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Doug Tuthill

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A lifelong educator and former teacher union president, Tuthill has been president of Step Up For Students since August 2008.

Commentary and OpinionCommon GroundCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedSchool Choice

The evolving public education market

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

An education savings account ensures that Anna Ragusa of North Carolina can continue to receive needed therapies during social distancing.

Public education has historically been a poorly managed, underperforming market. The pandemic is driving changes that could, over time, lead to market improvements that will benefit families, students, educators and the public.

In effective and efficient markets, consumers control their purchasing power, monopolies do not exist, the barriers to entry and exit are appropriate (i.e., not too high or too  low), information needed to make good decisions is available to suppliers and customers, and the public good is well served.

None of these features exist in public education today. About 90 percent of public education services are controlled by a single supplier – government. This market domination constitutes a monopoly. Almost all purchasing power is controlled by government.

When families have no control over their public education dollars, new suppliers are discouraged from entering the market. That’s because most families cannot afford to pay both school district taxes and the cost of education services from non-government suppliers. This barrier to entry is why there has been so little supplier diversity and innovation in K-12 education over the last 170 years. Giving families control over their education dollars would unleash demand and create a market that would attract more suppliers.

While the availability of information in public education has gotten better over the last 25 years, families and schools still lack the quality and quantity of information they need to make good decisions. These market flaws are causing taxpayers to get a poor return on their investments in public education.

Some of these market deficiencies are starting to be addressed as families respond to the pandemic by asserting more control over their children’s education. Affluent families are using their own funds to create and access alternative schooling models, including micro-schools, homeschooling cooperatives and pandemic pods. And a few governors are using federal stimulus dollars to fund scholarships so low-income families may have these same opportunities.

 If this trend continues and more families gain greater control over their public education dollars, the barriers to entry for new, more diverse suppliers will be lowered and the creativity and innovation we are starting to see will increase. Using Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) to give families more flexibility over how they spend their public education funds will also open the market to providers such as tutors, counselors and therapists.

 In healthy markets, more desirable supply attracts more consumers, which then attracts even more desirable supply, which then attracts even more consumers. This type of virtuous market cycle is emerging in a few communities and could start to erode the government’s monopoly on supply and further the development of a healthy public education market.

 The unbundling of education services will also accelerate the improvement of a better public education market. Government has historically used its monopoly to force parents to access all their education services from a single provider (e.g., the neighborhood public school). While the unbundling of these services has been occurring slowly over the last three decades as families increasingly use programs such as virtual schools and dual enrollment, the pandemic is encouraging suppliers to accelerate this unbundling.

 Some private schools are offering childcare services for families who want to access a virtual instructional program but need out-of-home childcare. Some school districts are providing breakfast and lunch programs for low-income families who are homeschooling. And some community organizations are providing extracurricular activities, such as theatre and sports programs, that are no longer available at some neighborhood schools.

 We have almost two centuries of data showing that a dysfunctional public education market is not capable of delivering systemwide excellence and equity. The work required to develop the infrastructure necessary to support an effective and efficient public education market is daunting. But this horrific pandemic has provided us an historic opportunity we should not let pass.

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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedSchool Choice

Is it time for Blueprint 2030?

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law in 1999 the A+ Plan for education calling for greater school and teacher accountability eight years after his predecessor signed the Education Reform and Accountability Act.

In 1991, the Florida Legislature passed, and Gov. Lawton Chiles signed, Blueprint 2000: The Education Reform and Accountability Act. The purpose of Blueprint 2000 was to restructure how Florida’s public education system was managed.

In the late 1980s, Florida was a national leader in experimenting with teacher empowerment and site-based decision making (SBDM). The SBDM movement sought to transfer more decision-making power to schools in exchange for these schools being held more accountable for results. Blueprint 2000 was designed to create a state policy infrastructure that would institutionalize SBDM across all of Florida’s public schools.

Legislative and executive branch leaders, all of whom were Democrats, thought Florida’s public schools were underperforming because they were being micromanaged. Blueprint 2000 was going to change that.

I was one of four teacher union representatives on the state commission appointed in 1991 to develop the Blueprint 2000 implementation plan. In collaboration with the Florida Department of Education and thousands of educators, parents, business leaders, and other citizens, we created new state curriculum standards, a new state assessment system called the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), established School Advisory Councils (SACs) at every public school, and required schools to implement annual School Improvement Plans (SIPs). We failed to reach consensus on how best to hold public schools accountable for results, a failure Jeb Bush fixed when he became governor in 1998.

Next spring will be Blueprint 2000’s 30-year anniversary. Florida’s public education system has made great improvements using the education reform and accountability infrastructure that sprang from Blueprint 2000. But that infrastructure has aged. Florida’s public education system needs a new blueprint. It is time for Blueprint 2030.

The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing educators and parents to innovate at a pace never before seen in public education. In the period of a month last spring, every district, private, and charter school campus closed and every student became a homeschool student. When school begins this fall, families will choose from a variety of instructional models, including on-campus, virtual, hybrid (i.e., a combination of on-campus and virtual) and homeschooling. In coming years, families will have access to even more choices.  

State government has waived a variety of state laws and regulations to allow schools and families to adjust to this new normal. But these waivers are temporary solutions. Our state leaders need to start developing a new public education infrastructure, and Blueprint 2000 provides an approach they could consider emulating.

Similar to what the Florida Legislature did in 1991, the 2021 legislature could pass legislation establishing a commission to develop recommendations for creating a new public education infrastructure. This new infrastructure should be designed to support a more diverse and flexible public education system, one capable of meeting the unique needs of each student.  

The largest task for this commission would be improving Florida’s antiquated public education funding system. This funding system is hostile to systemic innovation and the flexibility needed to meet each student’s needs.

The state has created flexible spending accounts for some students with unique abilities/special needs. About 16,000 families will use this spending flexibility this fall to customize their child’s education. Providing all families with access to flexible public education funds is necessary if all children are to benefit from a customized education program.

We also need to reinvent our state assessment and assessment data systems.  As students increasingly receive publicly-funded instruction from multiple providers (tutors, virtual school, college via dual enrollment and assigned neighborhood school) we will need to assess the progress students are making with each provider, aggregate their achievement data, and properly share students’ data with those providers.

We also will need to institutionalize better processes for helping families and students pick the most appropriate providers. Well over 10,000 providers are eligible to serve the 16,000 unique abilities/special needs students using flexible spending accounts, often called Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Deciding which of these 10,000 providers is the best fit for a specific learning need is a daunting task.

A Blueprint 2030 commission will have a huge job helping state government, school districts, schools and other education providers create the infrastructure necessary to support an effective and efficient post-pandemic public education system. We are never going back to the pre-pandemic education system.

Planning for the future should begin soon.

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Commentary and OpinionFeatured

Facts are the best vaccine for excessive negativity

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

Let’s start with a quiz.

1.       In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?

A.      20 percent         B. 40 percent     C. 60 percent

2.       In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has

A.      almost doubled       B. almost halved       C. remained about the same      

3.       The life expectancy in the world today is

A.      60 years              B. 70 years         C. 50 years

4.       How many of the world’s one-year-old children have been vaccinated against some disease?

A.      20 percent         B. 50 percent     C. 80 percent

5.       What percentage of the world’s population have some access to electricity?

A.      80 percent         B. 55 percent     C. 20 percent

6.       Today there are 2 billion children in the world. How many will there be in 2100?

A.      2 billion              B. 4 billion          C. 3 billion

These quiz items come from a book called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Bill Gates calls Factfulness, “one of the most important books I’ve ever read.”

Rosling was an extraordinary man. He was a doctor who traveled the world treating people in developing countries and educating people in developed countries about the developing world. He was particularly passionate about dispelling negative myths about the lack of progress in developing countries and replacing those myths with facts.  

Evolution has hardwired humans to be highly attentive to negative information. Survival has required heightened awareness to threats. Media outlets intuitively understand this, which is why news on TV, radio, and newspapers historically has been overwhelmingly negative. Negativity sells, which is why if it bleeds, it leads.

My colleague, Ron Matus, has highlighted the impact of negativity bias on how Florida’s media covers public education. Ron has repeatedly cited examples (here, here, here, here, and here) of Florida’s media not reporting positive information about how well our public education system is performing. 

One of the downsides of our attraction to negative information is that it often causes us to base our decisions on misinformation. For example, we may be less supportive of public education funding if we are convinced the system is performing poorly, or we may be more supportive of greater restrictions on immigration from a developing country if we exaggerate the amount of that country’s poverty, violence and illiteracy.

Throughout his book, Rosling identifies cognitive habits that contribute to our embracing of negative myths. These habits of mind are manifestations of three well-documented cognitive biases: negativity bias, confirmation bias and availability bias.

Negativity bias refers to our tendency to be more attuned to and affected by negative information and events. Confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out evidence that supports our existing beliefs and ignore evidence that does not. And availability bias is our tendency to assume that information that is readily available to us is more reflective of general conditions than actually is the case. Availability bias is why people think traveling by plane is more dangerous than traveling by car immediately after a high-profile plane crash.

These three biases work in tandem to make negative thinking predominate in humans. We are more attracted to negative beliefs (negativity bias). We seek out information to confirm these negative beliefs (confirmation bias), and then we exaggerate the prevalence of these negative beliefs (availability bias).

This is the pattern Matus has documented in his reporting on how Florida’s media cover our public education system. Florida’s education reporters are attracted to information they think confirms their negative biases. They then report this confirming negative information while excluding contrary facts. This results in many people having an inaccurate, and overly negative, opinion of Florida’s public education system.

Rosling hopes that by increasing global awareness about how believing and promoting inaccurate negative information distorts our perceptions and undermines our decision making, people will be less susceptible to the detrimental effects of negative myths. He worries that too much negative thinking encourages a sense of hopelessness that undermines motivation.

According to every objective measure, this is a golden age for Florida’s public education system. We still have huge unmet challenges, most notably in addressing a large achievement gap that is correlated with racial, ethnic and economic class differences. But we have much progress to celebrate and to inspire us to keep going.

If we can effectively manage our negativity bias, our greatest successes still lie ahead.

 Here are the quiz answers: 1 C; 2 B; 3 B; 4 C; 5 A; 6 A. How much influenced did negativity bias have on your answer?

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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedSchool ChoiceUnionism

Are teacher unions putting profits before people?

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the for-profit business practices of Florida’s teacher unions and their for-profit business partners.

The Journal reported recently that teacher union leaders are pushing teachers to purchase retirement investments from union-owned, for-profit companies that charge unusually high management fees. These higher fees are increasing the unions’ profits at the expense of teachers’ retirement funds.

The Journal writes: “The setup is one of an array of similar deals in which unions and other groups get income from endorsements of investment products and services — often at the expense of teachers … The ties help explain why many local-government workers continue to pay relatively high retirement-plan costs, while fees in corporate-based retirement plans are often lower and have been falling for years.”

I was first informed about the for-profit business ventures of teacher unions when I became a local union president in 1978. I had questions, but I was 22, and my mentors assured me our profits benefited our members and the union. Forty years later I still use a credit card that is managed by a for-profit joint venture involving the National Education Association (NEA), MasterCard, and Bank of America, even though I haven’t been an NEA member since 1997.

Given how critical teacher unions often are of for-profit businesses operating in public education, it’s ironic that these same unions operate a variety of for-profit businesses themselves. But the unions are selective in their criticisms. They only criticize for-profit businesses they perceive as competition, such as the small number of for-profit charter schools that aren’t unionized. For-profit contractors, bus companies, furniture vendors, teacher training providers and hardware and software companies, among others, are fine.

I do not object to teacher unions, or anyone else, operating for-profit businesses in public education. Without profit there would be no credit. Without credit there would be no scalable innovation. And without scalable innovation, we’d all be living in caves.

I also don’t object to teacher unions using their influence with the Democratic Party and the media to maximize their profits, provided it’s done legally and with transparency. All multimillion-dollar corporations, including teacher unions, work the media and lobby government to enact policies that advantage their businesses. I do object to teacher unions promoting their business interests in ways that hurt our most vulnerable and disadvantaged children. While the SEC is investigating the legality of the unions’ business practices, my concern is with the morality of their business practices.

In Florida, teacher unions have used their profits to help fund lobbying and lawsuits to take away education options from our state’s highest-poverty, lowest-performing students. Their goal is to protect their market share and revenue even though these actions hurt disadvantaged children and are inconsistent with the values of most teachers. Instead of attacking our most vulnerable children, teacher unions need a new business model that allows them to find common ground with these children and their families.

The future of public education is customization. Soon every child will have access to a customized education. Teacher unions need a business model that aligns with and supports customization. They will go out of business if they continue insisting that public education can only take place in government-managed schools covered by one-size-fits-all collective bargaining agreements. This 1970s model of public education, and the early 1900s model of industrial unionism that accompanies it, doesn’t work for many children and is going away.

There is a positive role for teacher unions in public education if they will adopt a new unionism that puts people above profits and empowers teachers and families to have more control over how each child is educated.

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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeatured

A memo for Jeb Bush

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

In a recent interview with Sal Khan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suggested we need a common term for concepts such as mastery-based learning, personalized learning, competency-based learning, individualized learning and customized learning. 

“We need to come up with a name that everyone uses,” Bush told Khan at a recent education reform conference in San Diego. “When you figure it out, send a memo out to the rest of us.” 

Governor, I recommend we use the term ”customized education.” Here’s why.

All learning is personal. Thirty students sitting quietly in rows taking detailed notes of their teacher’s lecture are engaged in personalized learning. No two students assimilate the teacher’s words in the same way. We all interpret incoming stimuli through the lenses of our previous experience and knowledge. Since no two people have lived identical lives, no two people interpret information, such as a lecture, in identical ways. Consequently, all learning, including how well someone masters a competency, is personal.

When people use terms such as personalized learning, they are really referring to teaching, not learning. While 30 students sitting in rows taking lecture notes are engaged in personalized learning, the teacher is not engaged in personalized instruction. The teacher is using one-size-fits-all group instruction. This group instruction is what reformers want to replace with instruction that is customized to each child’s needs.  

Progressive educators have been advocating for personalized instruction for at least 150 years. Public education adopted one-size-fits-all batch instruction in the late 1800s because it was scalable and personalized instruction was not. Our inability to scale personalized instruction has thwarted us ever since. What’s different today is technology. Technology that did not exist 30 years ago is now enabling entities such as the Khan Academy to make customized education possible for every child globally. 

So why do I prefer customized education over personalized instruction?

Khan Academy does not provide personalized instruction for every child. But it does provide content and tools that make it possible for learners to customize their education.

Education is more than instruction. Many of my most powerful learning experiences have come while doing yard work. I listened to a thought-provoking discussion between Sal Khan and Jeb Bush, thought about their exchange while working in the yard, and then clarified my thoughts by writing this blog post.  This is why the term you are searching for, Governor, should be broad enough to encompass external instruction and self-guided learning activities. And why I prefer customized education.

So why customized education and not personalized education?

The term personalized learning has become so ubiquitous that trying to explain why it is redundant and misleading seems overly complex and onerous. I’d rather reboot, dump the word “personalized,” and go with customized.

Customized education – the future of public education, workforce education, and civic education.

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Advocate VoicesCommentary and OpinionProgressives and ed reformSchool Choice

Education choice and ‘How to Be an Antiracist’

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

Ibram X. Kendi, best-selling author and Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, became at age 34 the youngest recipient of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” Kendi is a former assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. PHOTO: Stephen Voss

When I was a teacher union president in the early 1990s, I gave an interview with our local newspaper in which I criticized the educational inequalities that were being exacerbated by public magnet schools. Many found my criticisms hypocritical because I was an education choice advocate who had helped launch one of our community’s first magnet schools a decade earlier and had enrolled my two children in a magnet school.

But not all education choice programs are inherently good. Those that perpetuate and increase inequalities undermine public education and the public good. My criticisms in that interview were not aimed at education choice in the abstract, but rather in how education choice was being implemented in our community.

I thought about that interview and the controversy that ensued as I was reading Ibram X. Kendi’s new book, “How To Be An Antiracist.” Kendi is a Florida A&M graduate (Go Rattlers!) and a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., where he teaches history and international relations. He is also the founding director of American University’s AntiRacist Research and Policy Center.

Kendi is a systems thinker. To Kendi, racism isn’t about white people disliking black people, or light-skinned blacks feeling superior to dark-skinned blacks. Racism is a set of systemic policies and practices that use race to perpetuate power inequities. Groups use racism to help maintain their social, political, and economic advantages.  

Kendi defines anti-racism as actively working to dismantle those systemic policies and practices that use race to perpetuate power inequalities. And he says there is no neutral ground. All of our policies and actions are either racist or anti-racist, including our nonactions. Nonaction in the face of racism is racist because it allows systemic racism to persist.

“There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral,” Kendi writes. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”

As a systems thinker, Kendi supports racial discrimination when it is used to undermine systemic racism by redistributing power in ways that create greater equity: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is anti-racist.  If discrimination is creating greater inequity, then it is racist.  Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging an inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached.”

Kendi’s take on the systemic nature of racism and anti-racism are not new. The Black Power movement in the 1960s and ‘70s was built on a similar analysis, as articulated by activists such as Malcolm X, Kwame Ture (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), Omali Yeshitela (International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement), and Bobby Seals and Huey Newton (Black Panther Party).  

What is unique, at least to Kendi, is his personal journey. The path he describes in his book suggests he arrived at his understandings through personal experiences and the insights they fostered rather than an in-depth study of Black Power literature. His openness about his struggles to develop a satisfactory understanding of his relationship to racism as a young black man is refreshing and enlightening, although not without criticisms.   

Thanks in large part to the ongoing advocacy of long-time educator and community organizer Owusu Sadaukai, or Howard Fuller as he is best known in the education choice community, today’s education choice movement is deeply grounded in an anti-racist and anti-poverty agenda. The movement has largely embraced Fuller’s social justice rationale for education choice and consequently focuses much of its energy on restructuring public education in ways that expand opportunities for low-income, minority, and special needs children and their families.

Without ever having met Fuller, Polly Williams, or other social justice warriors in the early education choice movement, my concerns in the early 1990s about how public magnet schools were increasing inequality aligned with Fuller’s agenda and eventually led me and many other left-of-center progressives to join the social justice wing of the education choice movement.

If Black Power advocates from Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) to Ibram X. Kendi are correct in identifying racism as the systemic use of race to perpetuate social, economic, political, and education inequities, how can my fellow progressives continue to defend public education policies and practices that advantage the powerful while systemically disadvantaging low-income people of color? How can they oppose Fuller’s social justice approach to education choice and still be anti-racist?

These are questions more progressives need to consider. They can start by reading Kendi’s book.

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AnalysisBipartisanshipEducation and Public PolicyEducation EquityEducation LegislationFamily Empowerment ScholarshipFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipGardiner ScholarshipSchool ChoiceVouchers

Growth in Florida’s education choice programs accelerating

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

Editor’s note: The data in this post are accurate as of 5:06 p.m. Monday, Nov. 11, 2019.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran announced recently that the state’s new Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES) program, enacted with bipartisan support, reached its 18,000-student enrollment cap only three months after becoming law. No education choice program in the country has ever grown this large this fast.

The average income for a family of four on the FES program is $28,252.65. These are low-income families fighting to give their children a chance at a better life.

The number of low-income Florida families trying to access more education choices through our nonprofit, Step Up For Students (which hosts this blog), is accelerating. Last year, 170,471 low-income students started applications in our system before we turned it off. This year, 198,030 students started applications.

The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship (FTC) has served 31,225 new students this year compared to 18,806 last year. The FTC and FES programs together have served 125,184 new and renewal students this year compared to 98,802 FTC students last year.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the funds to provide scholarships to every qualified student. We have 35,825 students who have been found eligible for FTC and/or FES scholarships but do not currently have a scholarship award because of insufficient funds.

The Gardiner Scholarship program for children with unique abilities/special needs is the third scholarship program SUFS manages in which demand far exceeds supply. With strong bi-partisan support, lawmakers gratefully funded 1,900 new Gardiner students this year. But demand is so high that by January we’ll have about 3,200 additional eligible Gardiner students who do not have scholarships because of insufficient funds.

A side benefit of more families having greater control over how their public education dollars are spent is small business development, especially in under-served urban communities. As enrollment in our five scholarship programs continues to increase, and as families are able to spend their scholarship funds on a greater variety of educational products and services, the number of small and medium-sized businesses benefiting is also increasing.

Over the last few years our scholarship families have purchased products and services from over 10,000 providers, including schools, tutors, occupational therapists, counselors, educational hardware and software companies, physical therapists, curriculum providers, and book stores.

Hopefully, when the Florida Legislature convenes in January, there will again be bipartisan support for more families having greater control over how their low-income and unique abilities children are educated. No child’s future should be put on a waiting list.   

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Charter SchoolsCustomizationEducation EquityEducation Savings AccountsParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Charter schools and the unbundling of K-12 education services

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill

Editor’s note: This post is an edited version of a talk Step Up For Students president Doug Tuthill delivered in October to the Florida Charter School Conference in Orlando.

Products and services in many industries are in the process of being unbundled. Thirty years ago, we had to buy albums to own our favorite songs. Now we can buy individual songs and bits of songs online.

Classified newspaper ads used to be a cash cow for daily newspapers. But no more. Craigslist’s unbundling of classified ads is a key reason daily newspapers are dying.

The demise of cable TV may be next as streaming services such as Netflix unbundle programing. Shopping malls are closing as Amazon unbundles retail shopping, and banks are responding to the unbundling of banking services by licensing unbundled banking applications in a new business model called “banking as a service.”

Now the process of unbundling public education services has begun. Thus far, this unbundling has included magnet schools, charter schools, dual enrollment, virtual schools, course choice, micro-schools, home schooling, workspace, and scholarships and vouchers to help families pay for private schools.  

But the real game changer will be Education Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). ESAs are going to accelerate the unbundling of public education services.

ESAs are publicly-funded financial accounts that families use to purchase state-approved education products and services for their children. Instead of a school district spending a student’s public education dollars, through ESAs state government allows a student’s family to spend these dollars.

About 18,000 Florida students will have ESAs this school year through two programs — the Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs/unique abilities, and Reading Scholarship Accounts for struggling readers in district elementary schools. These students’ families will use their ESA funds to purchase products and services, such as public and private school courses, afterschool tutoring, physical and occupational therapy, speech therapy, education hardware and software, summative and formative assessments, curriculum material, and books. Over the last two years, Florida families have used ESA funds to purchase products and services from over 10,000 education providers.

The number of families using ESAs will probably increase in the future. In six years, Florida could have 200,000 families spending $1.5 billion annually through their ESAs. This much purchasing power in the hands of families presents opportunities and challenges for Florida’s charter schools.

There will be competition to serve these families. Charter school companies in other states are exploring coming to Florida with offerings beyond schools. Some are planning to open charter and private schools with robust afterschool and summer programs. Others are planning to sell onsite and online courses, and one is exploring partnering with ride-sharing services to help transport students to in-school, afterschool, and summer programs. Think “Uber for Kids.”

Home schooling is the fastest growing education choice option in the country. Charter schools could be selling this population access to classrooms, computer and science labs, afterschool and summer programs, and onsite and online courses.

With the possible exception of Miami-Dade, most Florida districts will be slow to offer services to ESA families. Florida charter schools could help fill this void.

Dayspring Academy charter school in Pasco County moved quickly to create an afterschool tutoring program after the Reading ESA became law. It is now one of Florida’s top providers of ESA-funded tutoring services. (Dayspring founder and chief financial officer John Legg is a board of directors member for Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Other charters could follow the Dayspring example. Entrepreneurial Urban Leagues across Florida are also moving quickly to develop afterschool and summer reading programs for families with reading ESAs.

The unbundling of products and services inevitably leads to innovative ways to rebundle them. Spotify is a good example of a company facilitating rebundling in the music industry. Spotify empowers and enables music listeners to organize songs from diverse artists into customized playlists and share these lists with others. Spotify empowers customers to have a greater sense of ownership over their music since they now control how their “albums” are assembled. They also have access to the diverse playlists of millions of other music fans.

We need to replicate an appropriate version of the Spotify experience in public education. Educators need to be empowered and enabled to rebundle their services and products so that families can purchase highly effective customized instruction for each child with their ESA funds.   

The unbundling and rebundling of education products and services is coming. Charter schools can help drive this train or follow the example of daily newspapers and get run over by it.

It’s their choice.

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