The Future Of Educational Choice Is In Good Hands

Through three and a half decades of relentless advocacy and litigation, IJ created a legal landscape that allowed educational choice programs not only to take root but to flourish. We took stock of this success back in 2023 and, as avid Liberty & Law readers will recall, decided that the time was right to shift our focus from defending legislatively enacted educational choice programs to tackling the many regulatory barriers that inhibit or impede education entrepreneurship and innovation. 

Of course, that meant ensuring a plan was in place to protect and expand the important precedent we’d set in our decades of defending choice programs throughout the country. That plan was the Partnership for Educational Choice: a multiyear project through which IJ would gradually hand off the work of defending educational choice programs to our longtime allies at EdChoice. We’re now more than two years into this four-year transition, and it is clear that the future of choice is in great hands.

The most recent sign of the Partnership’s success comes from Idaho, where we helped defend the state’s Parental Choice Tax Credit program. The program, which was enacted in 2025, provides a refundable $5,000 ($7,500 for children with disabilities) tax credit that empowers parents to access an education that works best for their children. Of course, empowering parents rarely sits well with the public education establishment, so a lawsuit quickly followed. 

Lawsuits challenging choice programs are nothing new. But this time, our opponents took the unusual step of asking the Idaho Supreme Court to hear the case directly, bypassing the lower courts altogether. The Idaho Supreme Court agreed to do so.

With EdChoice running point and IJ providing guidance and back-up, we moved to defend the program and, in February, received a unanimous opinion upholding the program. The opinion builds on the precedent that IJ set in so many other states over so many years. It holds that the public school system is “a floor, not a ceiling” and that the Legislature is free to provide for educational alternatives to that system. The opinion is a model for other courts, in other states, to follow in the future. 

This latest success leaves us even more confident that EdChoice is ready to carry IJ’s educational choice legacy into the future. And that, in turn, confirms our conviction that it is time to turn our attention to the regulatory barriers that so often stand in the way of education providers—especially those developing new and innovative models. We look forward to creating a legal climate as hospitable for education entrepreneurs as the one we fostered for parents who rely on choice.

Michael Bindas is an IJ senior attorney and the leader of IJ’s educational choice team.