The Learning Coop

Iowa pays for most private-school students now, but it publishes much less about private schools than about public ones. None of these exist for any Iowa private school:

• Exact ESA money or students by school. The ESA law (Iowa Code 257.11B) and its rules (281 IAC chapter 20) require no report by school; the Department of Education publishes ESA counts only by the public district where students live. The money sits in a state fund and is paid out by a contractor, so it doesn’t show in the state checkbook by school.¹ That’s why the dollars here are estimates.
• Graduation rates. The state’s graduation rates count public-school students only; its cohort definition leaves out home-schooled and nonpublic students.²
• Attendance and chronic absence. Reported for public districts only.
• Official ratings. The Iowa School Performance Profiles and federal school designations cover public schools only. Private schools get no state rating, and Funnel doesn’t make one: test results below are shown grade by grade, never combined into a score.
• Tuition. No state source lists it. The Department of Revenue’s 2022 study of School Tuition Organizations found an average tuition of $4,596 in 2021–22 across the schools in its data, ranging from $150 to $11,044.³
• STO scholarships by school. School Tuition Organizations must report each school’s scholarship students and dollars to the Department of Revenue (Iowa Code 422.11S(9)(e)), but the department doesn’t publish them; only each STO’s yearly tax credits are public (on Tax credits).