41% of traditional public-school parents say they would not choose the same school again, according to a nationally representative 50CAN/Edge Research survey. Among private-school parents the figure is only 13% — more than three times lower. The NCES corroborates the gap from a different angle: 79% of private-school families report being “very satisfied” with educational quality, compared with 55% of public-school families. Neither instrument measures regret directly, but the consistency across surveys and constructs suggests the asymmetry is real, not an artifact of question wording.
The demand-side data makes the inaction story sharper. EdChoice’s 2024 Schooling in America survey found that 36% of parents would prefer private school, yet only 9% actually enroll — a 4:1 gap driven almost entirely by tuition costs and geographic access. That gap complicates the Gilovich framing: most public-school “inaction” is involuntary, constrained by money rather than by indecision. A parent who cannot afford private school and later wishes they could have is experiencing frustrated aspiration, not the freely-chosen inaction that typically intensifies over time in the regret literature.
Selection bias is the largest confounder. Private-school families are wealthier, more likely to have two parents in the household, and more educationally engaged on every metric NCES tracks. Their higher satisfaction may reflect resources and involvement rather than anything intrinsic to private schooling. Randomized voucher studies (e.g., Milwaukee, DC Opportunity Scholarship) show modest academic gains and higher parental satisfaction, but the effect sizes are far smaller than the raw satisfaction gap implies. The directional finding — parents who chose private school regret it less — holds up; the magnitude should be read with the income gradient firmly in mind.