The Indiana Choice Scholarship Program (ICSP) provides K–12 students with state funds to attend private schools. Currently supporting more than 75,000 students, it is the largest voucher program in the country, and enrollment has grown nearly twentyfold since its inception in 2011. Historically, students whose families fell below the income threshold were among those eligible to participate. In April 2025, lawmakers expanded eligibility to all families. A prior study of participating students in grades 5–8 concluded that the ICSP generally had no effect on participants’ English language arts scores and a negative impact on their math scores. However, there has never been a large-scale analysis of the program’s impact on nonparticipants. Such an analysis is important because some worry that students who do not choose a private school risk being left behind academically.

Various arguments have been made suggesting that the competitive pressures of an education marketplace can benefit all students. Schools may innovate to improve learning in response to the fiscal pressure to attract and retain students. However, students who remain in their neighborhood public schools may be left with lower peer quality, furthering inequitable schooling experiences. Our research tests these theories by analyzing the ICSP’s effect on the standardized test scores and graduation rates of 837,000 public school students between the 2010–2011 and 2015–2016 school years. We excluded charter school students from our analysis.

Our research uses two metrics to measure the competition facing public schools: the drive time to the nearest private school and the number of private schools within a given drive time. We calculated drive times from before the ICSP began to avoid skewing our findings. This approach accounts for the possibility that new private schools may have responded to the program by establishing themselves near low-performing public schools, where they might have found it easier to recruit applicants.

Our findings reveal that the ICSP did not affect the math scores, English language arts scores, or graduation rates of public school students. The program had null effects in both its first year, when about 3,900 students participated, and the final year of our study, when about 37,000 students participated—3 percent of all school-aged children in Indiana that year. It is especially notable that the null effects remained as more students participated because public schools generally lost funding as students transferred to private schools. Furthermore, the null effects occurred regardless of the number of voucher students that nearby private schools accepted.

Our research finds that the ICSP may have affected some groups of public school students differently. Evidence suggests that the program increased math scores for female students and English language arts scores for students with limited English proficiency. Additionally, the program appeared to raise graduation rates for students in high-poverty public schools, but only in its first year.

Overall, our findings suggest that a private school voucher program targeted at low-income families will not necessarily reduce academic outcomes for students who remain in public schools. This may help assuage the concerns of some school choice opponents.

Note
This research brief is based on Anna J. Egalite and Andrew D. Catt, “Effects of the Indiana Choice Scholarship Program on Public School Students’ Achievement and Graduation Rates,” AERA Open 11 (2025).