Arizona

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Unless you’re a taxpayer, in which case you will get less than you wanted from Washington even though they used your money.

President Obama has left office, and the results of the ideas issued under his watch are coming in. Education research demonstrates we didn’t always get a bargain. A new study finds that a multi-billion-dollar federal grant program that incentivized district schools to change their operations neither changed such operations nor resulted in student achievement.

From 2009 to 2016, the U.S. Department of Education awarded School Improvement Grants (SIG). Each year, the agency divided approximately $500 million between states as part of Obama’s stimulus package to help ease schools out of the financial crisis that started in 2007. Georgia schools received approximately $16 million per year from 2014-16.

Schools could fire the principal, replace half of the teachers, and change instructional strategies like adding instructional time to the school day (part of what are called the “transformation” and “turnaround” methods); convert to a charter school; or close the school and send students to better-performing schools.

The result? SIG had no effect—none—on student achievement, graduation rates, or college enrollment.

Note this key detail: Researchers studied 1,200 participating schools and found that the transformation/turnaround methods were by far the most popular choices for schools. Just 33 schools converted to a charter school and 16 closed and allowed students to attend higher performing schools (3 percent and 1 percent of 1,253 schools, respectively). Thus, more money and grant applications promising to teach differently did not result in drastic changes.

Remarkably, researchers had already documented that some of the strategies SIG incentivized in the transformation/turnaround approaches were not supported by rigorous evidence: “Previous literature provides mixed evidence on the effectiveness of some of these practices at raising student achievement.” Yet Washington still spent some $7 billion over nearly a decade encouraging these activities.

Meanwhile, approximately 2,000 new charter schools opened without this federal slush fund from 2009 to 2016. Today, more than 6,000 charter schools operate nationwide. Charter schools are different state-to-state, but in some areas where all public school results disappoint, like Detroit, Michigan, charter schools are outperforming district schools. Those opposing President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Department of Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, have cited Detroit’s low scores and DeVos’s support of parental choice in Michigan as evidence that she is not qualified for the post.

But multiple studies demonstrate that Detroit charter school students are outperforming their peers in traditional schools. DeVos’s skeptics are free to scrutinize her policy positions, but opponents lose credibility when they misrepresent data.

Likewise, in Arizona, charter schools outperform district schools in terms of eventual college graduates. Charter schools account for 14 percent of Arizona’s total public school population, yet charter schools make up for 5 of the top 10 public schools in the state for students finishing college in 4 years.

Arizona charter schools—like nearly all charter schools in the U.S.—are producing these results despite being funded with less money per student than district public schools. Georgia charter schools are funded at approximately $3,000 less per student than district schools, and low-income 8th grade charter students are outperforming their peers in a national comparison. Now there’s a bargain.

Again, more SIG schools opted not to convert to a charter school with their grant money, choosing more administrative changes instead. And researchers did not find better student outcomes.

Let’s hope policymakers learned a lesson from a failed experiment relying on more taxpayer money for public schools. Lawmakers should commit to giving parents and children more quality educational choices over the next four years. Families will get a better deal when they can choose how and where their children learn.

Research evidence loves company. Consistent findings from different populations mean the results are less likely to be an accident and more likely to demonstrate a trend.

A new report from Mississippi finds that parents using education savings accounts report high levels of satisfaction, consistent with surveys of a similar law in Arizona. Ninety-one percent of respondents reported some level of satisfaction with Mississippi’s accounts, and 98 percent of respondents reported being either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their educational choices after using an account. Seventy-one percent of parents in the survey reported being “very satisfied” with their choices.

Similar to accounts in Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee, the education savings accounts in Mississippi allow parents to buy educational products and services for their children using a portion of their child’s funds from the state funding formula. Parents can make multiple purchases simultaneously according to their student’s needs.

Mississippi lawmakers gave parents of children with special needs this flexible option in 2015 after years of criticism of state services for these students. Empower MS’s Brett Kittredge says, “It was clear that many of Mississippi’s most vulnerable children were being left behind and this pattern would only continue unless policymakers took action.” In 2014, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that just 23 percent of Mississippi children with special needs graduated from a state high school.

Kittredge explains how Mississippi’s accounts are helping children like Lana Beard, who doctors diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and visual perception disorder. The accounts helped the Beard’s access a school that has specialized services for children like Lana when her assigned district school was no longer the right fit. Her parents used the account to help cover tuition and services at the new school.

Thousands of families across Arizona and Florida have similar stories. In some cases, families use an account to help pay for personal tutors, online classes, home educational needs, and even college savings plans. In Arizona, where students from failing schools and military families are eligible for the accounts, along with children with special needs, approximately one-third of participants are using their account for more than one learning option.

In 2013, researchers from EdChoice and the Goldwater Institute studied the nation’s first education savings accounts in Arizona and also found parents were pleased with their choice to leave an assigned public school and use an account. All parents in the survey reported some level of satisfaction, and 71 percent of participants were “very satisfied,” even among the families that were satisfied with their child’s previous public school. Focus group research conducted by the Goldwater Institute has also found similar satisfaction levels.

Georgia policymakers preparing for the 2017 legislative session should use the growing research evidence on parent satisfaction with education savings accounts to support efforts to give state families similar options.

Even though Mississippi’s program is still in its infancy, Kittredge reports the number of applicants for the accounts in 2016-17 exceeded the state’s cap of 425. He says families are now on a waiting list for a chance to participate next year.

“Parents are the ultimate accountability rating,” Kittredge says. “That is why we believe understanding parental satisfaction with [education savings accounts] is so important in judging this program.”

Jonathan Butcher is a contributing scholar at GCO in addition to his role as the education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

New research from EdChoice finds that Georgia’s scholarships for K-12 private school students have saved the state between $12 million and $85 million since 2011. Nearly two-dozen states have similar tax credit scholarship programs that allow individuals or businesses to make charitable contributions to K-12 private school scholarship organizations. The nonprofit scholarship organizations award scholarships to eligible students, and donors can take a credit on their state taxes that is equivalent to some or all of their donation.

EdChoice’s findings come at an important moment for state families because the state supreme court is considering a challenge to the program. Two years ago, the Southern Education Foundation supported four Georgia residents’ lawsuit to block state families from using the scholarships for their children. Recently, the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in support of the scholarships.

“We urge the court to affirm the determination that the tax-credit program does not violate the state constitution, focusing on the fact that it does not involve spending public funds for any sectarian purpose,” write Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald.

In Georgia, individuals and businesses can receive a dollar-for-dollar credit for their contribution to scholarship organizations up to certain limits ($2,500 for a married couple and businesses can claim no more than 75 percent of their tax liability). Since 2010, scholarship organizations have awarded more than 60,000 scholarships for students to use at K-12 private schools.

Teacher unions, school board associations, and other associations regularly challenge parent and student educational options in court. Fortunately for families, courts have upheld tax credit scholarships around the country, without exception. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the nation’s oldest such scholarships, in Arizona, in 2011.

The decision paved the way for students like Gabe Alba-Rivera to discover opportunities he didn’t know existed before his scholarship. In my 2014 interview with Gabe, he explains that he was born in Mexico and had little more than broken pieces of his school’s roof to draw hopscotch squares at recess. A bucket of water served two purposes when he used the bathroom—the first as his bathroom pass, the second to flush the toilet.

After moving to Arizona, Gabe used a tax credit scholarship—nearly identical to the scholarships available to thousands of students across Georgia—to attend Brophy Prep, where he was active in the school Robotics Club. Gabe earned a spot at MIT, where he studies 3-D printers.

Twenty-eight scholarship organizations serve Georgia families, and these groups awarded more than 13,000 scholarships last year. The state supreme court should uphold the lower court ruling and protect families’ freedom to choose the best learning opportunity for their child.

A certain desert city’s tourism department hopes you can finish the phrase, “What happens in Vegas…,” a slogan that turns lucky 13 this fall. Yet when it comes to the changing landscape of student learning, what happens in the desert isn’t going to stay there.

At the end of July, the Nevada Supreme Court held hearings on the state’s nascent education savings account law. In 2015, Sen. Scott Hammond sponsored SB 302, and Gov. Brian Sandoval’s signature made all 450,000 Nevada public school students eligible to apply for an account. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to take children’s educational choices away shortly after the law’s passage. The group charges that the accounts violate the state constitution (a group of parents filed another suit taking away parents’ ability to choose how their children learn, saying that the accounts would be illegally funded from a state source dedicated to public schools).

Nevada’s account law is the first such law to allow all public school students the opportunity to use an account to buy a variety of educational products and services. Parental choice in education is no longer rare in the U.S., but many of the laws that give parents options between public and private schools are limited to students that meet select criteria. For example, Tennessee and Mississippi’s education savings accounts, also enacted in 2015, are only available to children with special needs. As many Georgia parents may know, the Peach State has a private school scholarship program exclusively for children with special needs, while Louisiana and Ohio have private school voucher options for children from failing schools. The situation is similar across more than two dozen states.

A ruling in favor of parents and children from Nevada’s Supreme Court would boost efforts in other states, such as Georgia, Texas, Delaware, and Missouri, to name a few, where lawmakers have considered the accounts in recent years. In 2011, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s first education savings account law and have expanded student access to the accounts since its enactment. Arizona children with special needs can apply for an account, along with children from failing schools, adopted children, and children living on Native American reservations, among others. Nevada is the first state to give every public school child this opportunity from day one.

Education savings accounts have also attracted national attention. Republicans included education savings accounts in their 2016 platform (as for Democrats, who the Wall Street Journal says has a built-in “get-out-the-vote operation known as teacher unions,” education savings accounts were noticeably missing from their party positions).

In March, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced a bill to allow all children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools access to education savings accounts. Politico highlighted these students’ need for quality educational options in November 2015 with a feature headlined “How Washington created some of the worst schools in America.” Former presidential candidate and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a bill in January that would make all Washington, D.C. children eligible for accounts.

As a result, federal and state lawmakers across the country are watching what happens in Carson City, Nevada. Arizona’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of education savings accounts in 2011 after the state teachers union and other associations brought a lawsuit similar to the ACLU’s charges in Nevada (the Goldwater Institute defended the accounts alongside the Institute for Justice, the group defending Nevada’s accounts). A victory for students in Nevada would mark the second victory for the accounts over challenges that the accounts violate state constitutional provisions that block the use of public funds for private or religious schools.

Five states have passed the accounts so far, but the accounts are turning into a movement offering families flexible opportunities in education. The successes of these programs, and the lifelong knowledge and skills gained—won’t just stay in Vegas.

Six years ago, supporters of the national Common Core academic standards thought they had the formula to measure student success. Under the Common Core, states would agree to teach the same material in the same sequence to all students. The ensuing tests would measure all students according to the same material. We would track the results and compare student achievement across the country.

If only teaching children was so simple.

As centrally-planned policies are prone to do, the Common Core unraveled. South Carolina and Oklahoma left the standards citing, among other things, “federal intrusion” and vowed to replace the standards with better content. A group of states that agreed to offer the same test to students lost half of its state members by 2015. Three months ago, New Jersey had to postpone all student testing in grades 3-11 because the Pearson Education’s testing software malfunctioned.

Then came the Gates Foundation’s admission earlier this year that the Common Core isn’t ready and the “foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required.” The foundation’s mea culpa is significant because of the organization’s commitment to national standards and the associated financial support.

Despite this morass, some in Georgia still claim that alternatives to national standards and testing will cause more problems than pressing ahead with the Common Core. Most parents would agree that “whether they come from a civilian or military family, all children deserve to be held to high, consistent academic expectations that fully prepare them to succeed after high school.”

Yet there are other—and better—ways to do this than national standards.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education approved New Hampshire’s pilot project to administer the Common Core tests in fewer grades and use the SAT for high schoolers. Students will have ongoing projects during the school year to measure learning. Education leaders in states like Indiana are considering this alternative.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed HB 2544 this year, which allows public schools to choose from a “menu” of tests to measure student progress. Rep. Paul Boyer, chair of the House Education Committee, and Sen. Sylvia Allen, chair of the Senate Education Committee, led the legislative effort.

Schools should be allowed to choose from existing national norm-referenced achievement tests like the Stanford series of tests or the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. This way, schools could use a test that aligns with what they already teach—not curriculum imposed from somewhere else—and, because the tests are nationally normed, the scores could be compared across schools.

Critically, district and charter schools would have the same autonomy to choose what and how to teach while still measuring achievement in a comparable way across localities. The Common Core didn’t deliver, so Georgia lawmakers should be looking for solutions like those in Arizona and New Hampshire.

By April 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s crew wanted to see land. The men spent more than a year sailing to Antarctica and six days drifting in lifeboats with little food or sleep. Finally, the men spied a narrow, 30-mile long enclave called Elephant Island.

Writing in his book Endurance, Alfred Lansing says the crew had “a feeling of astonishment which soon gave way to a sense of tremendous relief.”

A century after Shackleton’s adventure, Georgia parents should know the feeling. A state supreme court ruling almost disbanded many of the state’s charter schools due to a lawsuit five years ago (voters subsequently approved a ballot measure in 2012 that resolved the issue). In 2013, the Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent said no new charters should open in the city until a pension lawsuit was complete. Charter schools have served the city for years, and, according to a Georgia Department of Education report, half of the charter campuses in the state are located in metro Atlanta (the pension case was settled two years later).

Having weathered these storms, parents and policymakers would welcome the sight of land in the form of student success.

Yet charter school achievement does not always have a simple explanation. This is especially true in Georgia, where charter schools fall into four different categories. Raw test score analyses benefit from comparisons of similar students and schools (and random student assignment to schools if possible).

Even without such data crunching, there are strong results that vary across school types and grade levels that should give students, parents, and lawmakers hope for the direction of state charter schools.

First, on the nation’s report card, more low income Georgia charter school 8th graders scored at the “Basic” level or above than their peers in district schools (Figure 1). In reading, 82 percent of charter students score at Basic or above, while 69 percent of their peers in district schools scored at this level. In math, 65 percent of charter 8th graders scored above Basic, compared to 63 percent in district schools. Fourth grade students are behind their peers in reading and no data are available for math.

Butcher-NAEP
Source: National Center for Educational Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress Data Tool. Author calculations.

These results mean a higher percentage of low-income 8th grade Georgia students attending charter schools demonstrated at least the basic skills necessary in these subjects. Similar research is available from the Goldwater Institute using Arizona charter school data (with even more positive results) and in the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual report card.

The complication in these data is that Georgia charter schools fall into four different categories (the number of schools of each type is in parentheses):

“Start-up” (77): These are the independent public schools most policymakers and parents are familiar with. Teachers and community leaders form these schools as an alternative to assigned district schools.
“Conversion” (18): A “converted” public school, as the name implies, is a school that changed its status from a traditional public school to a charter school and given more operational autonomy in exchange for higher levels of accountability.
“State start-up” (20): A state commission authorizes these schools (the state supreme court ruling mentioned above threatened these schools).
“Charter systems” (326): These school systems are traditional districts given more autonomy so that the rules under which the schools operate resemble charter school regulations.

More test scores are available in the the state department of education’s annual report on charter schools to help parse through these distinctions. According to end of grade test results, converted charter schools and start-up charters are well ahead of their district peers in nearly every subject in 8th grade in the percent of students exceeding the state standard (see Figure 2 for an example of 7th and 8th grade comparisons; for more results, see the link beneath the chart for the full report).

Butcher-GA
Source: Georgia Charter Schools and Charter Systems, 2014-15 and 2015-16, Georgia Department of Education, p. 44, https://www.gadoe.org/External-Affairs-and-Policy/Charter-Schools/Documents/2015%20Charter%20Schools%20and%20Charter%20Systems%20Annual%20Report.pdf.

The most encouraging finding is that the average results for all charter schools (the orange bar in Figure 2) are higher than non-charter schools (light blue bar) for every subject, in every grade except 8th grade Social Studies and Math in the state report. Charter high school students also out-performed district peers in English, geometry, biology, and economics.

Georgia charter schools should have parents breathing a sigh of relief. The project of creating and sustaining quality schools so that every child has the chance to succeed is never finished, but Georgia has given parents several ways to do so. With all that Georgia charter school families have been through, this success is welcome.

Last week, the Virginia senate passed what could become the nation’s sixth education savings account law, pending a governor’s signature. HB 389 would allow children with special needs to apply for an account. With an account, Virginia would deposit a portion of a child’s funds from the state formula in a private bank account that parents would use to buy educational products and services for their children.

Virginia’s proposal is similar to laws enacted in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Education savings accounts in these states allow families to use a child’s account to customize a child’s learning experience with online classes, private school tuition, curricular materials like textbooks, and, critically for children with special needs, educational therapy like speech and occupational therapy.

In Virginia, 13 percent of students—some 161,000 children—have special needs and could use an account to find educational services to help them succeed. As this blog has explained previously, Arizona families are hiring individual tutors to help children with autism, students who were struggling to learn basic skills prior to using an account. Others are combining public school extracurricular activities with home-based instruction, which gives children the chance to interact with their peers and learn in a setting that meets their needs. Such opportunities give hope to children and their parents.

Education savings accounts also provide lawmakers with a solution for large, statewide policy issues looming on the horizon.

Research from Matthew Ladner, Ph.D. at the Foundation for Excellence in Education finds that Virginia and Georgia have something in common: High age-dependency ratios. For Virginia, their score of +19 means the state has a “high percentage of people out of the workforce and a relatively small percentage of people trying to cover the costs of their education, retirement, and health care.”

The U.S. Census projects that Virginia’s public school enrollment will increase by 300,000 students over the next 15 years while the population of adults over 65 will almost double. The expansion in these two sectors will put a strain on taxpayer-funded services in education and health care.

Georgia finds itself in a similar position. Georgia’s +16 score is slightly below the national average of +17, but still points to a future where fewer people are pulling the cart of social programs and increasing numbers are sitting in the cart. The Census estimates Georgia’s student population will increase by a half-million students, while its elderly population will increase by nearly 1 million.

Education savings accounts and other private school choice options like tax credit scholarships (already available in Virginia and Georgia) will help ease the pressure on taxpayers who would be asked to pay for new district school buildings and public school staff. Parental choice in education comes at a significant discount compared to district school services. In Arizona, education savings accounts for children with special needs are worth 90 percent of what is spent on these children in traditional schools while, on average, mainstream students’ accounts amount to 50-60 percent of what taxpayers spend per child in district schools.

Virginia and Georgia badly need solutions like these. Education savings accounts improve the quality of life for participating families and can provide students with choices as the demands for public services increase.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) have dominated the school choice policy conversations as of late. However, many people are still unsure what ESAs truly offer, and some of the terminology can be confusing.

ESAs are similar to an Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) or a Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) in terms of the flexibility they provide but are used to pay for education expenses. A portion of the state’s allocated dollars that are already designated for each child’s public education are instead loaded onto a debit card that parents use to customize their child’s education. This money can be used for any educational resources including tutors, textbooks, private-school, homeschooling curriculum, and virtual learning.

Often these programs are confused with Coverdell Education Savings Accounts which are instead set up with personal money invested into tax-free accounts. These Funds can be used at any eligible educational institution whether that be elementary, secondary, or postsecondary. With a regular ESA, funds are coming from “legislative appropriations, local districts, and the federal government.”

Several states have already implemented ESA programs. For example, Arizona offers ESAs to children with special needs, attending failing public schools, in the foster care system, or children of active-duty military. Nevada offers a universal ESA program, allowing all public school students the opportunity to obtain quality education in the environment that best fits his or her learning needs.

Parents know their child’s learning needs best, so they are best equipped to decide how these resources should be spent to ensure their child obtains a quality education. By having control over the money the state is already spending on their child, parents who were previously limited by income or geography, now have access to more educational options for their children. Parents can keep their child in their school if they’re happy with it, but ESAs give more options to parents who feel that their child’s current school environment isn’t meeting their needs.

You can learn even more about ESAs at esaga.org.

In the late 19th century, Hawaiian sugar farmers struggled to prevent rats from eating their crop. Farmers introduced the Indian Mongoose to the islands to save the harvest.

Unfortunately, mongoose are active during the day, while rats are nocturnal. The mongoose did not quell the rat problem but even now the mongoose severely impact ground-nesting birds, including Hawaii’s state bird, the Nene, and endangered sea turtles. The mongoose is considered an invasive species in Hawaii.

We cannot always predict the outcomes of our decisions in the natural world, and history proves that the same is true in public life. Want the rich to pay more so we can balance the budget? In Maryland, the millionaires moved out. Want to increase the sales tax so people will smoke less? Now cigarettes are smuggled out of lower-tax states into other areas.

As the late Yogi Berra instructed, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

Still, in education, we all want every child’s future to be marked by success and achievement. This blog has explained how education savings accounts can provide Georgia families with opportunities to inspire their children to learn and find quality educational options. With these flexible accounts, families can make multiple decisions about what is best for their child’s education today and save for the future.

However, with every new law, rules and regulations must follow. These rules are important to help prevent fraud and misuse.

Families that use education savings accounts must be protected from fraudulent educators and taxpayers must be protected from mishandling of the accounts. But these rules should be written carefully, otherwise regulation may limit what students can achieve using an account.

In Arizona, where education savings accounts have been available to families since 2011, state policymakers adjusted the law after its enactment to include fraud protection provisions. The Arizona Department of Education must conduct regular account audits to stop misuse so that it does not become widespread.

Yet the department has still not used other measures, such as updating the cards’ technology to prevent a family from buying educational materials at an approved store (such as Walmart) and also purchasing something that has nothing to do with their child’s education, like a TV.

In Florida, lawmakers have enacted strict rules that often require parents using education savings accounts to spend their own money first and then apply for reimbursement from the state. It’s too soon to tell, but Florida may be too cautious with their rules, while Arizona is not cautious enough.

Three lessons are readily available to Georgia lawmakers:

1. Make deposits into education savings accounts quarterly, then audit every quarter. Families using an account should receive deposits every fiscal quarter. If there is misspending, either accidental or purposeful, quarterly audits will prevent the problem from growing.

2. Students should be allowed to use their education savings accounts at educational institutions and for educational products—but nothing beyond these purchases. We have the technology to limit the use of a debit card so that only educational items can be purchased. Policymakers should tell the financial institution distributing the cards that lessons from other states demonstrate this technology is vital in order to protect students and taxpayers. 

3. Learn from other states’ mistakes. In healthcare, food stamps, social security and all other government programs, fraud is a fact of life. But that means we must use all the resources available to allow vendors and individuals to report fraud over the phone or online and ask participating educators to help catch misuse. The Goldwater Institute has additional resources available to lawmakers.

Education savings accounts have the potential to help students from different walks of life succeed in their education and beyond. The proper rules must be in place to allow for flexibility while still protecting students and taxpayers. If we are not careful, the rules may stifle innovation and student success. Lessons from states already offering education savings accounts will help to limit unintended consequences.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior Fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

A few weeks ago, Wired magazine editor Joe Pugliese told readers a story that should sound familiar to anyone who followed the careers of computer icons Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: Pugliese almost didn’t finish college because life outside the classroom was more interesting.
“By the time I was 20 I had found full-time work as a designer, and I was serially ditching class in favor of time at the office,” Pugliese wrote in the September issue. “Prerequisites and lecture halls seemed like a distraction from the place where I knew I was learning the most—the real word.”

Today, students across the globe can learn in more ways than we can count, from books to YouTube videos to free online classes hosted by Harvard and MIT to computers installed on the sidewalk (even Wired magazine has partnered with the University of Southern California to create a graduate program). To better prepare every child for a successful future, parents, lawmakers, and educators need a new definition for what it means to learn. And one classroom might not be enough for a student.

Had Pugliese’s teachers recognized he was bored, clearly they would have tried to make their lessons more useful for the “real world.” No educator wants his students to be unprepared for life. Horace Mann inscribed the mission of generations of educators when he called education the “great equalizer of the conditions of men,” a phrase U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would repeat some 150 years later.

Yet how can education fulfill this noble treatise if schools can’t keep students in the classroom, or the very least, interested in the classroom?

Today, public education’s challenge is not just to limit the number of students dropping out of school, though that is critical. The percentage of students dropping out has been nearly cut in half since 1990, from 12 percent to 7 percent.

The implications of this decrease are profound. For example, black men of working-age (20 to 34) without a high school diploma are more likely to be in prison than employed, according to Pew research. A diploma may have far-reaching effects for these men.

But just attending school or even finishing high school isn’t enough. Students need to be challenged and inspired by learning experiences that meet their needs so that they can have a chance at the American Dream.

Education savings accounts provide parents and their children with the flexibility to choose from multiple learning options at the same time. As this blog has explained, education savings accounts, now law in five states, are bank accounts complete with debit cards that allow families to buy educational products and services for their children.

In Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Nevada, eligible families have more educational options than just their child’s assigned public school. The state deposits funding in each account, and families can pay for personal tutors, textbooks and curricular materials like science kits, online classes, private school tuition, and college classes. Families can even save money from year to year.

In Arizona, the Howard family uses Nathan’s account to pay for tutoring services and private school tuition. The Visser family educates Jordan at home, swiping his education savings account card with different vendors in order to combine therapy services and educational instruction. The McMurray family uses the accounts to participate in extracurricular activities offered by a public school. Research finds that more than one-third of accountholders use their education savings account for multiple learning options.

This is the future of learning. For some students, it may just be a new school. Or a tutor to help them keep up with their classmates. For others, it could mean enrolling in classes offered on the other side of the world or using an iPad—with a data plan—to learn math with an app.

Education savings accounts allow for one or all of these options. Every Georgia child should have access to the future of learning.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

Arizona

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