And while just 19 states now offer taxpayer-supported , which allow families to spend public funds on the school or program of their choice, the policy has a growing constituency: Nearly half of parents strongly support it. 

Meanwhile, the constituency for annual testing is withering, with just 29% of parents saying they strongly support it.

The new revelations come from the second edition of , conducted by the policy group 50CAN, which operates chapters in 12 states. It surveyed parents in 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found small but significant improvements across five key educational areas, including satisfaction with school quality and student mental health support. 

The findings paint a slightly different picture than the one we’re accustomed to seeing in accounts of crowding into school board meetings: 47% of parents now say they’re very satisfied with their child’s school, up from 45% in 2024. Satisfaction by low-income parents jumped five points, from 41% to 46%. 

Likewise, 41% are very satisfied with the kind of emotional and mental health support their children get at school, up four points from last year, with significant gains in critical transition grades such as sixth and ninth grade, both up about five percentage points. 

“Overall, my takeaway is we shouldn’t get distracted by all the headlines, all the crazy stuff going on in the world,” said Marc Porter Magee, 50CAN’s founder. “We have a very reasonable shot at making education better in ways that will meaningfully improve kids’ lives. We’re generally heading in the right direction.”

Among the findings: 

• Participation in tutoring rose from 19% to 24%, with the income gap nearly cut in half, from nine percentage points to five, but low-income families still struggle to get their kids tutoring, largely because of cost and transportation;
• 86% of parents now favor free tutoring, while 80% support free summer camps; 77% back open enrollment and universal ESAs;
• 49% of parents want their children to get a four-year degree, but only 38% believe it’ll happen, with college affordability a huge sticking point; 
• While more high-income children participated in summer camp, overall participation dropped two percentage points; among low-income kids, it dropped three points; kids from high-income families are now twice as likely to attend, 61% vs 27%.

On the summer camp statistics, Porter Magee said, “My takeaway from that is there’s still a need, and high-income families are really leaning into that. But low-income families are getting hit with affordability.”

Responding to the findings, Keri Rodrigues, president of the , said, “Parents are fighting for a school that works for their kid, but when higher-income families can buy tutoring and summer learning while everyone else gets waitlists and paperwork, that’s not choice, it’s rationing.”

She noted that the union’s polling shows that just 48% of public school parents say their child is “definitely academically prepared for next year”; 31% say schools didn’t even tell them what skills their child needs.

As for satisfaction with mental health support, a 2024 found that 65% give schools an “A” or “B,” but that 31% give schools a “C” or worse. 

She said her group’s findings on parents’ priorities are clear: “Make tutoring, mental health supports, and quality learning time universal and easy to access, especially for low-income families. If we’re serious about outcomes, we have to be serious about access.”

ESA support rising across political lines

Among the most significant findings, parents across the political spectrum are now increasingly interested in ESAs — 46% of Republicans, 49% of Democrats and 43% of Libertarians and Independents say they “strongly support” the idea, and among self-described members of the Green Party or , support climbs higher, to 57%. In most state-level debates on ESAs, political conservatives are their biggest supporters.

ESAs, as well as open-enrollment policies, which allows students to attend the public school of their choice, now command more support than charter schools, and by a wide margin: 46% to 36%.

Porter Magee said ESAs merit attention as an “anti-majoritarian” school choice policy that appeals to many different kinds of parents, for different reasons.

“If you’re on the far left, you probably don’t feel like your traditional public school and school district represents you and your values perfectly,” he said. “And it’s the same when you’re on the far right. A lot of times, the people who are most attached to traditional school districts are moderates — wealthy, suburban moderates. So it kind of does make sense.”&�Բ�����;

Porter Magee said he knows of no other parent polls that break out political beliefs like this, suggesting that conservative policymakers who favor ESAs and other school choice proposals should consider “a strange-bedfellow strategy” that invites Green and DSA-aligned parents. “Maybe they are better allies on some of these issues than we think.”

More broadly, he said, “We should not be writing off the left or the right when we’re trying to figure out the coalition that would actually pass these things.”

Kids who are ‘just not doing a lot’

The survey also broke out responses by about 1,000 parents who are K-12 teachers. It found that they’re significantly more likely to be very satisfied with their children’s school, and that their kids participate in summer programs, sports, community service, dual enrollment, and Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses at higher rates. “They’re just more engaged,” Porter Magee said. “They’re getting more out of their time as students.”

Asked about their children’s grades, parents with kids who get mostly A’s reported that their children were more likely to do 30 minutes or more of homework, spend time with friends in person and read for fun — “all the things we want them to do,” Porter Magee said. D and F students were more likely to play video games, scroll on their phones and access social media, their parents say. 

They also drop out of sports at higher rates, he said. “They’re just not doing a lot.”&�Բ�����;

The difference between how “A” and “D” students spend their time isn’t generally addressed in public policy, he said, “partially because we haven’t had the data, partially because we don’t know what to do about it. But I do think it’s an issue, and I think parents see it as an issue.”&�Բ�����;

Overall, Porter Magee said, the main finding from the survey is one of slow, incremental progress for kids, whose parents now feel that they have greater access to different kinds of opportunities. But the fact that much of that progress is largely enjoyed by high- and middle-income parents, he said, is problematic.

“How would you create the public systems to make a more equal world, where all of those opportunities are available to everyone?” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do, and [what] the survey is helping us track.”

McDonald predicted that even a few weeks of displacement from school for millions of kids could fundamentally change education. 

And while most kids would eventually return to school once the epidemic faded, she wrote, “some parents may discover that learning outside of schooling benefited their children and strengthened their family.” They might begin to consider homeschooling or other alternatives as a longer-term option. “They may realize that education without schooling is not a crisis but an opportunity.”

Five years later, it seems, something fundamental has changed: As many as 125,000 microschools now operate nationwide, according to the National Microschooling Center, and several states now support homeschooling and microschooling with public funds.

McDonald, a Massachusetts mother of four, frequent contributor to The 74, host of the and the author of a about self-directed education and alternatives to traditional schooling, set out to capture what the movement looks like now in her new book, . It’s out Tuesday.

She charts an ideologically diverse group of parents and teachers who are striking out on their own to essentially start small education businesses. The common thread, she finds, is a “desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.”

McDonald talked to The 74’s Greg Toppo recently about the book and the microschooling movement.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I wanted to start with this quote in your book from a Kansas mom who launched a microschool. She says, “The fringe is becoming the cloth.” That’s quite a statement, quite a realignment, if true. Do you agree that that’s what’s happening?

I’ve been covering unconventional education — homeschooling and microschooling — for over a decade now. This movement really began prior to 2020, and at the time I thought that we would continue to see slow but steady growth in homeschooling and alternative education more generally. But I always thought it would stay in the margins.

When COVID hit in 2020 and there was that massive educational upheaval, it enabled families to start to think more creatively about education options, to maybe look more openly at homeschooling and microschools and other ways of approaching teaching and learning. And many families liked what they saw. Some families even built these new alternatives. Since 2020, we’re really seeing a much more mainstream push towards alternative education.

I think it’s fair to call these folks disruptors. 

Peaceful disruptors. 

But I wonder if we’re getting ahead of ourselves to start calling it mainstream. I mean, there are still in public schools.

If you look at some of the data in Arizona, for example, so many families are of traditional district schools. Obviously, charter schools would be their primary alternative at the moment, but certainly with the expansion of school choice programs and universal programs in places like Arizona, you’re seeing more and more families realize that they have other options, and they’re able to find schools and spaces that are aligned with their values and viewpoints in ways that they haven’t before.

We have to give it a little bit of time, because we need to let these entrepreneurs do their work. As more and more entrepreneurship takes hold, we’ll see more options for families, and families will be able to find just what they’re looking for.

I want to define just who you write about in this book, because it’s a really specific kind of person. As you say, they’re people who “built what they couldn’t find.” You’ve got folks who start religious microschools, Montessori microschools …

LGBTQ+ microschools, Afrocentric microschools …

You talk to folks like , who opens this in Massachusetts, and it’s interesting that he’s in the mix because he blanches at the “coercive qualities” of traditional schooling, even the compulsion to attend at all. That’s a pretty broad coalition. And I wonder: What do these folks have in common?

It is a broad coalition. What’s so exciting about this current decentralized, entrepreneur-driven educational moment, is that it’s extremely diverse. There are founders of every demographic and ideological persuasion, and different motivations for creating programs, whether it’s that they can’t find what they’re looking for for their own children and they want to create something better, or they just think that there’s a different way of approaching education. 

I think about Tamara Becker, the founder of in Arizona. Her microschool, which now has 73 students across several locations — she didn’t build that for her children. She doesn’t have children, but was a long-time public school teacher and administrator, and just felt that COVID provided this moment to individualize education and move away from a one-size-fits-all learning model into something more relevant and personalized for the 21st century. That’s the common thread among these entrepreneurial parents and teachers, that desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.

The other common thread, and why the book is titled Joyful Learning, is that despite the tremendous diversity of these models — from secular, progressive microschools to conservative, faith-based, microschools, and different educational philosophies and approaches, from classical to Montessori to unschooling and everything in between — these programs are places where children are happy to be learning. I saw that as I crisscrossed the country and interviewed the founders and families on my podcast and interviews related to the book. That was a very apparent characteristic of all of these spaces: Children are happy to be there. They are often sad when snow days hit or when summer vacation approaches. 

As you were going through this list of different kinds of schools and all these founders, I wondered, “How did you find all these folks?” Obviously, you have this podcast. Were they coming to you? Were you going to them?

Great question. I’ve been in the alternative education movement for a long time. I wrote my 2019 book, Unschooled, which is where I first connected with people like Ken Danford. So I have, thankfully, a rich network of folks in the alternative education world and in homeschooling that crosses political and ideological lines. In many cases, folks have come to me. 

Then, of course, COVID hit, and there was more and more interest in alternative education. In early 2022 I decided to launch my LiberatED podcast, because I wanted a multimedia approach to storytelling beyond the articles I was writing, and was able to connect with many of these founders there. For the most part, founders have come to me. I’ve been able to visit many of these founders, either by reaching out to them because they’ve been on my podcast or featured in articles, or by them inviting me to come. I also have done a lot of collaboration with the [a group of entrepreneurs supporting alternative learning models] that’s now supporting over 4,000 of these innovative educators across the country.

My work now is just sort of an extension of the work that I’ve been doing in alternative education for over a decade.

As much as anything, this book is an instruction manual for future founders and, I guess, for policymakers as well.

And parents.

What are you hoping readers come away with in terms of real instruction?

The book is primarily geared towards founders and families. Obviously, I’d love it if policymakers read it as well, and members of the media like yourself who are curious about this movement. But it’s primarily a book for parents and founders of programs. And there’s often a lot of overlap between those two groups. A lot of the founders that I talked to had no intention of becoming education entrepreneurs, or opening a school or a microschool or learning pod, and either because of COVID and the disruption caused by that, or just being unable to find exactly what they were looking for for their own children, ended up making that leap into entrepreneurship. In most cases, they found the experience to be incredibly rewarding. 

The majority of the founders are former public school teachers who were disillusioned with the standardization and test-driven learning environment that they found in conventional schools. Many of these teachers found their own creativity and autonomy stifled within a conventional classroom and wanted somewhere where they could be free to educate the way they felt was most effective and beneficial to the students they’re serving.

There’s got to be a very steep learning curve for the parents who are not trained teachers, and I wonder if you saw that in your reporting. Did you see parents struggling to make school come alive?

Most of the founders in the book are former teachers. Some of them became homeschooling moms after being public school teachers and then opened homeschooling collaboratives. I think about Alicia Wright in Richmond, Va., who runs . She was a longtime public school teacher-turned-homeschooling-mom-turned-founder. So there’s also that trajectory. A lot of these founders who are parents and who launch programs are highly successful in their own right.

I think about Sharon Massinelli, who runs in Georgia, a physician associate as well as a long-time homeschooling mom who has balanced work and homeschooling for years. She was really attracted to a hybrid homeschool model that enables part-time enrollment off-site with trained educators working through a curriculum for half the week, and then the other half students are at home working through that same curriculum with their parents. That has been a model that’s been around since the 1990s and continues to gain popularity, especially over the last five years. She was able to create her own hybrid school after her children had been attending another hybrid school program that was far away and not quite what she wanted. She was able to use that model and create something new. 

That’s what we see with many of the entrepreneurial parents who may not have a background in education but are incredibly successful in their own professions. Now, they have so many resources to help them launch and grow their programs, largely because of the network effects from more and more of these programs existing. You have these microschool startup programs like or that really work with these everyday entrepreneurs to create successful, sustainable programs.

I want to be sure to address this issue, which a lot of people coming to your book might be wondering about: This idea that the choice movement itself is not as simple as just joy and entrepreneurialism. There are a lot of people who feel like it’s a play to undermine public schools, and I wonder how you approach that.

What we’re seeing now is the expansion of choice, variety and abundance in education that we enjoy in so many other parts of our lives, but that we haven’t had much of in education because it’s been largely dominated by traditional public schools. It’s a good thing that we see more options for families, more ways of approaching education beyond a conventional classroom. It’s no surprise that more families are gravitating to and and outdoor learning environments, because they want something that’s much more play-based, that’s much more learner-centered, and that’s much less restrictive and standardized than a conventional classroom. That’s a key piece of this: We see so much innovation in the 21st century in so many other segments of society, while K-12 education has largely been standardized and stagnant.

For folks who might not know about you, it’s fair to say you lived this. During the pandemic, your oldest set off on her own to do distance learning, and you enrolled your younger three in the private . Talk a little bit about your experience — right in the middle, by the way, of doing the reporting for all this.

My kids were unschooled, homeschooled since birth — never attended a conventional classroom. They were attending a microschool a couple of days a week when COVID hit and the microschool shut down. All of the classes that they were taking throughout the city were shut down for months in many cases, more than a year in some.

I write in Joyful Learning about how at one point I realized that all of this education disruption that I was documenting among other families was hitting my family as well, and we were making education changes as a result, including, as you say, my older daughter, Molly, who had always been homeschooled. She began taking online classes and then ended up enrolling in a full suite of high school online classes through while remaining legally a homeschooler in Massachusetts. She’s since graduated and is off to college. Next Saturday she moves in. And then the younger three enrolled in the Sudbury Valley School, which I had written about extensively in my Unschooled book and always really adored, but it’s far away from us, and also is a state-recognized private school. We were comfortable with homeschooling, but changes among our education ecosystem during that time of disruption led us to pursue other options, and they were thrilled to join Sudbury Valley.

Do you envision us ever going back to the way things were before COVID? And how do you think this movement is going to change the system itself?

Do I think we’re going to go back to the way it was before COVID? No, and my answer is related to your second question. What we’re seeing is a much greater focus around decentralized, choice-enabled, entrepreneur-driven education that’s responsive to the needs and wants of parents in local communities. One of the things I talk about in the book is the contrast between the education disruption and reform that happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which, of course, we’re coming up to the 20th anniversary later this month and what we’ve seen in terms of education reform and change in the wake of COVID. 

After Hurricane Katrina, the change largely came from the top. It was the state of Louisiana that took over the New Orleans Public School district to orchestrate change from the top, albeit with the goal of eventually returning New Orleans schools to local control, which would take more than a decade to accomplish. By contrast, the educational change that we’ve seen since COVID is the opposite. It’s an entirely bottom-up, decentralized movement of entrepreneurial parents and teachers creating the kinds of schools and spaces that enable young people to flourish and be happy. 

In the fall of 2016, as her daughter struggled through a disastrous first two weeks in middle school, Emily Harding-Morick searched for a way out.

In class, students sat in desks far apart from one another, with barely a moment to chat between periods. During breaks, monitors herded them through the halls with no time to find a bathroom.

“She was just so unhappy,” the mother recalled.

That’s when Harding-Morick called Kenneth Danford.

The veteran educator wasted no time, telling her 13-year-old, “You know, yesterday could be your last day of school.”

They were stunned, but Danford persisted: “You don’t have to go back.”

That began a journey that has become increasingly routine in this region: Harding-Morick disenrolled her daughter from middle school and she joined North Star Teens. Guided by Danford, North Star’s co-founder, she spent a year there studying, relaxing and socializing with a small group of like-minded teenagers. Her mother joined its board, eventually becoming its chair.

At its most basic, North Star is a small, private homeschooling collective for middle- and high-schoolers who know they don’t want to go to school anymore, but aren’t sure what comes next.

As more families question the value of school — and as states and the federal government increasingly offer taxpayer dollars for other options — models like North Star’s could take root beyond western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley. As it nears three decades in operation, Danford is moving to replicate it.

For 29 years, the private, non-profit center — don’t call it a school — has been a refuge for kids who chafe at the stress, loneliness or bullying of school. They spend a few months or a few years here, catching their breath as they prepare for life after graduation.

With an enrollment of 65, it offers rigorous, one-on-one tutoring; small, personalized classes in history, math, writing and the arts, and extracurriculars like weekly hiking club excursions. This year, young people designed and taught three courses on Dungeons & Dragons.

Or “members,” as they’re called, can simply show up and read a book, sit with friends, take the public bus into nearby Amherst or curl up on the couch with a bowl of ramen. All that’s required is a weekly check-in with an advisor and regular conferences with families.

But that freedom comes with a healthy dose of self-examination. Danford regularly reminds members, “You’re accountable to yourself. Is this the life you want?”

With a tuition scale that slides from $10,000 annually down to whatever a family can afford, North Star has been a quiet presence in the region since its founding in 1996. It has moved three times since then, but in 2015 landed in a faded two-story structure on State Highway 116 that once housed a used furniture store and a Subway sandwich shop. 

North Star functions like a gym, social club or even a religious institution: Attendance is encouraged but optional. Members can take classes or not. There are no grades, no transcripts or tests, no roll call and no diploma. 

Most who seek refuge here have good reason: They’ve been bullied or they’re on the autism spectrum and seeking a smaller, calmer venue. Or they’re LGBTQ and simply don’t feel comfortable at school.

“Some of them are just your non-conformist, skateboarder-poet-musician kids who think, ‘School?’ They roll their eyes,” said Danford. “We tend not to get your football player, cheerleader, sports team kids who want to be popular in school. But we get all the kids they pick on.”

Marley Bernstein, 16, faced years of bullying at a school she said was ill-equipped to stop it. So she stopped going, missing 120 days last year and 64 this year.

She arrived at North Star in late May, filing paperwork to pursue a GED. 

“I feel better being here,” she said one recent morning in the large common room. “It’s nice to just sit. You can walk around, you can kind of do whatever you want and not have to look over your shoulder every two minutes.”

Nearby, friends Asha Morbyrne and Tasha Harris chatted. Tasha confided that “a lot of people here are traumatized,” to which her friend replied, “A lot of people. Middle school is a violent place.”&�Բ�����;

Both 13, they confided that they’re here mostly to spend time together, occupying their days slurping ramen and rough-housing in the dance studio upstairs.

“This is, like, the only place I have a functioning friend group,” said Asha. 

“Same!” said Tasha.

But beneath the apparent slacking, Danford said, is often a quiet purpose. Last fall, Asha wrote a short play that she recently produced at a local theater, while Tasha learned to swim and is a regular on Thursday hikes.

Others arrive seemingly ready for anything. Joshua Wachtel began teaching at North Star in 2010, and last year brought along his stepson Lysander Woodard, who wanted an alternative to sixth grade.

The 12-year-old is trying a bit of everything. He joined a recent service learning trip to Washington, D.C., and is getting tutoring via Khan Academy. He took all three D&D classes, as well as one on the Star Wars canon taught by an adult.

“The freedom is nice,” Lysander said.

Danford urges supporters and skeptics alike to look past the unusual structure and “keep your eyes on the prize.” It isn’t regular attendance or even being a member of the community, he said. “The prize is independent control of your life.”

Flipping the unschooling paradigm

A powerfully built Gen Xer from Ohio, Danford got straight As in high school in Shaker Heights, a prosperous Cleveland suburb. He cut his teeth teaching social studies in public middle schools in the Washington, D.C., area and in Amherst, but soon grew weary of micromanagement from administrators. 

He left to earn his master’s degree, and was considering leaving education altogether when he read Grace Llewelyn’s seminal 1991 guide . Subtitled “How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education,” it changed his thinking about student agency, offering a template for young people searching for a different kind of education outside of school, a strategy often called “.”&�Բ�����;

Most unschoolers were younger, returning to school by ninth grade. But to Danford, high school was where kids could benefit most from its freedom as they separate from parents and find themselves as individuals.

He essentially flipped the paradigm: “If you made it through elementary school, why don’t you quit while you’re ahead? Make it to sixth grade and then quit. Unschool the rest of the way.”

It helps that the state of Massachusetts takes a hands-off approach to homeschoolers and largely stops supervising them once they’re 16.

“You don’t like school?” he tells prospective members, “Don’t go back. Don’t ever go back in the building. Send someone in to get your books. I help families write a homeschooling plan. Do it tonight, this week.”

‘I just could not stop crying.’

For Trixie Lawless, enrolling in North Star was a no-brainer. Her mother had worked there as a teacher and knew its benefits. But she had to persuade her father.

By sophomore year, she’d spent a lot of time skipping classes at her high school in Amherst. “I enjoyed my day,” she said, reading, writing short stories, taking in movies or museums.

“I was like, ‘I’m homeschooling right now. If I just had a math tutor, I would be fine.’”

But skipping all those classes meant pointless makeup work and the black mark of unexcused absences. While it was mostly worth it, the prospect of another year in school eventually took a toll.

While visiting family last summer in Connecticut, she recalled, “I just could not stop crying.” Even for Trixie, this was a shock. She can usually hide her emotions, “even when I’m feeling really horrible. So when it got to that breaking point, where it was like, ‘I can’t even keep up with myself anymore,’ that was the first time I’d ever really let it through.”

Her father took notice. Trixie enrolled in the fall. 

Having time to herself in a community of people who all want to be here, she said, is “so much nicer. It definitely wouldn’t be for everyone, but it has given me the space I knew I needed to feel better.”

She’s now studying for the GED with plans to start classes at Greenfield Community College in the fall. After a year at North Star, she’s beginning to appreciate how different members experience the center. 

“It’s about how you fill the space — a lot of people here do that by playing video games and organizing D&D campaigns.” She does it by oversubscribing to English and writing classes. “It’s a place for people who know what works for them.”

Second-generation members

By now, the center has been around long enough that it’s beginning to serve the children of its original members. One even teaches there: Aaron Damon-Rush arrived at North Star in 2011, when he was just 11, and stayed for seven years. He went on to attend nearby Hampshire College and returned in 2022 as alumni coordinator. Now 25, he teaches courses in film, game design and other disciplines.

At North Star, he took classes in psychology and criminal justice, learning about the morality of the death penalty and victims’ rights when he was just 12. “That was a huge, mind-blowing experience for me,” he said.

In lieu of finals and graduation, each member sits for a meeting with their parents and a handful of staffers where they review the year. They often find it’s their best year of schooling, even though they’re technically not in school. Parents speak tearfully of their kids opening up about classes for the first time, Danford said.

“It is all fantastic, even the hard cases,” he said.

As North Star nears its 30th anniversary, Danford, who’s 59, is nearly two-thirds of the way through what he calls a 45-year plan: In the first 15 years, he built it; in the second, he worked to make it run increasingly without him. Now he’s planning to step away so he can write, speak and consult with other educators who want to create something similar. 

A network of centers, loosely affiliated with North Star, already boasts about a dozen locations worldwide. And Danford continues to offer the same message to weary young people who show up at his door.

“Just take the year, breathe, wonder what you should be doing,” he said. “Meanwhile we’re gonna unlock the door and give you a couch — and we’ll be nice to you. Turns out that’s really healthy and responsible.”&�Բ�����;

While most mainstream educators would say letting young people “do nothing” for a year is out of the question, he sees it differently: In the unschooling world, he said, “there’s no such thing as ‘doing nothing.’ ”

It was the second such IT mishap of the year, following an episode in which a crush of parents the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s site that winter. Libertarian activist Corey DeAngelis, then rising to fame as an arch critic of teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians, said the trend convinced him that the experience of virtual learning had ignited in families a desperate hunger for more educational options.

“I’d been chugging away at this before COVID, but it really took off when we were getting into debates about reopening schools,” he recalled.

Five years after the onset of the pandemic, DeAngelis is one of the leading voices in an education world turned upside down by its effects. After a generation at the center of both federal and state policy, bipartisan reforms like charter schools and test-based accountability have receded from the spotlight; at the same time, billions of dollars were devoted to private initiatives that previously won few headlines and scant financial support.

Since 2020, have either enacted or expanded some form of private school choice, and 13 extend eligibility within their borders. Over 1 million children now , according to the advocacy group EdChoice, and over 20 million are eligible to do so. And just since the beginning of 2025, have been filed that would push the needle further, potentially allowing even more resources and greater flexibility for families in states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio. 

Patrick Wolf, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas who has studied voucher-like systems for decades, contrasted their fast spread over the last few years with the halting progress seen in the 2000s and 2010s. In particular, he said, education savings accounts (ESAs) stand out as having “found their moment.”

“It’s been amazing to see from a movement that had kind of plateaued and seemed stagnant just prior to COVID,” remarked Wolf, for the benefits of choice. “Now it’s dynamic like crazy, with all kinds of variations and evolutions that we didn’t anticipate even six or seven years ago.”

The leap forward was made possible by a pronounced shift in perceptions of schools, especially among Republicans. The structure of the ESA, a lightly regulated grant placed directly in the hands of parents, proved both politically attractive and legally viable in ways that earlier voucher schemes were not. Spurred by competitive pressures among red-state lawmakers — and accelerated by a political strategy relying on Republican legislative majorities, rather than the assent of voters — the new benefits took hold quickly. 

No less pivotal was the adoption of school choice as what DeAngelis called a “litmus test issue” for conservatives, who proved comfortable jettisoning Republican legislators standing in their way. Household names on the right, including Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, have personally intervened in state-level fights, while figures like Christopher Rufo national profiles by directly confronting social controversies in the classroom. The resulting fights have often taken a vituperative tone uncommon to discussions of K–12 schools. 

Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the left-leaning Brookings Institution, said he believed school choice proponents had broken through by yoking their vision of an open education marketplace to the ascent of culture warriors like Rufo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

“Those two groups came together in a marriage of convenience, and you saw the push for ESAs ride the wave of frustration that was building,” Valant said. “That frustration became political fuel in a lot of red states.”  

A gaping ideological divide

Accounts differ on the extent of public anger arising from the long era of school closures, quarantines, and mask mandates. But for many, COVID led to a serious reappraisal of the state of public education.

According to the polling organization Gallup, 70 percent of parents with the education their kids received in 2024 — down 10 points over the past two years, but the figure for Americans as a whole. Among that larger group, the proportion dissatisfied with the quality of American education crested at 63 percent in 2023 and remained at 55 percent last year, compared with just 43 percent of survey respondents who said they were satisfied. 

Beneath the overall numbers is a gaping ideological divide. Virtually identical numbers of Democrats and Republicans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in U.S. schools in 2019 (30 percent of Democrats vs. 28 percent of Republicans), but the very next year. By 2023, 43 percent of Democrats said they were mostly confident in schools; an extraordinary 9 percent of Republicans agreed.

What’s more, even while families approved of the performance of their local schools, the impact of the pandemic led thousands to pull their children out of them. 

A by Stanford economist Thomas Dee found that traditional public institutions lost 1.1 million students in the fall of 2020, largely driven by a substantial departure of kindergarteners and elementary schoolers. The decline was 40 percent higher in districts that provided only remote instruction at the beginning of that academic year. A separate analysis from the conservative American Enterprise Institute between 2020 and 2022 in districts that kept schools closed longer and enforced mask mandates when students returned to campus.

Martin Lueken, a researcher at EdChoice, said that prolonged closures both revealed and amplified the existing demand for private school alternatives. Although the process of building momentum for private choice initiatives was “slow” in the years before the pandemic, he added, the massive disruptions to school routines acted as a powerful accelerant.

“There has always been a recognition that in order for these programs to be implemented, you need to build a broad constituency for them,” Lueken said. “You never want to let a crisis go to waste, and COVID really shrunk the timeline for this to happen.”

A matter of branding

As parents became increasingly willing to leave their traditional school systems, politicians were converging on a vehicle to facilitate their exit: the education savings account.

ESAs were first introduced in Arizona in 2011 as a resource for parents of students with disabilities. The scope of the proposal was limited, with only 17,000 children eligible to participate in the first year. Compared with other K–12 reforms being pursued in the Obama era, from teacher accountability to rapid charter school expansion, ESAs received little national attention; but school choice advocates , immediately recognizing them as “.”&�Բ�����;

Their early excitement was a reaction to an unprecedented political opportunity— and grounded in two factors that made the policy more likely to gain traction than other forms of private school choice.

The first was legal. An earlier school voucher law had been passed by the Arizona legislature , only to be swept aside a few years later arguing that the program violated state law by to private or parochial schools. Thirty-seven states have written such prohibitions, known as “,” into their constitutions since the 19th century. 

By contrast, ESAs indirectly facilitate choice by providing families with money and allowing them to use it as they see fit. Supporters in Phoenix of that distinction, moving to to children attending failing schools just a year after they were first enacted.

The second advantage of ESAs was political. Surveys have often shown for private school choice, but voucher programs failed at the election booth for decades. Between 1978 and 2007, six states conducted nine different referendum campaigns to determine whether to establish either voucher programs or tax credits for private school tuition. , often by overwhelming margins. 

Valant called the branding of voucher programs “toxic,” especially relative to the simple appeal of sending money directly to parents.

“People don’t like ‘private school vouchers,’” he said. “But they don’t really know what an ESA is until they actually dig into the policy details, so they don’t have the immediate baggage that vouchers come with.”

������Ǿ�����’s , conducted with the nonpartisan research firm Morning Consult, consistently showed that about two-thirds of parents had positive attitudes toward ESAs during the pandemic. Even more importantly, Republicans were eager to pass them through the normal legislative process, without risking lengthy and expensive referendum battles.

Since 2021, over a dozen states have passed ESA legislation, significantly increasing the number of American families eligible to receive the accounts. Crucially, most have opted to follow Arizona’s lead by structuring their programs not as targeted benefits for disadvantaged students, but as that gain rapid acceptance among families from all walks of life. 

Dan Lips, a senior fellow at the and veteran education policy analyst, 20 years ago, while working at Arizona’s conservative Goldwater Institute. Reflecting on the decades-long path trod by the school choice community, he called the triumph of the policy a “silver lining” to the damage wreaked by COVID.

Inline pullquote:

“There’s been an advocacy effort, going back 30 years, to mobilize parents, to fund scholarship organizations, to educate policy makers about the benefits of these types of programs,” Lips said. “I don’t think the strategy changed during the pandemic, we just found a lot more motivated lawmakers who’d had enough with public school systems.”

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Republicans were motivated by more than the urgency of the pandemic, however. During the Biden era, backing for the expansion of school choice became something of a crusade on the right.

For more than half a century, conservatives have favored the evolution of new school models and options outside the public sector. But during the era of bipartisan education reform stretching across the Bush and Obama presidencies, most of that energy was redirected toward the spread of charter schools, a compromise position that also enjoyed the blessing of Democrats leery of any move toward vouchers. 

Arguments for direct subsidies of private schools — occasionally drafted into — were usually couched in the language of equity, with a heavy focus on targeting benefits at low-income families and freeing students from underperforming local school districts. DeAngelis said that while those discussions were tailored to win over the left, they tended to backfire. 

“When we leaned too heavily on lefty messaging on school choice, it didn’t do much to convince Democrats to come along,” he said. “But it might have alienated some of the more conservative or even moderate Republicans, because they didn’t feel like it was a Republican issue.”

With the arrival of COVID and the presidency of Donald Trump, messaging around the issue changed. Conservative activists and politicians increasingly voiced disapproval of what they perceived as political indoctrination in schools, militating instead for parents to be provided the autonomy to select among institutions more in line with their values. The moment presented an opportunity, , to take advantage of the culture war.

One of the most dedicated “anti-woke” combatants of the Biden era was Gov. Ron DeSantis, who pushed ����ǰ����岹’s Republican legislature to adopt how teachers can speak about sexuality or other controversial subjects in the classroom. At the same time, he transformed the state into America’s biggest marketplace for school choice, pointedly linking the expansion of ESAs with parents’ desire to escape “woke” instruction.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Texas, now at the precipice of adopting the policy. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott spent the past several years stumping for his favored ESA legislation at , warning of progressive bias in small towns as well as . He also moved relentlessly against a contingent of mostly rural Republican legislators who opposed him, succeeding in ousting over a dozen through competitive primaries; revealingly, while those campaigns were crucial to Abbott’s legislative strategy, their messaging than on the hot-button issue of border security.

Republican donors like former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos got in on the action, spending millions to promote legislation and fund against rural GOP legislators who resisted the new laws. In Iowa, where a universal ESA bill was being held up, the chairman of the House education committee after his opponent was endorsed by the Gov. Kim Reynolds. The bill was passed shortly thereafter.

Conservative media figures have been no less confrontational, casting their adversaries as would-be propagandists . DeAngelis, whose recent book from President Trump, has proven adept at the cut-and-thrust of social media trolling, personally for sending their own children to private schools while rejecting school choice for others. The popular Twitter account Libs of TikTok takes aim at more targets in the classroom, its creator, Chaya Raichik deems ideological or manipulative.

Joshua Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University who fiercely opposes the wave of new laws, said that while school choice has historically been understood as a reform grounded in markets and accountability, it is now principally a means by which the conservative movement can reward sympathetic constituencies and achieve its cultural aims.

“At the end of the day, the real energy for this is the culture war,” Cowen said. “It’s linked to the same energy that rolled back Roe, and…at the same time we’re talking about vouchers expanding across the country, we’re also talking about bathrooms and locker rooms and book bans.”

The future of choice

No one would have predicted that the last five years would be the most tumultuous in the modern history of school choice. Few would hazard a guess at what the next five might look like.

Going forward, it may be challenging even to learn how new ESA systems are affecting student learning. In part, this is because the state statutes passed since 2020 generally have not required private schools to take part in state testing, which could allow lawmakers and researchers to compare the performance of pupils in the private and public sectors against one another.

The University of Arkansas’s Wolf, who has previously conducted longitudinal studies of voucher programs in , , and , said he believed scholars could still devise strategies to identify the benefits or demerits of new private school programs even in the absence of testing — many already emphasize later-life outcomes such as college enrollment and completion — but added that he expected to face some obstacles. 

“There’s more of a sense that, ‘We want to do this, and we’re confident that it’s going to be good for families,’” Wolf observed. “When states have that attitude, they’re somewhat less enthusiastic about bringing a scholar in to actually kick the tires and determine if their expectations are correct.”

It is also difficult to project the future progress of the ESA wave. A large number of states with Republican governors and legislatures have already taken action, leaving mostly purple and blue states without some form of private school choice. Few Democrats have been willing to touch the idea; Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a rising star in his party, to create a voucher offering in 2022, only to back off after a storm of criticism. 

Resistance within states, even including those that have passed ESA bills, makes their future difficult to project. The South Carolina Supreme Court that the newly adopted Education Scholarship Trust Funds violated the state constitution, leading to to craft a program that might pass legal muster. And in Arizona, home to the first-ever ESA law, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has made repeated attempts to , claiming that their growing popularity poses a danger to the state’s finances. 

A national, ESA-type entitlement remains the dream for school choice proponents, including , the think tank most closely tied to the Trump administration and its education secretary, Linda McMahon, who previously served as the Institute’s chairwoman. Legislation has been proposed in Congress, though it would likely have to pass through the budget reconciliation process, which is not ideally suited for the creation of new programs. 

Valant said that, once the remaining red states decide on whether to embrace the policy, the U.S. could feature a striking regional contrast in education policy. Democratic- and Republican-leaning states on policies like charter school growth, school evaluations, and the science of reading, and ESAs may simply make the contrast more stark.

“For the short term and maybe the intermediate term, we’re going to be in the unfamiliar place of having very different systems of education governance in red states and blue states. That just isn’t what we’ve done in the past.”

Within the first few weeks of the 2025 legislative session, the that would provide education savings accounts (ESAs) worth up to $11,500 to families for each of their children’s schooling expenses, including private tuition. The more moderate House of Representatives, where prior efforts to establish voucher-style programs have run aground, appears to be headed in a similar direction, with co-sponsoring similar legislation. 

If successful, the state GOP will have accomplished one of its most ambitious and long-held goals: the establishment of a school choice system that dramatically expands educational options, transforming the K–12 ecosystem of America’s second-largest state and putting it once again at the forefront of conservative policy. To reach this point, Gov. Greg Abbott has had to put down significant resistance within his own party, expending both political and financial capital to defeat Republicans who stood in his way. 

Yet, while majorities in both chambers are converging on the same idea, enough differences separate their approaches to cloud the prospects of a final deal. The underlying ambiguity, as well as the symbolic importance of Texas as the largest Republican-controlled state, have been highlighted in recent weeks by household names like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz prodding officeholders to take action. With the full House opening the debate on their bill on Tuesday, the strength of the choice coalition will be put to a test that most believe they will ultimately pass.

Katherine Munal, a former legislative staffer for Texas Republicans who now serves as the policy director of the advocacy group , said she sees the enactment of ESAs as a “done deal” that will eventually emerge from negotiations between the House and Senate. Just as inevitably, she predicted, the initial $1 billion investment in the policy would “continue to grow.”

“I see this as a foothold for how Texas will look at education in the future,” Munal said. “This education savings account program will be a pillar of education conversations forever.”

That view was echoed by Notre Dame sociologist Mark Berends, who has studied the implementation of various forms of school choice, including ESAs and charter schools. Commenting on the design of both Texas proposals — which make the accounts universally available, rather than reserving them only for low-income families or those grappling with severe learning challenges — he said they were meant to attract a durable political constituency.

“If you have means-tested voucher or scholarship programs, they remain fragile,” Berends said. “Whereas proponents look at universal ESAs almost like Social Security: Once it gets passed, it will not be overturned.”

But a victory in the conservative mecca would validate Republicans’ political strategy as much as the policy itself. Over the past half-decade, a sequence of red-state governors have worked to expand private school choice; a muscular donor group, led by top GOP fundraisers like former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and TikTok investor Jeff Yass, has pursued the same ends, often by targeting uncooperative Republican lawmakers with primary challengers. They have succeeded in rewriting the conservative education agenda, with erstwhile priorities like charter schools and school accountability virtually disappearing from view.

The difficulty of bringing the same playbook in Texas has “felt like a black eye” to the national party, said Joshua Blank, research director of , a polling and public affairs organization based at the University of Texas. But he added that a breakthrough there would be viewed as a proof of concept, particularly as the program grows.

“When you look at the other states that have big aspirations around school choice, none of them will be doing it on the scale of Texas, and none will spend the money that Texas will to create a private market in education,” Blank said. “There is a sense that if you can make it work in Texas, it should be workable anywhere.”

‘Primarying out legislators’

Significant effort, and no shortage of funds, have been dedicated toward making things work in Texas.

The latest push in Austin was set in motion last spring, when Abbott succeeded in unseating 13 recalcitrant ESA foes in Republican primaries. Frustrated by a string of legislative failures in 2023 — including a hastily-convened special session and unheeded threats to veto bills that didn’t include voucher proposals — the three-term governor campaigned hard against a mostly rural contingent of Republican House members who refused to take up the cause. 

Their resistance was motivated by concern over the financial disruptions that ESAs would likely inflict on small communities, where school districts are traditionally the largest employer and center of civic life. Partnering with virtually all Democratic members, the group helped torpedo school choice bills going back to the tenure of Abbott’s predecessor as governor. 

To dislodge them, Abbott tapped the resources of both and national Republican mega-donors. Yass, one of the richest school choice advocates in the country, between 2023 and 2024, while DeVos another $1 million. By the middle of last year, Abbott — who isn’t up for reelection until 2026 — had over $50 million in his campaign account. 

Josh Cowen, a professor of education at Michigan State University and opponent of school vouchers, said the spending binge was simply an expansion of the choice movement’s strategy in states like Iowa and Arkansas. There, dozens of Republican voucher opponents within a campaign cycle or two. But in Texas, home to over 1,000 school districts and multiple large media markets, the cost and complexity of driving out dissidents took longer.

“Their entire strategy is based upon primarying out legislators,” said Cowen, who recently published on the spread of ESAs last year. “So it makes complete sense — setting aside stuff like local culture, politics, the state constitution — that the biggest state, and the most expensive to play in, will be the last one to fall.”

Somewhat paradoxically, the campaign didn’t predominantly hinge on the issue of school choice. A conducted before the primary elections showed that most listed immigration, the economy, and abortion as more salient than the fate of education, and even those who cited schools were unlikely to specifically mention choice. 

Even now, with legislators ready to craft a final law creating an ESA system, the national GOP is still applying pressure. President Trump and advisor Elon Musk have to insist that lawmakers finish the job. Blank noted that grassroots resistance to the policy still runs high even following last year’s ousters, with the author of the House bill at an East Texas PTA meeting in late February.

“The only way to change that is to bring in Donald Trump, bring in Elon Musk, and have Ted Cruz hit this issue and again,” he said. “It’s a reflection that, although the debate is nearly won, it still needs more thumbs on the scale.”

‘The stakes couldn’t be higher’

State Rep. James Talarico agreed that the extent of pressure from both campaign funders and the Oval Office indicated that the ESA legislation’s passage is not assured.

A Democrat from an Austin-based district, he has become one of the state’s loudest voices against private school choice, labeling the proposals a “voucher scam” and with Abbott. In an interview, he described the legislation’s likelihood of passage as a 50-50 proposition, calling his constituents’ opposition “relentless” and noting that even a few defections could cause negotiations with the Senate to break down. 

“The stakes couldn’t be higher, and I think that’s the reason why some of the wealthiest donors in the country have put so much money behind this,” he said.

Still, the widespread perception is that Abbott’s brass ring now lies within his grasp. While the House a K–12 funding increase before turning to the matter of choice — widely considered a sweetener to bring along those still anxious about its impact on district finances — it has also seen 75 co-sponsors sign on to the ESA legislation out of 150 total members.

The two chambers in their visions for the policy. The Senate legislation offers a set figure of $10,000 for each student, with an additional $1,500 provided for those with disabilities, but House Republicans propose to fund 85 percent of state and local spending per pupil (roughly $10,900) and as much as $30,000 for children with disabilities. While making all 6.4 million Texas students eligible to receive ESAs, both bills would also target various student groups — including those from relatively lower-earning families, and those who previously attended district public schools — at different levels of priority.

Given the prevailing likelihood that some compromise measure prevails, ������Ǿ�����’s Munal foresees a radical shift in how the state provides education, with the likely emergence of new vendors to offer increasingly specialized services to families seeking help with math learning, treatment of dyslexia, or English as a second language.

“We are really excited about opening that education market to allow for better outcomes and better products,” she said. “We’ll have a bigger market, ready to compete and create better products for kids.”

That market-inflected language contrasts somewhat with the way that education reform has historically been pursued in Texas. Wealthy philanthropists and donors tried to set up pilot voucher systems , often winning the support of Republican officials along the way. But those ventures were pursued alongside simultaneous moves to drive public school improvement, most famously by Gov. George W. Bush, whose was later replicated in the No Child Left Behind Act. 

Neither the House or Senate legislation would require schools serving ESA recipients to participate in Texas’s mandated STAAR exams, and Munal separately lamented the “years of debate wasted on testing and accountability.” Yet national assessment data indicate that the state ranks among the best in the nation in both math and reading, particularly when adjusting for student demographics.

Cowen said he expected conservatives to turn their eyes to Washington in the coming months, arguing that a triumph in Texas would represent a “high-water mark” for the red-state strategy of the last half-decade. Some remaining Republican legislatures are their own such bills, but they would add a relatively small number of new participating families. By comparison, a , perhaps passed through Congress in , would open a totally new chapter in the history of school choice.

“They’re realizing that they’re running out of real estate, and they need to find a way to keep growing,” he said. “Texas is kind of it. Once the state is done, whichever way it goes, they don’t have many places left to push.”

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.”&�Բ�����;

“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.”&�Բ�����;

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.

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 .

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.”&�Բ�����;

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.

Historically, the majority of this funding was only available to students who were low income, had special needs or attended poorly performing public schools. 

Over the past three years, that’s shifted: Today, at least 33 states offer private school choice programs, and of those 12 are “universal,” meaning any student, regardless of income or need, can apply for government funding to subsidize private, religious and — in some cases — home schools. 

Comprehensive analysis of the scale of these initiatives and their implications — both for students and state budgets — has been sparse. But a released earlier this month by , a research think tank based at Georgetown’s School of Public Policy, looks to change that. 

Policy Director Liz Cohen and analyst Bella DiMarco studied the evolution of established or emerging universal programs during the 2023-24 school year across eight states: Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. 

Their research comes on the eve of an election where school choice measures are on the ballot in three additional states and when disagreement continues to spark over whether these programs give freedom and choice to families who have been historically locked out of private schooling or are part of a larger movement meant to undermine and defund public schools. 

FutureEd’s major finding about how universal choice has played out so far? “Policy design really matters,” Cohen said, in an interview with The 74.

While all of the studied programs are universal in that anyone can apply, whether families end up actually receiving money, how much they receive and what accountability measures the participating schools are held to varies greatly state by state. 

They calculated that in total, 569,000 students received subsidies across these states, representing 55% of the students attending private schools with public funding and costing taxpayers an estimated $4 billion. About 40% of the nation’s 50 million elementary and secondary students are now eligible.

Here are five key takeaways.

“Universal” is not necessarily universal, and no two states’ policies look the same. 

“We talk about [universal programs] as such a monolithic thing,” said DiMarco. “I expected there to be more similarities between the programs and to see more similarities in the data. But that just wasn’t necessarily the case.”&�Բ�����;

In Ohio for example, families receive funding on a sliding scale based on need, private schools can’t charge low-income families more than what they receive from the state and participating private schools must use the same graduation requirements.

On the other end of the spectrum, in Florida and Arizona no student who applies for funding is turned down and participating private schools don’t need to be accredited. 

“If you listen to the sort of politically charged descriptions of these initiatives you get one fairly stilted perspective— both from proponents and opponents of these,” said Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “And when you look at them piece by piece, there’s a good bit of daylight between the arrangements from one city to the next.”

But there are a few overarching themes, some of which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

All states give participating families similar amounts of money, with the average award amount coming in at around $7,000, which is approximately 90% to 100% of state per-pupil funding. 

Most states require some sort of accountability testing — but not all. And most of the students who received the funding across all eight states were already attending private schools.

For example in Arkansas, 64% of students who received funds through the Education Freedom Act in its first year, the 2023-24 school year, were already enrolled in private schools. The majority were students with disabilities. 

“So much of the attention in general has been paid to the fact that the majority of kids are already in private school,” said Cohen. “But that’s actually the expected outcome if you are giving money to kids to go to private school, and anyone can get it.”

She said the bigger question moving forward is examining if that pattern will persist beyond the first wave of funding.

Josh Cowen, education policy expert and author of said he doesn’t anticipate the demographics of participating students to shift much over time, meaning he isn’t expecting an exodus of low-income students from struggling public schools to private school alternatives..

“Put me down for projecting that the next version of this [report] is going to find something very similar and even more stark… [because] no policy that isn’t directly targeted toward at-risk children or families, will remain primarily benefiting at-risk children or families.“

The income level of participating families is murkier than people think: Well-to-do families are signing up, but so are more modest ones.

While these programs continue to serve predominantly lower- and middle-income families, the researchers found that participation among higher-income families increased last year, in every state where eligibility expanded and data was available.

“One of the big sort of headlines you keep seeing around these programs is that it’s all affluent families,” said Cohen. “And I just think the nuance to that is that that’s not actually accurate.”

While it’s true that there are many more affluent families than in previous means-tested programs, there are still significant numbers of lower-income families who are entering these programs. She pointed to Florida where 30% of families participating are low income. 

DiMarco said they saw a lot of middle-income families taking advantage of the funds who were “sort of just above the line” under previous, means-tested programs.

Impacts of funding on state budgets remain unclear.

Because the majority of families who took advantage of this funding were not coming from public schools — and therefore not bringing their per pupil public funding with them — these subsidies represent a new state-level cost.

“They’re new expenses,” said Cohen, “which could ultimately down the road — if state lawmakers don’t really think this through — end up [putting] states in a position where they have to say, ‘We’re not going to build this highway … because we have to pay the bill on this private school choice thing.’”

Goals of the programs are rarely — if ever — clearly stated, making accountability tricky. 

Some states, like Arizona and Oklahoma, have no standardized testing requirements or other performance metrics, making it, “nearly impossible to gauge how much learning is taking place under the state’s private school choice programs,” according to the report.

Other states do have more stringent requirements, although Florida is the only state the researchers studied which has mandated funding to evaluate academic performance of participating students.

“The step it feels like a lot of these states skipped is identifying a clear goal for the program and then a clear metric of how you’ll know if you achieved your goal,” said Cohen. “And without stating those things up front, what are we even trying to measure?”

Malkus sees more of an effort to track student outcomes, though he emphasized additional data would help parents make better-informed choices. 

“I don’t think the testing requirements are as strict as some people would like them,” he said, “but the idea that there’s zero accountability for these isn’t true either. It’s somewhere in the messy middle.”

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.”&�Բ�����;

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.

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.”&�Բ�����;

“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.”&�Բ�����;

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.”&�Բ�����;

“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 ����ǰ����岹’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.”&�Բ�����;

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.”&�Բ�����;

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.”

Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner welcome back Stacey Childress, Senior Education Advisor at McKinsey & Co., for the second episode of a two-part series on the challenges facing K-12 education and promising strategies for addressing them. In this episode, each of them makes the case for one high-impact reform to address the challenges laid out in the previous episode. They discuss reforming how schools evaluate and recommend students, unbundling the core education experience, and doing more to instill character in values through education. 

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael and Stacey. Wow.

Michael Horn: You got to say hi to both of us. This is fun.

Stacey Childress: Hi, Diane. Hi, Michael.

The Two-Part Series on K12

Diane Tavenner: Good to be back together with you two. This is part two of a two-part episode the three of us are doing together. The premise for this episode started when we did a two-part episode previously around higher ed, and some of our devoted listeners and folks said that they enjoyed it so much, and they encouraged us to do something similar for K12, which we are doing. So this is our second episode, and it’s so much fun to be back together with the two of you.

Michael Horn: Hopefully, our listeners are not regretting that request after listening to the first part, but we’re going to be briefer this time. It’s our resolution.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, we even wore ourselves out on episode one of this series. So, yes.

Diane Tavenner: Just to remind folks, if you haven’t heard it, part one was identifying the elements of the K12 system that are the core elements and then identifying the problems with them right now. That’s all to lay the foundation so we could propose solutions. Since we recorded the first problem episode, we’ve had some good conversations, the three of us, and really pressed each other about how we wanted to approach solutions. We ran through a bunch of different options. But I think the one we got most excited about, and where we ended up landing, is rather than trying to go through a laundry list of all nine elements. Because it’s expansive, if you listened to the first one, you had to hang in there for quite a long time with us. We decided that we would each pick one of the nine to work on solutions for. And it turned out we all picked different ones.

So I think the approach we’re going to take today is to make our case for why we would try to solve the element that we’re picking, how we might solve it, and what solutions might be in the world already that are attempting to solve it. And in that, is there a way to unbundle it from the others to make it more possible? The other two of us will react to that and see if we have anything to add. Does that sound right?

Michael Horn: Let’s go forward with that as a plan. Diane, you get to go first, so you model what this looks like for us.

Diane’s Proposal: Reforming Schools’ Evaluator-Recommender Role 

Diane Tavenner: All right, well, I’m happy to go first. I suspect some folks might be taking some bets right now on which of the nine we chose. I am going to pick what was item number six in our first episode, the evaluator recommender. Let me just start by saying I think there is a huge opportunity. You both know I’ve spent the last several years trying to figure out what I want to do post-Summit. As part of that exploration, I’ve been searching for what I think is the greatest lever we have for change in the K12 system. I keep returning, sort of sadly and reluctantly, to assessment at the big level. I am attracted to this category because I think it’s a huge opportunity.

I also think it’s one of the easier things to unbundle from the rest of the K12 element list. I know that probably sounds counterintuitive to a lot of people because how in the world could you unbundle evaluation and recommendation? But I think with a mindset shift, it becomes pretty doable. Let me unpack three ways that I think we could do that and then share the mindset shift that would have to happen. First, when we talk through evaluator recommender and the element that schools do, they write these recommendations for colleges. There’s a huge expectation from higher ed that high school teachers and K12 will put in substantial effort to make recommendations of students. As Stacey pointed out in our last conversation, that’s for a relatively small number of students, but it takes up a huge amount of energy and time from people. I think the way to decouple this in K12 is to just stop having higher ed ask for recommendations as we know them, which are these letters. The most offensive part of these questions you have to answer as a recommender would say, “In what percentage of your lifetime experience with students does this student fall? Is it in the top one, top five?” I see you, Michael, leaning in because…

Michael Horn: This is the worst question ever.

Diane Tavenner: Worst question. Anyone who knows about the way our brains process will know no one’s capable of doing this in any unbiased way. It’s got to be the worst data ever. I don’t know why people keep asking for it. So, anyhow, I think do away with that. My invitation to higher ed would be to rethink how you’re doing admissions because, by the way, you should just rethink that to begin with. There’s better ways of doing it. And stop putting this extraordinary amount of work on K12 that is super biased and probably not helpful.

You’re probably not even really factoring it into your decision. What I would offer in exchange is, if you have to do something, do reference checks once you’ve already decided. Mirror the professional world: once you’ve already decided that you want to accept this student, if you want to do a reference check, great. Make it a simple, straightforward call-up reference check. I’m sure we all do reference checks regularly for former employees, and it can be very efficient. It would take far less time, it would be far less biased, and I think that would be a strong way to go and a change that could be made quite quickly and efficiently. I think it would be greatly appreciated by K12 on multiple levels and take them out of that role. The next thing is grades. As you all know, I have long believed that teachers should not be asked to both teach and coach and develop and grade their students for external reasons.

Diane Tavenner: Let me offer how you would provide students grades or feedback if not by their teacher. Step one: technology is actually pretty good at a lot of this, and with AI, it will get significantly better. It’s already getting significantly better at this. Put as much on technology as we possibly can. For a decade-plus, we’ve been doing this at Summit, and there’s people doing it all across the country. This is not out of reach. This is totally happening and possible and getting better every single day. Do as much there as possible.

I would argue the only type of grading that teachers should be doing is if it is a combined part of their professional development where they’re growing and developing their skills of teaching. There’s a whole methodology here, been doing it for 20-plus years around calibrating your scoring and then doing that in a group scoring. The more we have high-quality curriculum, which I expect might come up in some of your proposals later, the more the world is going. You have common assignments that this can be done around, which is a win-win for everyone. You have other teachers who are providing the actual scoring of your students. It makes the whole system better and a learning system. I think those are very possible, doable changes that could be made fairly easily and decoupled from most of the other elements.

Diane Tavenner: The final piece is around the high school diploma and the transcript. Here, a lot of people are working on a vision where the student is the keeper and the owner of their own transcript. I think this makes so much sense. More and more every day, students are learning from multiple institutions and multiple places. This is such an antiquated notion that you would go to one institution and have this transcript there. If you look at kids’ high school transcripts now, they’re already including community college and other types of institutions on those transcripts. The mindset shift is that the student is the owner and keeper of their transcript. Again, technology is our friend here.

It can be used to make sure this is validated, true, honest, and that they have the world of learning opportunities available to them that get integrated into the transcript. They control where it goes, who they share it with, and who they give it to. It’s very similar to a portfolio model and very complementary to a portfolio. It’s just the right way to think about young people and even older people having agency and self-direction around their own learning and how they’re driving it, and then what they’re sharing with the world. My last piece on all of these things is it focuses us more on evaluating the quality of the work that people have done versus someone else’s evaluation of who knows what. That’s my proposal. What do you all think?

Discussion of Diane’s Proposal

Michael Horn: Stacey? I’ll jump in first, and then you can tee off there. We’ll flip the order a little bit. No surprise, Diane. I love peeling this off from the rest of the enterprise. We’ve talked about this before. I would think about it conceptually almost in reverse order, in the sense that particularly grading and things of that nature should come before the reference checks. When you started with reference checks, I thought, that’s a lot harder for colleges to do for 18-year-olds than we might think. But if we flip the order and start with the system where the student is the keeper of their record, they’re having their performances and accomplishments validated by a range of individuals—teachers from other districts, professionals themselves—maybe actual projects for companies and organizations.

There’s real importance to what they’re doing, not pretend, but real. There’s an incentive for those professionals to give feedback on it. Using technology to help with inter-rater reliability, making it translatable, and so forth. The application then comes into a college, and they can trust it. They can say, “I’d love a double click on this.” You have a team around you of folks that have worked with you. So, I know who to call. When I imagine it almost in that way, then I start seeing how this hangs together even more.

I would offer just one last observation on this. You all know I’ve long been fascinated with Western Governors University in the higher ed world. They have a whole separate faculty who is trained just in the art and science of assessment. When you haven’t mastered something yet in their competency-based model, you don’t blame the teacher because the teacher who assessed you does not know you. To your point, Diane, it just seals that thing. They’re not evaluating something about you as the individual or a bias or whatever else. They’re just looking at the work. We can have multiple faculty members who are trained in assessment looking at the work to make sure it really represents what a great performance does or doesn’t look like. Stacey?

Stacey Childress: Yeah. I like flipping the concept of evaluation and recommendation on its head as well. I resonate with moving to a world where a student is the keeper of their portfolio of learning experiences and the evaluations of those. I wonder about which actor in the ecosystem is the keeper or provider of this different construct. Is it like at Western Governors University, where it’s still in-house, but we’re staffed up differently in terms of expertise, roles, etcetera? And in the K12 system, maybe think about the system more granularly or modularly. How does this look in the early, elementary to middle school years, and then how does it start to shift in middle school? Maybe it’s fully from an outside partner in high school, where we need to see the supply of partners who have the tools in school districts that have this kind of expertise. It doesn’t have to be built inside the system. That probably increases the validation, credibility, and legitimacy of the credential as it then goes on to the next steps in education and preparation. Diane, I’m not sure how you were thinking about that, but it’s an interesting idea to think about. How does the ecosystem shift as kids get into their teen years on their way to graduation from high school in a way that creates an opportunity to introduce new players, new expertise, and maybe increases the validity and credibility of the signal to the next step on a kid’s learning journey. But just wondering how you were thinking about that.

Michael Horn: Yeah, I was going to say quickly, quick clarification, then I want to hear Diane’s answer. You raised a good point. Western Governors would be better, in my mind, if it was an external entity playing that role. I think the reason why at the higher ed level we can’t get to competency-based education and replace paying for seat time is because no one trusts that the institution is going to fairly evaluate itself for learning. I think they’re right not to trust that when dollars are at stake. The more unbundled this can be, the better it is. Diane, you can give the more thoughtful answer, though.

Diane Tavenner: Well, no, that’s super thoughtful and pulling strings from both of you. One of the things I love about this proposal is I think it helps us start to unbundle the role of the teacher, which is something we have all been talking about for a decade-plus at this point. There are people who are amazing at assessment, and they love assessment, and they think about assessment. You could unbundle those roles within an institution. That would be one way. Like you, I like it even better across institutions. When we talk about a common high-quality curriculum, it doesn’t make sense anymore for an individual teacher to be writing and developing their own individual curriculum. We should be using high-quality curriculum that is across institutions.

There’s a huge opportunity there for people from different institutions to be evaluating on the same projects, the same work, etcetera, across institutions. I do think, and I’m personally involved with a number of them, some I can speak about, some I can’t, efforts are underway to build nonprofits and for-profits that have the ability to do these evaluations. The ones that I think are most exciting are on-demand for students and families. No matter where I’m learning, I’m able to go to a place where I can validate the skills I have, the knowledge I have, and the work that I can do. That way, I am not handcuffed to my zip code and the one institution that may or may not be gatekeeping me on multiple levels.

What this does to the psychology for families and students about what’s possible, it undoes so many of those negative effects we were talking about yesterday in these other groups where the system is not actually doing what we wanted it to do. We’re not going to touch on that particular element today, but I think we are because this is a powerful solution to fulfilling that number nine, that dream, that promise. If you work hard and drive your own learning, there are ways that you can show that and truly benefit from it.

Stacey Childress: Yeah. I love that.

Michael Horn: Should we dive into the second one?

Stacey Childress: I think it’s probably an interesting segue into my choice, which was number one, just that core education experience. It was at the top of my list. If I had to pick from our 17 or 82 on our list, however many there were. Twelve, nine. So, just to remind folks, this is like, when we think of school, we think of these things, right? It’s the core educational experience. Historically, it started with the three Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic, and lots of other subjects have been added over time. It includes the strength and breadth of the academic program and the social learning. It’s different than social-emotional, but like, how to be part of a community, what’s it like to be in a group, in a class, in a team, your people. It also includes those social aspects of managing yourself.

Stacey’s Proposal: Unbundling the Core Education Experience

Stacey Childress: On top of that, extracurriculars, sports, interest-based activities—all of those experiences we consider part of the education of our kids. We said a challenge with it was often what we teach and how we teach it is not aligned to the current science of learning. What we know about how learning happens and what makes for a good, integrated set of learning experiences, but also towards what end. Our second challenge is a lack of vision and purpose. We have these large cafeteria menus at high school and a broad waterfront of concepts, skills, and topics that we ask elementary schools to cover. But the “to what end” has gotten lost over time as we’ve added more and more. That was one of our main critiques.

Following our model here, I thought first about whether this core academic function could be unbundled. Diane, you started to talk about how unbundling the evaluation and recommendation piece might open up more opportunities to start unbundling the actual core educational experience.

If you were able to demonstrate your learning outside of the mandated tests at the school or state level, maybe you could have more options for how to get that learning, how to experience it, and prove it to an outside provider. Another thing that would have to shift is policy, which was number five on our list. Policy would have to be in play to create some of the shifts we see. Along with evaluation, funding policies would need to shift. There are efforts in states about this, which can be quite controversial and politicized. But for unbundling the core function to work at any scale in a community or region, along with the evaluation function moving to something external, the dollars would have to come to families. Not just follow students to their chosen place, but actually be in the hands of families to spend on educational services.

These types of programs, such as traditional voucher programs and education savings accounts (ESAs), usually go to a bundled school experience. They are not driving the unbundling of the core educational experience in any way. I am an informed, interested observer, but because these policies are not driving the unbundling of the core educational experience now, it makes me wonder what would have to happen. It also makes me a bit skeptical that these policy solutions will lead to an unbundling of the core experience. 

Let me say a little about why I think that is. There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. There aren’t sufficient choices for families to take advantage of in core educational opportunities. That includes the core academic experience and character-building experiences, the social learning aspect. Even if I got my money directly from the state, I don’t have enough options to spend it on in sufficient quantity to choose among them. I am likely to choose a bundled experience that is better than what I had but may not allow me to unbundle.

Unbundling shifts a lot of non-financial costs to families. If I don’t have that bundled experience to go to, I am responsible for putting things together. I might not have the time or interest in doing that, even if I do have the resources. You can imagine other providers growing up that could play that orchestration or concierge role among some online experiences and some local, regional, and state providers. That’s super interesting. The biggest barrier is it flies in the face of our concept of school as the place we go, where our kids go, and where we get everything we need or most of what we need. But there’s something compelling about the idea.

As more choice options emerge in states where there is a financial and policy component, the long-term aspiration of what it could be if we unbundled evaluation, unbundled the money, and had some incentives in the communities for the options to arise based on the science of learning, are clear about what vision they’re educating against, and maybe have chunks—maybe I’m not getting reading here and math there and character here—but maybe I’m getting those bundles from a provider and also have options for sports leagues, which already exist. A lot of sports leagues, children’s theater, and those kinds of interests and extracurriculars show much more promise.

What does that hybrid look like? Where we’ve got some bundles validated with the science of learning and an external evaluator? I am more optimistic and less skeptical about that. So, that’s my unbundling piece in the bundled environment. I think we’re seeing some interesting things. Diane and I are on the board of an organization we helped start called Transcend Education. We worried about communities not being engaged in the vision of schooling. Transcend has this amazing process that takes whole communities through to create or unearth the values, wishes, dreams, and intentions of a community against what an educational experience should aim for.

They have built expertise around processes to be on a journey of reinventing your schools and your system of schools in ways that align with that vision, so schools and districts aren’t on their own trying to do that piece. It’s still a bundled experience. The work they’re doing in Texas with lots of districts, for example, Aldine Public Schools, which has 60,000 students and 80 schools, and 90% of the students are economically disadvantaged. There’s this beautiful community-wide process with the help of Transcend as an expert partner.

I’d love to see more Transcends, more capacity for Transcend, and more Transcend-like organizations that can work with systems and schools in their communities. We still need more opportunities for school creation. Diane, you know this better than any of us. When you can have that conversation with a community and create a new school that lives into that vision, is based on the learning science, and isn’t trying to do everything but has agreement on the core things they will do across core academics, character building, and interest-based activities, you’ve got a lot more likelihood of achieving coherence. 

I am distressed by the reduction in new school creation around the country, both with philanthropy and policymakers. In the last 20 years, and even in the eight years I was at New Schools, we helped enough new schools come into existence to serve as many kids as the San Francisco Public Schools and the Boston Public Schools. These interesting models meet community needs, create great results for kids, and have more ability to do it because they’re not burdened with the layering that has gone on over the last 100 years or 40 years or 30 years. I’ve been talking for a long time, so I’ll pause. But we need a vibrant mix of opportunities so more unbundled services can arise, so districts can undertake this with expert support, and we still have new schools opening up that meet these aspirations and provide examples of what’s possible while serving their communities.

Discussing Stacey’s Proposal 

Diane Tavenner: Wow. There’s so much in there. Let me try to pull out a couple of things. I resonated with all of it. One thing I feel is this tension for families. When we talk about family choice and parent choice, there really is only choice at the bundled school level for the most part. That’s as far as we’ve truly gotten.

It’s like you can either pick a whole school for your child, or you can be a homeschooler family. In that case, you’re responsible for everything. Over here, you still have to curate a lot because the school doesn’t generally work in the summer, so you have to curate the summer. Oh, by the way, the holidays don’t match your workdays. It feels a little more steady, so that is very limited choice in my mind. I love that you’re proposing a more doable choice if it’s on a continuum, something more in the middle of this concierge model, these new entities. I think this is an interesting space for new entities to come into where they have a different mindset.

They want people to be able to assemble what works for them and make that easy and doable, without putting the full burden on a parent. Most parents I know have spreadsheets to try to manage summer experiences alone. By the end of summer, I was exhausted. Just put me back in school, even though it’s 8:00 to 3:30, because at least that’s consistent except every other Friday and the holidays, whatever. You know my rant about this. I love that idea paired with ESAs. These are very controversial right now because they’re happening quickly. I think we’re up to maybe eight.

Michael Horn: 14 or 15 states, I think.

Diane Tavenner: Okay. Who have these in motion. There’s probably another ten that are working on them.

Stacey Childress: Texas will likely happen this year.

Michael Horn: Yeah, exactly. There’s a bunch that failed last year, but after the primaries, it will likely pass.

Diane Tavenner: There are people from multiple sides of the political spectrum who don’t like ESAs and are working hard against them. The two primary arguments are, one, accountability—how do we ensure kids are getting quality education, which we all care deeply about—and two, adult reasons. They don’t want money going away from the system, which is sometimes the largest regional employer. There’s more to it than that. I’m not being nuanced, but you know what I’m saying. They’re not thinking about what’s good for families and kids. These systems are far from perfect. Policy is very difficult to write. I don’t want to throw it out because we have a couple of egregious examples of someone using their ESA money to buy a big screen TV and claiming they were showing their kids learning content on it. Not awesome. That’s not the kind of thing we want. We need to learn how we can help people spend this wisely. We need significantly more supply of good science-aligned options and help for them to assemble those options to really take advantage of it.

I hope we can keep moving forward and make this better versus trying to rip this system out. I think we had this intuition when we said we were only going to talk about three topics that we’d end up touching on many more. What I love about what you said is in this vision, it contributes to the mixing of people, socioeconomic mixing and political diversity, which we’re concerned is not existing right now.

A lot of people get afraid when people want to talk about school choice. They’re worried it’s going to cause more polarization. I think this approach has people doing more mixing because you are picking and choosing and engaging with other people. It goes to that big societal intention and hope of our system if we can stick with it and figure it out. What do you think, Michael?

Michael Horn: Yeah, I agree with what you just said. I’ll unintentionally come back to this when I tackle my lever. On the mixing point, when you have dollars that can unbundle the school experience in the way described, you lower the stakes on picking the thing. My guard comes down. I’m worried less about the mix of kids around me and the parents. It becomes a more optimal choice for something different now in these different experiences that contribute to what you just said, the different mixing.

I wrote a piece on how we shouldn’t expect a great unbundling right away. In all markets, customers initially prefer highly proprietary, interdependent bundled offerings because they don’t yet know their preferences and customization they want. We don’t have any experience as a society for the most part outside of homeschoolers and increasingly hybrid homeschoolers in picking and choosing and thinking outside of a school frame of reference.

It’s not surprising that you look at the state of Florida with its education savings accounts. The majority of those dollars go to full school tuitions. What’s interesting is if you look at Florida over time, fewer dollars are going to tuition. I had a conversation recently with someone in Utah, and they were seeing the same trend. That’s starting to change. The big thing is now we need the supply side of the market to catch up. We need more good school operators in there.

We need more concierge-type services and more one-offs in the ways we can imagine. What’s exciting is I don’t see a way to incentivize what Diane was talking about in her first point unless we go in this direction. Otherwise, you’re asking a school to somehow pay out money to an external validator. They’re not going to want to lose those dollars. If it’s the kids and the parents saying, “I want to validate that Michael learned how to do X and show evidence of it,” and it’s dollars that I get to control in a wallet, it’s greatly preferable to vouchers or tax credit scholarships, which I don’t think accomplish any of what we’re talking about.

Stacey Childress: So you’re saying ESAs as a preference?

Michael Horn: Strong preference. I think the other two are not. They do several things wrong. They don’t force me, as the individual, to think about value trade-offs in terms of saving the money for different offerings. When I think about Diane’s vision of separate places to validate what I’ve mastered or learned or accomplished, you can imagine in the professional world, there’s the CFA, CPA. There are longstanding credentialing bodies that we pay for to show mastery. 

You can imagine a flourishing of supply-side options that start to do the same thing. Colleges, employers, apprenticeship programs start to say that’s a valuable signal. That’s how we start to get around some of the accountability concerns in the longer run, by this flourishing. We have talked about the challenges with philanthropy in this country. We may find a time to come back to this topic. This calls for real patient capital to seed this marketplace and acknowledge that it’s not going to all come together at once and be comfortable with a messy transition as we get there. Diane gave one example of messy, where there’s going to be some bad spending, as though that never happens in districts today. There will be a messy transition of us trying to figure out how to do this in a way that doesn’t overstress parents and comes together. It’s not going to be an overnight process. It’s very grassroots, what you just described.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ll kind of wrap up on this one based on your reflections, both of you. I do want to say I think I might be a little more skeptical than I hear the two of you being about our shared ambition for socioeconomic diversity and racial diversity in the choices that emerge. I often say, if I had more confidence in my fellow man, I’d be a libertarian. If I had more confidence in my government, I’d be a liberal. If I had more confidence in my church, I’d be a conservative. So I actually don’t know where I fit on all of these.

I’m not sure. I think where I get a nagging sense that the critics are likely right about this is that I don’t know if, left to our own devices with ESAs as currently conceived in the policy frameworks, we’re likely to get less isolation rather than more. If I had to lean one way or another, I’d say we’re not likely to get more equity. I’m not certain about that. It could happen, but I’m not certain in the current climate and conception. But I do think it’s interesting to consider ESA policy provisions that don’t squelch their vibrancy and goodness but include some thinking about the great American experiment. It could be an interesting addition to the thinking.

Michael Horn: It’s a great point, Stacey, and I don’t think Diane or I want to sound pollyannish on this. I’m putting words in your mouth, Diane, but I guess what I would say, and increasingly have felt, is the current way we’re doing it isn’t accomplishing it. So I’m willing to take a gamble.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, totally. No, I’m not certain. You guys know me. I’m not defending the status as better.

Diane Tavenner: No.

Michael Horn: I think it’s an important caveat, though, that you introduced.

Stacey Childress: Yeah.

Michael Horn: Yeah.

Diane Tavenner: I think this is a nice segue into, Michael, the element you’ve picked to unpack and provide hope and solutions for. But I just want to mark, I feel like the three of us should take an action item out of this conversation so far. We have this privilege of engaging with a lot of, whether they be your students at the university level or young people, at least younger than us, who are very entrepreneurial and ambitious. There is such significant opportunity right now to conceive of new nonprofits or for-profits to create the supply that is so needed here. So I think we should all take, not that we don’t already, but even extra care in nurturing and encouraging that type of entrepreneurship going forward. I just gave you an action item, Michael.

Michael’s Proposal: Teaching Character and Values

Michael Horn: The best meeting is one where you assign someone else to work. Okay, so let’s jump in. She’s good at it. The one that I picked was the character values bucket. It was our second bucket yesterday, and it was, to use Diane’s words, more macro than the social bullet that fell under the core education that, Stacey, you just tackled. To remind people, there were three big pillars we talked about yesterday. One was the basic norms and values of living with other people in society together, preparing people for adulthood.

So something we often call habits of success. I’ve adopted Diane’s language on this. Character, though certainly in the now sunsetting Character Lab, has used that phrase to encompass a lot of these characteristics. And then thirdly, being a participating member of a democratic society. The observation I made is that the public school system in many ways got its start around this particular purpose of inculcating, and I’ll use that word intentionally, democratic values in the populace. The first question, can it be unbundled? I’ll lead with what, in a lot of our worlds, would be the controversial statement: of course it can, because parents are the first teachers. There’s that observation, but that’s not where I want to sit with my thoughts, because I know a lot of families, and to your equity concerns, Stacey, that’s not the entry point.

Where I want to go is a different starting point. Yes, that’s part of this possibility and part of the fabric. But what I want to say is, in our conversation yesterday, the flip side we observed is that while there’s significant polarization and arguments against certain character education, there’s actually a lot of commonality in the populace around what we agree the centerpieces of these things are. I can’t remember the exact number I said, but there’s a lot of agreement. It’s interesting that in education savings accounts, there’s a lot of agreement at the population level that they’re popular. It’s just the politicians that don’t necessarily agree, which is interesting.

My observation is that there are two ways to approach creating a common set of democratic values, civic values, and values of how we conduct ourselves in a society with people we may or may not agree with. One is a top-down approach, almost like the Common Core approach, which aims to get alignment. The challenge I’ve observed is you get a lot of energy around what’s in and what’s out, and you get a lot of anger on either side that often erodes consensus. The controversial point I want to push forward is that if we took an unbundling approach, very much like what you said, Stacey, in our previous conversation about how each school community comes together and has this conversation around its purpose, and we trust that most Americans have these central values they want their kids to learn, we can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort. This might be the most productive way to move us forward on these things we really care about in a grassroots way, rather than spending 80% of the energy trying to get the 20% to fall in line. 

I get it, it doesn’t solve everything, but we’re not solving everything at the moment either. An 80-20 rule that takes some of the tension out of the culture wars would be a really important way to go. I think education savings accounts are an interesting way to approach this. I can start to opt into school communities, and I’m going to trust that families are going to make choices where they’re making sure that, for the most part, 80% of the population is saying, “I want my kids to understand the promise of the American dream, acknowledge the dark parts of our history, and strive for a more perfect union.” These values are integrated into these experiences.

I think this approach will open us up to a lot of innovation in terms of form factors and how it integrates. I really like your observation, Stacey, that we’ll rebundle the content with the character as we unbundle other things. One question I’d love you both to reflect on, in addition to the stuff you react to, is that starting with Diane’s point, we’re going to do a lot for increasing agency in this country. We’re going to do an incredible amount, and that’s really important to thriving and having people feel better about themselves. I think the two questions we should worry about and think about are coherence among experiences, which goes to the concierge, but also content and things of that nature. 

The second question, which has been on my mind lately as we’ve watched things unfold across college campuses, is how we embed a sense of humility in kids. How do we make sure they know they’re still learning and don’t know everything? The one nagging worry I have is when I see so many great interest-based school communities thriving, kids are picking things they’re excited about. But when is the thing that says to them, “You don’t know X, and that’s okay”? Are we modeling things that introduce some uncertainty where they get the feedback that they can do, but also the humility to say, “I don’t know everything”? I don’t know if that’s well articulated, but that’s the one thing on my mind at the moment. I’ll kick it to you all for reactions.

Discussing Michael’s Proposal 

Stacey Childress: Go ahead, Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Okay. Still processing those questions. As you were talking, Michael, and listening to this whole conversation, here’s what’s coming up for me. First of all, I can imagine what you’re proposing, because like Stacey said, Transcend does this work. I did this work with Summit Learning for a number of years. I had the privilege of working with communities in just the type of experience you’re talking about. It was fascinating and amazing.

Diane Tavenner: Communities really did come together and identify what they thought the purpose of education was. There was huge agreement, and it was a powerful experience. I could imagine this, and I’ve seen it with Transcend and others. What was coming up for me is we’re at a point in time where the public has lost trust in most institutions in our country. Trust in institutions is at the lowest level we’ve seen in a long time. I hear this all the time, “I don’t trust, I don’t trust, I don’t trust. You don’t have my trust. You’ve broken my trust. Trust, trust, trust, trust, trust.” In my experience, the only way to build trust is to do meaningful, authentic work together, which builds trust. People often say, “We have to communicate better to build trust.” I don’t believe that at all. Communication is important, but it is not the pathway to building trust.

It’s truly working together and building relationships over meaningful work. This is such a powerful idea that every school community can do. Every school community in the country is doing some sort of community engagement, whether through their accreditation, strategic planning process, or federally or locally mandated committees of parents that do work. Most of the time, that is not meaningful, authentic work that builds trust. It is box-checking, perfunctory, rubber-stamping. What if we took those existing opportunities and flipped them into true dialogues and consensus-building around what the purpose of education is? What do we actually share together, and how are we going to build that? I think that’s a very doable thing within the existing system that would go a significant way towards the vision you’re talking about and building the trust we need. Let me pause there with my reaction and turn to Stacey. I will gather my thoughts around your good provocative reflection questions.

Stacey Childress: Yeah, and Michael, I want to pick up on your powerful insight about the challenges with top-down approaches at any level, but especially at the national level. They are destined for disappointment. Even though I joked about different political philosophies, I trust people with their own choices, especially parents making decisions for their kids and families. Since I joked about it, I want to make sure that’s clear. What I love about what you said, Michael, is because we trust that, and because we know top-down approaches are probably not going to be all that good anyway, and we’re allergic to them as Americans, where real trust is built is on the ground, doing meaningful work together. If we give up trying to get national consensus, we’re going to get it at the ground level. Where people are together every day, showing up at school or other educational options, in the grocery store, in their churches, and at community activities, they agree on 80% of important things.

If the locus of shifting to a vision of learning and education that works better for kids and sets them up for long-term community living, self-sustainability, following their dreams, and being strong and productive members of our democratic society, starts where they live today, tomorrow, and 20 years from now, where we actually experience all the dynamism of being part of a pluralistic society and a functioning democracy is in our neighborhoods. I love what you said, Michael. If we ever do have the conversation about philanthropy, I think this is where we miss big time. We’re looking for scale and things that can work everywhere, but scale is healthy communities doing strong work together. That leads to clarity about shared values and a vision for how to help the next generation build towards those values. As Michael said, “Yes, I’m capable of everything, but right now, I don’t know everything.” What are the habits of mind, skills, and habits of success that lead to that possibility at the micro level for every young person, at the building level for every school, at the community level for groups of families in schools, and then it builds up from there without feeling like we have to have national fights and mandates. I think we’ll be much more successful moving from the smaller level to a larger agreement if we’re talking to each other in our communities and neighborhoods.

Diane Tavenner: Awesome. Maybe I’ll say a quick word on your provocation around humility in kids. I’ll leave the coherence aside and just say two words: Swiss cheese in the existing system. There’s no coherence given the way it is. On humility, here’s what came to me: the habits of success and the building blocks pyramid we often reference. One of the top building blocks is curiosity. Underneath humility is curiosity. We can cultivate that because it feels impossible to lack humility if you are truly curious. What I see across our country, and it’s not just young people, is a lot of people who act like they know everything and are not curious about other people’s perspectives, lived experiences, or what knowledge they may or may not have. As a K12 educator, I believe curiosity is something you can cultivate.

There’s debate about whether you can teach it, but there’s a whole suite of skills around it that curate that approach and mindset. That is where, and I would put that under both of your buckets, core education and values, character education. Working with communities across the country, curiosity often comes up as a value they care deeply about in developing young people.

Michael Horn: Well, maybe as we transition out of this to our final segment of the show, I’ll just say you gave me a lot more faith. Thank you. That was a very helpful answer. The other thing that occurs to me, hearing both of your reflections about the declining trust and faith in institutions and that there’s humility in recognizing we don’t know the individual circumstances of every single community and family. As my co-author in “Choosing College,” Bob Mesta, likes to say when he does the jobs to be done research, you can’t imagine someone’s job to be done from a kitchen table. You have to go out and shoot the movie of them living to figure out what their circumstances are. There’s no way to create blanket statements or policy that covers all those unique circumstances. I appreciate y’all digging in on this.

Media Recommendations

Michael Horn: As we wrap up, I hope everyone’s enjoyed it as well. We get to return to the segment we know a lot of people enjoy and have even created tracking lists around. You don’t know this, Stacey, but our recommendations for books or things that we’re watching, reading, or listening to. We’ll give Stacey a moment. Diane, why don’t you go first, then Stacey, and I’ll wrap us.

Diane Tavenner: I’m happy to go first. Some folks might not know that I actually lived in LA for about ten years a long time ago and lived in close proximity to the Academy Awards show every year. I used to be an avid follower but have sort of fallen off. This year my husband and I watched all ten Best Picture nominees for the 2024 awards from last year. I have been pleasantly surprised. What a spectacular lineup. There are the big banner movies like “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” but there are so many gems in that list. We had such an enjoyable time watching all of those films.

If you want a movie list, pick those ten and go through it. It’s hard to pick a favorite. I love “The Holdovers,” which provides commentary on schooling and education. I love “American Fiction,” and I really loved “Past Lives.” It’s such a beautiful, nuanced film that is incredible. It’s a reminder that I don’t think it would be made in America. It’s not a film we would make here. What a gift of a global community to share such a beautiful film.

Michael Horn: Very cool. Stacey?

Stacey Childress: Yes. I have not seen “Past Lives,” and I’m always a sucker for a movie about a school. So I also loved “The Holdovers.” I recently finished the book called “Hello, Beautiful.” It’s about four sisters in Chicago. I’m the oldest of four sisters, and the title comes from what their dad would say to them when he saw them: “Hello, beautiful.” It follows them from their late teens, early twenties into their early fifties. It’s wonderfully written and beautiful, but it’s also really hard. They are very close, but as they go on their life’s journeys, things happen, and sometimes people don’t live up to high standards. There are breaks in relationships, and then suddenly you’re in your early fifties looking back, wondering where all the time went and missing your family. It was not what I thought it was going to be, and I really loved it. So, “Hello, Beautiful.”

Last time you guys invited me on, I was so excited about the Astros. Then the season started, and the Yankees showed up in town and literally punched them in the face, swept them in four games, and they had a hard time recovering. They are off to their worst start since 1969 when I was four years old. I’m hanging in there with my guys, but it is really hard. It’s really hard.

Michael Horn: Well, you’ve had a run of success that most places would be envious of. We’re spoiled. I’ll wrap us. I love all these. I thought, Diane, you had routinely watched all the Best Pictures, so this was a learning for me. I finally kicked back into overdrive and started reading a bunch of books. I’ll pick out “The Three-Body Problem.” It sent me and a few others said I had to read it. Now it’s on Netflix as well. But I read the book first, and it definitely made me think. It made me ponder a bunch of scientific concepts, as good science fiction should. It also freaked me out a little bit. It hit all the points.

Diane Tavenner: Are you going for number two and three? Because that is a trilogy, Michael, my son’s favorite all-time trilogy.

Michael Horn: Is that right? We’ll talk offline about how I’m thinking about it. We’ll leave it there. Thank you for joining us on yet another epic episode. We’ll see you all next time on Class Disrupted. Bye.

The shakeup could set the stage for a statewide roll-out of education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow families to use public dollars to pay for private school.

Vote tallies Wednesday morning — DeWayne Burns, Justin Holland, and John Kuempel — losing to their primary opponents, each of whom had been endorsed by Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. A fourth, veteran Texas House representative Gary Vandeaver, by a little under 1,400 votes.

The four men had all helped thwart the governor’s push last year behind legislation that would have made ESAs universal throughout the state. Along with House Democrats and a committed faction of rural Republicans, they voted the use of state funding for all forms of school vouchers last spring; in a special session called by Abbott several months later, the same coalition a school choice provision from an omnibus K–12 funding bill.  

In response, Abbott and several major conservative donors took the rare step of backing ESA supporters against the incumbents in state legislative primaries. In March, nine Republicans who’d previously defied Abbott lost the party’s nomination, while four more were denied majorities and forced into runoff elections decided on Tuesday. 

Taken together, 13 Republican ESA opponents were pushed aside, which would be more than enough to flip the 84-63 margin against universal ESAs that prevailed last year.  

But the passage of a new school choice bill is still not guaranteed. The Texas Legislature is out of session until next year; elections in November will determine the body’s partisan composition, and while Republicans are favored to retain control over both chambers, the size of their majorities — and the continuing willingness of anti-voucher Republicans to defect again — will help determine the prospects of statewide ESAs.

Ebullient in victory, Abbott announced that House Republicans now held “enough votes to pass school choice.”

“While we did not win every race we fought in, the overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice,” the governor in a statement. “Opponents can no longer ignore the will of the people.”

Recent polling suggests that education savings accounts do enjoy the support of large numbers of Texans. While many voters are unfamiliar with the details of particular legislative proposals, that 49 percent of respondents — and particularly African Americans, parents, and churchgoers — favored vouchers, compared with just 27 percent who opposed them. A more recent poll from the University of Texas at Austin found a tighter margin .

Zeph Capo, president of the teachers’ union affiliate Texas AFT, said in that the primary results reflected a crush of spending from deep-pocketed school choice advocates. While the primary campaign had succeeded in its immediate goals, he argued, the fate of ESAs was still to be decided. 

“Just five out-of-state donors have flooded Texas with $33 million, the same as our state’s record-breaking budget surplus last year, in this election cycle,” Capo wrote. “What it’s bought them so far is a smattering of wins for extremist challengers who now must win outright in November.

We recently moved from Texas to the Tampa area. Being closer to my family in Florida was a big reason for the move. But finding the right educational fit for my kids was also important.

In doing research before the move, I came across the many inclusive state-funded school choice programs that Florida offers, and I was thrilled to see education saving accounts for kids with learning differences or medical needs. This was critical because all three of my children — James, 18, and Max and Vanessa, both 15 — have learning and medical challenges. In Florida, they were all eligible for the ESAs, which I used to enroll them in a Catholic school.

That’s a huge contrast from what we faced back in Texas. There, my husband and I had enrolled my oldest son in a specialized private school after he failed first grade, as his local school was unable to serve children with dyslexia. After just a few months in his new school, his reading ability soared and his confidence returned. It was such a relief to see my child happy again and able to learn. 

But because Texas has no private school choice program, we had to pay for the specialized school ourselves. Our daughter also has dyslexia, and when she reached school age, we had to prioritize which child to send to a place that would best meet their needs. So after my son graduated from elementary school, we sent him to our local, zoned middle school and enrolled his sister in the private school. 

I know we’re not the only family in Texas who have had to make these kinds of agonizing decisions. I actually spent time at legislative sessions in Texas advocating for choice programs like the kind Florida has. But so far, Texas has not acted. Far too many Texas parents continue to feel frustrated and defeated. 

In Florida, we chose to put our children in a Catholic school. Our decision had to do with how well-rounded and nurturing Catholic schools are. They do an excellent job preparing students not just for college, but for a life in which they have the skills and character to make a positive impact on the world.

Across the country, including in Texas, Catholic schools are shrinking and closing. But it’s not because parents don’t want them. , thanks to school choice programs. A new from Step Up For Students, the organization that administers the choice scholarships in Florida, found the state’s Catholic schools now enroll a higher percentage of students of color than public schools do. It also found the number of students using special needs scholarships at Florida Catholic schools has nearly tripled in the past 10 years. My family would not have been able to send three children to Catholic school if we were still living in Texas.  

I love talking to Florida parents about school choice. I am amazed at the endless options families are using and even creating to get their children the best learning environment. ESA programs allow Florida parents to basically fit the pieces of their puzzle together to create the best learning experience for their kids.

I am grateful to have these options for my children. Families across the country want choices in education, and more and more states are doing the right thing in providing that. It’s time for Texas to join them.

A data breach exposed the personal information of thousands of Arizona students enrolled in the state’s school voucher program, according to Gov. Katie Hobbs, but the state’s top education official says it’s not a problem.

Earlier this month, ClassWallet, the online financial administration platform that handles payments for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, suffered a data breach that jeopardized the names and disability categories of thousands of Arizona students. The incident triggered an investigation by the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, according to a sent from Hobbs, a Democrat, to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, on Friday.

Over 60,000 Arizona students are currently enrolled in the ESA program, more than in the , Mesa Unified. A recent enrollment explosion was the result of a universal expansion passed last year by the GOP-controlled legislature. Previously, only public school students who met specific criteria, such as being a foster child, being part of a military family or having special education needs, qualified for a voucher that roughly equals the cost of teaching them in a public school. That voucher can then be used for homeschooling efforts or private school tuition.

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The expansion has been widely denounced by Democrats and public school advocates as bankrolling the education of wealthy Arizona families at taxpayer cost. The initial wave of new applicants last year were found to be and, as of June, those students continue to make up .

Hobbs, a long-time critic of the expansion who earlier this year , rebuked Horne in Friday’s letter about the data breach. She requested a detailed response by Aug. 3 explaining his administration’s actions regarding the breach, preventative measures in place for the future, how the department has notified parents, what laws may have been violated by the exposure of private educational information and whether or not the department has referred the problem to the state attorney general for investigation.

“It is my responsibility to ensure the safety and security of our state, our agencies, and our people,” Hobbs said, in a press release accompanying the letter. “Arizona students and families deserve to know that proper measures are in place to protect their personal information.”

In a letter released shortly after Hobbs’ request, Horne shot back that the incident was a nonissue and no cause for alarm. Once a breach was identified, Horne said, his office contacted ClassWallet. The company responded with assurances that the problem had been resolved internally and only one user had actually been affected.

“Parents were not notified because of the finding that it was a unique and isolated incident that affected no other users and was corrected right away,” Horne wrote.

Horne criticized Hobbs for not seeking answers to her questions about possible legal violations with the state department of homeland security.

“Since the department of homeland security is part of your office, we would have thought you would have checked with them before writing your letter that is full of wild exaggerations,” he wrote.

Data breach spat caps week of ESA scrutiny

The news of a data breach comes on the heels of a week of renewed criticism leveled against the ESA program and closely shadows the Aug. 1 deadline for the education department to select a vendor to oversee the program’s financial administration — which until now has been ClassWallet.

On Monday, Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, issued a consumer warning notification for parents considering taking advantage of school vouchers. She advised that leaving the public school system puts students in danger of losing critical non-discrimination protections.

“Families should know that when they accept an ESA, they lose protections from discrimination related to a child’s learning abilities, religion and sexual orientation,” Mayes .

Under state law, schools that accept vouchers aren’t required to abide by the same policies or laws that public schools do. Public school advocates have warned the loophole allows institutions that accept vouchers to discriminate against LGBTQ Arizonans while receiving state funds without legal repercussions, as happened in the who were told they weren’t welcome on their daughter’s private school campus earlier this year.

Also on Monday, two high ranking program administrators, Director Christine Accurso and her assistant, Operations Director Linda Rizzo, suddenly resigned, raising eyebrows among critics of the program. In her letter, Hobbs questioned their departures so soon before the first school year when school vouchers will be widely available.

“As students and parents prepare for a new school year, the sudden and unexpected departures of Director Accurso and Linda Rizzo raise concerns and questions about the administration of the ESA voucher program and the protection of student data under your supervision,” she wrote to Horne.

The ballooning cost of ESA vouchers to the state, and ultimately, taxpayers, also received renewed attention this week, after Hobbs’ office released a funding analysis sounding the alarm over skyrocketing costs. In June, the is likely to grow to 100,000 students in the next year and cost $900 million — hundreds of millions of dollars more than the $500 million allocated to the program in this year’s state budget.

An early of the voucher program’s impact, released while the expansion was being considered, estimated that it would cost just $65 million in fiscal year 2024.

outpaces even the education department’s whopping estimate, pinning the cost to Arizonans at more than $943 million and warning that the current funding level is set to fall short by more than $300 million in the upcoming year. The report notes that the rapidly increasing price tag of the voucher program means that more than 53% of new K-12 education spending in fiscal year 2024 will benefit ESA recipients, who represent just 8% of all Arizona students.

GOP leadership, however, remains skeptical of both financial reports and is .

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

More than double the number of expected students applied for Iowa’s Education Savings Account program to pay for private school attendance, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced last week.

The governor’s office reported that more than 29,000 students applied for the program and over 17,500 have been approved, far exceeding the state’s projection that just over 14,000 students would be approved to use an ESA in the first year of the program. The state has until July 31 to approve or reject the remaining applications.

“The tremendous response from Iowa families demonstrates there’s both a need and a strong desire for school choice in our state,” Reynolds said in a statement. “Allowing parents to choose the education that’s best for their children levels the playing field and creates equal opportunities for Iowa’s students.”

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����ԴDZ������ in January. Lawmakers approved $107.4 million to fund the program in its first year during the 2023 legislative session — but the program is already set to cost at least $26 million more. Funding for every application already approved as of last week would cost the state $133.5 million. The state has confirmed every approved account will be funded.

Officials with the governor’s office said exact costs and numbers are still unknown, as the money will only be disbursed if the student is accepted to attend private school. Reynolds’ office said the finalized numbers on cost and how many students are participating will not be available until October.

There are about 9,000 open seats available in accredited private schools, the governor’s office said, meaning there may be more ESA applications accepted than there are available spots. If a student is approved for an ESA but does not attend private school, their account will be closed for the school year and the funds will be returned to the state’s general fund.

The ESA program funds will be managed through Odyssey, a New York-based education technology company. Funds within an ESA will remain in the state’s possession until the student’s parent or guardian approves the private school’s invoice requesting payment for tuition and associated fees.

Students’ accounts will begin receiving funding July 15, the governor’s office said.

While final numbers remain unconfirmed, 40% of the applications approved — roughly 7,000 — are students currently attending a public school who plan to move to an accredited private school using ESA funds. The remaining 60% are students already attending accredited private schools.

For the 2023-24 school year, current private school students are only eligible to create an account if their family has a household income up to 300% of the federal poverty line (FPL) — roughly $90,000 for a family of four.

That threshold will raise to a maximum of 400% of the federal poverty line in the 2024-25 school year; all Iowans, regardless of income, will be eligible for ESAs from the program’s third year forward.

The governor’s office reported that among approved applicants:

• 14% have household incomes below 100% of the FPL — $30,000 or less for a family of four.
• 31% have household incomes between 101% and 200% of the FPL — between $30,000 and $60,000.
• 36% have household incomes between 201% and 300% the FPL — between $60,000 and $90,000.
• 19% have household incomes above 300% the FPL — more than $90,000 for a family of four.

Some opponents of the ESA program say the program will hurt Iowa’s public education system. The program diverts the $7,635 per-pupil funding for a student from their public school district to the ESA account. Reynolds and Republicans have argued that the law’s provision granting public school districts $1,205 in state funding for each private school student with an ESA in their district will offset the lost funding.

Mike Beranek, president of the Iowa State Education Association said the money being used to fund the ESA program could be used to help improve Iowa’s public schools and “give every student an equal chance for success.”

“Unfortunately for Iowans, the governor and the majority party in the statehouse have decided that unlimited budgets are reserved for just a select few Iowans,” Beranek said in a statement. “A voucher program that would initially have cost Iowa taxpayers almost a billion dollars over the next three years will cost Iowans even more.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

The Arkansas Department of Education began accepting applications for a new school voucher program last week after the state Supreme Court lifted a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of the LEARNS Act.

The department opened the application window with little fanfare and has declined to answer the Advocate’s questions about the program or the application process amid the continuing litigation.

A legislative priority of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, created the Educational Freedom Account program that will provide up to 90% of the annual per-student public school funding rate for use on allowable expenses, including private school tuition. That’s roughly $6,600 per account for the 2023-24 school year, .

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The program will be phased in over three years and absorbs the Succeed Scholarship Program, which provides about $7,400 for private school tuition for students with disabilities, foster children and military families.

Mary Catherine Paulus of Little Rock was told her seven-year-old son would be grandfathered into the new program as a current Succeed Scholarship recipient, but said there’s been a lot of confusion and uncertainty surrounding next steps.

Since the law was passed in March, Paulus said she’s reached out to the Arkansas Department of Education and The Reform Alliance, the nonprofit organization that administered the Succeed Scholarship, with questions about the process.

More recently, she’s learned information about enrolling her son in the program by communicating with other parents who are in a similar situation.

“It’s really confusing and for me, if I didn’t know any other parents in this world, I would be lost,” Paulus said. “Even with the help of The Reform Alliance, I mean they’re one organization and they’re helping a lot of families. So you really need a network of other moms and dads because different people are going to know different things.”

A lawsuit challenging the LEARNS Act’s effective date has added to the confusion of navigating a new application process. According to an from Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, the EFA program was set to launch June 1, but that was put on hold when a judge issued a temporary restraining order that .

The Arkansas Supreme Court . When asked on June 16 when ADE would launch the EFA program, a spokeswoman told the Advocate to refer questions about the LEARNS Act to the attorney general’s office because “we are currently engaged in an active lawsuit.”

On June 19, an attorney general spokesperson responded to emailed questions saying, “Following the Arkansas Supreme Court’s vacating of the Temporary Restraining Order, we reaffirm what we previously said: The Department of Education can get back to implementing LEARNS. Please see the LEARNS website at for the latest updates.”

Paulus received an email from the Reform Alliance on June 20 that the EFA portal was open. The email contained a link to the , but that same link wasn’t added to the homepage of the LEARNS website until Tuesday morning.

The email was confusing to Paulus, who said she had reapplied for her son through the old Succeed Scholarship process in the spring, per The Reform Alliance’s instructions. She later received clarification that her son’s application needed to be resubmitted through the new portal.

When Paulus completed the new application process last week and received confirmation, she said it was “really a great feeling.”

Paulus also decided to apply for her daughter who’s entering kindergarten this year once a father with a special needs child told her new applicants could apply, not just former Succeed Scholarship recipients.

In the first year of the program, eligible participants include students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, foster children, children of active duty military members, students enrolled in an “F”-rated school or school in need of Level 5 support, and students enrolling in kindergarten for the first time.

According to the application, students will be accepted on a rolling basis until Aug. 1. After that, students may be accepted on a one-off basis pending program funding availability.

ADE is also interested in becoming EFA participants. Schools that did not previously participate in the Succeed Scholarship Program must apply by Friday, June 30. Schools will be accepted on a rolling basis, and private schools will be immediately deemed as eligible once approved by ADE.

Student EFA participation in the 2023-24 school year will be capped at 1.5% of the current public school enrollment in the state, or 7,148 students. As of April, 760 students were enrolled in the Succeed Scholarship program, according to ADE.

Paulus’ son received the Succeed Scholarship for the first time during the 2022-23 academic year. When he started public school in 2021, he needed a higher level of support than the school could provide, Paulus said, so they switched to private school, where she said he’s thriving.

Raising children is expensive, Paulus said, especially children with special needs, and the Succeed Scholarship can alleviate some of the financial burden of families taking steps to support their children.

“We’re always in the car going to therapy and that’s time and that’s money for gas and babysitters to watch younger siblings if they can’t go,” she said.

Even though there has been confusion about the application process and glitches with the portal, Paulus said ADE and The Reform Alliance have done a decent job answering questions, considering the circumstances.

“Because of the lawsuit, something that was already kind of a tight timeframe, it just further truncated that and so everybody’s sort of scrambling to do their part, but there’s a lot of information to get out,” she said.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herbert Wright on June 20 heard oral arguments in the lawsuit challenging the validity of the LEARNS Act’s emergency clause, which would allow it to go into effect immediately, instead of 91 days after the legislative session ends.

Wright said he would issue a ruling within two weeks. If the emergency clause is ruled invalid, the law wouldn’t go into effect until Aug. 1, again delaying implementation of LEARNS Act provisions like the EFA program.

The ruling could be appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which has a vacancy following . Gov. Sanders will be responsible for appointing a justice to fill Wynne’s seat until an election can be held.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com. Follow Arkansas Advocate on and .

But the work of policy reform is just beginning. And, as we argue in a new Manhattan Institute , there is a tremendous amount of work to do, especially with respect to ESA programs.

The history of education reform is littered with programs that were announced with great fanfare, only to fall apart because of a failure to attend to the crucially important challenge of implementation. Legislation is simply words on a page. It is the administration of these programs, and tens of thousands of private decisions by would-be participants — families, schools, other providers — that determine whether they succeed or fail.

Our report highlights four areas that those implementing ESA programs must attend to.

First, resist the temptation to declare victory when a program is passed. ESAs are wonderful in theory, but they are not a panacea. Difficulties in implementation have arguably the effectiveness of private school choice programs in the past, and ESAs are even more complex. Attending to these issues is critical to ensuring that they will work in the lives of real families. Our report discusses several categories of implementation challenges.

Perhaps the most important decision needs to be made quickly: Who administers the program, and how? Unlike earlier school choice models, ESAs are more than scholarship programs. Families can use ESA funds for a range of expenses, and with numerous providers. This makes an efficient, user-friendly and low-glitch platform where families and providers can conduct transactions essential. Without this, the whole program will fall apart.

Second, don’t put the accountability cart before the administration horse. Already, even many ESA supporters cannot seem to help focusing first on how to regulate and punish wayward providers and participants. 

While avoiding fraud is important, at this stage, it shouldn’t take administrators’ eyes off much more pressing issues like ensuring that parents’ efforts to enroll their children go seamlessly, and making sure that providers are paid promptly. These are not small tasks. For example, in the week after Iowa’s ESA program opened May 31, the state received over 15,500 applications from families wishing to participate. There is a risk, to be sure, that some will push the edge of acceptable spending. But that risk is nothing compared with the risk of parents unable to access their ESA funds or service providers going , as has already happened in Arizona.

The political embarrassment of a few misspending decisions can be offset by tens of thousands of satisfied families. But turbulent administration that prevents parents from participating will be a death blow. Administrators and advocates should focus first and foremost on recruiting as many families to participate as possible, making clear what expenses are permitted and trusting parents with the funds allocated to their children’s education. Audits can take care of financial accountability.

Third, inform parents about their choices. One reason that ESAs initially will be used primarily for private school tuition is that, although customized education sounds wonderful in theory, most parents have no idea how to go about it. Indeed, many families are completely unaware that their state has a parental-choice program at all. Organizations focusing on educating parents about their options already exist in some states; replicating their success is essential.  

Fourth, attend to the religious liberty of participating schools. Nothing deters schools from participating in choice programs more than legitimate worries that doing so will require them to compromise their religious ethos. This concern must be taken seriously. If high-quality schools refuse to participate, programs will flounder. It is therefore essential to jealously guard their autonomy.

Thankfully, most ESA legislation includes robust religious liberty protections. For example, states that no provider is required to alter its creed, practices, admission policy, hiring policy or curriculum in order to participate. Other states’ statutes contain similar protections. It is essential to communicate this to school leaders and continue, as program regulations unfold, to guard against encroachments on participants’ first freedom.

Sir Roger Scruton wrote in , “The work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating: the work of creation slow, laborious and dull.” Getting new school choice laws passed has been exhilarating (if not quick or easy), but now the real work begins. 

We are heartened that advocates are aware of, and working to address, the challenges of implementing education savings account programs. Their efforts will not make headlines or choice advocates’ Twitter feeds. But they will determine whether this moment in education reform will prove as transformational as we hope. We cannot understate its importance.

And while a few charter and school choice leaders are quietly supporting the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, seeing it as a watershed moment for religious freedom, others are saying, in so many words: Be careful not to drown.

While public funding would bring unprecedented growth and financial stability to such programs, it could also create a fraught path to the religious freedom they’re seeking, as the burden of complying with court orders and myriad regulations, which even autonomous charters face, could be overwhelming. 

The school and others like it will almost certainly be tied up in litigation for months or years, said Greg Richmond, of the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools. And that’ll be bad, since it will take precious autonomy away from what should be independent schools’ sole decision-making power.

Richmond said he looked the other day at the website and counted more than 150 regulations, including meeting agenda formats, residency requirements, Open Records Acts rules and more. 

“It’s odd to try to fit a religious school into that regulated charter framework,” he said. “The accountability that comes with charter schools, I think, would be a shock to many Catholic schools in terms of the quantity of measures — academically, financially, operationally.”

That said, what happens when a Catholic charter school teacher, for instance, takes to Facebook to advocate for abortion rights? Are the teacher’s free speech rights protected, as in a public school? Or can the charter school dismiss her because she’s advocating against the teachings of the church?

For their part, charter proponents fear that while the new school may be a good political fit in deep-red Oklahoma, the legal precedent it sets could both damage and perhaps even decimate the larger charter sector in coming years. “It will give opponents of charter schools yet another reason to claim charter schools are not public schools,” said Richmond, who formerly led the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. “So that does represent a threat to charter schools.”

Aside from betraying charter schools’ implicit vow to welcome and educate all students, they say it could further erode charters’ , especially in blue states. They’ve vowed to fight what could soon be one of their own.

In the most recent development, Oklahoma’s virtual charter school board last month turned down an application from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City to open the new virtual school, a move that proponents say was largely pro forma. 

But Nina Rees, president and chief executive officer of the , said the board’s hesitation likely stemmed from “the strong probability of breaking state law if the school is approved. Should a charter school be authorized that falls outside the scope of the law, it will certainly be challenged in court, and we will be on the side of those seeking to uphold the law and affirm the public, non-sectarian nature of charter schools.”

Public or private actors?

While the Oklahoma case plays out, both sides say the coming weeks could also set in motion one of the most consequential federal court decisions ever about the future of charter schools: The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide whether to take up a that could wreak havoc with the bedrock idea that charter schools are public schools, as they’ve maintained since the first one opened more than 30 years ago.

The case, , pits three female students against their “traditional values” school, which has required that they wear skirts. In doing so, they say, the school violated their civil rights — its founder has called female students “fragile vessels” and believes the dress code will preserve chivalry, ensuring that girls are treated “courteously and more gently than boys.”

In court filings, the school argued that even though it enjoys public funding, it is a private entity and not a “state actor,” like district schools. So the Constitution’s 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to it, the school maintained. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond last year rejected that argument, setting up a possible hearing in Washington, D.C., before a high court that has already struck down states’ so-called Blaine amendments, allowing public funds to flow to religious schools in small communities without sufficient school capacity.

“It’s not a new conversation,” said Rees. “What’s new about it is that we have a more conservative Supreme Court.”

For Rees, who served as a top official in George W. Bush’s Education Department, the truth of the matter seems clear: “As public schools, we can’t teach religion.”

They also must open their doors to anyone, both students and staff, she said. That could potentially bump up against schools that, as private operations, can openly reject candidates that don’t uphold their beliefs.

Rees and others say the path forward for funding these schools would more appropriately — and legally — be found in another recent development taking place in statehouses nationwide: taxpayer-funded education savings accounts, or ESAs, vouchers and tax credits, which in a few states offer as much money to families for private schooling as charter schools get per pupil.

“In some respects, if you wanted to promote religious education,” Rees said, “the ESA route will get you to that end goal faster, without rules and regulations that come if you open a religious charter school.”

In January, the charter school network Great Hearts, which operates classical education schools in four states and online, said it was doing just that: It announced it was opening a pair of Christian academies in the Phoenix area. But the schools, the network said, would be , funded by the state’s ESA program. 

Jay Heiler, Great Hearts’ CEO, said Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are worth about $7,000 per student, not quite enough to fund a successful private school, but enough “when supplemented with some philanthropic effort, which we’re out there pushing to try to make ends meet, partner-to-partner, with churches that have some existing classroom infrastructure.”

But Brett Farley, executive director of the , which represents the church on public policy issues, said that in most states, ESAs don’t typically provide anything near full per-pupil funding, leaving students a dearth of options, especially in rural areas.

While Rees’ group has vowed to oppose schools like St. Isidore and efforts to reframe charters as private actors, others aren’t so sure. 

Heiler said Great Hearts, which has operated charter schools for more than 20 years, “will continue to follow that pathway,” keeping its religious schools private. But it also in the North Carolina case, arguing that the Supreme Court should decide that charter schools “are not presumptive state actors.” Failure to do so, it said, “will wreak havoc” on education systems more broadly and innovative charters specifically. 

Held up in court ‘for a long time’

Farley said the Oklahoma virtual charter board’s rejection last month was largely routine, giving the archdiocese 30 days to revise aspects of the plan that include how they’ll provide rural broadband statewide and special education services to disabled students. He said the board also wanted to know more about how the archdiocese will address the question of whether a religious public school violates state statute.

“We’re confident we’ll be able to answer all three of those questions sufficiently, and then we’ll move on to a vote,” he said. He anticipated that approval would take place in June. 

But in interviews, he whether the new virtual school would admit LGBTQ students or hire such staff members, saying it would follow state regulations while maintaining its right to operate according to religious beliefs. Asked if gay, lesbian or transgender educators are invited to apply for employment at the school, Farley declined to comment. Like other public schools, charters are prohibited from discriminating based on religious belief, gender identity or similar factors.

He has said he believes that charter schools are non-state actors — Oklahoma’s charter framework, he said, is “very loose.”

M. Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the charter authorizers’ group, said even Oklahoma law is clear: It’s unlawful for a public school, including a charter school, to provide a sectarian education.

Whatever happens with the Oklahoma board, Rausch said, the case will be tied up in litigation “for a long time.”

If the Oklahoma board ultimately rejects the St. Isidore application, the archdiocese can appeal the decision to the state board of education.

Gov. Kevin Stitt has for the effort, but new Attorney General Gentner Drummond has slightly complicated the process: In February, he withdrew an opinion from his predecessor that said the state board would be on solid legal ground if it approved a religious charter school. 

His said state law is “currently unsettled” as to whether charter schools are so-called “state actors” or private school operators. Like many in the sector, he’s awaiting the decision in the North Carolina case.

‘Proceed with caution’

Kathleen Porter-Magee, superintendent of , a network of 11 independent Catholic elementary schools in New York City and Cleveland, said high-performing private schools like hers would love the extra per-pupil allotment that comes with being a charter school: It costs her about $11,500 per student to keep the doors open, yet her students bring in just $800 apiece from New York state in the form of reimbursements for such as required assessments, immunizations and attendance reports. 

Were Partnership’s New York schools to become charters, they’d stand to bring in more than $16,000 per pupil, which the city’s charter schools typically receive, and about half of what they’d get if they were district schools. “We wouldn’t know what to do with that much money,” she said. “It would be just absolutely game-changing for us.”

But it would also complicate matters. “How much freedom do those religious organizations have to live out their faith every day if they are technically running public charter schools?” she asked.

Like many in the school choice world, she’s closely watching what happens in Oklahoma. She’s “deeply conflicted” about the case: Denying public funding to non-profits because of their religious status “feels wrong,” she said, so she supports the archdiocese’s application for charter status.

“From a constitutional standpoint, I think it is the right decision. I think it makes sense. But I just think it’s like, ‘Proceed with caution.’ ”

The two dominant forms of school choice, charter schools and private school vouchers, have moved on parallel tracks since the 1990s. Now, the emergence of education savings accounts could bring these paths together.

Charter schools, first established in 1991 and now educating roughly 3.7 million students, have been called many things, including labs of innovation and incubators for excellent teachers and leaders. Many charters place their mission right in the school’s name: Success Academy, Knowledge is Power Program and Excel Academy, to name a few.

But not all the descriptions are positive. As a presidential hopeful, Sen. Elizabeth Warren publicly called charters a “” on the system, and Sen. Bernie Sanders did the same. Others have gone so far as to accuse charter schools of implementing a new . More recently, the Biden administration proposed and implemented new federal that limit charter school autonomy and growth.

The charter landscape has become the site of entrenched education forces’ last stand. Unable to stop parents from exiting public schools for private in during the pandemic, many school boards and teachers’ unions became determined at least to block the creation of more charters. According to compiled by the National Association of Public Charter Schools, new school openings are at their lowest levels since 1998. In Philadelphia, for instance, the school board a single new charter school since it was returned to local control by the state in 2018.

At the same time, just this year, 29 states have introduced legislation that would create education savings accounts. Iowa and raced to pass the year’s first ESA bill, recently followed suit and latest school choice expansion is headed to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s desk. These programs allow state dollars to follow students to the educational setting selected by their parents — not to the one dictated by their zip codes. While the dollar amounts vary from state to state, the programs tend to fund students at levels between 50% and 80% of what would go to a public school.

Despite this lack of funding parity, charter school leaders (or prospective founders) should ask: What is the best path that will allow me to serve students in need of better options? In states where recalcitrant school boards stifle education best practices evidenced in many charter schools, the answer may be found in converting from a charter to a private school. Indeed, at least one charter school , Great Hearts, is making the move. 

Three things stand out as reasons why charter school leaders and board members might consider making the switch.

First, in places where charters are authorized by local public school districts, ESAs give the option of decoupling. The relationship between a charter and its authorizing school board is often a tenuous one, where charters must show they can do more with less while remaining in the district’s good graces.

Second, though not exempt from the culture wars, private schools have largely avoided the fraught standoffs seen over the last few years, which can be a tremendous challenge for school operators and limit the true goal of educating children. Furthermore, as publicly elected bodies, school boards raging against one set of curricula in 2023 may embrace the very same ideas after the next election. Private schools can remain mission-driven, and parents know what to expect, consistently, from year-to-year. 

Finally, escaping public school bureaucracy helps to keep the main thing the main thing — delivering instruction to students. Recent indicates that most teachers would like to spend less time on administrative work and more time teaching. But as compared to their peers at private schools, charter school educators must complete myriad compliance reports that merely document a job well done rather than adding value to a student’s experience. 

Some of the best educators and school leaders I know work in charter schools, and their success often has little to do with being inextricably linked to a school district. Those schools would be just as committed to serving their communities, focused on excellent results and responsive to parents if they were organized under a slightly different section of the state education code. 

In 2023, with four ESAs available to all families having been signed into law in as many months, it is clear that there is no stopping the education reform revolution. The charter sector has a golden opportunity to be part of it, or to be left behind. As ESAs expand nationwide, innovative educators will take serious note of which option allows them to best serve students. In states that have both charter regulations that burden operators and emerging private choice options, it would not be surprising to see many take a dramatically different path.

The COVID pandemic — the topic that has dominated education conversations for the past three years — is largely missing from the State of the State addresses that governors are delivering to their legislatures this winter. 

Instead, state leaders are using their bully pulpits to call for bigger investments in early learning and in the transition into the workforce and college. They are supporting better pay for public school teachers while pushing for public money to flow to private schools, which could ultimately make it more difficult to fund public school pay increases. 

FutureEd speeches and partnered with The 74 to convert our analysis into a series of interactive maps. We found that despite the academic gaps exposed in last year’s National Assessment for Educational Progress scores, there was surprisingly little talk of learning loss and efforts to catch students up. There was also little explicit “culture war” rhetoric around teaching racial history or banning books — and more lofty talk about the value of education.

“Education is a great equalizer in our society,” said Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in her Feb. 14 address to the Maine legislature. “Every child, regardless of where they live, deserves a world-class education that will prepare them for a successful adulthood.”

Here are some of the topics trending among the nation’s governors this year:

(Click here if you are having trouble viewing maps)

Teaching Profession

The teaching profession was a top priority across party lines, with 24 governors discussing ways to improve pay and support educators. Most of those governors proposed raising salaries, largely in response to shortages in their states but also as a way to recognize the important role teachers play. 

In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andrew Beshear is supporting an across-the-board 5% pay hike, which he called “both vital and necessary to address Kentucky’s shortage of nearly 11,000 public school teachers.” Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little also pledged to increase salaries — both for starting teachers and for all instructors — by an average of $6,300 annually because “students and their families deserve quality teachers who are respected and compensated competitively.”

South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster took a different approach, offering both salary increases and one-time $2,500 retention bonuses, paid out in two installments. Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants to provide retention bonuses as well as $50 million in performance-based compensations. Republican state leaders began supporting teacher pay hikes in response to against low pay in red states in the years before the pandemic — perhaps realizing that many rank-and-file teachers in their states are Republicans, even though teacher unions, favorite Republican political foils, lean left.

Governors also pitched additional strategies to address recruitment and retention challenges. Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore is pushing legislation to strengthen the teacher pipeline with loan forgiveness, fellowships and grow-your-own programs. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is proposing grants to help paraprofessionals become teachers. Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is adding $30 million to provide stipends and tuition for student teachers. And in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced plans to invest more than $20 million in recruiting, developing, and retaining teachers and student teachers.

School Choice

Unlike the bipartisan support for teacher compensation, the school choice proposals in 15 State of the State addresses nearly all came from Republican governors. The only Democratic governor to broach the subject, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, pledged to provide more accountability for a broad expansion of education savings accounts that her predecessor pushed through the legislature. “Any school that accepts taxpayer dollars should have to abide by the same accountability standards that all district schools do,” she said. 

Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds proposed, and has since signed, a measure that would provide nearly $8,000 in state funding to each family who sends their child to a private school — the same amount the state provides for each public school student. “Every parent should have a choice of where to send their child — and that choice shouldn’t be limited to families who can afford it,” she said. Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine proposed expanding eligibility for the state’s voucher program to include middle-class families. He also proposed increasing funding for charter schools.

Some governors emphasized the importance of parents in making educational decisions for their children, including Idaho’s Little, who plans to make permanent a grant program that helps families pay for such educational expenses as computers, instructional materials and tutoring.

While school choice programs open to all students, like those in Iowa and Arizona, are drawing much of the attention — and criticism — this year, governors in Nebraska and South Dakota have focused specifically on children in need, including those in foster care or living in poverty.

Curriculum and Instruction

With support for the “science of reading” sweeping the country, governors are responding with calls for explicit, evidence-based reading instruction. “The evidence is clear. The verdict is in. There is a great deal of research about how we learn to read. And today, we understand the great value and importance of phonics,” said Ohio’s DeWine, one of 11 governors who mentioned literacy in their speeches; altogether, 19 proposed some sort of curriculum initiatives or restrictions.

Some governors, such as Iowa’s Reynolds, are focusing on training teachers to implement reading initiatives. Youngkin called for extending the use of reading specialists under the Virginia Literacy Act to fifth grade.

In Wisconsin, Evers announced a $20 million investment to increase literacy programming and implement evidence-based reading practices. He, along with Youngkin and Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, also proposed investments in high-quality math curricula, training and support. 

In Nevada, Lombardo wants to reinstate a rule holding back students who aren’t reading proficiently, and Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb is proposing to reward schools that improve their third-grade reading results. 

This focus on literacy and academic initiatives marks a big shift from last year, when culture wars and critical race theory were prominent in the State of the State addresses. Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is one of the exceptions, with comments on gender and sexuality. “There is no room in our schools for policies that attempt to undercut parents and require the usage of pronouns or names that fail to correspond with reality,” he said in proposing a Parents’ Bill of Rights requiring schools to “adhere to the will of the parents” on such matters.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott framed his push for education savings accounts as a way to empower parents and to fight “woke agendas” and “indoctrination.” Likewise, West Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Justice voiced support for “parents’ rights” by directing school districts to make all curricula available online, “where we can see every single thing that’s being put into our little kids’ heads.”

In Illinois, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker spoke out against restricting what’s taught in schools, saying it undermines historic investments in education. “It’s all meaningless if we become a nation that bans books from school libraries about racism suffered by Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron, and tells kids they can’t talk about being gay, and signals to Black and brown people and Asian Americans and Jews and Muslims that our authentic stories can’t be told,” he said.

Higher Education

College affordability emerged as a top priority among the 23 governors who mentioned higher education, but their proposed solutions differed across party lines. Governors from both parties called for expanded scholarship programs, but only Republicans — from South Carolina, Utah and Virginia — called for tuition freezes. GOP governors were also the only ones to mention repairing aging campus buildings, with proposed investments ranging from $65 million in Nevada to $275 million in Missouri. 

New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham touted her state’s program that provides free public higher education to all state residents, and Illinois’s Pritzker pledged another $100 million for scholarships helping to make community college free for eligible students. Others pushed for expanded scholarship programs: Arizona’s Hobbs is allocating $40 million to create the Promise for DREAMers Scholarship Program, while North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum is doubling his state’s investment in the Native American Scholarship program. Governors in other states, including Montana, Georgia and Hawaii, emphasized the need for expanded scholarships and programs to encourage students to become health care providers. 

Several governors proposed using these investments to encourage students to stay in their state for college and ideally, for their careers. Indiana’s Holcomb pitched a $184 million increase in higher education funding to reward universities “for keeping their graduates in careers in our state. After all, Indiana’s college campuses need to be the epicenters of brain gain — not brain drain!” Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen offered $39.4 million to fund over 4,200 scholarships for Nebraska students attending school in state.

Workforce Development

At least 29 governors across the political spectrum voiced support for improving students’ career readiness, including through apprenticeships and dual-enrollment programs. 

Virginia’s Youngkin hopes to accelerate dual-enrollment partnerships between high schools and community colleges so that eventually, “every child graduates with an industry recognized credential.” Kentucky’s Beshear announced a $245 million investment to renovate and rebuild career and technical centers in high schools. And Colorado’s Polis argued for career-connected learning in high school. 

Apprenticeships were a large focus, with Iowa’s Reynolds increasing funding for health care apprenticeships, Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson expanding apprenticeships in areas such as information technology and public safety, and Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte doubling the Trades Education Credit. Wisconsin’s Evers is connecting apprenticeships to other initiatives, including through a $10 million investment in clean energy job training and reemployment.

Early Education

Even as Congress failed to fund early care and early education in , 20 governors from both parties made the early years a priority in their speeches. 

Pritzker announced a broad Smart Start Illinois plan to expand access to pre-K and child care, help build new facilities and ramp up home visiting programs for young families. While only Democratic governors — including those in Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and New Mexico — discussed the need for universal pre-K, several Republican governors also advocated for expanding early learning and child care options, particularly better access for kids from low-income families. For example, Missouri’s Parson is planning to invest $56 million to expand pre-K options for low-income children, and Nevada’s Lombardo is providing $60 million for similar efforts. 

Governors are also calling for bureaucratic changes: New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to make it easier for eligible parents to access child care assistance, saying, “Less than 10% of families who are eligible … are actually enrolled. This is the legacy of a system that is difficult to navigate — by design. That has to change.” Similarly, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem said her state would work with providers to overhaul rules and regulations. 

Mental Health

Sixteen governors acknowledged the rise in  post-pandemic and the need to expand access to services, particularly for children and teens. Some focused specifically on school-based services, while others supported community-based approaches.

Several Democratic governors called for increasing the number of school counselors, psychologists and social workers, including Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who is proposing to expand Mental Health Intervention Teams in schools. In Wisconsin, Evers announced he is investing more than $270 million to allow every district to expand school-based mental health services.

Though largely a priority among Democrats, mental health also came up in a few Republican speeches: Missouri’s Parson proposed an additional $3.5 million for more youth behavioral-health liaisons, and Ohio’s DeWine hopes to address the shortage of pediatric behavioral-health professionals and facilities. 

While the culture wars and other divisive political issues continue to play out in schools and colleges, it is perhaps encouraging to see significant numbers of state leaders from both parties proposing pragmatic policy responses to teacher shortages, student mental health needs, low reading scores and other systemic challenges facing the nation’s educators.

Maps by The 74’s Meghan Gallagher

A proposal that would have made Michigan home to one of the largest voucher-like systems in the country is in jeopardy after the victory Tuesday night of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the likely emergence of a Democratic state legislature.

Whitmer handily defeated Trump-endorsed Republican Tudor Dixon. But it is the possibility of Michigan’s first Democratic “trifecta” since 1984 that could kill the proposal to create Education Savings Accounts in the state. Even if voters collected enough signatures to put the matter to a vote in the legislature, Democrats would almost certainly reject it, experts say.

A proposal before Michigan voters would create one of the largest voucher-like systems in the country, with the potential to offer more than a half-billion dollars in public funds for students to attend private schools.

There’s just one hitch: Most residents have never heard of it.

In a recent statewide , 93% of the electorate knew little or nothing about the proposal, which has been enthusiastically backed by former education secretary Betsy DeVos and her family, who have donated $4 million to the cause. The proposal would create Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) that offer 100 percent tax credit for donations to “opportunity scholarships” that pay for private school tuition and other educational services. 

“There’s always conversations about vouchers,” said Terah Chambers of East Lansing. “But I haven’t heard anything from parents or others in my district about this initiative.”

Chambers serves on the board of her local school district, where her son is in sixth grade. She is also a professor of education, focusing on K-12 administration, at Michigan State University. If anyone would be expected to understand the complexities of the state’s proposed school choice initiative — or hear other parents’ concerns — it would be her.

But that’s not the case. 

“I’m an education policy scholar and I don’t always understand the nuances of these types of initiatives,” she said. “They can be intentionally written in a way that masks the motivation and impact. Of course people will have trouble understanding them.”

Michigan has long debated vouchers and school choice. So far, to overturn a constitutional amendment barring public funds from going to private schools have failed. In 2000, the state emphatically defeated a voucher initiative. But there’s some evidence that the times have changed as the pandemic exacerbated existing educational inequities and fueled parent discontent. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court has in recent years shown itself willing to embrace broad definitions of

Along with the funds from DeVos and her family, “Let MI Kids Learn” — the political action committee backing the initiative — has received another $4 million from other supporters. 

But few potential voters are focused on the measure.

A May conducted by EPIC-MRA, a Michigan-based polling company, found that 93 percent of Michigan voters knew little or nothing about the proposal. After respondents heard a neutral message explaining the initiative, 36 percent supported it and 48 percent opposed it, with 16 percent undecided. That reflects a majority of Democrats and plurality of Republicans, said Bernie Porn, the company’s president.

The lack of attention is in inverse proportion to the proposal’s possible outsized impact. It would create one of the largest ESA programs in the country in terms of how much money it can divert from the state, according to Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University.

The scholarship fund has a $500 million cap the first year, and could increase by 20 percent annually depending on how much of the fund is distributed.

 ‘Tax shelters for the wealthy’

Michigan’s scholarship proposal is modeled on one passed in Kentucky, said Beth DeShone, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, an advocacy group established by DeVos. The Kentucky program is currently being in court. The Franklin District Court that the program violated a provision in the state constitution that prohibits using private money for public education. The decision was appealed, and the state’s Supreme Court arguments in October.

This type of initiative “is distinctly different than a state voucher that is normally given directly to a private school,” DeShone added. “Here, the families completely control where those dollars go and who the service provider will be. We fully believe that families need every opportunity in their toolbox to meet the needs of their individual students.”

The Michigan scholarships would be available to all students five years old or over whose family is defined as low-income under the proposal’s formula, has a disability or is in foster care. The money is expected to primarily fund private school tuition, but can also be used for tutoring, transportation and other education needs, according to Michael Van Beek, director of research at the conservative , a Michigan think tank. 

Education choice has also been a hot topic in the Michigan governor’s race. Democratic incumbent Gretchen Whitmer opposes the education proposal, while her Republican challenger Tudor Dixon it. DeVos is also a big Dixon supporter and has contributed at least to her campaign.

Last year, both houses of the Michigan legislature passed bills that would have created ESAs, but Whitmer vetoed them, they would “turn private schools into tax shelters for the wealthy.”

In most other states, that would be the end of the story: Advocates would have to wait for a more sympathetic governor or put it before voters in 2024. But in Michigan, supporters have : Residents can petition to send the matter to the legislature. They have already turned in the needed number of signatures (8 percent of those who voted in the last gubernatorial election — in this case, 340,047 signatures) and once they are certified by the secretary of state, the proposal will go before the legislature. 

If it passes, the governor cannot veto it. If it is defeated or not acted upon, it will go before voters in 2024. 

The idea was that the Republican-dominated legislature would “rubber stamp” the initiative, said Bill Ballenger, a political pundit who served as a Republican state legislator almost 50 years ago and now publishes , an irreverent look at Michigan politics. “It would be an end-run around the governor.”

But he predicted Benson will not submit the initiative to the legislature until after the Nov. 8 election.

And since an independent commission redrew the state’s districts, “everything is up for grabs,” Ballenger said. “There is rampant speculation about whether the Republicans will control one or both of the Houses or if the Democrats will.” And while Whitmer is still ahead of Dixon in most , her lead is shrinking as the election nears.

Ballenger, noting the 2000 that “got killed,” nonetheless wonders if “the pandemic has shifted public opinion.” But he still believes the measure will be defeated if it goes on the ballot in 2024.

‘Money should follow the child’

Unlike most potential voters in the state, Katie Woodhams, a mother of three in the Kalamazoo area, is well-aware of the opportunity scholarships and is a big supporter.  

Her oldest, a high school freshman, has high-functioning autism and does most of his schooling remotely. But he participates in archery on-site. He can also meet with teachers at school or, if room is available, sit in on a class. 

Her middle son is attending seventh grade in-class in a public school, but was previously enrolled in virtual learning because of severe asthma. And her daughter, a first-grader, is also going virtual for the time being.

The schooling is provided without cost through the public system, and she believes her children have received “a great education.” She’s become a strong advocate for choice, she said, because that’s what her children have enjoyed.

“It’s extremely important we are funding the students and not funding systems,” she said, echoing a common message among supporters. 

She’d also like financial help, which the act could give, to provide sports for her middle son, arts programs for her daughter and social coaching for her older son; Woodhams said she and her husband now pay $150 monthly for the social skills coaching.

Part of the trouble are widely conflicting estimates about how the tax credits — which allow residents to divert state taxes to the scholarships — will affect spending on public education. Much of that depends on how many students now going to public schools would use scholarships to switch to private schools. 

Based on conducted by the nonprofit , 60-90 percent of scholarship uses would come from public schools, Van Beek, of the Mackinac Center, said. The financial impact on the state would be minimal, because what it would lose in taxes, it would gain by not paying for students who have left public education, he added. 

Cowen, who has researched voucher programs around the country for 17 years — including five as an official evaluator of Wisconsin’s voucher program —noted that both Arizona and New Hampshire recently expanded private school voucher programs. In Arizona, 75 percent of the new voucher users were students already in private schools and in New Hampshire, that figure was 90 percent.

“Don’t take my word for it, don’t take Mackinac’s word, look what happened in other states,” he said.

Peeling back the layers

The main group opposing the initiative, the coalition, has raised far less money than its opposition — Mark Schauer, treasurer of the opposition coalition, argues that the program has “the potential to siphon up to $1 billion in public tax dollars away from the state.”&�Բ�����;

Chambers, the school board member and education professor, worries that the proposal “is a mechanism to put public funds into private hands. The trouble with initiatives like this is that they sound great on paper — who wants to oppose the idea of opportunity scholarships — but if you peel back the layers, this will not help us accomplish what we want to in this state.”

Despite a very favorable education budget passed by the state last year, Chambers said the state is facing “a long-time disinvestment in education that is cumulative.” She pointed to the fact the state ranked in the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress released in October. 

One thing that is often lost in school choice debates, Cowen said, is how students do academically. , especially more recent studies, shows that children who use vouchers to move to private schools often do worse academically based on standardized test scores than comparable students in public schools. That’s because there simply aren’t enough good private schools to serve at-risk students, he said. 

For Bernita Bradley, a Detroit resident and a director with the National Parents Union, a network of parent organizations and activists, neither side is looking out for the interests of Black and brown children.

She has tried city and suburban public, charter and private schools for her children and wasn’t satisfied with any of them. She agrees with Republicans that “money should follow the child,” but asks, “Who’s going to make sure that’s equitably done?”

For that reason, she practices what she calls “extreme choice.” In 2020, she started , a homeschooling co-op and advocacy network. She homeschooled her own daughter, who has now graduated, for a year and a half. 

Lack of satisfactory educational opportunities for many of Michigan’s children “is not a pandemic thing, or a last 10- or 20-years thing,” she said. “This has been going on for generations.”