Course choice for public school students would complement Education Savings Accounts by offering instruction from another online or in-person provider. (Commentary)
by Michael Brickman
The movement to enact education savings accounts (ESAs), which have now passed in a dozen states (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia), has been one of the best things to happen to American kids in decades. But it’s not enough.
I’m a huge fan of ESAs, as well as vouchers, charters, tax credits, homeschooling, and all of the rest. The more options the better, especially when parents themselves do not have the means to pay for the best education money can buy.
ESAs are exciting because they allow full customization of a child’s education; parents are no longer forced to choose the government school bundle, the charter school bundle, or the private school bundle. Instead, ESA parents can pay for private school tuition, while at the same time purchasing courses, therapies, tutoring, career-focused instruction, software and often hardware, and much more. It’s a policy that gets better with age because it creates and then leverages a marketplace that anyone can access.
In Arizona, the state with the most mature ESA program, over 70,000 students participate. That is a major success, but it is still only about five percent of the state’s K–12 population. The other 95 percent need options too.
It’s time to bring that unbundling to public schools too. Course choice would serve the overwhelming number of students who are still in public school by allowing them to take a couple of courses from another online or in-person provider. It should be the next frontier for advocates of educational freedom.
Because of bundling, many public schools feel that they need to be all things to all people. While this feature may keep families enrolled, it has also contributed to administrative bloat and, in many cases, lowered the quality of services a school can provide: While a single school can do many things, it may not necessarily do any of them well. With course choice, parents can accept the default when their local school does something well and choose an alternative when it delivers a poor product (or one that is simply not right for their child).
For choice advocates, course choice is a perfect complement to ESAs because it is a “gateway drug” to choice and should be embraced as such. Public school advocates should see benefits too, since it can relieve some of the pressure for public schools to do more things than they can handle. Families seeking career-focused options, AP courses, foreign languages, or politically neutral social studies curriculum can get these things without having to switch schools, something that can be an extremely disruptive change for a family, even if the benefits of doing so might be significant.
With course choice, some of the same providers already serving ESA students could also address the needs of families who are content (but not thrilled) with their assigned public school. Often, these are the families who send their children to the local public school simply because it is the default. They’re either paying a mortgage in the district, their kids can walk to school, their children have friends there, or any number of other reasons.
It is hard to quantify, but it is reasonable to bet that the “public by default” students represent a larger share than the entirety of the choice market share in any state today. If choice advocates want to deliver a better and more customized education to these families, they will need to find a way to reach them. Course choice can be just that.
Originally published by the American Enterprise Institute. Republished with permission.
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