Jonathan Butcher

Social distancing: a perfect opportunity for parents to find out what their children are learning

Jonathan Butcher March 26, 2020

Jonathan Butcher

Coronavirus is interrupting life in general and education specifically. As parents in the U.S. adjust to school closures and the potential for their K-12 child’s coursework to continue online, families should come to realize that they will be exposed to more of what their children are learning.

For some, this will be new.

Wall Street Journal editor Serena Ng wrote recently from Hong Kong, where schools have been closed since Feb. 3, that she now can “see every detail of every lesson.” Ng says, “I previously had only a vague idea about what they were learning in school.”

All parents should be able to know what their children are learning, and for those paying attention in the coming weeks, the virus offers a chance for them to do just that. Working parents who juggle jobs and their children’s school activities while managing a home haven’t been neglectful if they don’t know what happened in fourth-period math on a given day (try asking a teenager what happened in class). Some simply have relied on schools to decide on instruction.

For others, this focus on content has been there all along.

March 2-4, the Institute for Classical Education and the Great Hearts Foundation held the National Classical Education Symposium, an event featuring sessions on teaching the Great Books, from “The Confessions of St. Augustine” to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Great Hearts’ charter schools, which started in Arizona and have expanded to Texas, base their curriculum on these works. (You can find a complete list of the books students will be studying here.)

School districts are not always so transparent. As Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute explained earlier this year, even if state law allows parents to review their child’s curriculum, they can do so only on school premises; in some cases and in some districts, there are limits set on when parents can see the material. Again, parents are not lazy if they don’t always know what is in their child’s syllabus.

When parents know what is being taught, they can effectively advocate for meaningful change. The reading wars over phonics versus whole language instruction are still with us today, while the Common Core debates over a national curriculum have simmered in time for everyone to scrutinize the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

The Project, a set of essays accompanied by K-12 curricular materials, “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Slavery and the racism that followed are a blight on our nation’s past, but the Times has taken the idea too far according to many scholars. Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, leading intellectuals and even the Times’ own fact-checkers have criticized the essays, citing inaccuracies.

For thousands of parents, the initiative is not just a problem for someone else’s school. The Times and the Pulitzer Center have successfully advocated for integrating the material into some of the nation’s largest and most-high profile school systems, including Chicago, Newark, Buffalo and Washington, D.C. In Florida, Florida A&M University highlighted the Project in September 2019 and has hosted events on the topic with Florida State University.

Critically, the Times on March 11 issued a correction to a central premise of the essays, saying that not all colonial revolutionaries fought the British to protect the institution of slavery. If the Times heeds other warnings from experts, this modest correction should not be the last. Meanwhile, the Times already has disseminated the original curricular materials to schools.

Developments like these are among the many reasons why the next few weeks of school closures and online instruction are an important opportunity for parents to catch up on what is happening at their child’s school. When parents send children back to brick-and-mortar schools, they should do so ready to raise questions, prepared with more information.

Parents practicing “social distancing” in the coming weeks should use this period to get closer to their child’s school assignments.

March 26, 2020 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Education Choice Education Savings Accounts Education Spending Featured Jonathan Butcher School Choice

Ongoing debate over district fraud in Tennessee shines positive light on education savings accounts

Jonathan Butcher February 26, 2020

Jonathan Butcher

Between 2015 and early 2016, the U.S. Attorney’s office determined that a national insurance fraud scheme involving prescription drugs included Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennessee, the insurance administrator for the Hamilton County Department of Education.

Who knew a prescription cream could be so expensive?

Last fall, officials suspended three Tennessee public school employees while investigators reviewed the individuals’ involvement in an insurance fraud scheme that cost the school district some $800,000. The issue dates to around 2015, when two doctors began writing prescriptions for pain-relieving creams to be bought in bulk. Some of the claims were filled through the Hamilton County School district’s insurance plan.

The fraud in Hamilton County, the school district encompassing Chattanooga, has all the makings of a con: Kickbacks, third party-intermediaries in California, and crooked doctors. The movie script writes itself.

Auditors and other investigative offices regularly uncover such illicit activities in school districts around the country. With some $600 billion in federal, state, and local funds flowing to schools every year, district offices, especially, are vulnerable to a wide range of financial crimes, from embezzlement to common theft.

In the 1990s, large school systems such as Chicago and Los Angeles created offices of inspectors general to deal with the problems. Yet some of these offices say that the number of claims is more than they can investigate.

Chicago’s inspector says that the office cannot open enough cases, which “creates a substantial risk, that waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement, and employee misconduct go undetected.” The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has written similar warnings in the agency’s regular reports to Congress. Chicago is home to one of the largest examples of theft in recent years, as former CPS Superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for her role in manipulating district contracts totaling $23 million.

Periodically, districts without dedicated inspectors general consider adding such offices. For example, in 2016, the Broward County (Florida) School Board considered adding an inspector to the district. When board discussion turned to using the federal inspector general instead of creating a new office in the school district, a federal representative said he must “cherry-pick complaints to investigate because there are only five investigators to cover the entire state of Florida,” according to the Sun-Sentinel—echoing the complaints from Chicago and the federal OIG’s home office.

The boxes of pain-relieving cream in Tennessee and Chicago’s illegal contracts help to put claims of misspending among Tennessee’s education savings accounts (called “Individualized Education Plans”) in perspective. Tennessee’s accounts operate similar to Florida’s Gardiner Scholarships, and families of children with special needs can use the accounts to choose a school or customized set of learning services, including education therapy and personal tutors, for their student.

No amount of graft or misuse of resources meant for a child’s education is acceptable. But recurring claims in the media of “serious problems” with the accounts—most recently coming from the Daily Memphian, but Arizona media have made similar accusations—ignore the size and scope of fraud in school districts and lawmakers’ efforts to limit such problems in the savings accounts.

For example, the financial loss due to fraudulent prescriptions in the Chattanooga district described above is larger than all the money parents are suspected of misspending statewide in Arizona and Tennessee’s education savings accounts combined in 2018. Audits of Arizona’s accounts have found that the total amount of suspected misuse hovers around 1 percent or less of the total amount the account awards annually.

Meanwhile, Arizona policymakers have taken an innovative approach to education savings account oversight and contracted with a private firm to monitor individual transactions. As explained on redefinED last year, North Carolina officials have already outsourced management responsibilities for education savings accounts in their state. The new systems can confirm eligible savings account families and their intended purchases before processing a transaction, helping to limit intentional or unintentional misspending.

Now, Tennessee’s Department of Education is trying to do the same. Tennesseans should applaud state officials for upgrading these accounts at the first sign of trouble, as opposed to letting fraud fester for years as commonly happens in school districts. Remember, the prescription fraud in Chattanooga began in 2015. Parents and taxpayers should not have to wait five years for fraudulent use of a child’s education spending to be resolved.

February 26, 2020 0 comment

Analysis Blog Guest Courts Education and Public Policy Education Equity Education Legislation Featured Jonathan Butcher School Choice Unionism

Can an amendment close a state’s achievement gap?

Jonathan Butcher January 17, 2020

Jonathan Butcher

One of several century-old school buildings in Minnesota, where new language is being proposed to the state constitution that would give students “a fundamental right to a quality education.”

A member of the “Purple People Eaters” may have retired from the NFL, but he now has a state teacher union on the run.

Former Minnesota Viking defensive lineman and justice of the state Supreme Court Alan Page is among those supporting a change to the state constitution that has philosophical and practical problems, but the idea has elevated an important K-12 discussion and has unions scrambling.

Page and Neel Kashkari, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, have drafted a change to Minnesota’s “uniformity clause,” a provision that says the state must have a “general uniform system of public schools.”

Page and other supporters of the amendment argue that the state’s commitment to a system of schools is not enough: “No parent aspires for their child to have an adequate education,” Kashkari and Page told the StarTribune. The system should do more than spend “more and more money and [get] the same poor results,” Page said.

An admirable sentiment, but similar efforts have (appropriately) failed in some state and federal courts. According to local media, the new language gives students a “fundamental right to a quality education,” and the state’s “paramount duty” would be to make sure all children have “the skills necessary for participation in the economy, our democracy, and society.”

Sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Again, this concept has been considered in court. At the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodriguez that the Constitution does not guarantee a federal “right” to education. Similar cases in Colorado and Wyoming resulted in debates and rulings concerning how much taxpayers should spend on K-12 schools—not a surprise, because if education is a right, then others have a duty to pay for it. And keep paying until terms such as “quality” and “skills” are fulfilled according to someone else’s definition.

Page and his allies introduced this proposal amidst a longstanding discussion of Minnesota’s K-12 achievement gaps. Recently, Kashkari’s office released a report that found the state has “some of the largest gaps in the nation” in academic outcomes such as test scores and graduation rates. The Nation’s Report Card also shows disparities in math and reading between students eligible for free- or reduced-priced school meals (a less accurate measure of poverty than before recent changes to federal meal programs, but an indicator nonetheless) and children from wealthier families. In 8^th grade math, the disparity between low-income students and their peers is greater than 30 points.

Meanwhile, unions are looking for dollar signs. In its statement against the proposal, the special interest group said educators are “waiting for funding” and the legislature needs to “fully fund public education.”

The union also says the proposal would “bring our state closer to vouchers,” as though taxpayers and lawmakers should fear giving children more access to quality learning options. Left unspoken is that other state unions have used uniformity clauses to challenge education choice—something Floridians may remember from Bush v. Holmes. A revision to Minnesota’s constitution may force the union to adjust its plan for potential litigation.

The union is resisting meaningful, substantive change, which Page and Kashkari told Minnesota Public Radio that they are hoping for, at least in part. “If some kids need more choices, this amendment can support that,” Kashkari said, and if “some kids need more funding for their schools, this amendment can support that.”

In that case, we should applaud half of the intent, even if the means are flawed. Catrin Wigfall, Policy Fellow at the Center of the American Experiment (based in Minnesota) writes, “While I respect that the conversation on how to solve the gap is at least started by this proposal…[solving] Minnesota’s education achievement gap is more complicated than an amendment change.”

Minnesota is home to the nation’s first charter school law, so if this proposal has taxpayers and policymakers talking about more K-12 learning opportunities, including private options, the conversation is welcome. Making education a right is neither a necessary nor sufficient (nor fitting) condition to give students from all walks of life a chance at the American Dream.

January 17, 2020 0 comment

Blog Guest Commentary and Opinion Education Spending Featured Jonathan Butcher School Choice

Guest commentary: Setting the record straight on K-12 funding

Jonathan Butcher December 18, 2019

Jonathan Butcher

A recent Education Next poll found the general public, parents, teachers, Republicans and Democrats underestimate per-student spending by approximately $6,000.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola asks to see the face of Olivia, a grieving countess who wears a veil.

“Is’t not well done?” asks Olivia. “Excellently done, if God did all,” Viola replies, slyly suggesting Olivia’s good looks would be impressive if they were natural and not due to the generous application of makeup.

Last week in the Washington Post, the University of Virginia’s Robert C. Pianta got his facts wrong, and he could not add enough color to the supposed benefits of socioemotional learning or the shortcomings of No Child Left Behind to obscure this simple truth: K-12 spending has not decreased over time.

And whether due to pressure exerted through social media (more on that below) or otherwise, the Post issued a correction to the spending claims this week. But Pianta’s position that increased spending should drive policy choices still drives his column and weakens some of his otherwise sensible proposals.

Pianta’s argument begins naturally enough. He points to the same examples of low test scores and uninspiring examples of student performance on the Nation’s Report Card and international tests that are cited by nearly every commentator on K-12 district schools in the U.S. (“ever-growing achievement gap,” “public schools in a state of crisis,” etc.).

Then come the cosmetics, poorly applied.

“This issue has been recognized for decades,” he says, but “politicians neglected to consider the thing that might improve education the most but never emerged as part of a far-reaching solution set: investing more public money in our teachers and children.”

“The biggest problem plaguing U.S. public schools,” he says, is “a lack of resources.” Funding has decreased since the late 1980s, Pianta said in the original column and cited a study by Rutgers Professor Bruce D. Baker—who proceeded to refute Pianta’s contention via twitter:

Baker’s comment is notable because he has argued that spending does matter in order to improve student outcomes, but even he took issue with this part of Pianta’s analysis.

In fact, Baker’s figures are too tame. After adjusting for inflation, K-12 spending per student has nearly doubled since 1980 and is nearly four times greater than 1960. Spending has increased in every category, from administration to instruction to plant operations. The financial crisis more than a decade ago temporarily stalled annual increases, but the downturn did not erase years of increases, and spending graphs are pointing up again (in May, the U.S. Census announced “U.S. Spending Per Pupil Increased for Fifth Consecutive Year”).

Even with the Post’s correction, Pianta’s column still says schools “have been starved for funds.”

Still, Pianta is not alone in his error. A nationally representative poll finds the general public, parents, teachers, Republicans, and Democrats underestimate per student spending by approximately $6,000. Borrowing from the Bard again: In Pianta’s hit, he misses. Once actual spending numbers are provided, fewer survey respondents say that we need more money in education.

Despite his creative accounting, Pianta closes with a welcome call for teacher unions “to become more responsive toward performance evaluations.” If policymakers want to increase teacher pay and benefits—which make up some 80 percent of school budgets—then taxpayers and parents should have better ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Across-the-board pay raises, as awarded recently in San Diego and in states where teachers went on strike earlier this year and last, are sloppy ideas that reward poorly-performing teachers as much as effective teachers. District officials should treat educators like professionals and compensate them accordingly.

And we should put this debate to rest. Pianta’s inaccurate claims of K-12 spending cuts cannot support his sensible plea for compromise over teacher evaluations and some of his other ideas, such as “inspiring talented people to enter the teacher workforce.”

The countess Olivia assures Viola that her good looks are natural and says, “’Tis in grain, sir, ‘twill endure wind and weather.” Pianta’s claims that K-12 spending has decreased were clearly less robust. Spending has increased over time, and the ways in which school leaders and lawmakers use these resources still matters more for student success than how much is spent.

December 18, 2019 0 comment

Commentary and Opinion Education and Public Policy Jonathan Butcher School Choice Testing and Accountability

Guest commentary: NAEP should be a wake-up call for ed reformers, policymakers

Jonathan Butcher November 21, 2019

Jonathan Butcher

A recent comparison of K-12 children around the U.S. brought bad news for education reformers—an amorphous group of policymakers and advocates who are akin to locksmiths searching for the right combination of resources and policy ideas to unlock student potential. The news was bad for students, too, but since the scores do not affect a student’s report card, the results mattered more to the aforementioned locksmiths today.

The results will matter for students tomorrow.

As readers of this blog will know, the Nation’s Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is a set of math and reading tests given to a sample of fourth- and eighth-graders around the country every two years. The U.S. Department of Education also administers NAEP tests in other subjects and specific cities.

The more frequent math and reading results allow education locksmiths to gauge whether any number of inputs in the nation’s schools—from spending increases to new laws—are having their desired effects. With both more money and federal law firmly in place, observers were frustrated that national averages for 2019 reading and math scores fell from 2017 (with the 1-point improvement in fourth-grade math a small exception).

Rigorous research is required to appropriately link policies and school budgets to NAEP outcomes, but Florida’s aggressive upgrade to its K-12 education design in the early 2000s tracked closely with improved NAEP scores among minority students. The additional parent options in education, along with a focus on reading among third-graders and more attention to the use of Advanced Placement testing has been the subject of policy discussion around the country since.

This year, reformers pointed to similar reading-related policies in Mississippi to explain the state’s improvement in fourth-grade scores, while calling for “urgent action” elsewhere. The Council of Chief State School Officers even said the “urgency of improving outcomes for all students” was enough to plan … a meeting. This “urgent action” is why the results will matter for students tomorrow: That is when the changes will affect the classroom. Parents can only hope it is not too late by then.

Nationally, average scores among fourth- and eighth-grade students increased in math by 27 points and 20 points, respectively, between 1990 and 2009. Yet since 2009, and a decade is almost the length of a child’s K-12 career, the improvement stalled. Reading scores have improved by just three points in both grades since 1992.

It is these scores and other comparisons that have not changed that should bother reformers and policymakers alike in 2019. Last summer, Harvard University’s Paul Peterson wrote in Education Next that the test score gap on NAEP and international tests between students from low-income families and their more affluent peers has not changed since the 1960s. Peterson wrote later that the “performances on math, reading, and science tests of the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged students differ by approximately four years’ worth of learning, a disparity that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly half a century.”

Such findings temper enthusiasm for any year-to-year increases. So, too, do the results from NAEP’s other test, the Long-Term Trend Assessment (LTT). Average scores for 17-year-olds in math and reading have not changed since the 1970s (the LTT was last given in 2012 and is scheduled to resume in 2020). Students appear to lose any gains made in elementary and middle school by graduation.

Over time, these results have been depressingly more of the same, which should incentivize education reformers and policymakers not to do the same things. Such as: In the last two years, many state policymakers were either absent or complicit in teacher union attempts to keep students in assigned district schools by curbing charter school growth in Los Angeles and Chicago and blocking new private learning options in Kentucky and West Virginia.

These options are the most significant departures from the routine of school-by-zip-code because parents can help a struggling child immediately by moving them to a new setting with a charter school, private school scholarship or education savings account. Students will not have to wait for the urgent meetings to finish, hoping to find success this time.

Now that would be different.

November 21, 2019 0 comment

Blog Guest Education and Public Policy Education Equity Education Savings Accounts Jonathan Butcher Parent Empowerment School Choice

Helping students succeed in school and life with education savings accounts

Jonathan Butcher November 6, 2019

Jonathan Butcher

Editor’s note: Senior policy analyst Jonathan Butcher is co-editor and one of nearly two-dozen contributors to “The Not-So-Great-Society,” a new volume released today by The Heritage Foundation. Butcher’s chapter on education savings accounts, in which he explains the original Arizona model and describes how ESAs have evolved in large part due to upgrades in Florida and North Carolina, is reprinted here in its entirety.

Beta-propeller protein-associated neurodegeneration (BPAN) is a rare genetic disorder.[1] Caused by a mutation in a gene related to the body’s production of protein, researchers have documented less than 70 cases in medical research since it was first described in 2012.[2] The National Institutes of Health says that individuals with BPAN experience seizures and lose physical and intellectual functions over the years as the nervous system deteriorates.[3]

Libby Bradford, age 10, is one of these cases.

Libby is confined to a wheelchair. She cannot talk and must use a device that follows her eye movements in order to communicate. By her first birthday, Libby was visiting 11 therapists each week, says her mom, Liz.

As Libby grew and approached school age, Liz wanted to work with her own, traditional, school district. “We truly tried with a public school,” Liz says. “Toward the end of the time [she was in a district school], we did everything by the book,” she says. But it just was not working.[4]

Libby “is an extraordinarily complex kid,” Liz says. After trying different “workarounds,” as Liz describes them, and trying to talk with school staff about Libby’s needs, the situation had deteriorated too much for Liz. “I was in the classroom a fair amount and I found out more than I ever wanted to know about how it was run,” she says.

“It just got to the point that we had to get a lawyer because of safety and a complete lack of education,” Liz says. “By the end, she was throwing up on the way there. The anxiety was pretty intense. This was not a safe environment for her.” Fortunately, this story has a happy ending.

In North Carolina, students like Libby are eligible for education savings accounts, flexible spending accounts that allow parents to customize their child’s learning experience or choose a private school.[5] Liz applied for an account for Libby, and “she has done beautifully,” Liz says.

With an account, parents remove their child from the assigned government school, and the state deposits a portion of a child’s funds from the state education formula into a private account that parents use to buy education products and services for their child. Lawmakers in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, and Tennessee have enacted similar proposals.[6] Parents can buy textbooks and other learning materials, hire a personal tutor, find education therapies, pay private school tuition, and even pay for college classes or deposit account funds in college savings accounts—all with the taxpayer resources already designed for a child in state education budgets. Parents can save unused account funds from year to year.

Today, Libby attends a private school, and is the only student with BPAN there—or possibly anywhere, Liz says. Libby works with a speech therapist who modifies the curriculum so that Libby can keep up with her classmates, and this allows Libby to be in a mainstream classroom.

“The children have embraced her, the school has embraced her,” Liz says. “For the first time ever, she is being taught. She had been written off. She’s been given the opportunity to learn and absolutely embraced it.”

Education savings accounts and the reality of choice in education

Wealthy families have always had “school choice”—they can move to another school district or send their children to private schools. Over the past 30 years, some 7,000 public charter schools—schools with independent school boards that generally enroll any student who applies, subject to space—have opened around the country to give all students more choices in education, but especially those whose parents cannot find (read: afford) a new neighborhood in which to live.[7] More than half of all U.S. states have some form of K–12 private school voucher or other scholarship option—though these options are largely limited to children from low-income families or children with special needs.[8]

All of these learning opportunities bring hope to students who are struggling in an assigned district school. And, today, students have so many more learning opportunities than what they find in the four walls of a classroom. Education savings accounts create the possibility that a child could, for example, take classes at a local district school, visit a personal tutor, and enroll in online courses. Again, parents can even save money in their child’s account from one year to the next, helping to ease the pressure of saving for college.

The accounts are the nation’s newest form of parent choice in education. Yet in just the past eight years, even the ways families and students use the accounts to access education services has changed, as demonstrated by the experiences of students in Arizona and North Carolina.

Arizona. To protect taxpayers and students, accounts such as these must be designed carefully to make sure that resources are being used for student learning and that fraud or unauthorized spending is contained. In Arizona, the first state in which lawmakers enacted education savings accounts in 2011, the state issues prepaid Visa cards to account holders.[9] The state education department places restrictions on the cards, so that they cannot be used to pay travel agents or restaurants, for example.

The state department of education makes quarterly deposits to the savings accounts, and families must complete an expense report at the end of each fiscal quarter before the department makes the next deposit. This method has served account holders well, though, like anything else, it is not infallible. The department might not discover a payment for an unauthorized item or service until after the purchase has been made, which requires the agency to try to recover the funds.

Still, initial audits indicated that Arizona’s payment system was limiting the number of times parents—intentionally or unintentionally—misused the cards. In 2016, a state auditor report on the accounts said the agency established various processes to help ensure that program monies are spent appropriately, including preventing transactions at merchants whose goods and services are not related to education, such as fast food restaurants and lodging, and has worked with the Treasurer’s Office and bank to automatically deny these transactions.[10] Research finds that approximately 1 percent of account monies had been misspent at the time of the audit.[11]

North Carolina. North Carolina legislators and agency personnel learned from the experiences of Arizona account holders. State lawmakers enacted the accounts in 2017 and contracted with a company that specializes in facilitating payments among teachers, schools, and merchants to monitor parent transactions.[12] Instead of giving parents Visa cards and checking expense reports or asking parents to seek reimbursement, North Carolina’s contract with ClassWallet tasks the payment-processing company with applying its system to the new accounts.

ClassWallet already works with schools around the country and provides payment platforms that allow teachers and parents to use school resources to buy materials, such as books, from local vendors and online retailers, such as Amazon.[13] Teachers initiate a transaction by using ClassWallet’s online tool to make a purchase. ClassWallet’s records allow the company to confirm that the teacher is authorized to make the purchase, and that the chosen vendor is part of the ClassWallet payment system. Then, the payment processor transfers the money from the school’s account to the vendor without the teacher even seeing the money.

Likewise, with North Carolina’s education savings accounts, parents visit the company’s online portal, choose an item or service, and ClassWallet confirms that the purchaser and the vendor are in the system before transmitting funds. This three-tiered system of oversight—where ClassWallet sees the beginning, middle, and end of each purchase—helps to ward off misuse.

District schools have struggled for years to have such effective oversight. It is not uncommon for city or state inspector generals to discover financial fraud in a school district after millions have been stolen over the course of five years or more.[14] But even with Arizona’s original education savings account model, the department of education could identify misuse at the end of one fiscal quarter and suspend or even close an account—preventing ongoing loss of taxpayer money. North Carolina and ClassWallet’s system give parents the flexibility to pay for multiple products and services simultaneously while limiting the potential for misuse.

As this book went to press, Arizona officials signed a contract with ClassWallet to operate the payment functions of the state’s savings accounts, similar to North Carolina’s system. Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman said the new services would be “phased-in over the next several months.”[15]

Helping students from all walks of life

People are already using financial technology for their personal banking needs. Surveys have found a marked increase in the number of adults who use online banking systems and make purchases online. Between 2011 and 2015, the percent of individuals ages 18 to 29 who used mobile banking increased from 45 percent to 67 percent.[16] For adults ages 30 to 44, the use of mobile banking went from 29 percent to 58 percent, a key indicator demonstrating that this generation of parents is uniquely prepared to adapt to an online Web portal, or even a smart device, to make purchases for their child’s education.

Parents’ access to a wide variety of learning options that fit their child’s needs is just as important as oversight mechanisms. The education savings account “gives me the ability to find someone who might not be in [our insurance] network but who understands my child and provides services that she couldn’t get previously,” Liz says. “We have an occupational therapist who ‘gets’ Libby. A huge part of it is just that they know her and she is not a textbook case.”

Students from all walks of life are using the accounts today. In Arizona, the state Department of Education reports that while children with special needs constitute more than half of account holders, 6 percent of participants are students previously assigned to a failing public school, 13 percent are children from active-duty military families, 5 percent were adopted from the state foster care system, 6 percent are Native American students, and 10 percent are siblings of existing account holders.[17]

In North Carolina, where adopted children and students in military families are eligible along with children with special needs, more than 1,400 families applied in the first year for just 350 available accounts.[18]

For Liz and Libby, the accounts mean more than an education. Their lives and the lives of those around them are being changed through Libby’s courageous example—and through the creative, groundbreaking innovations stemming from the connection between education savings accounts and financial technology. “They don’t see the bright orange wheelchair or the device in front of her or the braces she has,” Liz says. “They truly do adore her.”

“The parents have come to me to say how thankful they are that she is in their class. How the children talk to her and understand her, they whisper in her ear, tell her stories. It’s just amazing to see,” Liz says. “It gives you a lot of hope for our future.”

[1]National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Genetics Home Reference, “Beta-Propeller Protein-Associated Neurodegeneration,” https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/beta-propeller-protein-associated-neurodegeneration (accessed June 3, 2019).

[2]Kjersti Eline Stige et al., “Beta-Propeller Protein-Associated Neurodegeneration: A Case Report and Review of the Literature,” National Institutes of Health Clinical Case Reports, Vol. 6, No. 2 (February 2018), pp. 353–362, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5799652/# (accessed June 13, 2019).

[3]National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Genetics Home Reference, “Beta-Propeller Protein-Associated Neurodegeneration.”

[4]This story about Libby as told to the author by Libby’s mother.

[5]General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 2017, Senate Bill 257, https://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2017/Bills/Senate/PDF/S257v8.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019).

[6]Jonathan Butcher, “A Primer on Education Savings Accounts: Giving Every Child the Chance to Succeed,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3245, September 15, 2017, https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/BG3245.pdf.

[7]Rebecca David and Kevin Hesla, “Estimated Public Charter School Enrollment, 2017–2018,” National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, March 2018, https://www.publiccharters.org/sites/default/files/documents/2018-03/FINAL%20Estimated%20Public%20Charter%20School%20Enrollment%2C%202017-18.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019).

[8]EdChoice, “The ABCs of School Choice,” January 16, 2019, https://www.edchoice.org/research/the-abcs-of-school-choice/ (accessed June 3, 2019).

[9]Arizona Department of Education, “Empowerment Scholarship Account—Parent Handbook: A Guide to Utilizing Your Empowerment Scholarship Account,” for school year 2018–2019, https://cms.azed.gov/home/GetDocumentFile?id=5c25284f1dcb250a1c4e90eb (accessed June 3, 2019).

[10]Arizona Auditor General, Performance Audit Division, “Arizona Department of Education: Department Oversees Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program Spending, But Should Strengthen Its Oversight and Continue to Improve Other Aspects of Program Administration,” Report No. 16-107, June 2016, https://www.azauditor.gov/sites/default/files/16-107_Report.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019).

[11]Author calculations. See Jonathan Butcher, “My Turn: Voucher Fraud Is Terrible, But Put It Into Perspective,” Arizona Republic, July 18, 2017, https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2017/07/18/voucher-fraud-terrible-but-put-into-perspective/484733001/ (accessed June 3, 2019).

[12]North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority, “Education Savings Account: Information for Parents and School Administrators,” http://www.ncseaa.edu/pdf/ESA_Program_Overview.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019).

[13]ClassWallet, “How It Works: Spend Management 2.0,” https://www.classwallet.com/how-it-works.htm (accessed June 3, 2019).

[14]See, for example, Arizona Auditor General, “Santa Cruz County Superintendent: Theft of Public Monies,” November 25, 2005, https://www.azauditor.gov/reports-publications/counties/report/santa-cruz-county-school-superintendent-theft-public-monies (accessed June 3, 2019), and Doug Donovan and Liz Bowie, “Former Baltimore County Schools Leader Dallas Dance Pleads Guilty to Perjury,” The Baltimore Sun, March 8, 2018, https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/bs-md-dallas-dance-trial-20180305-story.html (accessed June 3, 2019). For more, see Jonathan Butcher, “The Scourge of School-District Fraud,” National Affairs, No. 39 (Spring 2019), https://www.nationalaffairs.com/authors/detail/jonathan-butcher (accessed June 3, 2019).

[15]Arizona Department of Education, Office of Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, letter to Empowerment Scholarship Account families, July 25, 2019, https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Information-and-Updates-Regarding-the-ESA-Program.html?soid=1107647512252&aid=tvwcu7fbGPI&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVdVME16ZG1OREprT1RZNSIsInQiOiJzb2NQcVdDck5iWTV2V0JtSklyZ1ZQdFBBVWE2dmRGWXl5c1dYcVZvV05Jbmp3MVJ0a1pqN0VJcW84SkZGTlwvY2VEU3F6aTlOYlo0SGhGMDZKV1wvdFpiSzZjdXBwY2hEd0ZFaWx0ckpWR1JsMzc5S3M0WE1UaHZxNWV6MW54XC96MyJ9 (accessed August 21, 2019).

[16]Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services 2016,” March 2016, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/consumers-and-mobile-financial-services-report-201603.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019).

[17]E-mail correspondence with Karla Escobar, Arizona Department of Education, and Sarah Raybon, Arizona School Tuition Organization Association, April 11, 2019.

[18]North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority, “Education Savings Account Summary of Data,” February 12, 2019, http://www.ncseaa.edu/documents/ESA_Summary_Data.pdf (accessed June 3, 2019).

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