Five Questions to Guide Effective Education Savings Account Implementation 

July 7, 2025

By Robin Chait and William Berry

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)—programs that allocate state education funds directly to families for private school tuition and other approved educational services—are among the fastest growing forms of school choice in the country. As our landscape analysis late last year explored, ESAs have been expanding rapidly over the past 5 years to serve more students in a greater number of states. In 2025 alone, five states—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, and Wyoming—have enacted new ESA programs.  

Beyond the creation of these new programs, several states with existing targeted ESA programs that served specific student populations expanded them to universal programs that serve all students and not just targeted groups. Arizona was the first state to create a universal ESA program in 2022, expanding its targeted program for students with disabilities in 2011. Similarly, Florida expanded its ESA programs in 2023 from serving families of low and middle income and students with disabilities to serving all students. The state has several different kinds of programs to meet the needs of different student groups. Notably, Texas’s new universal program is set to become the largest ESA program in the country with a funding cap of $1 billion. 

As ESA programs expand in number and evolve to serve more students, it’s critical to consider how state leaders are measuring their success. Following up on our landscape analysis, which examined accountability and data transparency for ESA programs, we’re highlighting five important questions state leaders should ask about the implementation and effectiveness of ESAs so that they can achieve their intended goals.  

Who will have access to ESA funds and who will not?

As noted above, some states determine access to ESAs by student income, disability status, or geographic location. In other cases, ESA programs universally serve all students in a state. Of the five new ESA programs, two (Texas and Wyoming) are universal, one (Georgia) is targeted to students in D- and F-rated school districts, and two (Alabama and Louisiana) are income based.  

While Texas is universal, if demand exceeds funding the state will prioritize certain student populations, including siblings of participating children, children from families with low income, children who previously ceased participation in the program due to enrollment in a school district or open enrollment in a charter school, and children with a disability and household income below 500 percent of federal poverty guidelines. 

Notably, both income-based ESAs (Alabama and Louisiana) are designed to automatically become universal after 3 years. This means that in 3 years, at least four of these five new ESA programs will be universal.  

Trends point toward an ESA landscape with both larger programs and a universal programs. However, while an ESA program may be universal on paper, student participation in the program may not be universally distributed across the state. To address this, four of the new ESA programs that were launched in 2025 included equity and access provisions that gave special consideration to particular groups of students, such as students with disabilities, students from active-duty military families, and students from families with low income. By including special considerations of this sort, states can ensure that universal ESA programs in fact serve all students as they grow.  

How are ESA dollars being spent?

In our previous brief, we highlighted two key measures of financial accountability that states use to ensure proper usage of ESA funds: (a) explicit lists detailing allowable and unallowable uses of ESA funds and (b) regular auditing of ESA programs to ensure proper fund usage. Each of the five programs that launched in 2025 contains regulations of this sort. Each has lists of allowable expenses limiting ESA funds to items such as tuition, tutoring, textbooks, technology, and approved therapies. They also have requirements for annual or random audits to prevent fraudulent uses of funds. Louisiana and Wyoming include requirements to create an anonymous hotline for individuals to report suspected misuse of funds.  

Georgia and Texas have regulations that prohibit account holders from using funds within family-owned businesses. Louisiana’s explicit statutory language forbids conflicts of interest. Additionally, the Georgia ESA program includes a Parent Review Committee that is designed to aid the state in making decisions on qualified expenses and appeals, ensuring community involvement in decisions on how ESA funds are spent.  

Understanding how families spend ESA dollars can help state leaders ensure that funding supports allowable expenses and evidence-based activities. 

How can we measure the effectiveness of ESA programs?

How to measure the effectiveness of ESA programs is a difficult question to answer for a variety of reasons. Many of the proponents of ESA programs believe that families should be the arbiters of effectiveness. If families choose a program, it must mean that it is working. Families refer programs to other families when they are satisfied with their outcomes. While family satisfaction is surely an important measure of program quality, there might be other measures of program effectiveness that are equally important, such as different types of student assessment results, portfolios of student work, attendance, measures of student engagement, advancement to the next grade level, and graduation rates.  

Typically, private school choice programs are assessed by analyzing the standardized testing outcomes of students who receive funds to attend private schools. However, most ESA programs don’t require students to take the state’s standardized assessment (usually opting to allow families to take any norm-referenced exam of their choosing). Therefore, it’s difficult to compare their achievement to those of students in other educational programs. States should consider how to measure the effectiveness of these programs to better understand their impact. 

Are ESA programs improving student achievement?

A critical measure of any education program’s effectiveness is whether it improves student outcomes. However, as mentioned previously, many ESA programs do not require students to take standardized assessments, and those that do often rely on nationally norm-referenced assessments or alternative assessments. As a result, there is no consistent or comparable measure of student achievement across ESA participants. Additionally, not all families use ESA funds for interventions that are explicitly designed to improve academic outcomes—for instance, funds may be used for extracurricular programs that are valuable but not focused on academic achievement. These factors make it challenging—though not impossible—to evaluate the impact of ESA programs on student performance. States should consider how to gather meaningful data to assess student progress. Even if causal links to ESA participation are difficult to establish, examining how students in ESA programs are faring is a critical step to getting a full picture of their academic growth and achievement. 

Are ESA programs transparent for families and policymakers?

Our brief highlighted the importance of data collection and reporting in ensuring ESA program transparency for families. Each of the five new ESA programs enacted in 2025 contains requirements for data collection and reporting. Georgia, Texas, and Wyoming, require the type of traditional data reporting highlighted in our brief: The states compile data on ESA usage and disaggregate the statewide data by categories such as proficiency, grade level, and graduation outcomes in the state’s annual report. Meanwhile, the other two states require data reporting from participating private schools and education service providers on topics such as attendance, services rendered, and test results. The inclusion of these data reporting requirements across all of the new 2025 ESA programs highlight the enduring importance of data reporting in maintaining ESA transparency. By ensuring the programs are transparent for families and policymakers, state leaders can provide some accountability for ensuring the programs are achieving their intended goals. 

Looking Ahead

As ESA programs quickly grow in size and scope, state leaders face a growing responsibility to ensure that these programs are fair, transparent, and effective in achieving their intended goals. These five questions can guide ESA planning, advance our collective understanding of program implementation and student outcomes, and contribute to future research—but they’re just a start. An impartial evaluation partner can help state leaders ask the right questions, surface the most useful data, and make informed decisions that prioritize student outcomes. To discuss how WestEd can partner with you to design rigorous, context-specific evaluations of ESAs, contact Robin Chait.