They include Tabitha Sue James, whose son has been following an online curriculum at home since 2020. 

“I applied the first day,” she said. “I’ve paid thousands of dollars in property taxes to schools. Why shouldn’t we be able to have … homeschool choice?

While families won’t know until early April whether they have received funding, she could be among the nearly two-thirds of homeschooling families who say they use public dollars to educate their children, according to from the Rand Corp., shared exclusively with The 74.  

Of those who live in a state without education savings accounts or tax credits for private education, more than 70% said they would use public funds to offset homeschooling costs if they could, the data show. 

RAND’s American Life Panel on homeschool ESA use of parents who homeschool at least one child:

The similarity between the two figures is significant, said Angela Watson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Homeschool Research Lab.

“That gives some confidence that these responses are accurate,” she said. “Sometimes people will say they might do something when in reality, they wouldn’t actually do it. But here we see that people say and do things at the same rates.”

The lab commissioned Rand to ask the questions as part of its American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of more than 2,400 parents with K-12 students. While homeschoolers only represented about 10% of the respondents, the data are among the first to independently measure their views on ESAs. The results follow from the ​​Arkansas Department of Education and the University of Arkansas showing that about a quarter of students who used that state’s ESA program last school year were homeschoolers. 

Most existing data come from advocates who private school choice, an issue that still sharply divides homeschoolers. Some remain strongly opposed to ESA programs and warn that they threaten parents’ rights to educate their children as they see fit. “Government cheese always comes in a trap,” one parent posted in the Texans for Homeschool Freedom Facebook group. 

On the topic of ESAs “there are not a lot of indifferent people,” said Kevin Boden, director of legal and legislative advocacy for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “They either think it’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened in education, or they think that it’s the thing to be most feared.”

James, for one, is grateful for the financial support. She wants to add music lessons and buy materials for STEM projects. The Texas program “makes those opportunities possible for us.”

Under the program, she’s eligible to receive $2,000 annually. But parents who choose an accredited private school will receive $10,474 or up to $30,000 for a child with a disability. 

While James prefers the “low-stress” environment of homeschooling, that funding gap is enough of an incentive to make some homeschoolers rethink their educational model.

“Maybe the family has always wanted to get into an accredited private school and now they can,” said Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, which supports the state’s new program. “There are other families who say ‘Homeschooling is what would have been best for my child but we can’t afford what the child needs, so we’re going to have to go to this other option.’ ” 

Erin Flynn, lead instructor at , an Austin-area microschool for seventh through 12th graders, said she’s received several calls over the past few months from homeschooling families inquiring whether she will be accepting Education Freedom Accounts for tuition. 

Operating out of a converted house with a large porch, she offers a twice-a-week option for $600 per month and a full-time program for $950. She described the curriculum, which focuses on humanities, STEM and art, as “self-directed.” 

“We want to put the power back in students’ hands so that they aren’t just learning the canon; they’re learning how to identify what it is that they love,” said Flynn, a former English teacher. She was the principal of a charter school until she founded Hedge during the pandemic.

Microschools, she said, can be “a bridge” between homeschooling and traditional private school because they often allow students to attend part time. 

‘So many options’

According to Travis Pillow, spokesman for the Texas comptroller’s office, which runs the program, there’s no “seat time requirement.” As long as students are enrolled in a on the state’s list and take an annual assessment, they qualify as a private school student. 

To Pillow, who previously worked for the nonprofit running Florida’s school choice program, the different funding levels in Texas have been an adjustment. Florida’s program doesn’t differentiate between homeschoolers and private school students.

“I saw a lot of virtue in that idea because there are just so many options that don’t necessarily fit in a traditional box anymore,” he said. It’s hard in some cases, he said, to draw “a bright line” between schooling and homeschooling.

Some applicants educating their kids at home, he said, will likely enroll in approved online schools, which would qualify them for the larger award. But Newman, with the Coalition, also expects homeschoolers to pressure lawmakers to increase the amount for their children’s educational expenses. He thinks the proportion of homeschool applicants would be “dramatically higher” if the funds weren’t capped at $2,000.

“Many families homeschool because they have special needs children,” he said. Some types of therapy, “can very quickly surpass $2,000.” 

‘Out of necessity’

Texas isn’t the only state that offers different amounts for private school students and homeschoolers. Alabama’s awards $7,000 per student toward private school tuition and $2,000 for a “home education program.” Homeschooling families are capped at $4,000 even if they have more than two school-age children.

Texas and Alabama are “incentivizing people to go to private school and not to homeschool,” said Watson, with Johns Hopkins. But that could be a challenge for families living in rural areas without a lot of private school options, she said.

Like Florida, Arizona took a different approach when it passed the nation’s first universal ESA program in 2022. The base funding amount, which typically ranges between $7,000 and $8,000, is the same whether parents choose homeschooling or private school. Arizona parent Kathy Visser, whose son has disabilities, said $2,000 wouldn’t cover a month of his tutoring costs. In total, he receives about $40,000. Her daughter, formerly homeschooled, is now in a private school and receives $9,000.

“For families who choose to homeschool out of personal preference, I am sure the $2,000 is welcome,” she said. “For families like mine who homeschool out of necessity, because we could not find any traditional school that came close to meeting either of our kids’ needs, it wouldn’t go far.”

Arizona, however, is the state ESA critics most often point to for examples of a lack of guardrails on spending. A of expenditures turned up a number of “unallowable” items, like diamond jewelry, expensive gaming consoles and designer purses. State Superintendent Tom Horne of the program, but his methods for determining whether purchases violate the letter, or at least the spirit, of the law. 

Pillow said Texas limited homeschool awards to $2,000 because those families don’t have the “big ticket expense” of tuition. But another reason was to avoid “politically hard-to-explain purchases.” Parents also have to shop for supplies and materials within a “closed marketplace.” 

“Legos are legitimate educational items,” he said, noting purchases that have in Arizona. “But are we going to curate that marketplace with the latest and greatest collectors’ item? The $500 Harry Potter set is not necessarily going to be available.” 

Newman, with the Texas Homeschool Coalition, added that there’s much less “administrative weight” on the program when parents primarily spend the money on tuition. But both he and Pillow agreed that the state is likely to revisit the issue.

Don Huffines, who won the Republican nomination for comptroller, and is expected to easily win the general election in November, has said he the program. 

But the staunch conservative is also a . Newman said he hopes that means Huffines’ will be open to addressing the “disparities.”

“People have this idea of what they think homeschooling is,” he said. “It’s the people who have done it who really understand.” 

It’s a victory for Granite State families and a reminder that when policymakers listen to parents, students win. 

The journey to universal eligibility has been years-long and, at times, winding. Now, New Hampshire joins a growing wave of states — totaling more than a dozen — that have made their scholarship account or voucher programs universally available. In doing so, every child in New Hampshire will now have access to a personalized learning path that works for them. It is an affirmation that educational opportunity shouldn’t depend on where a family lives or how much money they make. 

Education Freedom Accounts empower parents to direct state education funds toward a variety of approved services, including private school tuition, tutoring, therapies, online learning and curriculum materials. This flexibility is especially critical for students who need something other than a one-size-fits-all school assignment, whether they’re struggling academically, seeking more rigorous coursework, dealing with bullying or pursuing specialized learning interests. 

Since launching the program in 2021, New Hampshire has witnessed the power of Education Freedom Accounts in action. But under previous eligibility limits, fewer than half of students could access the program. Many families who didn’t qualify because of income thresholds were still unable to afford private school or enrichment services, leaving them without meaningful options. 

Now, that barrier is gone. Every New Hampshire parent can consider the full range of learning environments and services to meet their child’s needs, not just the one assigned based on where they can afford to live.

That expansion reflects a larger national trend. Over the past few years, a sea change has taken place across the country as parents seek and gain more control over their children’s education. Since 2021, 17 states have enacted universal education choice. From Arkansas to Iowa to Texas, governors and legislators have responded to the call for change with sweeping reforms that prioritize students over systems. 

Why is this happening? Because parents know what’s best for their children. They have seen the way their states’  education methods and priorities fall short of their expectations or leave their kids behind. Choice gives families agency. It gives them hope. And it often provides students with the very thing they need to succeed: the right environment at the right time with the right support. 

The data back this up. School choice programs enjoy among parents and the public because it has . shows that choice can lead to stronger academic outcomes, higher graduation and and even long-term benefits like reduced crime and improved civic engagement.

Despite , universal choice doesn’t mean a mass exodus from public schools. In fact, the majority of families still choose their neighborhood public school when given the option. But having the power to choose, even if they never use it, puts parents in the driver’s seat. It ensures schools are responsive to families and that no student is trapped in a system that isn’t working. 

At ExcelinEd in Action, we believe that strong policy changes lives. And New Hampshire just changed thousands of them for the better. This expansion is more than policy — it’s possibility. 

New Hampshire policymakers have not only honored the promise of public education, they’ve expanded it. They’ve sent a clear message that students come first, and that New Hampshire will continue to create innovative, student-centered education policy. 

I hope other states take notice. Because every child, no matter where they live, deserves the chance to succeed. 

Among the biggest wins of her tenure, she counts increases in charter funding and twice electing Democrat and school reformer Gov. Jared Polis as governor. After serving as chief of staff for the Denver Public Schools, she fully expected to finish her career at DFER.

“We worked hard to build power in the Democratic Party specifically around accountability, choice and the role of public charter schools,” she said. “Everything had always been grounded 100% in public education.”

But last year, she said she “saw the writing on the wall” when the organization’s leader embraced Education Savings Accounts and other forms of private school choice. She is among several who have since left the group over the issue.

In a , DFER CEO Jorge Elorza, former two-term mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, suggested that instead of “rejecting them offhand,” his party should explore how ESAs can advance Democratic values like uplifting needy families and protecting civil rights. Eighteen Republican-led states now have such programs, which parents can use for private school tuition or homeschooling. Most Democrats say vouchers and ESAs lack accountability and threaten funding for public schools.

To Alisha Searcy, who just last year, Elorza’s about-face felt like a betrayal. 

“DFER has done extraordinary work to get courageous Democrats elected to push bold policies that would truly improve public education,” said the former Georgia state legislator. She was hired last year to expand the organization’s reach into her state, Alabama and Tennessee, but resigned in May. “We need a strong Democratic voice, now more than ever. This move to embrace vouchers and ESAs is the exact opposite.” 

The issue has brought bubbling to the surface a debate that was previously restricted to Democratic backrooms. Elorza took the helm of DFER at a time when polls began to show that voters were losing confidence in Democrats as the party they most trusted on education. Parents, the surveys suggested, were more preoccupied with whether their kids were recovering from pandemic learning loss than how schools were teaching issues of race or gender in the classroom. The only intensified in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s election.

Founded in 2007, DFER always advocated for . Leaders worked with the Obama administration and reform-minded Democrats to support like magnet schools, dual enrollment and lifting state . Now, Republicans and their push for parental rights are dominating the education conversation, including a recent to enact a national tax credit for private school choice. Elorza is among those who say the party needs to be open to more options for families if it’s going to regain its edge with voters, especially parents. But he recognizes the risks.

“There are a lot of Democrats who are choice curious,” he told The 74. “They’ll say privately that they’re open to the idea of choice, including private school choice, but that the politics of it are just so darn challenging.”

In a , he pointed to Pennsylvania as the best opportunity for a swing state to pass an ESA program. Democratic came close to supporting such a bill in 2023.

Some observers say Shapiro and Elorza are outliers in the party. During the Obama years, DFER “nudged” the party toward school reform policies like and maintaining strong, said David Houston, an assistant education professor at George Mason University in Virginia. But now it’s “further from the center of Democratic politics.”

The recent departure of other DFER staff offers further evidence that Elorza’s position doesn’t reflect the Democratic mainstream.

Will Andras served as political director in Colorado for Education Reform Now, a think tank affiliated with DFER that Elorza also leads. Andras left last year, shortly after DFER joined the , a group of organizations that advocate for open enrollment and removing school attendance boundaries. 

The member organizations, funded largely by the conservative Koch network, also support vouchers and ESAs. In his resignation letter, Andras referenced the change in direction since Elorza came on board in 2023. 

“The last six months have shown that the organization I have devoted a substantial portion of my professional career to help build no longer aligns with my political or personal values,” he wrote.

Jessica Giles, who led the D.C. chapter, similar words when she walked away in May. It’s one of several chapters to close since Elorza became CEO. The Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts and DFER South chapters have also shut down. 

Elorza said he respects their stance.

“There are a lot of folks who put a great deal of stock into this public-private distinction, and I think it comes from a principled place,” he said. “But I truly believe that it is in the party’s political best interest to be open minded to any approach that moves the needle for kids and families.”

‘Political winds are shifting’ 

Backed by , the private school choice movement has been on a winning streak since 2022, when Arizona passed the first universal ESA.

“The political winds are shifting,” Corey DeAngelis, a self-described “school choice evangelist” and fellow at multiple think tanks, said at a conference in Atlanta in April. “If Democrats are smart, they’ll stop the Republicans from being able to pick up the football and win on this issue.”

He pointed to Louisiana, where six House Democrats — one-fifth of the party’s caucus — for the LA GATOR Scholarship, an ESA that starts this fall. One of them, Rep. Jason Hughes, passionately defended his vote on the House floor. 

“As I watch children in poverty, trapped in failing schools, who can hardly read, I’ll be damned if I will continue to defend the status quo,” he said. 

Rep. Marlene Terry, a Missouri Democrat, delivered an equally heartfelt speech in May after caucus leaders when she supported a $50 million increase to the state’s ESA program. 

“I will vote how I please, when I please and where I please,” she said. “No one can take away my voice. I will not be silent.”

While her own children attended public school, she said families in the St. Louis-area district she represents are frustrated that their schools have for 15 years. 

“That’s a long time for families to wait for improvement,” Terry told The 74. Riverview Gardens, a majority Black, high-poverty district, regained local control from the state in 2023, but leaders are still working to make continued gains in . “That’s why I support giving families a range of high-quality public options, including public charter schools, and — when absolutely necessary — scholarships to attend other schools if no viable public options exist.”

Some Democrats agree with Elorza that the party shouldn’t distance legislators like Terry. In a , Virginia Board of Education Member Andy Rotherham, who served in the Clinton White House and co-founded Bellwether, a think tank, said Democrats need to welcome “a much wider range of perspectives on these questions,” given school choice’s surge in popularity since the pandemic.

“This is America — we like choice,” he wrote. “Being on the wrong side of that culturally and politically is not a great place to be.”

‘Solidly entrenched’ 

Using an ESA can be particularly uncomfortable for a lifelong Democrat — especially In Arizona, where Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has called the program a “” and wants to on families using it. Kathy Visser, who administers a ESA Facebook group for parents and vendors, knows some who left the forum because they felt that it was “not a safe space for Democrats.” 

“I hate election time because it’s always a mess in the group,” she said. “People think we should be able to talk about ESAs without talking about politics, but when you’ve got one party so solidly entrenched against it, it’s really hard.” 

Some Democrats who use ESAs say they hold their noses when it comes to other aspects of the Republican agenda. 

Christina Foster, whose daughter has used an ESA in the past, said she gets “heart palpitations” when she has to decide on a candidate. She’s board chair for Arizona’s , which runs microschools serving students using ESAs, and wants to protect the program. But in the 2024 election, she voted for Democrats. 

“Some of those Republicans were not supportive of minority rights, immigration rights, women’s rights. Those are very important to me,” she said. “I said ‘OK, unfortunately, I’m going to have to vote against the ESA.”

For those within the traditional K-12 system, the choice to use an ESA can be tricky. As a kindergarten teacher in Arizona’s Peoria district, Melanie Ford is familiar with about how the program undermines funding for traditional schools and is susceptible to waste and fraud. 

But she overlooked those arguments when public school no longer seemed like a safe place for her transgender son Ash. He avoided using the bathroom all day because students said he didn’t belong in the boys’ or the girls’ restroom.

For the 2023-24 school year, Ash used an ESA to attend the , a microschool for middle schoolers in Phoenix that incorporates into the curriculum. Ford told her colleagues that despite her support of public schools, she had to think first about her son. Ash has since returned to a public high school, where he plays on a drumline in the marching band and has straight A’s, his mother said. But using the ESA allowed him to transition in a more supportive setting.

“He didn’t have to deal with the comments from peers that slowly rip a person apart from the inside out,” she said. “He could grow into himself without judgement from others and this was so important for his mental health.”

While some Democrats, as Elorza suggested, may think an ESA is the best option for their children, that interest hasn’t risen to the national level. No Congressional Democrats, for example, have endorsed the federal Educational Choice for Children Act, the tax credit scholarship program tucked into the Republicans’ reconciliation bill.

In some states, vouchers remain unpopular, said Joshua Cowen, an education professor at Michigan State University and a strong opponent of directing public funds to private schools. 

He points to Kentucky, where a private school choice measure last November. Coloradans also defeated a school choice-related , and voters in Nebraska .

While the Democratic party may embrace vouchers in the future, that day is a long way off, said Ravi Gupta, a former Obama staffer who runs a nonprofit media company. On an intellectual level, he’s intrigued by ESAs. Democrats, he said, would never say Medicaid should only be used at a public hospital or Section 8 vouchers only in a housing project, so why doesn’t the same principle apply to education? 

“Twenty years from now, do I think that could be the reality?” he asked. “I think it’s very likely, but it will take some time.”

Disclosure: The Charles Koch Foundation funds Stand Together Trust, which provides funding to The 74. Andy Rotherham sits on The 74’s board of directors. 

Over the past few years, the education choice movement has taken off, with states from Arizona to Florida to Iowa launching or expanding ESA programs that allow parents to direct funding for their children’s education toward schooling environments, services or products that meet their needs. Texas’ program, which will launch in the 2026-27 school year, is the largest new investment in this idea to date. It couldn’t come at a more critical time. 

The strength of Texas’ new program lies not just in its size, but in its potential to drive innovation. Managing ESAs at scale is no small task. As more families gain access to these accounts, states are realizing that approving every expenditure on educational products, services and vendors one by one may not be sustainable. Parents need programs that are efficient, transparent and flexible — more like managing a health savings account than applying for a grant every time they want to buy a math workbook. 

Texas has the chance to lead the way by adopting a debit card model where parents use secure accounts linked to approved expense categories instead of an endless string of applications and approvals. Think about how a health savings account debit card works to pay for everything from a doctor’s visit to a pharmacy prescription. On the back end, that system uses codes to categorize eligible purchases. A similar system for education that categorizes tutoring, curriculum, therapies, classes and more would make it dramatically easier for parents to navigate their options without compromising accountability. 

Building a modern, intuitive ESA system in Texas would do more than serve families in the Lone Star State. It would create a blueprint for every other state in the country. Instead of reinventing the wheel, states could adopt common standards for educational expense categories and fraud prevention, all of which would lead to faster program launches, improved oversight and better experiences for families nationwide.

The country is standing at the brink of an era when education funding finally and truly follows students. Parents in the nearly 20 states that have adopted ESAs are empowered not just to access a quality school for their kids, but to customize that educational experience in a way that felt unattainable just a decade ago.

As we’ve learned in Florida over the past quarter-century, expanded choice must go hand in hand with thoughtful design. Parents deserve the freedom to personalize their child’s education without unnecessary red tape. Taxpayers deserve programs that are transparent and accountable. And states deserve solutions that scale as participation grows.

The Texas Legislature and Gov. Greg Abbott have shown they are willing to lead on education freedom. As this program moves from legislation to reality, they also can lead by building a model ESA program that operates efficiently, is easy to use and sets a high bar for excellence. If they succeed, the ripple effects will extend far beyond Texas’ borders.

Advocates should celebrate the incredible progress that school choice has made in recent years and recognize that how these programs are built matters just as much as generating the support to create them. The passage of Texas’ ESA program marks a new chapter, not just for Texas students, but for the future of education choice across America. 

If policymakers get this right, the next generation of ESA programs will be faster, smarter and more parent-friendly than ever before — guaranteeing that every family, no matter where they live, can access a customized education that unlocks their child’s full potential. 

I’ve always favored studies that measure attainment rather than achievement. College enrollment and completion offer a clearer window into long-term success than small bumps in test scores. While this study isn’t a randomized controlled trial, it still adds modest weight to the case that expanding educational options can improve outcomes.

Still, a word of caution: The case for school choice should never rest primarily on academic evidence.

I don’t expect this to be a popular stance among education reformers broadly or even among school choice advocates who’ve spent years to “prove” that school choice “works.” 

It wasn’t popular in 2022 either, when Jay Greene and I it was “Time for the School Choice Movement to Embrace the Culture War.” That paper drew sharp pushback from colleagues, many of whom were openly hostile and visibly annoyed by the shift in strategy. We had challenged the prevailing orthodoxy that avoiding cultural conflict — or parroting the language of social justice — was the safest path to political support.

But reality has proven otherwise. Cultural arguments, centered on parents choosing schools that align with their values, have powered a wave of school choice expansion across the country. Far from alienating voters, this approach has energized them.

Now, with dozens of new programs launching or growing, there will be more research. That’s a good thing. But advocates must resist the urge to treat every study as a referendum on the entire movement. Educational freedom shouldn’t be reduced to a debate over effect sizes, methodological choices and findings in technical journals.

Research can inform the conversation, but it must not define it. We shouldn’t bow at the altar of capital-E Evidence — especially when it obscures the moral clarity at the heart of the school choice movement.

The best argument for educational freedom has never been statistical. It’s moral. It’s about affirming the right of families to raise their children according to their own beliefs. A successful education system isn’t just one that boosts college attendance; it’s one that respects parental authority.

Good research has its place. Studies like those from the Urban Institute can inform policy and spotlight promising outcomes. But for school choice advocates, such evidence should remain secondary, even when the findings are favorable. For most parents, the case for school choice isn’t grounded in p-values.

Too often, advocates fall into the trap of justifying every policy through academic evidence, obscuring the stronger argument: No child should be forced into a school that undermines their family’s values.

Some may call this moving the goalposts. That after years of highlighting low test scores in traditional public schools, we’re now backing away from data. I reject that framing. We’re not bound to defend strategic choices made decades ago. Plus, parents simply aren’t chasing incremental gains on standardized assessments; they care more about whether schools are helping raise the kind of people they want their children to become.

And that brings us to a deeper issue: Why should all school sectors be judged by the same metric in the first place? I can already hear the charges of hypocrisy: You slam traditional public schools for low test scores but won’t hold choice-based schools to the same standard. But that criticism misunderstands the premise. In a system where families are empowered to choose schools aligned with their own priorities, the need for any single, standardized measure of quality becomes far less salient.

In the absence of universal educational freedom, standardized test scores and attainment metrics serve as rough proxies for school quality. But when families are truly free to choose, they make decisions based on a much broader range of priorities. In that context, relying on any outcome as the sole measure of effectiveness feels increasingly out of step with how parents actually evaluate schools.

Outcomes like character formation, civic knowledge and psychological resilience are harder to measure than college enrollment — but they matter deeply to parents. One of the most promising ways to help families find schools that support the outcomes they value most is through universal Education Savings Accounts: generously funded and available to all, regardless of student background, family income, or prior public school enrollment.

When a school contradicts a family’s values, no test score can justify it. That’s why school choice must be grounded in the principle of parental authority, not in academic metrics or technocratic validation. Research can support this case, but it can’t substitute for it. The most fundamental outcome remains whether parents are free to choose schools that reflect their values — or trapped in ones that don’t.

Gov. Mark Gordon lauded a controversial universal school voucher bill Tuesday morning before signing it into law hours later.

 will represent a significant expansion of school choice in the state, offering families $7,000 per child annually  for K-12 non-public-school costs like tuition or tutoring. The scholarship will also offer money for pre-K costs, but only to income-qualified families who are at or below 250% of the federal poverty level.

The legislation has sparked a deluge of constituent feedback, according to lawmakers, both from supporters of school choice and from critics who call the measure an unconstitutional bill that will erode the quality of public education in the state. 

Gordon had himself  last year, citing constitutional concerns. However, he lauded this version as a “remarkable achievement for Wyoming.” 

“I’m very excited that we’re not only going to be able to expand K-12 choices to be accompanied by careful oversight and … ensure that all families have access to the best educational options,” Gordon said, “but as we pursue these opportunities, I want to make sure that we uphold the strength of Wyoming’s public schools.” 

Bill journey

The law will transform and expand an existing state education savings account program that gives public money to income-qualified families to help them pay for pre-K programs, homeschooling costs or private school tuition. The education savings account program was passed last year and began accepting applicants in January. 

House Bill 199 sponsor Rep. Ocean Andrew, R-Laramie, called the 2024 ESA program much too narrow. His new bill proposed to offer up to $7,000 per student regardless of a family’s economic needs. Along with making the program universal, in its original form, the bill dropped: the preschool component, a requirement that participating students take statewide assessments or similar nationwide tests and a requirement that providers be certified by the Department of Education. 

The bill has been transformed substantially as it travelled through the Legislature; some 26 amendments were brought, including 11 that passed. Along with changing the name from the Wyoming Freedom Scholarship Act, the final version reinstated the assessment requirements, the provider certification and the inclusion of pre-K, though families have to show income need to qualify for that portion. 

It spurred much debate as it traveled through the body, triggering discussion on the state of public education in Wyoming, the constitutionality of the program and the importance of early childhood education. Many lawmakers asked what the rush is, given that Wyoming’s existing ESA program is only two months old.

Those who say the new law is unconstitutional cite Article 7, Section 8 of the Wyoming Constitution, which reads: “Nor shall any portion of any public school fund ever be used to support or assist any private school, or any school, academy, seminary, college or other institution of learning controlled by any church or sectarian organization or religious denomination whatsoever.”

When Gordon partially vetoed the education savings account bill last year, he pointed specifically to constitutional concerns when he narrowed eligibility to families at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. That referenced the constitutional language that prohibits the state from giving money to individuals “except for the necessary support of the poor.”

On Tuesday, he said he’s taken the last year to consider the issue, “and I realize that that will be sort of handled by our courts” if the question is asked. “In the meantime, I think it’s important to remember that we have all been working to try to expand school choice, and this gives that opportunity for parents.”

This comes less than a week after a judge ruled in favor of the Wyoming Education Association and eight school districts in a court case that’s anticipated to have major implications for the state. Laramie County District Court Judge Peter Froelicher the state’s public schools and ordered the state to fix that.

Praise and worry 

House Bill 199 drew loads of attention — both from local advocacy groups vowing to fight it and from out-of-state groups . President Donald Trump even weighed in when he gave kudos to Senate President Bo Biteman for helping to advance the legislation.

“This would be an incredible Victory for Wyoming students and families,” Trump wrote on Truth Social while the measure was still awaiting Senate votes. “Every Member of the Wyoming Senate should vote for HB 199. I will be watching!”

In Wyoming, the hard-right House Freedom Caucus celebrated the signing of the bill, crediting Rep. Andrew for its success. “Finally, we can say that in Wyoming, we support students, not systems,” a Wyoming Freedom Caucus Facebook post read. 

Many in the detractor camp, meanwhile, decried Gordon’s action. 

“Particularly in light of the extraordinary opposition to the voucher program by the majority of Wyoming’s residents, we are disappointed by Gov. Gordon’s decision to sign HB199 into law,” the Wyoming Education Association said in a statement. The association also questioned the decision’s wisdom following so closely on the heels of the strongly worded ruling. 

“The district court’s ruling from only days ago confirmed that the state is not funding public education to the level as it is required, and the choice to take taxpayer dollars to support a voucher program is a curiously poor decision,” the WEA said. 

The organization warned that similar laws in other states have proven these types of programs to be vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse and ineffective in improving student performance.

“Unconstitutional universal voucher programs serve as a taxpayer-funded welfare handout to wealthy families whose communities have access to such schools and whose students already attend private schools,” the WEA said. 

During his press conference Tuesday, Gordon characterized the ESA bill passed last year as a generic program. 

“I know it’s a big national agenda item,” he said of school choice. “But it’s important to remember that this is Wyoming’s way of doing it. This was created and crafted by people here in Wyoming, not somebody from out of state … and it really meets the needs specifically of Wyoming.”

Reporter Maggie Mullen contributed to this article.

Last September, the CEO of a company handling online payments for West Virginia’s private school choice program promised not to seek additional business until he fixed technical glitches that led to a huge backlog of orders.

“Student First Technologies has assured us that they will not pursue contracts with additional states until the issues and challenges we’re experiencing here in West Virginia are resolved. That’s a commitment,” said former Treasurer Riley Moore. His comments came during a board meeting devoted to the state’s Hope Scholarship, an education savings account program that pays for private school tuition and homeschooling.

Well into the current school year, over 3,000 orders were unfulfilled, forcing parents to pay out of pocket for books, tech equipment and services that the state promised to provide. Some families couldn’t even download Theodore, the company’s payment platform. 

Four months later, some parents using the Hope Scholarship say not much has changed. They still complain of poor customer service and purchases that are approved for some families, but not others.

“From a parent perspective, performance has not improved significantly,” said Katie Switzer, a mother of five who shared concerns with the state last summer. 

In January, others posted complaints on Google’s webstore, where parents can access the payment platform. “Please go back to last year’s system. I still cannot access … TheoPay,” one parent wrote. Another said, “I’ve scanned the cart at least 100 times and the same sentence pops up every time, ‘Something unexpected happened, please resubmit your cart.’ ”

Despite its promise to West Virginia, The 74 has learned that the Indiana-based company has been pushing to expand. In late fall, Student First submitted an unsuccessful proposal to handle expenditures for .

Now the company could be in the running to manage a statewide ESA program in Tennessee, a prize that would mark a turnaround for a newer player in what has become a . Student First already manages for about 2,000 students in the Memphis, Nashville and Chattanooga areas. passed last month would take the program statewide, where it would serve roughly 20,000 students. 

The potential for growth, however, raises questions over whether Student First, which lost a $15 million contract to run Arkansas’ ESA program because it failed to deliver on its promises, can meet the demand. 

‘Evolving very quickly’

The Tennessee governor’s office won’t say for sure whether it plans to hold a competitive bidding process. Elizabeth Lane Johnson, the governor’s press secretary, told The 74 Tuesday that the state Board of Education will first have to write rules for the expanded program. 

She added that officials have “met with a number of experienced vendors to learn how other states have implemented universal school choice programs successfully.” 

Last November, Lee met with , a leader in the industry, at a conference in Oklahoma City, The Tennessean reported. But Mark Duran, Student First’s CEO, said the situation in Tennessee is “still unfolding” and that he hopes to continue serving the state. 

Some observers say it would be unusual for the education department not to open the process up to other bids.

“The technology is evolving very quickly,” said Jim Blew, a former U.S. Department of Education official and ESA advocate who later advised ClassWallet. “I would be really surprised if they don’t open it up to a new competition. They’re scaling up; they’re going universal.”

If get their way, red states won’t be the only ones with universal voucher programs. They’ve reintroduced a bill in Congress to create a nationwide tax credit scholarship program. And while details have yet to emerge, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Education to use grant funds to prioritize private school choice.

“We have millions of students right now who live under some sort of school choice program,” KellyAnne Conway, a counselor to the president in his first term, said . “We know it’s effective.” 

The West Virginia treasurer’s office did not answer questions about whether Student First has caught up with its backlog of orders. But Duran told The 74 “a lot has changed” since last fall. 

That’s when Arkansas fined Student First over $500,000 because of delays in delivering a “fully operational” platform. In an canceling the contract, Education Secretary Jacob Oliva told Duran that processing delays meant that students, families and vendors were receiving “service below the standard to which they were entitled.” At the same time, homeschooling parents in West Virginia couldn’t order curriculum, equipment and school supplies for their kids because of problems with the company’s payment system. 

A hold-up in funding can be a major setback for small businesses trying to establish themselves in the market. 

When Student First still operated in Arkansas, Lauren McDaniel-Carter waited seven weeks after the school year started before her microschool ACRES received payments totaling about $23,000. All but three of the 26 students she serves at her home in northeast Arkansas participated in the state’s Education Freedom Account program. She had to take out a $50,000 loan to run the school and pay her small staff. 

‘Larger and more numerous’

The state replaced Student First with , which held the contract during the program’s first year.

Duran, Student First’s CEO, did not respond to specific questions about the status of orders in West Virginia, but said his team seeks to “constantly improve our operations.” 

“Momentum remains strong,” he said. “We’ve grown and are ready for even more growth.” 

The company now has over 35 staff members and recently hired Andrew Nelms, formerly with school choice advocacy group Yes. Every Kid, as its new head of government affairs. Other include a vice president of operations, a software engineer and a “customer success” director. 

The additional personnel, Duran said, will allow the company to “support larger and more numerous programs across the country.” 

An entrepreneur, Duran grew up in northern Michigan where his mother taught him while building a large network of homeschooling families. The flexibility, he said, allowed him to spend time with his dad, a homebuilder, and sparked his business career.

He got his start in the private school choice sector in Indiana when he teamed up with a friend who built a software platform for managing donations to tax credit scholarship programs. 

Indiana “education freedom policy folks” encouraged them to break into the ESA market, he said. He was further inspired after attending a 2020 ExcelinEd conference in Florida, where he mingled with voucher advocates who saw the pandemic’s disruption as an opportunity to expand private school choice. 

“We saw a bigger picture,” he said. Among lawmakers there was a “big push to unlock more money … to send to families through these different programs.” 

I fear that in the coming rush to expand publicly-funded private school choice, students with disabilities have a great deal to lose. As the leader and co-founder of a national nonprofit dedicated to advocating for students with disabilities to have access to high-quality educational opportunities and choices, I see school choice and parent empowerment as vital to student success. 

I have also served as a board member, appointed and elected, for a local charter school and a traditional school district. In those roles, I saw firsthand the importance of open enrollment, a public budgeting process, open meeting laws, and essential accountability via state assessments, with an expectation that results are transparent and available for all to see. After all, exercising school choice is a big responsibility for families.

They deserve ready access to clear information and excellent school options – criteria that are especially urgent for students with disabilities and their families.  But too often, as a new paper from the Center for Reinventing Public Education found, families are faced with convoluted admissions policies, limited transportation options and a dearth of choices that can actually meet their children’s needs.

Today, roughly one in five U.S. students requires support under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Their families come from across the political spectrum, from every corner of the country: small towns and rural areas, big cities, sprawling suburbs, and “red” and “blue” states.

The current push to expand private school choice – whether called vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), or tuition tax credits – promises little in the way of public access or accountability for delivering results. Instead, these approaches have the dubious distinction of potentially being bad for kids and taxpayers. 

Despite multiple methods of enacting private school choice programs, what is universal is that the rights of children with disabilities are diminished when they step inside a private school. This includes not only the right to attend but also to be taught alongside their peers, and to access individualized supports. So, a child with autism, dyslexia, or Down syndrome, for example, may be denied access, and private schools are under no obligation to provide any specialized services or supports to help them succeed. 

This extends to needs that surface after enrollment – that is, a private school can simply inform the family that the child is “no longer a good fit” for the school. By contrast, a traditional or public charter school is required to conduct an evaluation and provide services. While some private schools cater to students with disabilities, it is very unclear to what extent this model is financially or programmatically sustainable absent designated funding or explicit federal protections.

Making good school choices requires information. Our public education systems are obligated to provide detailed information regarding school and student achievement, graduation rates, and other measures of school quality. Public school choice – among charters, magnets, and traditional schools – is also defined by transparent application and enrollment procedures to ensure fairness. 

In the charter schools sector, for example, when demand exceeds the supply of seats, uniform enrollment systems and public lotteries provide transparency. Yet, as states expand private school choice, only some require participating private schools to adhere to the accountability and oversight systems that apply to public schools. 

The right of any child with a disability to attend school, to be included with peers, and to access individualized supports is only 50 years old in the United States. These important rights have created possibility and independence through education. But they hinge upon public schools: Those rights do not follow students into private educational settings. We cannot forget our recent history, when exclusion was the norm – and we must not go back.

President-elect Trump and his team are not hiding their cards. They have been transparent about seeking to leverage the federal tax code, and specifically tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations, to expand private school choice. As someone who has worked for many years to create the conditions for families to make informed school choices and to help schools earn and keep their trust, I’ve learned that simply having options isn’t enough. A choice in schools is only meaningful if it leads to a better education. 

Her youngest two attend the Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest district. But public school wasn’t a good fit for Kain, who at nearly 11 still doesn’t speak. He needs constant supervision and requires help with tasks like handwashing and opening snacks.

The state’s education savings account, held up among conservatives, allows Pihlman to spend state funds on private school tuition or homeschooling costs. But that program didn’t work for her either. Schools that accept the ESA only offered to put him on a waitlist. For now, they’re homeschooling.

“He’s not aggressive. He’s not violent. He just has high support needs,” she said. She used ESA funds for a music therapy program, but her husband had to attend class with him in case Kain tried to leave or needed to use the bathroom. “They tried their best to work with him, but they weren’t able to accommodate his needs.”

For parents like Pihlman, school choice hasn’t lived up to its promise as an alternative to traditional classrooms. With states like and aiming to pass voucher programs next year — and President-elect Donald Trump vowing to nationalize — a from the Center for Reinventing Public Education focuses on the families that choice has left behind. Confusing admission policies, transportation challenges and inadequate supply means that minority students, kids from low-income families and those with disabilities often miss out. 

“You can’t use choice as a solution to the quality problem,” said Ashley Jochim, the author of the study and a principal at CRPE, a think tank. “Policymakers should make it so there aren’t any really bad choices. That’s priority number one.”

Jochim examined more than 30 years of research on the competitive education landscape, from district lotteries to education savings accounts, with an eye toward challenges faced by families trying to access such programs. 

She points to Milwaukee as an example of the limitations of market-based education. Home to the nation’s first private school voucher program, launched in 1990, the city has a reputation for “robust competition” between the public, private and charter sectors. But involving charter operators and a among private schools participating in its voucher program has sent families scrambling for other options. In a separate, forthcoming paper for Education Next, Jochim notes that between 1990 and last school year, 41% of the private schools participating permanently closed.

Overall, she said, Milwaukee families are left with a system of schools that is “quite middling.” 

A from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, a think tank, echoed that assessment. It shows that the city’s Black students are the least likely to attend high-performing schools. Almost three-quarters of Black students in grades three through eight, in both district and charter schools, score below grade level in math, compared with 29% of white students and 59% of Hispanic students. 

But national data tells a more promising story. A from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes concluded that on average, charter students — including Black, Hispanic and poor students — perform better than their peers in traditional schools. 

To Karega Rausch, the president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, CRPE’s report means two things can be true at the same time: Charters have improved outcomes for poor and minority students and there are still “real barriers” to increasing the number of high-quality schools. 

A meant to encourage innovative school models and efforts to extend credit to Colorado charters waiting on federal grant funds are examples of policies that can help meet the demand, he said. 

‘High-cost mistakes’

But the momentum building around private school choice demonstrates that parents can sometimes get lost in an abundance of options, Jochim wrote.

Florida, for example, added 1,700 private schools to its voucher program between 2010 and 2020, and Arizona families using an ESA can choose from thousands of , including private schools, tutors, and sports or arts programs. 

“Navigating this rapidly evolving landscape without reliable information increases the risks that families will make high-cost mistakes,” Jochim wrote. “The search for a ‘good’ school can be time consuming, and when the chosen school disappoints, families must begin their search again.”

Families whose children have disabilities often end up in a “holding pattern,” said Lauren Morando Rhim, executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, which focuses on ensuring that students with disabilities receive needed services from charters.

“I’ve spoken to parents who said ‘I tried a district school and they couldn’t serve my child. I tried a charter — they couldn’t serve my child,’ ” she said. Out of “desperation,” they sometimes turn to an ESA-funded private school, but that often means their children won’t be able to interact with non-disabled peers. “They say, ‘I’m not happy about it, but it’s the least bad option right now.’ ”

Jochim supports choice “as a means to introduce some competition and improve all schools,” but thinks that for its most passionate advocates, it has become “a value unto itself.” She recommends that states collect data on students who exit school choice programs to get a fuller understanding of what is driving turnover. 

She also urges policymakers and foundations to fund what school choice experts call “navigators” —those who can help families evaluate options, stay ahead of key deadlines and go into the process more informed. 

‘People trust people’

That’s the work that Colleen Dippel, of Houston-based Families Empowered, has been doing for 15 years. Even with public school choice, she said parents remain confused about how lotteries and magnet schools work. And with Texas likely to pass a voucher bill next year, families are looking at even more options. 

With ESAs also come multimillion-dollar state contracts for payment systems, websites and online vendors marketing supplies and curriculum. Dippel said that parents benefit from having someone to field their questions.

“We have underinvested in people in the school choice space and overinvested in technology,” she said. “People trust people, not institutions.”

Funded largely by donations, Families Empowered is neutral about which models work best, she said, and might steer a family toward a traditional school if its a better fit. She once lost a funder because she wouldn’t agree to direct families to IDEA Public Schools, a large charter network with over 100 schools in Texas. 

She also hopes that Texas learns from other states about how to ensure families can use the programs without having to spend their own money and wait for reimbursement. 

“That would be very concerning for us,” she said. “We believe that’s a barrier that does not need to be in place for low-income families.”

Families using ESAs often wait months to get paid back or say they have to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get . In Arizona, Pihlman uses an ESA debit card to buy books, Legos, puzzles and other supplies for Kain, who is just beginning to write. But she worries that months later, state officials will deny a purchase and she’ll have to pay it back.

Some ESA proponents argue those obstacles aren’t a mark against school choice — just evidence of birthing pains as states explore new options. 

During the pandemic, Kevin Gemeroy relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona, from Seattle, where in-person school wasn’t an option. He uses the state’s ESA program to send his oldest son, a bright student with dyslexia, to a private school, but is considering public school for his youngest. 

“Having a system where you can choose between public school, private school, homeschool, religious school — and be able to use your lifetime of education tax dollars — is a huge advantage,” he said. “Just because some people have problems using the resources available or some people are abusing them doesn’t mean that the other 98% of people that aren’t should have their options limited.” 

PIERRE — A $4 million proposal by South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem to help students enroll in private school and other forms of alternative instruction would undermine public education by diverting state money to unaccountable entities, opponents say.

Supporters of the plan say it would allow the state to start educational reform that’s gained momentum nationwide while lowering education costs, forcing public education to innovate and offering South Dakota students tailored education to best meet their learning needs.

Noem pitched the creation of education savings accounts, or ESAs, to lawmakers at her annual Tuesday in Pierre as a way to continue to “prioritize education” without cutting public education funds.

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“Good education starts in the home,” Noem said. “And parents should have the tools to choose what educational path is best for their kids.”

The program would cover about $3,000 per student annually to pay for a portion of private school tuition or curriculum for alternative education, Noem said. She hopes to expand the program eventually, but she might not be around to act on that plan. President-elect Donald Trump has as his nominee to lead the federal Department of Homeland Security, which means she could resign as governor as soon as late January, elevating Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden to serve the rest of her term.

The program would be for “families who meet eligibility requirements,” according to , and Noem’s spokesman said the requirements will include being low-income. Sixteen other states already allow families to use .

The proposal comes as South Dakota sees one of the highest rises in alternative instruction in the nation. Across the state, alternatively enrolled students account for about 6.5% of the school-age population, based on public, non-public and alternative enrollment data from the state Department of Education. Alternative instruction includes homeschooling and private schools that are unaccredited or accredited by an entity other than the state, such as online, hybrid and microschools.

Lawmakers and education lobbyists in Pierre are eager to learn the details about Noem’s proposed legislation – especially how the state will ensure oversight and accountability, how students are chosen for the program and how it’ll fit into the state’s ongoing expenses.

“We have homework to do,” said incoming Senate President Pro Tempore Chris Karr, R-Sioux Falls, a former member of the legislative budgeting committee who supports the school choice movement. “We have to go look at this and figure out how to implement this responsibly.”

Sandra Waltman, director of public affairs for the South Dakota Education Association, said any entity that accepts public funding should be held to the same standards as public education, such as testing requirements and anti-discrimination policies. Alternative instruction students are currently not required to take standardized tests or present a portfolio to demonstrate educational progress. Private schools aren’t obligated to serve all students, so they can deny admission and educational services, Waltman added.

“When you’re taking those precious funds and diverting them from public schools, you’re undermining what public schools can do for students,” Waltman said. “There’s no assurance the money they’re investing in education is actually making a difference.”

Noem didn’t propose cutting public education to fund the program, but proposed a state funding increase to public education of 1.25%. The inflation rate this year is 3.2%, according to the .

Lower-than-expected sales tax collections primarily drive the leaner $7.29 billion budget Noem , which also includes cuts to some state departments and programs.

That signals to Rob Monson, executive director of School Administrators of South Dakota, that lawmakers will challenge the feasibility of ESAs.

“Some legislators will look at public education serving over 80% of students in the state and think, ‘If we have extra money, maybe we should obligate that to a program we’re already obligated to fund instead of funding a new program with ongoing dollars,’” Monson said.

Efforts to failed twice in the Legislature in recent years, largely due to questions about financial feasibility, said Brookings Republican Rep. Mellissa Heermann, a member of the House Education Committee.

South Dakota must be intentional with the “small pot” of tax revenue it has to work with, Heermann said. She added that there are already school programs in place to help address students’ mental health, behavioral and learning needs.

“I don’t know that vouchers would be as impactful as other programs,” Heermann said. “The timing doesn’t feel right to me to embark on something like this when we’re already trying to reduce costs as much as possible.”

Incoming House Majority Leader Scott Odenbach, R-Spearfish, said the proposal focuses on educating students, rather than supporting a public education system that’s weighed down by overhead costs and top-heavy administrative costs. An ESA program could force local districts to decentralize, adapt and focus more on students’ education, he said.

“No entity evolves until it’s forced,” Odenbach said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on and .

WASHINGTON — During Donald Trump’s first term as president, he was reluctant to speak boldly about school choice.

That’s according to Kellyanne Conway, an aide to the president back then, and one of his former campaign managers. “He would say ‘Aren’t we the ones who say it [education] is local? Why would the president of the United States bigfoot all that?’”

Expect that reticence to be a thing of the past, Conway told the audience  devoted to promoting the benefits of school choice — from  in the style of programs in West Virginia and Arizona to charter schools and . On the campaign trail, Trump already has been vocal about his embrace of parental choice. “We want federal education dollars to follow the student, rather than propping up a bloated and radical bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.,”  at a rally in Wisconsin last month.

(To be sure, Trump did  near the end of his first term offering states the opportunity to use federal money to create school choice programs. When I looked into it a few years ago, I couldn’t find any state that had taken him up on the offer.)

Conway urged participants at the post-Election Day gathering to speak a certain way in their advocacy to lawmakers going forward. “Lead with solutions not problems. The problems can be the second part of the sentence, or maybe the second paragraph.” The panelists — including the founder of a group of charter schools for students with autism in Arizona, the leader of a private school for boys in Alabama and the head of a foundation that supports microschools — were all winners of , fueled by  and run by the Center for Education Reform.

She also urged the crowd not to make school choice about teachers unions, “which is fun to do, especially this week but it doesn’t educate another child.” (The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, generally has opposed private school vouchers and has been celebrating the . “The decisive defeat of vouchers on the ballot across multiple states speaks loudly and clearly: The public knows vouchers harm students and does not want them in any form,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in a statement.) 

Lawmakers who need convincing aren’t holding out just because of union pressure, Conway said. In Texas, for instance, rural lawmakers worried about the effect of vouchers on their schools  or torpedoed plans in that state that would allow parents to use public money for private school tuition. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott helped elect enough new members in place of those rural holdouts, however, that .

The school choice event at the Ronald Reagan Building in D.C. was notable for the range of people it featured, including parents and pastors, people who are white, Black and Latino, and several Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams of Pennsylvania. Some of the speakers told stories about opening their own charter schools and private schools. They urged the president-elect to take action on choice, including allowing  for children in low-income families to follow those kids to private schools or other settings outside public schools.

In Congress, with Republicans taking hold of the Senate and expected to retain control of the House, lawmakers already have proposed legislation that has, until now, mostly been a nonstarter. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who is likely to become chair of the committee that oversees education in his chamber, introduced  this session that would give families and corporations tax credits if they contribute to groups that give scholarships to students to attend private or parochial schools. It would target students whose families earn no more than 300 percent of the area median gross income. Cassidy’s wife, Laura, runs a charter school for children with dyslexia in Baton Rouge.

“I think that there’s going to be a real opportunity to promote innovation in school choice,” Cassidy said. “There is great promise in this administration, and I am looking forward to working with them.”

This story about  was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for .

Ayotte beat Democrat Joyce Craig, the former mayor of Manchester, the state’s largest city, with 53.6 percent of the vote. Ayotte previously served one term in the Senate from 2011 through 2016 after four years as New Hampshire’s attorney general. 

The race gained national attention after Ayotte backed, then criticized; and then again backed iPresident-Elect Donald Trump between 2016 and today. Ayotte’s anti-abortion stance was another sharp difference between her and Craig that attracted attention.

But the candidates also took different positions on school choice issues, mostly centering on New Hampshire’s “Education Freedom Accounts,” a plan the state created in 2021 to give parents money to spend on private school tuition or approved homeschooling expenses.

Similar to vouchers, the accounts give parents $4,100 a year if family income is under 350 percent of the federal poverty level, or $109,000 a year for a family of four. More money is available for families with lower income, English language learners or students with disabilities.

Attempts to expand eligibility for the money this year won some support in the state legislature, but not enough to pass. Ayotte has repeatedly called for choice to be “universal,” not just expanded to some groups. 

“I believe that parents make the best decisions for their children,” Ayotte last year. “I’m a strong believer in education freedom…we want to give every child in this state the opportunity to go to the school or the educational setting that is best for them.”

Ayotte’s husband, Joseph Daley is a math teacher at a private school, St. Christopher Academy in Nashua, where students use the accounts.

Her opponent vigorously opposed the accounts, calling them a that takes millions of dollars of tax money away from public schools. The American Federation of Teachers – New Hampshire endorsed Craig,

Ayotte also pledged to back and sign a “parental bill of rights” if elected. There have been and nationally. Ayotte’s campaign did not clarify what the bill would include.

The most prominent in New Hampshire, , required schools to share with parents if students identify as a different gender at school, including using different names. That bill sparked emotional debate last year, with the LGBTQ community saying students have the right to not be “outed” to judgmental parents and parents saying they have a right to raise their children as they want.

from parents, the first state supreme court to rule on an issue flaring up in several states.

Ayotte, however, said throughout the campaign and on that she will “enthusiastically work to pass and sign the Parental Bill of Rights.”

“Parents have a right to decide what is best for their child – period,” according to her site.

Several GOP wins in the Texas House of Representatives on Tuesday will expand Republicans’ existing majority, giving Abbott an estimated 87 of 150 seats in the lower chamber. When lawmakers reconvene in January, that could finally give him the votes needed to successfully put forth legislation that offers a universal voucher, or education savings account — a proposal that many Democrats and rural Republican lawmakers have rejected in past legislative sessions.

“Frankly, it was a bit surprising that Abbott pulled this off,” said Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. 

With flips of Democratic seats in Corpus Christi and Uvalde, the GOP now enjoys an 87-to-63 margin in the House. He noted, “At a minimum, the Legislature is likely to pass some form of an Education Savings Account plan,” which families could use to cover tuition or other expenses. 

Taylor added that two House districts in San Antonio came close to flipping the other way, from Republican to Democratic, but fell short by about four percentage points apiece, handing the seats to pro-ESA Republicans.

Abbott, who first began pushing for school choice , has aggressively fought for it ever since. In 2023, he called lawmakers into four special legislative sessions to pass a school choice bill, among other measures, and has proposed giving students about $10,500 per year, overseen by the state comptroller. 

He has also worked over the past year to oust lawmakers who fought his proposal to offer ESAs to all students, not just those whose families are low-income.

With deep pockets, Abbott targets ESA foes

Late last year, Abbott began actively campaigning against members of his own party who stood in his way, portraying them as weak on important issues like border security and property tax relief. He was aided by deep-pocketed donors and political action committees that poured millions of dollars into state legislative races.

Jeff Yass, a well-known school choice proponent and investor in TikTok parent company Byte Dance, contributed more than in this political cycle, while Miriam Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands casinos, spent about , making the pair — residents of Pennsylvania and Nevada, respectively — Texas’ two biggest political donors.

Last spring, the effort helped persuade voters to unseat eight House Republicans who had blocked ESAs. One of them, of San Antonio, said in a September interview with The 74 that he opposed Abbott’s plan because Texas families already have many options, from magnet schools to charters to a program that lets students in low-performing schools transfer to a better-performing school. Lawmakers, he said, have approved countless programs that provide “choice on top of choice on top of choice” within districts.

Abbott is already doing a victory lap. Taking to the social media site X , he wrote, “Every candidate that I backed in Texas House general election races won tonight. We even had Republican candidates win seats that had been held by Democrats. There are more than enough votes to pass school choice in Texas.”

Katherine Munal, policy and advocacy director of , said Tuesday’s election results in Texas mark “a significant victory for school choice advocates, signaling a continued momentum for policies that prioritize parental empowerment and educational freedom.”

Texas, she said, “is poised to expand opportunities for students and families, allowing them to access a wider range of educational options that best meet their needs. This shift reflects a broader recognition of the importance of individualized education and the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to thrive in an environment that works for them.”

Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, said that for Abbott, “the night really couldn’t have gone better.” 

The question now, he said, isn’t whether school choice will succeed in Texas in 2025. “It’s really what form of school choice legislation will pass. How robust and expansive will it be?”

The most likely scenario, he said, would have Abbott offering an ambitious proposal with more students covered than in his 2023 plan, and with less money going to school districts that lose students to ESAs.

While foes of Abbott’s plan can probably still negotiate to help districts, he said any hope that Democrats and anti-school-choice Republicans had of blocking choice in 2025 “vanished last night.”

Abbott has pushed for ESAs despite recent polling that isn’t necessarily conclusive: of respondents to a recent University of Texas survey said they support spending taxpayer dollars to help families pay for private school. Meanwhile, a poll from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found 65% support.  

The Texas Education Agency last year estimated that about 500,000 children, or about half of the state’s private school and homeschooled students, would apply for the program in its first stages, with more each cycle. The figures prompted Democratic Rep. James Talarico during a legislative hearing that it would be “a massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.”

He added, “It’s welfare for the wealthy.”

Elsewhere on Tuesday, voters in two states — Kentucky and Nebraska — defeated voucher-related ballot measures. A third measure, in Colorado, appeared headed for defeat.

Each of these states offers students access to education savings accounts, which give families education dollars so they can customize and personalize children’s learning experiences, from school tuition and tutoring to educational products or services. 

Now school districts in these states are enabling families to use their funds to purchase individual public school classes.

Early examples have emerged in Utah’s Canyons School District, Arizona’s Vail and Pima school districts and Florida’s Glades County School District. 

In Canyons School District, families can use ESA funds to enroll in public school programs, including , through the Utah Fits All Scholarship. Vail School District developed a that outlines costs for homeschool families who want to purchase individual school courses, enroll in clubs, access sports or engage in other extracurricular programs using Arizona’s ESA program. And Pima School District lets students use their ESAs to pay for .

In Florida, the Personalized Education Program allows homeschool families to access the nation’s largest universal school choice program — and this year, districts are starting to respond by allowing families to purchase one-off courses. In one recent example, let a student use education savings account funds to buy honors biology and American history classes. And students using Florida’s education choice scholarship program . This shift mirrors a change that began in 1996, when Florida passed the nation’s first law making available to homeschool families.

These initiatives demonstrate a profound shift in how public schools can serve students. Traditionally, ESA funding has been spent on providers such as private schools and tutors. By embracing the customization ESAs offer, public school districts no longer treat student funding as all-or-none. Rather, these districts are demonstrating a future where public schools compete in the education marketplace to better serve individual students and families.

This evolution in education mirrors the transformation I saw while working at Uber. When Uber first emerged, it was viewed as a threat to the taxi industry. to to Uber and other ridesharing companies. And when customers kept coming, lobbying efforts got them banned from airports and . But today, 13 years since Uber first rolled out its app in major cities, you can in  nearly every city, from Miami to Helena, Montana. And at nearly every major airport, travelers will find signs directing them to rideshare pickup locations as well as traditional transportation options — a result of the industry as a whole embracing the apps.

Just as transportation companies have adapted to offer better overall service to riders, public schools are making a similar shift in education to meet the demands of today’s families, improving their offerings and attracting more students.

More than 80% of families surveyed by want a customizable education experience for their child, yet only 38% say they can currently achieve this. The lesson is clear: Rather than resisting ESAs, public schools should see them as a tool for innovation. By providing services families want — whether it’s advanced academic courses, specialized arts programs or extracurriculars — public schools can thrive in this new, competitive marketplace.

The future of education in America is not about pitting public and private schools against one another. It’s about giving families the power to choose what’s best for their children — and public schools have every opportunity to be part of that solution. Just as Uber transformed transportation by focusing on what customers wanted, public schools can revolutionize education by listening to families and providing the services they need. ESAs are the tool that can make this vision a reality.

A third measure in Colorado, appeared headed for defeat. 

Despite the growing popularity of such programs with conservative lawmakers, the results continued the trend of voters, when given the chance, rejecting the idea of allowing public funds to pay for students’ tuition at private schools. 

“These bills are super unpopular, even in rural Trump country,” said Joshua Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and outspoken voucher opponent. 

He was particularly surprised by the results in Kentucky, where voters defeated , 65% to 35% even though former President Donald Trump won the presidential contest there by the same margin. The measure would have allowed state funds to pay for students to attend anything other than a traditional public school. “In an election that seems to be turning on ‘What has the government done for my family?,’ a lot of conservative voters in deep rural parts seem to be asking ‘What would vouchers do for my family?’ ”

In Nebraska, a law, passed last year, that created a private school scholarship program. Support Our Schools Nebraska, a union-backed group, led the campaign to get the referendum on the ballot. In Colorado, a state that would create a right to school choice was failing to reach the 55% threshold to win. Criticized for its vague wording, the initiative could pave the way for voucher legislation in the future. 

Like public school supporters in other states, opponents argue that vouchers drain funding from state budgets and are more likely to serve families who never attended traditional schools. In Colorado, Christian homeschooling families because the initiative also acknowledged the rights of students. They viewed that language as a threat to parental rights.

But school choice advocates say families deserve options outside of the public system. 

“The results from these three states are disappointing and discouraging, especially in light of what other states like Florida have shown school choice can do for students and families over the long haul,” said Ben DeGrow, a senior policy director at ExcelinEd, a nonprofit that advocates for private school choice.

“Opponents have once again shown they can unsettle enough voters with rhetoric that ultimately denies students needed educational opportunities.”

Nevertheless, he doesn’t expect the movement to slow down. In addition to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott and wealthy conservative donors worked hard to elect pro-voucher members to the House, DeGrow said Tennessee and Idaho are also likely states to push for private school choice programs next year. 

While choice initiatives drew significant attention this election year, there were also several other contentious ballot measures affecting education. 

Florida

A measure that would have required school board candidates to state their political party, failed to win 60% of the vote — the required threshold for the measure to pass. Backed by the legislature and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the measure received just 55%, according to unofficial results. 

“Honestly, I thought more people would vote no,” said Sue Woltanski, a school board member in Monroe County, Florida, who has written about the influence of conservative candidates endorsed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty. “Where I live, people are so tired of the division in the community and seemed to be turned off by the hyper-politicization of school boards in particular.”

But Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which has focused on culture war issues, like trans students in girls sports and sexually explicit library books, said she didn’t understand why anyone would be opposed to candidates disclosing their political affiliation.

“People want to say, ‘Well, the school board isn’t political,’ but the teachers unions have politicized school board races for years,” she said. ‘Ninety-nine percent of the that teachers unions give go to Democrats. I just think more information is good for voters.”

Massachusetts

Voters approved a proposal, sponsored by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, to relax high school graduation requirements, with a vote of 59% to 51%. Tenth graders would still have to take state exams in English, science and math, but they wouldn’t have to earn a passing score to receive a diploma.

The measure highlighted the debate between opponents of high-stakes testing and those who argue states have lowered the bar for achievement in the aftermath of the pandemic, leaving students less prepared for college. 

“Now watch inequities grow wider,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union and a Massachusetts resident, , noting how voters in towns known for high-performing schools rejected the measure. “May the odds be ever in your favor, kids.”

California

Voters approved a $10 billion bond issue — $8.5 billion of which will go to school districts for new construction and renovation projects. Some districts are also likely to use the funds for teacher housing as a way to ease shortages, but they’ll have to come up with local matching funds in order to receive the money.

Voters rejected the last statewide bond issue in 2020, meaning some schools have gone without , but opponents argued it didn’t make sense to spend billions on upgrades when student enrollment is declining.

The following are remaining results:

• With almost 90% saying yes, Arkansas voters overwhelmingly approved that would allow students attending vocational and technical schools to be eligible for the Arkansas Scholarship Lottery. 

• With a vote of 54%, approved a on firearms and ammunition to take effect April 1, 2025. The tax is expected to raise roughly $39 million a year, with $1 million going toward a school violence prevention program, staff training and facility upgrades to improve safety. Another $3 million would expand access to youth behavioral health programs.

• New Mexico voters approved a to fund upgrades and materials for school libraries, as well as early childhood education centers at both the state school for the blind and the school for the deaf.

• , voters approved a measure to increase from 4% to 5% the cap on investment earnings the state can transfer from the State School Fund to education. Local school councils of parents and educators decide how to use the funds. 

A affecting education funding was dropped from the ballot because it wasn’t published in a state newspaper 60 days before the election. The initiative that would have removed a state constitutional requirement that all revenue from income taxes and intangible property, like capital gains and royalty payments, be spent on education, children and people with disabilities. 

But in late 2023, Abbott began speaking out against him. With the support of other lawmakers and several political action committees, the governor began portraying Allison as weak on border security and property tax relief — two no-compromise issues for Texas GOP voters. In February, one PAC ran a calling Allison “wrong for Texas.”

The San Antonio Express-News as “easily the most qualified candidate in this race,” but the attacks stuck: Voters in his district in the March 5 primary, overwhelmingly choosing Marc LaHood, a criminal defense attorney with no political experience, as the Republican nominee.

In an interview, Allison said his defeat came down to one unlikely issue: school choice, specifically his opposition to Abbott’s long-stalled effort to enact a statewide Education Savings Account to help families pay for private and homeschool expenses.

It’s a scenario that’s playing out in Texas and beyond as lawmakers, pushing to remake legislative maps, increasingly turn for assistance to groups like the American Federation for Children and the School Freedom Fund, a pro-ESA group tied to tech billionaire Jeff Yass. Yass, a well-known Pennsylvania-based school choice proponent and investor in TikTok parent company Byte Dance, has spent millions to promote ESAs.

The effort has already changed the ballot this November and produced an unprecedented shift in statehouses, with lawmakers increasingly approving taxpayer support for private education. Seventeen states now have universal or near-universal ESA programs. 

Whether it’s via a traditional voucher, which gives families tuition for private education, a tax credit, or a less restrictive ESA fund, the idea is increasingly finding favor in state legislatures. In Florida, families can receive 72% of what the state spends per-pupil; in Arizona, it equals 90%. The pro-school-choice group EdChoice has estimated that more than now take advantage of ESAs, up from 40,000 in 2022.

But many rural conservatives fear the funding won’t be useful in isolated areas where private schools are unlikely to open. In many small towns, school districts are the largest employer, making ESAs political kryptonite.

A few observers say the development also could backfire. Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, warned that a rightward primary shift could spell defeat for Republicans in the Nov. 5 general election.

“It is possible, even after all the craziness, even after all the attacks and the millions of dollars spent, particularly by a particular TikTok owner, that you’ve got a situation where Abbott may not get his vouchers after all,” Jones said.

‘So wrong for Tennessee taxpayers’

For the moment, school choice efforts are moving full-speed ahead. FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank, private-school choice bills in 34 states, with most aiming to broaden options like ESAs.

The effort is playing out in states like , and, most recently, in Tennessee, where the School Freedom Fund spent an estimated against Republicans who stopped a in 2024. Among their targets: Sen. Frank S. Niceley, a 20-year legislative veteran who boasted a lifetime on the conservative Tennessee Legislative Report Card. 

The fund painted him as “liberal Frank Niceley,” with one ad to give undocumented students in-state tuition benefits at Tennessee colleges, adding, “No wonder there’s an invasion.” Playing on his last name, it concluded: “Nice to illegals, but so wrong for Tennessee taxpayers.”

Niceley in July that allowing out-of-state PACs to label the most conservative senator as a liberal amounted to trashing elections in favor of pre-determined outcomes by interest groups. “Just call up and ask ’em who they want.”

A statewide voucher, Niceley said, ran counter to Tennessee’s reputation for curbing what he called wasteful spending.

Early evidence in other states suggests that while ESAs are popular, their benefits often take the form of tuition discounts for families whose children are . In Iowa last year, for the state’s ESA came from such students. In Florida, .

Despite Niceley’s plea for frugality, in August, primary voters ousted him in favor of Jessie Seal, a public relations director for a medical facility. 

Celebrating the defeat of Niceley and others, David McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman and the School Freedom Fund president, said, “Make no mistake: if you call yourself a Republican and oppose school freedom, you should expect to lose your next primary.” 

McIntosh declined an interview request.

Abbott’s ‘white whale’

On the flip side, teachers’ unions are well-known for supporting both Democratic candidates and anti-school-choice legislation. In this political cycle, the National Education Association has spent $21,800,773, according to , a nonprofit that follows money in politics. The American Federation of Teachers has spent $3,949,330.

In Texas, anti-ESA Republicans earned support from a PAC funded by H-E-B grocery store chain heir Charles Butt. It threw in more than $4 million last winter, equal to what the School Freedom Fund a dozen Republicans who blocked Abbott’s voucher legislation.

Voters have rewarded the Freedom Fund’s efforts: Over the past few months, they’ve sent more than a dozen anti-ESA lawmakers packing. Abbott has persuaded a handful of others to retire rather than face difficult primaries. 

Yass, the TikTok billionaire, more than $12 million in this political cycle, while Miriam Adelson, owner of the Las Vegas Sands casinos, about $13 million, making the pair — residents of Pennsylvania and Nevada, respectively — Texas’ two biggest political donors.

School choice backers hope that kind of support ultimately results in a win for ESAs, a goal that has repeatedly eluded Abbott. 

Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, joked that ESAs have become Abbott’s “white whale,” one of the few legislative wins he can’t seem to earn.

Jones, the Rice political scientist, noted that several red-leaning states, including Florida, Georgia and Arizona, have ESAs. Texas Republicans have enjoyed a unified government since 2003, he said, creating a kind of “dissonance” between Texas’ perception as the most conservative state and Abbott’s inability to seal the deal.

While the financial support of Yass and groups like the School Freedom Fund may seem unprecedented, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, said it merely serves to counterbalance “the enormously, humongously large coffers” of teachers’ unions and the educational establishment.

“The choice movement support, even with lots of wealthy people, pales in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of in-kind and financial support that the unions put into legislative races,” said Allen, who also directs the . She called the development “obviously overdue.”

Allison said he opposed Abbott’s plan because Texas families already have many options, from magnet schools to charters to a program that lets students in low-performing schools transfer out. Lawmakers, he said, have approved countless programs that provide “choice on top of choice on top of choice” within districts.

Recent polling on school choice isn’t necessarily conclusive: of respondents to a recent University of Texas survey said they support spending taxpayer dollars to help families pay for private school. Meanwhile, a poll from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University found 65% support.  

‘We lost some very good members’

On occasion, the push to defeat lawmakers like Allison has taken an ugly turn. Last October, while he was down in Austin for one of several special sessions, an activist pulled a onto his suburban street. Mounted on the back were huge video screens that broadcast messages saying the former school board member “hates children” and “supports rogue administrators.”

“They also came up on the lawn and videoed and scared my wife and scared kids in the neighborhood,” he said. The truck’s commotion forced police to reroute a school bus.

Though lawmakers in Texas don’t convene again until early 2025, the effects are already playing out, said Allison. “We lost some very good members because of this — and some very experienced members.”

That could affect the legislature’s institutional memory and its ability to deal not just with education but other urgent issues, he said. “We’ve got a population that is growing by leaps and bounds. We’ve got some serious infrastructure problems: water, roads, bridges. Property taxes. I mean, it just goes on and on. So to single us out and to focus so much by the governor on this one issue is very shortsighted.”

Jones, the Rice political scientist, noted that while legislatures turn over regularly, the more immediate impact will be the “de facto purge” of House moderates. While he predicted that Abbott will likely gain enough support on Nov. 5 to pass some sort of voucher — perhaps not a particularly robust one — Taylor said Abbott’s aggressive pursuit of centrists could backfire, tilting as many as nine House districts into Democratic hands. Texas Democrats have said they hope to flip several seats based on what they call Abbotts’ .

In what may be the final irony of his ordeal, Allison reluctantly predicted that LaHood, who beat him in the primary, may have difficulty winning the seat against newcomer Democrat . LaHood in 2022 lost a race for county district attorney to a Democratic incumbent. 

One of Allison’s soon-to-be-former colleagues, Democratic Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who represents a nearby district, in June Democrats’ hopes to gain seats “increased tenfold” with LaHood’s primary win.

For his part, Allison didn’t hesitate when asked if he thought the district might flip blue in November. “I think there’s a very good chance,” he said.

Set against 55 closures or consolidations that also took place — the lowest number in years, according to from the National Catholic Education Association — total student enrollment managed to hold steady from the previous year. Just stopping the bleeding is considered a good omen in more than 3.5 million pupils, or two-thirds of its headcount, since the 1960s. 

The sustained drop in demand for Catholic education reflects a combination of broad changes in American society, including the Church’s gradual decline in membership and the migration of many of its congregants away from major cities, where diocesan schools have historically found eager customers. But new research implicates a much more recent variable: the swift rise of charter schooling since the 1990s.

In , a team of academics from Boston College’s demonstrated a clear link between the opening of new charter schools and substantial declines in enrollment at nearby Catholic schools. Between 1998 and 2020, an average of 3.5 percent of students left their Catholic school within two years of a charter opening nearby, according to the paper’s authors. As the number of families transfering to charters grew, the Catholic establishments became significantly more likely to close.

The findings provide the first national overview of a competition that has changed the complexion of school choice over the last quarter-century. Though the parochial footprint was charters arrived on the scene, the sector’s advocates awakened quickly to losing to a novel alternative with plenty of political and philanthropic support behind it. 

Boston College Professor Shaun Dougherty, the paper’s lead author, said that the tenuous fiscal position of many Catholic parishes made declining enrollments a serious threat to their ability to survive. 

“It seems like the margins of these schools are pretty thin,” Dougherty said. “In general, budgetary management is a challenge for a lot of parish schools, but the loss of income is catastrophic in many instances.”

But if the research paints a clear picture of the last few decades, it will be an uncertain guide to the next few. After years of unchecked spread, charter growth through the end of the 2010s as in Democratic-leaning states and cities. Meanwhile, a stampede of red states has rushed to enact statewide systems of school vouchers or education savings accounts, which provide families money to spend on the private school of their choice — including religious options.

Nicole Stelle Garnett, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said that it would take decisive action on the part of Catholic schools to alter their long-running downward trajectory. So many campuses have been shuttered over the heyday of charter growth that dioceses can’t simply flip a switch and restore the capacity they enjoyed during the Clinton administration, when school voucher programs were still a far-off possibility.

“If we’d gotten this much of private school choice in 1999, instead of 25 years later, we might have a lot more kids in Catholic schools today,” Garnett said. “So the question is what will happen now: Will they come back? Will the Church take advantage of these resources to reopen schools?”

Reaction to abuse scandals

Doughterty’s study is one of the first to examine the national sweep of the Catholic education sector across the country, with data collected from over 10,000 Catholic and 15,000 charter schools. After mapping the distances between the two school types, he and his co-authors calculated the effect on Catholic institutions of a charter school opening for the first time within a five-mile radius. 

Quickly after being exposed to charter competition, Catholic schools lost about 10 students, or more than 3 percent of their total enrollment. Those departures increased with time and helped drive the unwinding of some Catholic options. For each successive year in operation, the existence of a charter raised the chance that a K–8 Catholic school would close by between 1 and 3.5 percentage points.

Departures were not driven by competitive pressure alone, however. At the same time that charter growth was exploding in major cities, in a decades-long scandal involving the sexual abuse of minors. Schools in dioceses throughout the U.S. , while costly settlements that might have cushioned the blow from disenrollments. 

A , released last year by Bates College economist Kyle Coombs, found strong evidence of a link between abuse cases, Catholic school closures, and charter school openings. Gathering news accounts of over 3,000 such scandals between 1980 and 2010, Coombs discovered that within six years of sexual abuse being reported in news media, Catholic schools in the area where the event took place lost an average of 75 students and were hit by an uptick in closures. 

Over the same period, Coombs discovered, charter schools — but not traditional public or non-Catholic private schools — gained an average of 50 students, strongly indicating that families who previously favored Catholic education might also prefer the charter experience. 

Coombs said that both his study and the one circulated by Boston College were uncovering parts of the same story: At the same time that families were being pulled away from their traditional preferences for parochial schools, they were also being pushed out by accounts of misconduct.  

“In these instances, it takes a little while, but it’s not shocking that when one school closes, another one opens,” Coombs said. “And of course it’s not shocking that the most prevalent type of school to open is the type that is the fastest-growing in the United States.”

Further, he found that in areas with Catholic schools, new charters were considerably more likely to open in places where a scandal had been reported than in places where they had not. That trend suggests that charters were being strategic in expanding to areas where students might suddenly be up for grabs.

Coombs said it was likely that charter operators had taken notice of the ongoing migration away from urban Catholic schools.

“When the scandals occur, that’s something that can lead to a drop in Catholic school enrollments,” he said. “And charter schools, if they are looking for places where there’s need, would see that.”

‘A totally new world now’

Notably, Dougherty and his colleagues found, the tie between charter growth and Catholic school decline is stronger in some areas than others.

In the 10 jurisdictions that offered some form of voucher or tuition reimbursement program to families, such as Indiana, Maine, and Washington, D.C., the impact of new charters on Catholic school enrollments and closure rates was smaller than in those without any form of private school choice. The difference is likely a sign that parents’ decisions are motivated, at least partially, by their finances. 

Dougherty said that, notwithstanding the “strong attachments” many families felt to their local Catholic school, the availability of a no-cost alternative could prove decisive. 

“The potential savings to a family of switching from an urban Catholic school to an urban charter could be substantial, even if they were only paying a few thousand dollars per year in tuition,” Dougherty said. “Getting a few thousand dollars back seems like a fairly large benefit.”

Yet the existence of universal, high-dollar systems of private school choice, such as the education savings accounts that have been approved in a dozen states over the last few years, could level the playing field considerably. Dougherty observed that, depending on the state, the value of an ESA would likely go farther to cover costs at a Catholic institution — the sector has healthy discounts — than at other independent schools.

The Church has been increasingly willing to embrace new K–12 models, albeit at a pace one might expect of a 2,000-year-old entity. During the headiest days of the school choice era, some dioceses allowed schools with an emphasis on character education. In New York City and Cleveland, 11 Catholic programs by a charter-like management organization known as Partnership Schools (this school year, responsibility for day-to-day operations in the New York schools to the local archdiocese). 

Garnett said she was heartened by the apparently positive impact of voucher-type programs on Catholic school retention, especially given how paltry those schemes were until 2020. Many were granted only to certain subgroups, such as students with special needs or those attending failing schools, and they were not always user-friendly, she added.

Before the advent of universal ESA systems, “the amounts given to families were less, the number of families who could participate was smaller, so the fact that there was any effect is telling,” Garnett said. “But we’re in a totally new world now.”

Two years ago, Katie Switzer for a new school choice program that grants homeschooling families in West Virginia up to $4,900 annually to educate their children.

She was on the winning side when opponents sued to stop the program. But now, she says, the story of the Hope Scholarship has entered a frustrating new chapter. 

Glitches in a new online purchasing system mean she can’t spend funds to order headsets for her three children in online classes. Her kindergartner received the wrong laptop and she spent weeks trying to get a refund. Her kids are among thousands whose learning has been disrupted this school year because orders for curriculum and supplies are backed up. Families have been forced to wait or spend their own money and ask the state for reimbursement. 

“We fought so hard to get this program,” said Switzer, a mother of five and founder of a that has become a forum for dozens of families frustrated with the payment system. “Now we have a number of parents that haven’t received what they ordered.”

In April, the West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office, which runs the Hope Scholarship, awarded a to Indiana-based Student First Technologies to manage purchases and payments to education providers, replacing a non-profit the state contracted with last year. But the system has struggled to keep up as enrollment in the education savings account program jumped from about last year to over 10,000. In late September, almost 3,000 of the 9,000 orders submitted through the company’s platform had not been processed, according to the state. By Thursday, the system had gotten that number down to 1,600 out of 11,300 — or roughly 14% of orders.

Last week, the treasurer’s office held a forum to allow parents to voice their concerns. But Switzer said the meeting was short on hard information.

“I’m like, ‘We want answers; we don’t just want to yell at you,’ ” she said.

Student First’s problems aren’t limited to West Virginia. In a Sept. 16 letter, Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva told CEO Mark Duran that his company failed to meet deadlines, including one for delivering a “fully operational” purchasing platform for homeschool families participating in the state’s Education Freedom Account program. He followed up with a second Tuesday, canceling the company’s contract as of Dec. 31 and requiring Student First to pay an estimated $563,000 in damages. 

On Wednesday, the state also posted a  for another vendor.

“The failure of Student First to perform its obligations under the contract requires the agency to procure a new contract that, based on the circumstances, will increase the cost to operate the same program,” Oliva wrote.

Student First officials have not returned phone calls or emails for this article.

As Republican-led states continue to adopt and expand ESAs, they are building centralized  systems for homeschooling parents to buy curriculum, services and supplies. Controversy surrounding ESAs has largely focused on isolated cases of fraud, including funds for “ghost students” in Arizona and extravagant parent-purchased items and . But school choice advocates argue that one of the biggest threats to the programs is poor customer service, including online platforms that malfunction or block orders for items that should be allowable. 

Parents are complaining about “long approval wait times and issues with getting invoices paid,” said Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an advocacy group. “It is tough to say whether it is the platforms or the states that are causing the problems. I imagine if you ask the platforms they’ll blame the states, and if you ask the states they’ll blame the platforms.”

The West Virginia treasurer’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Last year, McShane states not to skimp on the “slow, laborious and dull work” of implementation. He called the difficulties “teething pains” as states open programs to more families.

‘Through the roof’

Under ESAs, parents can use their accounts to pay for tuition at private schools, or to fund homeschooling expenses or a mixture of in-person and online learning.

Recent data from and other shows that homeschooling rates remain above pre-pandemic levels. In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 6% of students were homeschooled, compared with 2.8% in 2019. ESAs “will potentially expand homeschooling practice even more.” 

While it’s relatively simple to use ESA funds to pay tuition to a private school, advocates say Student First probably didn’t anticipate the flurry of activity from homeschooling families who often place dozens of orders for curriculum and supplies.

“The demand for these programs has been through the roof,” McShane said. “So scaling up the tech and infrastructure is going to take time.”

Critics, however, argue that such “middleman” vendors are not only causing headaches for families, but raising the costs of running the programs themselves. Iowa, for example, upped its contract with Odyssey, a similar payment company, to reflect additional charges for on purchases.

Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and leading voucher opponent, said it’s typical for states to contract with third-party providers to manage publicly funded programs. But Cowen, who recently published about some of the wealthy donors behind the school choice movement, pointed to a “chronic problem” with vendors running ESA programs, especially as the list of allowable items grows.

“I think that the burden should be even higher on states authorizing vendors to explain why we need them and why they’re worth the cost,” he said. 

Arkansas, where the ESA program provides $6,800 per student, awarded a to Student First in April, replacing ClassWallet, the largest company in the sector, with contracts in 11 states. 

The program began in 2023-24, but this is the first year some homeschoolers can participate, including the children of first responders, servicemembers and those in failing schools.

“Not all homeschool families are eligible this year, and it’s really a good thing” given the processing delays, said Lisa Crook, director of Education Alliance, a network of Arkansas homeschooling families. Parents are calling her for answers, but she said the state is reimbursing expenses as fast as it can. “It has been frustrating, but I don’t feel like they have turned a blind eye to us or anything.”

The West Virginia treasurer’s office has also created some temporary workarounds. In a Sept. 23 email, the state said it would reimburse families that had to pay up front for expensive items like school uniforms and musical instruments. But advocates note that not all families can afford to pay for items out of pocket and wait for reimbursements.

In addition to the backlog of orders, Student First’s “TheoPay” platform, for now, only works as an extension to Chrome — a violation of its the program to work across multiple browsers and be mobile-friendly. 

Switzer said parents who lack Chrome or home internet service have come to her house to place orders. 

“This is a high-poverty state,” she said. “Parents can’t use their phones [to place orders] or they can’t use the local library computer to order stuff because you can’t install the Chrome extension on a library computer.”

As director of education partnerships and strategy at the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a right-leaning think tank, Tiffany Hoben is an advocate for ESAs. 

She also has an 11-year-old son on a Hope Scholarship. She uses the funds to purchase science, math, and reading materials from different vendors and to pay for tutors. Student First’s website promises “frictionless technology.” But the system is blocking orders for some parents while green-lighting purchases from other families for identical items.

“It’s hard for families,” she said. “It’s like, ‘Well, dang it, I should be able to have this because it’s on the list.’ ”

‘In the dark’

Most states with ESA programs have had some challenges with their payment systems. But in Arizona, which contracts with ClassWallet, many of the kinks have been worked out, said Kathy Visser, who runs a Facebook group for ESA parents. If there are delays with approvals, it’s usually due to a backlog at the state level or because officials have changed the rules about what’s allowed. 

“For the most part, if you contact ClassWallet with an issue, they’re very responsive,” she said. “And if it’s their fault that you had an issue, it’s quickly resolved.”

She worries that problems with vendors in other states will bolster critics’ arguments that ESA’s drain state resources.  

“They’ll say, ‘Look, you can’t even manage the programs,’ ” she said. “They want to make sure parents quit using it. If parents get fed up, then the program fails.”

Hoben, with Cardinal Institute, said in the rush to get West Virginia’s purchasing system in place, families have been kept “in the dark” about why their orders aren’t being processed. 

“Other states,” she said, “are watching us out of the corner of their eye, like ‘God do we even want to mess with this?’ ” 

Dominique Bryant made the switch for her 10-year-old after two years of watching him struggle with reading. She first noticed how far behind Malcolm was in second grade when he couldn’t read the instructions on a homework assignment. 

“I looked in his face and he just was so defeated. I said ‘I’ve got to do something else,’” she said. Now her two daughters, Ebony and Aviana, attend the school as well.

One way Burbrella stands out in a growing marketplace of unconventional school options is by grouping students of similar ages and learning needs together in pods — a format that a lot of families became familiar with during the pandemic. The school, however, takes a more mainstream approach to measuring how well students learn math and reading. Teachers turn to some of the same assessments still used in traditional public schools, like the Iowa tests to pinpoint students’ skills when they first enroll and i-Ready to monitor progress throughout the year. 

“We look for their strengths, their interests, and we integrate that into play, nature and projects — just to really make learning fun — but also to close the gaps they have academically,” said Dominique Burgess, the school’s founder.

Her reliance on widely used assessments is not unique in the expanding universe of school choice options, according to a from Vela, a nonprofit that promotes and provides grants to such programs. Most leaders of unconventional schools use methods like observation, student presentations and projects to track progress, but more than half also use standardized tests or assessments built into online curriculum — like DreamBox and Zearn. Leaders of such programs say parents are their number one audience for the data. But with more states allowing families to use public funds for tuition at microschools and other private school programs, there’s also for greater transparency into how students stack up against their peers in district schools.

Burgess, previously a public and charter school educator, doesn’t have a problem with that. 

“I think we’re at a very pivotal point in this whole movement,” said Burgess, who also has an online program that serves students from 19 states. “A lot of what we’re doing needs a light shined on it — not just for parents to say ‘Oh, it’s something different. Let me go try it’ — but more so the country can see this might be the new way of educating kids and providing families with choice.”

Vela, with a network of 3,000 founders of alternative schools, was “uniquely positioned” to survey leaders on how their schools define and measure student success, said Meredith Olson, president and CEO. 

Of the 223 programs that responded, 70% said they track academic progress, but ranked developing students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills as more important than reading and literacy skills — 74% and 66%, respectively. Nearly 40% of the school programs said they measure math skills, and 13% said they don’t track anything. 

Programs using digital tools are more likely to capture student assessment data using education technology from Khan Academy than any other program, Vela found in its survey. More than half of school founders said they use the popular website, with much smaller percentages using Lexia for reading (24%) or Zearn for math (15%).

Laurie Hensley, who runs the Learning Essentials microschool on an acre of property southeast of Phoenix, doesn’t let her students move to the next level until they score at least 90% in Lexia. Sometimes she “has a little chat” with parents if their child still can’t master a lesson after multiple attempts.

“But most of the time kids are progressing,” said Hensley, who worked as a paraprofessional in a charter school before launching her own program five years ago. “The whole point of being out of a public school is that they progress, even if it’s slower. As long as they’re moving forward, I don’t worry about them.”

Doug Harris, a Tulane University economist who studies school choice, including education savings accounts, said he’s not surprised that many microschool leaders rely on Khan Academy to tell them how students are performing. 

“Microschools have only one or two teachers and they can’t be expert in, or create assessments for, such a wide variety of material,” he said. But even if public funds are paying for students to attend a microschool, the public won’t necessarily see that data. “Khan doesn’t provide useful info to anyone but those families and educators in the school.” 

That’s not good enough for many opponents of ESAs, especially those in Arizona, which places no academic requirements on private programs that serve students with public funds. Criticism has spiked in recent months as the state makes to accommodate growth in the program. 

Holding microschools accountable

“Microschools propped up by taxpayer funds should be held to the same standards as public schools, which means they should take the same tests and post the same level of results,” said Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public school advocacy organization that strongly opposes the state’s ESA program. “Otherwise, it’s not really about school choice at all, since parents don’t have access to any information about the microschool’s academics. And taxpayers have zero information about their return on investment.”

Jenn Kelly, who runs Education Through Adventure microschool in Scottsdale, agrees that ESA-funded programs should be held accountable for student achievement. But she thinks portfolios full of student work provide a more accurate picture than tests. The question, she said, is who would review the assignments.  

The state education department’s ESA staff “is already overloaded with purchasing and vendor pay requests,” said Kelly, a former special education teacher in district, charter and Catholic schools. “What happens if a child does not show any growth … from year to year? Does the state pull the ESA funding for that child? Every answer raises more questions.”

Unlike Arizona, some states with ESAs or vouchers, like West Virginia and North Carolina, require programs to administer either state tests, or another standardized assessment, and submit the data to the state. 

In West Virginia, Michael Parsons, who runs Vandalia Community School in Charleston, said he’s interested in how students in his school compare with those in other microschools, as well as those in public schools. But he’s most concerned about his students making progress. 

“Most important as a teacher is accountability to my students and their growth, and as an administrator, accountability to my staff,” he said. “If I can keep those two things on par, then accountability to parents, taxpayers, regulators happens by default.”

At Burbrella, Burgess said she could have given the same end-of-grade assessments that students in North Carolina public schools take, allowing for a direct comparison, but she described them as “not kid-friendly” and decided against it. 

One reason parents seek out is because they feel public schools have a narrow focus on testing. 

Bryant remembers how stressed her oldest daughter Ebony would get before state tests in New York City, where they lived before relocating to Burlington.

“She freezes up and does terribly. Compared to her performance in school, it was like night and day,” she said. At Burbrella, assessments don’t create the same level of anxiety. “It’s more like, ‘We’re going to assess where you are, and then we’re gonna work from there.’ ”   

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Stand Together Trust and the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation provide financial support to Vela and to The 74. 

A pioneer of sorts, the state became the first in the nation to offer education savings accounts, or ESAs, in 2011. A decade later, it was the first to make those programs — which offer parents roughly $7,500 to spend on their children’s educational expenses, including private school tuition — available to any family. 

But following a wave of copycat laws that have subsequently brought ESAs to in the last few years, Arizona voters might set another precedent this fall: becoming the first electorate to hand over governance of its system of private school choice to the state’s Democratic Party, led by Gov. Katie Hobbs. Doing so could pose a serious test to ESAs’ political sustainability, but also to their detractors’ powers to stymie them.

Republicans currently hold in both the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives, a narrow enough edge for Democrats to dream of capturing one or both chambers for the first time in decades. With Hobbs approaching her third year in office, the party would enjoy its only period of unified control of government in Arizona since 1966. 

Just two or three seats in each chamber are considered highly competitive, and public polling is rarely conducted in legislative campaigns. The Democratic presidential ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in a recent poll, and is expected to increase Democratic turnout on Election Day, but it is impossible to guess whether such a surge would move votes in lower-profile races.

What is in little doubt is local Democrats’ opposition to ESAs. In her first state budget framework, submitted last spring, to repeal the statewide expansion enacted the previous year, which extended eligibility for the program even to well-off families already enrolling their children in private schools. But the idea floundered at the statehouse.

Earlier this year, Hobbs a package of much more modest reforms aiming to bring “accountability” to the system by, among other things, requiring private schools receiving ESA money to fingerprint their teachers (as traditional public schools must). That mandate, along with one preventing ESA families from using their accounts over summer vacation, in the FY 2025 budget passed in June, but that they would do little to stem the growth of private school choice. 

Since eligibility was made universal, enrollment figures show that the number of Arizona students receiving ESAs from 12,000 to 75,000. 

Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster at Highground Public Affairs Consultants, said that legislation to make ESAs more transparent was “overwhelmingly popular.” 

“Democrats could pass more accountability measures tomorrow,” said Bentz. “All the polling demonstrates that voters support requiring schools that receive ESA support to have the same reporting requirements, the same teacher verification and school safety, as public schools.”

Still, he added, the party probably wouldn’t be able to shackle the sector — at least, not without claiming sizable Democratic majorities in November. More likely, Bentz predicted, the party would win one chamber, or perhaps enter into a 50-50 split that would necessitate some form of power-sharing.

“I don’t think they can outright eliminate [ESAs] at this point. The genie’s out of the bottle for that.”

Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association and one of the most influential union leaders in the state, held out hope for a more thorough-going victory. With a big enough legislative advantage, she said, Democrats would gain the ability to “slowly dismantle” the ESA program. While adding that state leaders should proceed with care, given the with special needs, Garcia argued that a better-funded public school system could step into the breach. 

“It has to happen slowly to honor those students,” Garcia told The 74. “But at the same time, those students should be cared for by the public schools to make sure they’re getting their needs met.” 

Financial debate

For Garcia and many other educators, the principal downside to the program is financial.

According to estimates from the Arizona Department of Education, its total cost over the last fiscal year. That figure was equivalent to roughly half of the state’s deficit, in the recently passed budget through a mix of spending cuts. 

Accounts differ sharply over the total fiscal impact of private school choice, with opponents of ESA recipients as a major driver of debt; meanwhile, that the lower cost of the accounts relative to the annual per-pupil spending on public school students (about $7,500 vs. $10,000) will actually yield savings over time.  

Matthew Ladner, a veteran researcher at the Arizona Charter Schools Association and a defender of ESAs, characterized any linkage between the program’s growth and the state’s challenging budgetary projections “completely and utterly false.” 

“The Arizona ESA program’s budget is within the budget of the Arizona Department of Education, and last fiscal year, that department put out a press release ,” Ladner said. He added that it would be “impossible” for the department, run by Republican State Superintendent Tom Horne, “to be running a surplus and to have simultaneously caused a budget deficit.”

Yet many in the local education policy community still lament the state of K-12 finances, which could prove a headache over the next few years in either divided or unified government. Arizona has consistently ranked near the bottom of the United States for school spending, placing at over the last academic year. 

That reality resulted partially from that were enacted during the Great Recession and never fully reversed. Prolonged dissatisfaction with stagnant teacher pay led to the 2018 #RedforEd school walkouts, which helped awaken a major progressive movement in what had been a reliably red state. 

Democrats have benefitted from that organizing energy, winning the state narrowly in the 2020 presidential election and seizing a string of statewide races that culminated with Hobbs’s election in 2022. But without repeating their successes in the legislature, they haven’t been able to slow the growth of school choice or transform education funding. Even a voter-supported ballot measure that would have raised taxes to generate more revenue in state court. 

Indeed, some dollars that have previously been considered safe may soon be in jeopardy. Proposition 123, an initiative passed in 2016 to school districts each year from the state’s land trust, will sunset next year unless it is reauthorized by voters. While both parties agree that the proposition should be renewed, Hobbs’s own bid to increase the outlay with a GOP counterproposal to direct funds solely to teacher salaries. The deadline to place it before the voters expired, though lawmakers can still call a special election before the money disappears.

Rich Nickel is the president of , a nonprofit group advocating for educational improvement in the state. He also believes that ESAs are likely to stay in place, though he believes more data should be collected to study the effectiveness of schools receiving money through them.

More pressing, Nickel continued, was the need for further resources in school districts struggling to emerge from years of COVID-disrupted learning. But it’s unclear whether that realization has broken through to the state’s leadership. In of the public’s views on education policy, the organization discovered “a gap between what voters tell us they want and what they’re getting” out of their elected officials, he said.

“There’s wide agreement among both parties, all races and ethnicities, that our leaders should be doing more to increase our achievement and attainment rates. But we’re not seeing any investments in that in this current budget, and there’s not a lot of optimism that we’re going to see that in the next couple of years.

They signed a lease with the local historical society for the and checked with the city to ensure that a tiny alternative school could occupy the building, erected in 1905 by a son of the city’s founder. They opened in February 2021 and moved in with just four students.

A month later, city officials broke the bad news: The Bryan House was actually zoned as a “learning center,” an informal space for tutoring and exhibitions — not a school. It had a sprinkler system, fire alarms and a fire escape. But if they were to stay, the historical society would have to install massive metal fire doors, among other changes. 

When the historical society balked, the couple persuaded it to let them back out of their lease. The change forced them to go virtual for the rest of the school year as they searched for a new space.

“That nearly broke us,” Slaven said.

But new regulations, approved last year by state lawmakers, could save future microschools from similar headaches. The regulations say private schools can occupy existing spaces from museums to movie theaters without seeking local government approval. 

Making more locations accessible to microschools could help the movement grow nationally, just as education saving account laws in places like Florida and elsewhere have opened them up for consideration by families who otherwise couldn’t afford them.

The new Florida regulations, Slaven said, “are a really big deal for the ecosystem.” If they’d been in place two years earlier, he and his students could have stayed at Bryan House. 

Florida was already a leader in the burgeoning microschool movement — the group counts more than 250 programs in its current directory. But the new regulations, first reported by , could be groundbreaking, advocates say, tempting lawmakers elsewhere to do the same. passed the first law limiting state regulation of “learning pods” in 2021 and similar changes have since taken place in .

“The first generation, so many of these were in church basements or people’s homes,” said Michael McShane, director of national research at , a policy organization. If the sector is to grow, he said, “they need to be able to operate in more readily available spaces.”

McShane and a colleague that between 1.1 and 2.1 million school-aged children nationwide, or 2% to 4%, used microschools as their main provider.

But microschools often face maddening regulatory challenges. McShane recalled hearing from an educator converting a commercial space into a microschool who installed half-inch drywall. Regulators said he had to rip it out and install the three-quarter-inch variety. In another instance, a microschool seeking to set up shop at an old mini-golf course had to not just decommission a play windmill but raze it.

Nathan Hoffman, senior legislative director for the , a policy group founded by former Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said the changes build on Florida’s 2023 that “really blew the doors open on what’s possible” in different forms of schooling. He noted that upwards of 400,000 to 450,000 Florida students are now receiving taxpayer-supported scholarships to attend private schools, including microschools. “It’s created, I think, a whole new way that parents are interacting with K-12 education that we’re only just now getting to understand.”

But policymakers are also realizing that if microschools are to thrive, they can’t be regulated the same as larger schools, Hoffman said. “They’re only serving 30, 40, maybe 50 families. They’re not serving hundreds of families. The size of the buildings that are necessary, the land that’s necessary, is not going to be the same.”

In that respect, microschools are reminiscent of a similar movement that began more than 30 years earlier.

Don Soifer, CEO of the , said the new microschooling founders remind him of “those life-changing educators that we had in the beginning of the charter school movement — it’s fun to be around them.”

A longtime school choice advocate, Soifer opened his own microschool near Las Vegas during the Covid pandemic. In the process, he began consulting with other operators and soon realized they needed help navigating the technical, legal and pedagogical obstacles they faced. He now trains school leaders and offers them access to digital learning and student management tools from providers that typically deal only with school districts. 

Families taking on all the risk

Not everyone welcomes the new changes — or the explosive growth of the sector. 

The Florida League of Cities the legislation, saying it would prevent cities and counties from having a say in school rezoning.

Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of the The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, noted that Florida, like other states, requires students to be de-enrolled in public school to be eligible for education savings accounts, which give families state funds for tuition or homeschooling expenses. These accounts have helped microschools flourish, since they offer families “one more place to spend that money.”

To that end, Cowen called microschools “the food trucks of the new education industry.” 

As with food trucks, he said, these new models may allow for schools to quickly open and offer students new options. But even if they’re appealing, he said, safety monitoring “is probably poorer.” The hours are sporadic, and even in the best case, he said, it “could pick up and leave tomorrow — or close altogether because the margins didn’t work for the business model.”

That risk-reward equation, he said, “is fine when you’re shopping for a taco. Not when you’re shopping for a school that’s intended to give your kid a strong start in life.” Families also take on virtually all of the financial risks associated with microschools, he said, especially those backed by .

Hoffman, the Florida legislative director, said the food truck analogy is “extremely outdated,” invoking fears similar to those of early homeschooling as serving isolated rural, off-the-grid families. “That’s just not the case anymore,” he said. “The fastest growing segment of the homeschool population are ” in urban areas.

Likewise, he said, microschools “are fine options for families that want to use them.”

Soifer said microschooling will likely never be competitive with options like charter schools and private-school vouchers, noting that ESAs have typically been designed to help make Catholic schools more affordable and that many states saying programs must hold accreditation to participate. He pointed out that many microschools closed in Washington, D.C., because parents couldn’t take advantage of the city’s longtime . It requires schools to file, among other things, two years of audited financial statements. 

“Broadly speaking, the frameworks need to modernize,” he said. The changes in Florida are “one important lever that lets us do that.”

Hoffman, the Florida policy advisor, added that state regulations prevent “fly-by-night” operators who can “come in and come in on Tuesday and say, ‘I want to serve students,’ and by Wednesday you’re serving students.”

On occasion, however, microschool parents have had bad experiences, as with a West Virginia operation that one parent called “a glorified babysitter.”

‘Mystical alignment of the universe’

Not far from Fort Lauderdale, in Coral Springs, Fla., Frank Farro and his wife Natalie in 2020 were looking for a place to start their own microschool. Like the Slavens, they wanted to bring an Acton Academy network school to their neighborhood. And like the Slavens, they struggled to find a building. “Location has been the hardest thing for us,” Frank Farro said. “Not even close.” 

The couple found a suitable space in a commercial building, but ended up getting kicked out when another school reclaimed it after the pandemic. Looser regulations would open more spaces for consideration, he said.

Like many others, the Farros’ school has grown quickly, from just six students in 2020 to 32 this fall. They’re currently renting about 5,000 square feet from a church, but Farro anticipates they’ll reach capacity in about six months, with a planned enrollment of around 60 students.

“Then we’ll be looking for our forever campus,” he said. “And that’s when things will get even more interesting.”

In 2020, he recalled, they looked at a five-acre tree farm in nearby Coconut Creek. It had a few houses that could serve as classrooms and seemed perfect. But at a selling price of $1.5 million, it didn’t seem practical for just six students.

Farro noticed recently that the property is back on the market this summer — for a cool $4 million.

Finding the right space, with playgrounds and outdoor spaces, he said, is “near impossible,” but he hopes the new regulations open up other options. As it is, “you have to find some mystical alignment of the universe in order to land a place that is zoned for a school — or you have to be massive, with a massive amount of capital, to go find another place.”

That fact that three former education agency employees were among those indicted shows that the program lacks adequate fraud prevention measures, said Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes.

“It was very easy for these individuals to do this,” Mayes said during a press conference. They’re accused of faking birth certificates and special education evaluations to bilk over $600,000 from the program. “I think we all have to be asking the question: ‘Is it being replicated?’ ” 

But ESA advocates saw little in the news that would lead them to push for more guardrails on Arizona’s system or halt the movement for in other states. Some dismissed it as an “inside job” that reflects more on government corruption than the thousands of families looking for better educational options for their children. To this group, the fact that Arizona investigators uncovered the alleged plot shows that existing safeguards worked.

“I don’t think there’s any program that can regulate out the possibility of bad actors,” said Lisa Snell, senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, a foundation funding school choice initiatives, and one of the leading voices nationally on ESAs. “In any sector, there are people that are taking advantage of taxpayer money.” 

She pointed to the national and as two government programs that have proven vulnerable to corruption. And she noted an investigation last year that found Los Angeles teachers union members received .

“Government employees committing fraud is a tale as old as time, and by no means unique to education,” said Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an advocacy organization.

‘This kind of abuse’

Unlike their counterparts in several states, Arizona private schools accepting ESA students don’t have to be accredited and their staff members don’t have to pass criminal background checks. There are also no testing requirements for students, and while homeschooling parents are required to use funds to teach core subjects, many pull curriculum materials from the internet. 

Some argue that, with a little over 30 employees, the program lacks the staff to accommodate its rapid growth to nearly 76,000 students since 2022. 

“What I’m most concerned about is how ripe the program clearly is for this kind of abuse,” Mayes said in detailing the .

Suspects Dolores Lashay Sweet, Dorrian Lamarr Jones and Jennifer Lopez were ESA program specialists at the department who allegedly admitted real and fictitious students — some with identical birthdays — to the program and then approved expenses on their behalf. Jadakah Celeste Johnson, and Raymond Lamont Johnson, Jr., also indicted, are Sweet’s adult children. 

In an odd coincidence, just hours after the indictments, educators met in Washington, D.C. at the conservative American Enterprise Institute whether Democrats should get behind the ESA movement. Arizona’s program came up frequently.

“No academic accountability. No financial transparency. No student safety measures,” said Bethany Little, managing principal at Education Counsel, a consulting firm. 

“I agree with you on the flaws of Arizona’s law,” responded Ravi Gupta, a former Obama staffer and charter school leader who said he supports the idea of ESAs, but sometimes questions their implementation. 

In several other states that have embraced ESAs, administrators say they’ve put guardrails in place to prevent fraud and corruption. 

In Utah, where applications for the state’s new ESA program opened last week, advanced software is designed to spot fake documents, said Jackie Guglielmo, vice president of ESA programs at the Alliance for Choice in Education, which runs the program. If the system flags something irregular, a member of the customer support team will manually review it and might ask for additional documentation, she said.

New Hampshire officials employ to differentiate people processing applications from those who approve vendors. A third group approves expenses. A bill to passed the state House last month.

Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has proposed for the program by having an outside auditor track how private schools are using ESA money. 

But Snell, with Stand Together Trust, said she doubts there are any reforms that would satisfy most Democrats. She was among the school choice supporters gathered at a over the weekend to highlight the growth of microschools, homeschool co-ops and other unconventional programs. 

Not all of the programs represented accept ESA funds, but many attendees view their success as critical to the future of their movement. John Thompson, a researcher from Kennesaw State University, which organized the event, said the notion that ESAs are a fad is “very crazy and wrong.”

“It’s not going backward,” he said.

Kaity Broadbent of Prenda Learning, a microschool network, said alternative models are responding to parents who feel their children weren’t well served in a typical classroom.

“This generation of parents cares about mental health,” she said. “They don’t just need their kids to get into Harvard. There’s a new vibe.”

While sessions focused on policy and accountability, no one mentioned the indictments.

‘Bigger than any superintendent’

Inside Arizona, however, the news upset advocates who say thousands of children are benefiting from the flexibility ESAs offer.

“This type of thing is just devastating to those of us who really depend on the program,” said Kathy Visser, who administers a Facebook page for ESA families and vendors. “It angers us because accountability matters more to us than anyone else.”

Hobbs has also proposed background checks for staff members at private schools accepting ESA funds and for students to attend public school for a minimum of 100 days before they qualify for the program. But have opposed the measures, likening them to “death by a thousand cuts.”

This was the second batch of indictments involving the program since last summer, when a grand jury in Maricopa County accused of fraud and theft of over $87,000 from the program. 

They allegedly created receipts and claimed reimbursements for “bogus” educational services, according to a prosecution report. When investigators examined one woman’s account linked to the ESA program, they found charges at retail stores, restaurants and companies like Uber and Airbnb. The case is ongoing.

Also last summer, the former head administrator of the ESA program, Christine Accurso, and another high-ranking official, Linda Rizzo, following a “cybersecurity incident” in which student names and their disabilities to a parent through ClassWallet, the program’s online financial platform. 

Superintendent Tom Horne, a Republican and strong advocate for ESAs, hired Accurso when he defeated Democratic incumbent Kathy Hoffman in 2022. After Accurso’s resignation, Horne put John Ward, who has years of auditing experience, in charge of the program. 

While a tip from a credit union alerted officials to large amounts being withdrawn from Sweet’s account, Horne, , said it was his department that raised concerns about Jones and Lopez and that he is working to “root out potential fraud and abuse.” 

But in an email to The 74, Hoffman said the state legislature should reform the program and fund more fraud prevention efforts.

“Ultimately, the problems with this program are bigger than any superintendent,” she said. “The ESA program does not have — and has never had — enough oversight to ensure tax dollars are being spent appropriately.”

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The 74.

Changes that started with passed in 2022 are now in effect for those with 529 education savings accounts. Now, besides putting aside funds for school expenses, account owners can jumpstart their retirement savings.

Starting Jan. 1, account owners are now able to roll over unused funds to Roth IRA accounts. It’s an important change for those who had concerns about oversaving for educational purposes, said Greg Dyer, chief compliance officer at , a state agency that manages and provides education on the savings plan.

“Congress’ intent was really to help kickstart the retirement savings for a beneficiary that has gotten through college,” he said, “and doesn’t need them anymore for college expenses.”

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During the first 10 days of the change, there were more than 90 rollovers in Utah, Dyer said. The state has the fourth largest 529 plan in the country with over $21 billion in assets under its management, a fact Dyer attributed to the state’s low fees in investments and, overall, a good reputation.

529 plans, which got their name from section 529 of Internal Revenue Code, allow people from all over the country — except for Wyoming — to save for tuition and other school expenses, such as books, fees, room and board and other K-12 and graduate school expenses in their state’s plan.

Though there are different kinds of plans, one of the most popular works similarly to a Roth IRA, allowing people to have tax-advantaged savings plans for education purchases.

“You don’t get a federal tax deduction going in, but the funds can compound and grow tax deferred,” Dyer said. “And if you use them for qualified education expenses, then the taxes are waived.”

But, there are some requirements to be able to transfer the funds: Accounts must be over 15 years old and account owners can’t roll over any funds or earnings that have accrued in the past five years.

“Those funds can grow but you can’t put a contribution in last year and then roll over this year,” he said. “You have a five-year kind of wait period.”

The annual amount that users can roll over is limited to the Roth IRA contribution cap, which is typically around $7,000 for all savings sources.

“Let’s say that you put $5,000 into your regular Roth IRA,” he said, “you can only do $2,000 from your 529 plan.”

Then, there’s also a lifetime limit of $35,000 for these rollover contributions.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com. Follow Utah News Dispatch on and .

Gov. Kay Ivey Monday reaffirmed her support for creating education savings accounts at a rally on the Alabama State Capitol steps on Monday.

But Ivey and other speakers gave few details of what they would support on the issue, which has already drawn pushback from State Schools Superintendent Eric Mackey and other educators in the state.

“It will be sustainable, responsible and it’s how we will shape the future of education in Alabama,” Ivey told several dozen people at a rally for “School Choice Week,” a push to expand nontraditional public schools and publicly-funded private school options.

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Education savings accounts are similar to vouchers in that they allow the use of money originally intended for public schools to be used for other items, including private school tuition. Vouchers send the money to an educational institution that the student attends. Education savings accounts go to the parents, who can use it for any number of services, including tuition, tutoring and counseling.

Ivey made expansion of education options The Alabama Legislature passed legislation expanding the Alabama Accountability Act, a scholarship program allowing students in low-performing schools to qualify for scholarships to private schools.

The governor told the crowd that her “top priority is ensuring education savings accounts bill crosses the finish line.”

What emerges from the session will be up to the Legislature, and likely Rep. Danny Garrett, R-Trussville and Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, the chairs of the legislative committees overseeing the Education Trust Fund budget, which would fund any type of Education Savings Account. Messages seeking comment were left with Orr and Garrett on Monday morning; neither man could be seen at Monday’s rally.

Sen. Larry Stutts, R-Tuscumbia, filed , which would have allowed roughly $6,900 to follow a student. The bill, filed late in the session, did not become law.

Rep. Ernie Yarbrough, R-Trinity, who filed a House version of Stutts’ bill, said Monday that he also supported an expansive education savings account option.

“It brings the free market back to education,” he said.

Stutts and Yarbrough tend to be some of the most conservative members of the Republican supermajority Legislature.

Yarbrough lined out his plans for “true school choice:” universal for all students; flexible spending ability; protects autonomy of private and home schools, while making traditional public schools’ curriculum transparent and is not an “attempt” to increase government spending.

“I believe that true school choice does not increase the size or scope of government,” he said.

The bill has not been filed as of Monday morning.

Students and parents spoke about their own experiences with education options in the state at the rally also.

June Henninger, a fifth grade student at the private Montgomery Christian School, said that she benefited from her experience at the school. She said she was grateful for her education and her teachers.

“I’m ready for my next school of my choice,” she said.

Montgomery Christian School students are on scholarships through donations and from scholarships

“School choice” can refer to a number of things, namely charter schools, vouchers and/ or education savings accounts.

, State Superintendent Eric Mackey said that he would want the money to go to schools and would require accountability.

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By September 2020, Crista Swier’s second grade daughter had had enough of online school.

Classes were being held by video conference because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Swier said her daughter was too young to know how to use a computer, and wasn’t learning. What’s worse, students were posting “nasty messages” on the school’s online forum, and Swier said, “teachers were basically disciplining kids on the other end of the computer.”

That frustration drew Swier, a resident of Pflugerville north of Austin, to become one of tens of thousands of Texans who pulled their child out of public school and began home schooling. That year alone, almost 30,000 students in grades 7-12 left Texas public schools to begin home schooling — the highest number the Texas Education Agency has recorded since it started keeping track in the 1990’s.

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Three years later, conservative lawmakers in the state are pushing a measure that would provide state support to that growing home-school community. This month, at the behest of Gov. Greg Abbott, the Texas Legislature convened a special session in which “school choice” is the top subject. The Senate has already passed a measure that would introduce a voucher-style program called education savings accounts, in which parents who do not enroll their kids in public school would have access to state funds to pay for qualifying educational expenses. For home-schoolers, that would mean access to $1,000 per child from the state each year. The House, where a small faction of skeptical Republican lawmakers has teamed up with Democrats to block similar proposals in the past, Thursday night. It also included $1,000 for home school parents, but capped the number of education savings accounts at 25,000 in the first year.

Much of the debate has focused on how the accounts could be used to pay for private school tuition — qualifying parents sending their kids to private schools would be eligible to receive $8,000 in the Senate bill. But data suggests that home-schoolers might be the biggest group of beneficiaries. There were nearly 480,000 home-schooled children in Texas at the end of the 2020-21 academic year, according to a by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation. That’s 200,000 more than were enrolled in private schools.

Families that choose to home-school often spend several hundred dollars each month on their children’s textbooks, elective activities like sports and arts, membership in home-school co-ops and subscriptions to learning tools. But the home schooling community is deeply divided on the idea. Currently, Texas does not regulate home schooling in any way, and many families fear that accepting taxpayer money to support home schooling expenses could invite increased regulation of how they teach their kids.

“We do have zero oversight, zero accountability, and we want to keep it that way,” said Faith Bussey, president of , a group of 17,000 members largely organized on Facebook that opposes anything resembling vouchers.

The voucher bill has been promoted by Abbott as increasing “school choice.” Instead, the group worries that legislation like Senate Bill 1 poses “a real threat to parental freedom,” according to its website.

Bussey, an Arlington resident who home-schools three kids for moral and religious reasons, spoke to The Texas Tribune from the Capitol on the first day of the special session, where she was urging lawmakers to oppose any school voucher bill. She said there are many different reasons parents choose to home-school — moral and religious beliefs, bullying, safety concerns and inadequate accommodations for disabilities are among the most commonly cited — and with that, families choose a variety of home schooling styles and curriculum.

Many families work together forming home-school co-ops that meet together regularly and pool resources to pay for supplies and instruction. Others will enroll in online programs. Others will do ‘unschooling,’ which is more loosely organized and can be catered to the child’s interest in each particular subject.

Even if a bill such as SB 1 passes with no added government oversight, Bussey said, “it’s the nature of government” that eventually the state would seek to regulate home schooling more heavily. That, she said, threatens the array of parents’ choices.

“I know my kids better than anybody else,” she said.

For some parents, the fear of government regulation is rooted in the history of home schooling in Texas. Houston resident Jube Dankworth recalled the fear she felt home schooling her children before it was legally codified by the Texas Supreme Court in 1994. Up until the ruling, Dankworth’s family would practice “CPS drills,” in which her children would suddenly hide in case Child Protective Services came knocking.

Today, Dankworth’s four kids have all grown and attended college, and she is president of Texas Home Educators, a group that helps home-school families connect and find resources to make home schooling easier and more affordable. The group is also against education savings accounts. She said the home-school community in Texas provides lots of support, and families are able to home-school using only the internet and a library card.

“We’ve already built this infrastructure without any help from the government,” she said.

Opponents in the home-school community find themselves aligned with many public school advocates, who fear that a voucher program would pull money away from a state public school system that is already strapped for funds. SB 1 has faced stiff resistance from people who say the accounts fund education methods that receive little to no oversight. And, opponents argue, they would essentially be handouts to middle-class and wealthy parents, who can afford to pay a full tuition bill or have the educational backgrounds and financial flexibility to stay at home teach their kids.

But other home-school families say they would welcome financial help, noting that in addition to potential lost income from one parent staying home, they spend thousands of dollars per year to give their kids an education.

Joi Faltesek started home schooling after becoming frustrated with the “red tape” and rigidity of public school that she thought was stifling her son’s creativity.

“I honestly felt like I got my son back. I mean, he was happy again. He was smiling,” Faltesek said.

Her son has since gone to college, and now she teaches her two daughters and runs the Be Awesome Homeschool Social Club. Faltesek estimates that she spends about $300 per month per child on elective activities and online subscriptions to academic services.

The financial cost of home schooling is “a hard pill to swallow,” said Faltesek, especially when her son was in high school-level science programs that required either buying chemistry sets or enrolling in a program at an additional monthly fee.

Swier plans to continue home schooling her youngest daughter, but her sons are still attending public high school. “I think vouchers are amazing,” she told the Tribune while attending a Halloween party in Austin organized by Faltesek’s home-school social group.

“There are parents that want to home-school but lack the resources to do it,” she said.

Cristina Loor-Maldonado, a resident of Kyle, said it costs about $400 each month to home-school her fifth grade daughter and son in kindergarten, with sports programs and art classes costing the most. School safety, bullying, and the ability to spend more time with her family all factored into her decision to take her kids out of school, which she said has paid off because her kids are both testing at or above their grade level.

“The opportunities are so vast compared to public school,” she said.

Loor-Maldonado’s husband’s job allows her to support home schooling expenses, and she said if education savings accounts are ever ”connected to any type of stipulation,” that home schooling families “won’t go for it.”

“If you’re concerned about requirements that will come with the program, then don’t participate in the program,” said Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement at the Texas Homeschool Coalition, a group that does legislative advocacy, legal services and general support for home schooling families. The organization favors education savings accounts.

Newman, who was home-schooled for religious reasons, rejected the idea that vouchers would later be used to regulate home schooling and said it has not happened in any state with an existing voucher program. Instead, Newman said the added financial help will “empower the parents to make the decisions that are best for their kids.”

But the fear of regulation is not the only reason some home schooling parents oppose savings accounts. Even though they left public schools, some parents still worry about them losing funding.

Margaret Paulson of Austin said her son’s kindergarten classroom had become “total chaos” following the departure of the teacher, who was replaced by a first year teacher who trained to teach fourth grade. Following the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in May 2022, safety concerns and pent up frustration with how the school was being run led Paulson to try home schooling for the 2022-23 academic year.

Despite her experience, Paulson said “public schools serve a purpose,” and she remains “skeptical” of voucher-style programs that could direct money toward for-profit schools.

Before moving to Texas more than four years ago, Michele Arroyo participated in a home-school program in Washington state that was facilitated by the public school system. Her son, who is neurodivergent and has a visual impairment, was bullied in regular public school. Arroyo said Texas should be increasing public education funding, particularly for schools viewed as underperforming.

“The lower your rating is, the more resources you should get,” Arroyo said.

Disclosure: Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.