The report’s findings contradict the claims made by school-choice opponents, including in Oklahoma.

For example, the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA), a lobbyist organization, claims on its website that the LNH program “has shifted more than $38 million away from public schools to private schools over the last decade,” saying voucher programs like LNH scholarships “erode public school funding and harms the 700,000 students who attend public schools.”

But far from reducing public-school funding by $38 million, as OSSBA claimed, the EdChoice report shows that public schools have reaped at least $43.9 million (and up to $71 million) from the savings generated by the LNH program, money freed up for use on other students who remain in the public-school system.

Former state Rep. Jason Nelson, an Oklahoma City Republican who authored the 2010 law creating the LNH program, said the study’s results are no surprise.

“The report confirms what I and other supporters said at the time: It not only helps kids who are not able to be adequately served in their neighborhood school, but also improves the education system for all the kids by increasing the per-pupil spending in the traditional public schools,” Nelson said. “Opponents carried on that that was not the case and we simply didn’t understand school finance, but it turns out they were incorrect. It is a simple division problem, and the law has performed exactly as we said it would back then.”

While a dozen states have enacted broad-based school-choice programs since 2020 that allow nearly all families to qualify, only one of those programs was examined in the EdChoice study because the study relied on federal data that precedes the launch of most universal school-choice programs.

However, the report did examine Arizona’s Education Savings Account program, which allows most families to use a portion of their child’s per-pupil taxpayer allotment to pay for private-school tuition or other needs.

Arizona’s ESA program became universal starting in the 2023 budget year and had a short-run net fiscal effect on state and local taxpayers of $37 million in the 2024 budget year.

However, the EdChoice report found that Arizona’s program will “lead to annual net fiscal savings of $244 million.”

“These results call into question claims that education choice is ‘blowing a hole’ in the state’s budget,” Lueken wrote.

Similar savings may be generated by the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit Act, which provides refundable tax credits of $5,000 to $7,500 per child to help Oklahoma families cover the cost of private school tuition. The lower a family’s income, the larger the tax credit, and all families qualify.

The current maximum credit of $7,500 is significantly less than the per-pupil taxpayer funding in Oklahoma’s public schools.

According to Oklahoma State Department of Education data from the Oklahoma Cost Accounting System, public school district expenditures in 2023 (the most recent available) totaled $9,538,453,992, and enrollment in the 2022-2023 school year totaled 701,066 students. That means Oklahoma public schools had an average of $13,605 per student that year.

As a result, anytime a child shifts from public school to private school using the Parental Choice Tax Credit, it will free up $6,135 to $8,605 per student for use in the public-school system. The number of students shifting from public school to private school is expected to increase significantly over the next few years due to the Parental Choice Tax Credit program’s existence.