AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File When younger millennials and older Gen-Zs complained that they couldn’t afford a home, the response from some boomers was, “Well, stop buying avocado toast.”
The younguns rolled their eyes. From 2015 to 2025, house prices in America nearly doubled. The 30-year mortgage rate almost doubled as well. That means that a $175,000 starter home with an $835 monthly mortgage payment in 2015 became a $350,000 house with a $2,259 monthly mortgage payment in 2025.
So maybe it ain’t the avocado toast.
Something similar happens in education policy when school choice opponents try to blame choice programs for bankrupting states. ProPublica devoted an entire article to the idea that Arizona’s choice program is “blowing a hole” in the state budget.
But the truth of the matter is that, in most school choice states, voucher, tax credit and Educational Savings Account programs represent just 0.7 percent of total state expenditures. Looking specifically at states with universal choice programs, the number rises, but only slightly, to about 1.3 percent of total state spending.
So no, it ain’t the choice program.
If choice programs were blowing a hole in state budgets, their total spending would need to be large and growing disproportionately quickly — which they are not. Moreover, the programs would need to be all cost to the state and represent no savings, which is also untrue.
Choice programs are still a very tiny part of total state budgets. Arizona, which has the largest school choice program of any state per capita, still spent only $882 million on its choice program — about 8 percent of its total K-12 spending, 5.4 percent of state general fund spending, and just over 1 percent of the state’s total spending on all public services, including all state and federal matching funds.
If a state is going bankrupt, it isn’t because of 1 percent of its spending. It is because of the other 99 percent.
It is also worth noting that there were 1.1 million students enrolled in K-12 public schools in Arizona and 85,000 enrolled in the choice program in fiscal 2025. Moreover, Arizona public schools received $15.9 billion in total revenue from local, state, and federal sources. That means that the choice program educated 7.6 percent of the kids while spending only 5.5 percent of the taxpayer money dedicated to this purpose. So the program is actually saving Arizona money, not creating new expenses.
If we want to look at bloating budgets, we should instead turn to K-12 public education. Looking across the country from 2015 to 2025 , we see per pupil spending growing from around $13,000 per student to $19,000 per student, a 31 percent increase. Even after adjusting for inflation, that spending still grew around 7 percent. Given that most students attend traditional public schools, it is this growth, not choice spending, that has strained budgets.
Where has the money gone? Well, the Phoenix Elementary School District lost 39 percent of its students in the last seven school years, but increased its staff by 5 percent, according to data from the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown, which tracks K-12 staffing changes. Interestingly, the growth was entirely in non-teaching staff. The total number of teachers in the district fell by 7 percent.
And we don’t have to pick on Phoenix, because this has happed all over the country.
Denver Public Schools lost 2 percent of its students but grew its staff by 3 percent — one new staff member for every four students it lost.
Chicago lost 10 percent of its students (more than 35,000) but increased staff by 20 percent, hiring a new staff member for every six students it lost.
Even in fiscally responsible Florida, Miami-Dade lost 5 percent of its students but increased its staff by 1 percent.
Many supporters of the status quo in education try to blame school choice for public schools’ profligacy. But just as we shouldn’t blame young people’s inability to buy homes on their affinity for avocado toast, we shouldn’t blame state budget woes on education choice programs that aren’t causing them.
Dr. Michael McShane is Director of National Research at EdChoice, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to understanding and pursuing a K–12 education system that empowers every family to choose the schooling environment that fits their children’s needs best.
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