certain obligations that private schools do not, including testing mandates, a requirement to serve students with special needs, and non-sectarian status. Those constraints represented an acceptable price for access to public funding when the alternative was charging families tuition. But universal ESAs alter that bargain. Accordingly, states with universal ESAs should create a pathway for charter schools to convert voluntarily into private schools.
Consider the school entrepreneur who set out to build a Montessori school. Even though Montessori features practices that do not always fit neatly within the architecture of public schooling—grouping students across multiple ages, progressing through material at different speeds, and following a curriculum that does not necessarily align with the grade-by-grade sequence of state standards and assessments—charter Montessori schools are subjected to the same “accountability” structures as any other charter. In practice, that means that school leaders have to pick between a high-fidelity model that pleases parents or a low-fidelity model that can produce test scores to satisfy authorizers and state bureaucrats.
Consider, alternatively, a school leader committed to serving students with disabilities, who might value the additional public funding and access to special education services that come with remaining inside the public system. For such a school, charter status may still represent the right bargain.
The proposed charter-private pathway makes room for both models. Schools that prize maximum freedom could leave the charter system for the private market, while those that value the advantages of remaining in the public system could remain charters.
Of course, conversion should not mean simply handing public assets to private operators. States would need clear rules governing buildings, equipment, accumulated funds, and other property purchased with taxpayer dollars. A smooth transition would also require that schools provide adequate notice and a transition plan for currently enrolled families, particularly when conversion would alter admissions, transportation, or special education services or when the ESA allotment would not fully cover tuition and fees.
These complications are real, but hardly insurmountable. States have already rewritten the rules of school choice for families and for entrepreneurs entering the market today. There is little reason to deny existing charter schools the chance to reconsider a choice they made under a very different set of rules. Educational freedom should not stop at the schoolhouse door.
