How are SC school voucher recipients performing academically? Lawmakers don’t know
A mandated report on the efficacy of South Carolina’s school voucher program was not published last year, and there’s no timeline for when it might be completed.
The Education Oversight Committee, which is tasked with completing the annual report, couldn’t conduct it in the program’s inaugural year because the S.C. Department of Education didn’t transmit any student assessment data for it to evaluate, officials said.
The department, which is required by law to send student assessment data to the EOC annually, has not responded to The State’s requests for comment about its failure to transmit the data.
Education Oversight spokeswoman Tenell Felder said the committee had been in discussions with the department about the data since the program’s inception in 2024, but had not received a firm answer about when the information would be turned over.
“Our understanding is that the (South Carolina Department of Education) has received student assessment data in a variety of formats,” she said in an email. “They are making determinations about how to store and safely transmit these data to the EOC for analysis.”
Felder said the EOC suggested the department contract with the state’s Revenue and Fiscal Affairs office to launch an assessment submission portal that would securely store and compile assessments, but did not know whether education officials planned to heed its advice.
Absent a review of the data, there’s no way to know how voucher students fared on assessments compared to their traditional public school counterparts.
Nonetheless, both the governor and the superintendent of education have proposed growing the program from 10,000 students this school year to 20,000 students next year.
Expanding the program to 20,000 students, a 50% increase beyond the 15,000-student minimum set by law, would raise the program’s costs an estimated $38 million, from roughly $83 million to $121 million, according to an S.C. Department of Education budget analysis.
Patrick Kelly, a lobbyist for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, said it would be inappropriate to expand the program in that way without first analyzing if it is working.
“Deliberately built into this law is an accountability measure to make sure that students are learning and achieving,” Kelly said. “Until we have that data, we don’t think it’s appropriate to grow the program beyond what’s legally required.”
State Rep. Neal Collins, a Pickens Republican who sits on the Education Oversight Committee, shared a similar sentiment.
Collins, one of a handful of House Republicans who voted against the state’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund law, said he’s uncomfortable voting to expand the program without more information about student performance.
“They want to double the money to the program in the next couple of months and I don’t think it’s fair to the taxpayer or fair to me to ask me to make that vote,” he said.
Senate Education Committee Chair Greg Hembree was more forgiving of the department’s delay in transmitting assessment information.
Hembree, an Horry County Republican, said he didn’t know why the department hadn’t turned over the data, but chalked it up to the learning curve that comes with implementing any new program.
“It’s complicated, it’s brand new, it’s going to have problems,” said Hembree, who urged grace for education officials in the scholarship program’s early years.
“It’s inevitable,” he added. “You’re going to have hiccups along the way.”
What is South Carolina’s school voucher program?
Passed in 2023 and rolled out last school year, South Carolina’s Education Scholarship Trust Fund subsidizes the educational expenses of qualified families that enroll their K-12 children outside their zoned public school.
The program, which is being phased in over three years, becomes available to more families in each successive year.
Participants may spend their scholarship money on a variety of approved expenses, including tuition, tutoring, technology and transportation.
Spending on private school tuition was paused in September 2024, in response to a South Carolina Supreme Court decision, but resumed last year after the General Assembly amended the law.
The state’s school voucher law contains a variety of accountability measures that are intended to deter fraud and allow the public to assess the academic achievement of program participants.
Among them are requirements that scholarship students take regular assessments to track their academic progress and that the Education Oversight Committee evaluates and reports out the academic performance of scholarship students and the schools they attend.
Ensuring accountability in the program has been front and center for legislators since debate on the current state voucher law began in earnest about four years ago.
In fact, one powerful senator’s concerns about the removal of an accountability measure from a compromise version of the bill in 2022 actually delayed its passage until the following year.
That year, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, scuttled a vote on the bill after a joint committee removed a provision he favored requiring recipients to take the same end-of-course tests as traditional public school students.
While Massey softened his stance the following year and ultimately backed a testing compromise, the senator and other pro-voucher lawmakers have remained committed to ensuring that the parents of scholarship recipients can evaluate their children’s academic progress.
As the law currently stands, both education service providers and the parents of voucher recipients bear some responsibility for ensuring that scholarship students take “nationally norm-referenced” assessments that are approved by the S.C. Department of Education, align with state standards and include a linking study.
The law requires providers that offer full-time academic instruction to turn over assessment results to both parents and the S.C. Department of Education, although it is not clear how those assessments should be transmitted to the department.
While providers that do not offer full-time instruction have no duty to formally assess students, the law requires parents of such students to ensure that they are tested. It’s not clear, however, whether parents must submit assessments to the S.C. Department of Education.
The EOC, which is supposed to receive individual student assessment data from the department for analysis, said it believed education officials had asked parents, not education service providers, to submit test data.
“Our understanding is that providers do not share assessment data with SCDE, but rather parents submit (Education Scholarship Trust Fund) participating student assessment results directly to the SCDE,” Felder, the Education Oversight Committee spokeswoman, said in an email.
Since the department did not respond to requests for comment, it’s not clear why officials apparently deviated from the assessment submission process outlined in law.
This story was originally published January 22, 2026 at 10:57 AM.