Private Schools in American Education: A Small Sector Still Lagging in Diversity

Private schools have a long and important tradition in U.S. education and have been the focus of a great deal of political controversy in recent years. There is deep division among Americans over the desirability of using public funds to finance vouchers for private education—an issue that has become the leading educational goal of the Trump Administration. Surveys of the public show that substantial majorities of Americans do not favor voucher policies, yet these efforts have long been supported by significant shares of the public, the religious groups that operate nonpublic schools, and leaders of one of our national parties. This deep division is reflected in the extraordinary differences among the states in their adoption of voucher policies over the past two decades. Examining these differences, along with data on national and regional trends in private education, provides a useful framework for considering the relationship between private school enrollment and the impact of voucher policies.

This report explores how the size and share of private education has changed in the U.S. over two decades, from 1995 to 2015-16 (the most recent federal data), along with how the students are divided among different kinds of private schools: secular, Catholic, and non-Catholic religious schools. It also examines the racial composition of these schools, providing key data for evaluating the civil rights dimension of private schooling and voucher policies. The civil rights questions concern how well private schools serve students of color, what kinds of schools these students attend, how segregated they are, and whether students of color are getting a major share of the growth of private schools in the areas they are growing, especially in the South.