This week, a congressional committee signed off on a budget bill that includes the first-ever nationwide education choice scholarship program.
Trimmed in half to $5 billion per year, the Educational Choice for Children Act would offer tax credits to donors who contribute to eligible nonprofit scholarship funds. (Step Up For Students, my employer, is the country’s largest such scholarship organization.)
Here are a few ways to gauge its potential impact:
It could triple tax credit scholarships. The most credible national estimates, from Edunomics, show states provide about $2.4 billion a year in education tax credits. Increasing that number by $5 billion could turbocharge existing privately funded scholarship funds in states like New York and California.
It could double ESA funding. Funds could be used for private school or other eligible education expenses, meaning the scholarships could function like education savings accounts. Edunomics pegs those at about $4.2 billion in the current fiscal year. Add the additional $1.2 billion in tax credit programs that function like ESAs, and the current nationwide ESA total comes to about $5.4 billion.
It would represent a fraction of total public education spending. The Census Bureau just released its annual public education funding report for fiscal 2023. It found the federal government spent about $120 billion on public education that year, about the same as the previous year. State and local funding jumped by a combined $68 billion, to bringing total public education funding to $947 billion nationally.
If recent trends hold, ECCA would account for about half of one percent of public education funding. A historic step forward. But a future in which all parents are free to direct their children’s education funding would remain a long way off.
Under the radar: 529 reform. The same budget bill would give families more flexibility to use privately funded, tax-advantaged education savings accounts. The tax bill passed during President Trump’s first term expanded 529 accounts beyond college, allowing them to be used for K-12 tuition. The newest changes would allow the accounts to cover a much wider range of education expenses, and allow funds to be spent on career education programs.
In Brief
Tennessee was bombarded with 33,000 applications for only 20,000 available scholarships on the first day it launched a new universal education savings account program.
Has educational excellence become politically homeless?
Educators are questioning the once-fashionable practice of “grading for equity.”
Texas legislation would overhaul the state’s standardized testing system, shifting from a single test to three smaller assessments during the year. Results would be reported much more quickly, within a day, and student results would be measured against national norms.
A-F letter grades for schools may be back in Indiana.
Why it’s time to rethink conventional school accreditation.
A backlash is brewing against technology devices in schools. More educators question whether laptops fuel distractions. A viral social media challenge has students jamming foreign objects into their Chromebooks until they short circuit. Wake County Schools in North Carolina is the latest large school district to consider moving away from issuing a device to every student, with leaders noting it could free up $200 million for other uses.
Parent Corner
Christine Rosen has some advice: Let your kids get bored!
Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end of a healthy sense of anticipation in our daily lives.
