Editor’s note: This commentary by Nicole Stelle Garnett, senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute, and Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice and guest blogger at reimaginED, appeared Thursday on the74million.org.
For school choice advocates, 2023 has been a year of dizzying highs. Never before have so many states enacted so many far-reaching parental choice programs. Arkansas, Florida, Iowa and Utah join Arizona and West Virginia as states with universal or near-universal education savings account programs, which allow parents to spend a portion of the public resources allocated for their children’s education for private school tuition and other qualified educational expenses. South Carolina adopted a generous-means tested ESA, Indiana expanded its voucher program to near-universal eligibility and Oklahoma enacted a universal refundable tuition tax credit. Other states seem poised to join the parental choice roster in the near future.
But the work of policy reform is just beginning. And, as we argue in a new Manhattan Institute report, 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 hamstrung 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.
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