The school choice movement finally has the federal platform it never really needed. Donald Trump, in campaign mode, pledged to invest $20 billion in private school vouchers for poor children—an epic sum that will likely fund a federal version of the tuition tax credit scholarships 17 states already offer. Right-of-center witnesses to two cycles of centrally driven education reform warn against a repeat performance: Further federal overreach could hobble the school choice movement’s stalwart state-level march, coopting and corrupting its quiet gains.
State legislatures make regional headlines when, say, Kentucky’s legislature approves publicly funded independently run charter schools for the first time, as they did last month. But the movement’s momentum belongs to students and their parents, insofar as incremental innovations follow a desire for more options than the school district offers. Just out of reach from the feds, for now, parents have already begun to rebuild public education from the ground up. Active in four states, and making steady gains in seven more statehouses, the education savings account (ESA) is the purest iteration of this parental-intuition premise: Parents know what is best for their children, and children often guide them, as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the school choice champion in chief, often says.
The ESA is a publicly funded limited-use debit card for approved educational expenses: private school tuition, textbooks, online lessons, tutoring fees, community college courses, even college tuition savings. The nation’s first, Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, flows a full 90 percent of the public money a child’s education costs the state into a quarterly replenished, and regularly audited, debit account. In its first two years, Arizona’s ESA exclusively served children with special needs—as do similar programs in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida. But since then, a succession of expansion bills extended Arizona’s education debit account to children opting out of failing public schools, children adopted through the state’s foster care system, sons and daughters of active-duty military, Native-American children on tribal lands, and the brothers and sisters of qualified children.
And this year, the nation’s longest-running ESA is slated to go big, with a bill that would eventually make every student eligible edging on majority support in both chambers, according to Jason Bedrick, policy director for EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which took its name from economist and school choice advocate Milton). Governor Doug Ducey, already a hero to free-market conservatives for his deregulatory crusade against occupational licensing laws, will sign whatever universal ESA expansion makes it to his desk, I’m told. A vote could take place as early as today. In a statement to The Weekly Standard, Ducey lavished praise on the state’s achievements in school choice, saying, “Arizona provides a model for the nation of the value in putting parents in the driver’s seat of their kids’ education.”
New Hampshire looks to be next: In the Granite State, where they’ve been known to live free, a universal-eligibility ESA bill passed the senate this year. The Missouri legislature likewise is poised to pass a tax-credit-funded ESA for students with special needs, kids in foster care, and children of active-duty military. Even a hotly contested ESA bill in freedom-loving Texas has made unlikely gains against a rote opposition led by teachers’ unions, passing the senate 18-13. And in Nevada, where the nation’s first attempted universal education debit card program lost its public funding in a court challenge, lawmakers are maneuvering a workaround.
Arizona’s pioneering program is, naturally, the most robustly studied. According to EdChoice’s surveys of families using the accounts and analysis by the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke and the Goldwater Institute’s Jonathan Butcher, a third of “core” ESA users, families who joined the program in 2012, use their children’s accounts for more than just private school tuition. While more have opted out of public school and into ESAs with every expansion, an initial cohort continues to “customize” their children’s education—combining classes in the morning with a tutor in the afternoon, or online lessons with special education therapies. Private school vouchers are almost always a dead end for disabled children, whom private schools are ill-equipped to serve, and those who live in rural areas where there are no private schools within a day’s drive. An education debit card, on the other hand, that funds textbooks and online tutoring is unbound by geographical convenience.
Kathy Visser, a former public school teacher and now something of a poster-mom for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, tailors her children’s educational expenses to their singular, and sometimes common, needs. When we spoke on the phone, Visser’s two children—Jordan, who’s almost 13, and Skylar, who’s 9—were splashing and playing in the opening minutes of their afternoon ESA-funded swim practice. Jordan’s cerebral palsy made him eligible to join Arizona’s first ESA cohort. His little sister Skylar came along after Arizona law expanded the program to include siblings of eligible students. Whereas Jordan’s writing and attention span regressed below his grade level in between school years, Skylar flew far enough ahead of her peers’ reading level that decamping to the ESA community, where she too could learn at her own pace, was an easy choice. Jordan’s now on track with a seventh-grade math curriculum and Skylar, as voracious a reader as ever, already talks about where she wants to go for high school.
From a public school to a private school and now immersed a self-paced curriculum, they’ve found the best place for Jordan is alongside able-bodied friends in his ESA classes. “Special needs kids need a community to surround them that doesn’t look at them as disabled but looks at them as a person,” Visser told me, after describing how he was shunted aside in conventional schools. The Vissers join other ESA families in using their debit accounts to rent out church classrooms. And all the children, members of Visser’s parent group say, learn indispensable “soft” skills simply from interacting with Jordan.
With movement therapies and tailored instruction, his speaking and writing have consistently progressed so that his family knows him better than they did before. They now know Jordan also has autism, for instance, and a steel-trap memory for dates and details. Lately, the Vissers have been reading aloud from a series of biographies of the Founding Fathers, into which Jordan will routinely interject a detail or two his mother and sister long-ago forgot from an earlier book—what, for instance, were John and Abigail Adams up to while George Washington surveyed the wooded hills of western Virginia? Jordan Visser probably knows.
Think-tank types make a convincing argument for keeping the feds at bay, when the impetus for the education debit card’s state-by-state expansion belongs, as ever, to parents and children. The ESA, even when only used to pay for private school tuition, resolves the perennial tension between parents and teachers in favor of the former’s argument that each and every child has their own special slate of needs no classroom can ever adequately serve. A universal ESA, which can be tailored to any and every individual, opens endless possibilities.
Plus, when it comes to the ESA, the political imperative to put states’ rights first becomes a natural side-effect of putting parents in the driver’s seat. “When you have a program like education savings accounts that turns so much decision-making ability over to parents, what you set up is a system that’s much more difficult to become top heavy,” Goldwater’s Jonathan Butcher pointed out. The ESA community in Arizona, which has served the Visser family so well, likely wouldn’t survive a spate of federal regulation. The instructive lesson is the Common Core State Standards, sold as a state-led initiative, uncontroversially, until good faith got lost in “the vortex of Washington, D.C.,” as Butcher put it. As recently as last year, every Republican ran on the standards’ “repeal.”
The steady growth of the school choice movement—better called, frankly, parent choice or education choice, when you realize how many more options than conventional “school” the ESA opens up for the minority who “customize” their education spending—fits pretty neatly in the aftermath of the Common Core upset. It’s hardly a referendum on the standards, which were more offensive for the administration’s attitude and their hurried implementation than their actual practice. But ongoing innovations in school choice stem from the same intuition that turned so many Americans against federal meddling in their children’s schools. Parents, for better or worse, have always desired greater control over their children’s destiny, knowing all the while they’ll have to let go. A swelling movement, absent regulatory intrusion from on high, to honor the full complexity of that parental intuition makes an awful lot of sense.
