On Tuesday, Iowa became the third US state to adopt “education savings accounts” that will enable all families to use state funds—an average of about $7500 a year—to pay for private school tuition or other forms of education spending. The state follows Arizona and West Virginia in making such programs universal, or eligible to all families, not just students with special needs as in the case in several states.
Proponents like to paint a picture of education savings accounts as a means of personalizing education, reflecting each child’s unique interests and needs, and empowering parents to choose from a full menu of options. As one high-profile advocacy group describes ESAs, “a child can attend private school and receive speech therapy on the side. Another child can learn math and science online, English and history at home, see a tutor twice a week and save leftover money for future education expenses.” In this vision, parents are in firm control of public education spending and can use ESAs “to create a personal approach to education, where the ultimate goal is maximizing natural learning abilities.”
It’s an appealing prospect, but as a practical matter only a subset of engaged and motivated parents are likely to have the bandwidth to cobble together an effective and coherent education from disparate service providers. This fuels the common complaint of ESA and voucher critics that such programs only benefit wealthy families while harming public schools.
Common sense suggests that low-income and working-class Americans are far more reliant on actual schools—ideally a safe, effective, and well-run school within a reasonable distance of where they live.
This makes all the more intriguing the news out of Arizona in a piece I wrote for the Dispatch: Great Hearts Academies, a well-regarded charter school operator that runs 42 schools in Arizona and Texas has been quietly seeking partners among religious congregations in the Phoenix area. They plan to launch a new network of private Christian classical schools the first of which will open in August. Under the state’s recently adopted universal educational savings account (ESA), parents can now take 90 percent of the state’s share of education spending, an average of $7,000 per child, and apply those dollars to private school tuition. Religious schools are not excluded, and the new faith-based network dubbed “Great Hearts Christos” is aimed at low- and middle-income families.
“This is our response to the legislation,” Great Hearts Chairman and CEO Jay Heiler told me. “Parents may now directly receive and direct funds to support their child’s education. And that directs us to the creation of private schools in response to that policy.”
From the perspective of a school choice advocate, an operator with the reputation and track record of Great Hearts entering the private school market is an ideal response to the incentives ESAs provide. As I noted in the Dispatchpiece, there’s also strong evidence that low-income students do better in faith-based schools.
The idea of public dollars paying tuition for students at private religious schools doesn’t always sit well with Americans, but it’s long been a feature of the educational landscape. For half a century, the federal Pell Grant program has disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars uncontroversially to students attending private religious colleges. Opposition to ESAs and other similar funding mechanisms tend to draw charges of “privatization” of education. But Ashley Berner of Johns Hopkins University has long pointed out the US is something of an outlier in that regard. In most Western democracies the government funds and regulates, but does not necessarily provide, public education. “Our imaginations—and our public debates—remain captive to the existing paradigm, in which only district schools are considered truly public,” Berner has observed. “The difference is that, in educationally plural systems, many types of schools are considered to be part of the public education system.”
That paradigm shift, if it occurs, will likely take generations, and the US is a long way off from the more plural systems common to other countries. Nearly 90 percent of America’s school-aged children attend local, district-run public schools. But, suddenly it’s no longer unthinkable that the American paradigm of sending our children to local, district-run public schools might be challenged. In addition to Arizona, Iowa, and West Virginia, several other states are currently weighing ESAs. Don’t be surprised if there are eight to 10 such states by the end of the year, including Utah, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
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