Most state 2025 legislative sessions kicked off last week or this week. The remaining states will have their sessions underway by early February. Louisiana is the only exception, and it is not scheduled to convene its legislature until April.
During the legislative sessions, K-12 education will continue to be a common top policy area throughout the country. Efforts to enact and expand school choice legislation will be front and center in several states, as has been the case since 2021.
The prolonged public district school closures gave parents a front-row seat in their children’s classrooms through the remote Zoom sessions. What they saw concerned them greatly — a lack of quality academic learning and far-left political indoctrination. Public support for school choice grew quickly, and parents desperately pleaded for a way out for their children when their concerns were ignored.
A variety of school choice programs — private school scholarships, tax-credit scholarships, education savings accounts, and public school open enrollment — with different eligibility criteria have been signed into law over the past four years by historic measure.
Landmark legislation was passed that granted all or nearly all students within some states the funding for parents to select the best education avenue for their children, thus breaking the public school monopoly and creating a free market K-12 education landscape.
Looking back, in March 2021, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed near-universal school choice into law. In July 2022, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed universal school choice into law in The Grand Canyon State and set it on course for successful implementation later that year.
Eight additional states — Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah — enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law in 2023. Alabama and Louisiana passed universal school choice in 2024, bringing the total to 12 states that provide all or nearly all parents statewide with funding to select the learning avenue for their child.
At the time, each state had a Republican trifecta, except for North Carolina, where the Republican supermajorities in both the House and Senate were able to override the Democratic governor’s veto of the school choice bill.
Education freedom champion governors such as Doug Ducey (AZ), Kim Reynolds (IA), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (AR), Ron DeSantis (FL), and Kevin Stitt (OK) were front runners, blazing the trail with courage and conviction. Other Republican governors don’t want to be left in the dust by their peers, nor risk their state residents fleeing to neighboring states where education freedom is a reality.
Currently, there are 13 states — Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming — with Republican trifectas that have yet to pass universal or near-universal school choice.
For some of the governors of these states, advancing robust school choice has been a top priority, but they did not have the votes in their state Senate or House. Gov. Greg Abbott (TX) is the prime example of a governor with an unwavering commitment to education freedom yet lacking the needed votes in the Texas statehouse. Gov. Abbott refused to give up and employed an effective strategy that Gov. Reynolds used in Iowa when her efforts in 2022 failed to pass universal school choice — the replacement of Republican legislators who voted against parental empowerment.
Neither Texas, Idaho, nor North Dakota has a private school choice program. Other states such as Georgia, New Hampshire, and Tennessee have enacted school choice in recent years but with limited student eligibility.
This legislative session is a timely opportunity to pass universal school choice bills so all families statewide can access education alternatives from their government-run, teacher union-controlled, residentially-assigned public school.
Last week, New Hampshire’s newly elected Gov. Kelly Ayotte’s State of the State Address communicated her commitment to enacting universal school choice in The Granite State. Ayotte said: “As a mother, I understand that every child learns differently and that we should give each child the opportunity to be in the education setting that allows them to reach his or her full potential.”
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is a strong advocate for school choice. Recently, Gov. Lee said, “When it comes to education, more freedom is what our children need to succeed. That means empowering parents with school choice….that’s why we need to pass the Education Freedom Act in Tennessee.”
In Republican-controlled states yet to advance robust school choice, 2025 is the year for lawmakers to get the job done for all families of their state.