The voucher paid the rent. Tuition for kids who were already inside.

Arizona’s 2022 universal ESA was sold to legislators with a $65 million first-year fiscal note. Year 2 came in at $738 million. Governor Hobbs’s office tied the FY24 budget shortfall directly to ESA growth. One Arizona family attempted to use ESA funds to build a chicken coop for a homeschool science curriculum. The Department of Education approved the materials. It declined to approve the live chickens, citing “consistent with previous decisions to deny the purchase of animals.” The line between “educational” and “non-educational” is being drawn case-by-case, in real time, by a state agency without rule-making authority to clarify it.

Florida went universal in 2023. Voucher accounts more than doubled in one year. Eighth-grade reading scored 252 on the 2024 NAEP, the lowest since 1998. Eighth-grade math is below 2003 levels. Four straight NAEP cycles, declining.

The voucher is not the only thing that happened to Florida schools in those years. But if the voucher were the rocket fuel its architects claim, the results would not be running in the opposite direction. This is the state Jeb Bush ran, the program he signed in 1999, and the policy his organization brands as the model for seventeen years. When ExcelinEd’s chairman published his post-NAEP “success states” list in January 2025, Florida wasn’t on it.

Iowa went universal in three years. The receipt is on a state .gov site. Of Iowa’s 27,866 ESA participants in Year 2, only 1,905 had attended an Iowa public K-12 school the previous year. That is 6.8%. The other 93.2% were already in private school or entering kindergarten. Year 1 the new-to-private share was 33.7%. Year 2 it collapsed to 6.8%. As the program scales, the share of recipients who were already in private school grows, not shrinks.

Year one filled with families already homeschooling: 80% of recipients were already out of the public system before the program existed. The legislature had to amend HB 455 to cap extracurricular and PE purchases that “did not align” with the law’s educational purpose. On April 18, 2025, Judge Laura S. Scott of Utah’s 3rd District ruled the program unconstitutional under the Article X guarantee of public schools open to all and free. The legislature responded by raising ongoing funding: $80M in Year 1, $100M for 2025-26, $120M total for 2026-27. The court ruling did not slow the program. It accelerated it. Appeal pending at the Utah Supreme Court.

Texas blocked vouchers for two decades. SB 2 was signed in May 2025, with $1 billion appropriated for the first biennium (FY 2026-2027). The Legislative Budget Board projected $7.9 billion by 2031 in the same fiscal note. Eight-fold growth, in six years, written into the bill before a single account was funded. The program launches fall 2026; no Texas family has spent a TEFA dollar yet.

By May 2026, roughly 274,000 students had applied for the first round and 96,000 award notices had gone out, for a program capped at 80,000 to 100,000 slots in year one. Component 5 of the ExcelinEd playbook (fill the program) fires before a dollar disburses.

EdChoice’s own Texas brief, the document arguing for the voucher, includes this footnote: Texas has an 88.7% AFGR graduation rate, but a 47% STAAR Algebra I proficiency rate and a 51% STAAR English I proficiency rate. The brief concludes the diploma is “partly inflated.” The advocacy document admits the state’s headline education number is overstated, in the same text where it argues for expanding the voucher.

Indiana started its voucher in 2011. Successive expansions in 2013, 2021, and 2023 widened eligibility until universal eligibility kicks in for 2026-27. By 2024-25, nearly 70% of Choice Scholarship students had no record of attending an Indiana public school. The number has climbed every year since 2022-23, when it was 64%. IDOE attributed the rise to students who were already enrolled at their Choice school now qualifying without prior attendance at an Indiana public school. The already-private cohort is the structural majority, before the cap comes off.