What happens when parents have the ability to take the state education funding associated with their children, and spend it on their own, customized mix of options, from private schools to virtual schools to tutoring services?
That’s the question raised by the proliferation of education savings accounts, which have been created by laws in five states and counting, including Florida.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has convened policy wonks from all over the education world to chew on the question of how these programs should be regulated, with a focus on a newly created Nevada program that offers education savings accounts to all students who currently attend public schools.
We’ll have more to say on this issue, but for now it’s worth teasing out some important points raised by Fordham’s contributors.
Charter school consultant Neerav Kingsland questions whether Nevada’s program can offer families, especially low-income families, enough money to truly benefit.
Depending on their income level, a family in Nevada will soon receive between $5,100 and $5,700 to spend on education services.
This is a lot of power over a relatively low amount of money. Due to this low level of funding, an otherwise innovative regulatory policy will face significant quality and equity challenges.
Education consultant Andy Smarick sounds another important note of caution:
Unfortunately, public policy seldom goes exactly according to plan. Our experience with NCLB tutoring is instructive. It too was supposed to empower families and create a vibrant supply of services. But the law didn’t work as expected. The existing system found the cleverest ways to gum up the works; in the end, few families participated, and the results were disappointing.
The headline of a 2013 Tampa Bay Times investigation into specialized education services illustrates the kind of scandal regulators will be intent on stopping this time around: “Public schools lose millions to crooks and cheaters.”
Meanwhile, Robin Lake of Center on Reinventing Public Education writes that simply preventing the financial fraud and other questionable conduct that plagued the tutoring program won’t be enough. A new breed of bureaucrat will be needed, to help create buy-in among school districts and other traditional education providers, and to help stoke the supply of new providers that might not have been possible before.
Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, however, writes that regulation has a downside. Among other things, it could discourage new providers from participating in the program.
Apart from their negative influence on the supply side, state regulators should get out of the way because their track record is pretty lousy. There wouldn’t be such a clamor for choice if the heavily regulated government system was working well. The Silver State now has the opportunity to go a different direction—to allow parents to “regulate” their children’s education. It’s an attempt at something entirely different, so layering on the same old regulatory schemes certainly wouldn’t be appropriate.
Getting all of this right will take time. It will be worth watching how programs in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Nevada, most of which are focused on special needs students, develop. Which ones will attract the best mix of providers? Which ones will give families enough resources, and enough information, to make beneficial choices? How will these programs work with existing schools? It will be important to keep an eye on other states, and learn from mistakes along the way.
Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog and employs the author of this post, helps administer Florida Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts.
