Georgia Following Other States to an ESA?
They all have to keep thinking about implementation and accountability
The Georgia Senate today passed SB 233, the “Georgia Promise Scholarship Act,” which will now head to the Georgia House.
According to the Axios summary,
The legislation would give a $6,000 voucher to participating students to enroll in a private school that accepts the scholarship, which provides no limit on how many students can apply.
-Funds could also be used to cover tutoring fees, therapy for special needs students and transportation to the participating school.
-The Georgia Student Finance Commission would be tasked with managing the accounts for the program.
-The Commission would choose no fewer than three nationally "norm referenced tests" (think Iowa Test of Basic Skills) to measure the academic performance of participating students.
The bill is similar to other state ESA bills, and moved forward completely along partisan lines. If that were to happen in the House, it would again pass. This could put school choice into the reach of a lot more Georgia families. A $6,000 amount would cover tuition at just about every hybrid school in the state and would enable a lot more of them to open.
The bill necessarily leaves a lot of the implementation up to the Georgia Student Finance Commission, and the many, many implementation decisions GSFC is going to have to make for this will be important to get right if the Promise Scholarships are going to meaningfully increase choice and not be an empty promise (I’m so sorry. Can you imagine how many “empty promise” headlines there are going to be about this in the next few years?).
The audit section is very important. It is a good thing that there is a plan for that going in.
The word “homeschool” is not mentioned in the bill, but the practical effect (and, I assume, part of the intention) is to enable some number of families to at least partially homeschool (or, say, “hybrid school”…) their kids using these funds. I don’t think there is a huge risk, but there is some nonzero amount of risk to fulltime homeschoolers and to hybrid schoolers who don’t take the funds, in SB 233. Here is an article (which is not about SB 233, but illustrates the potential downside to homeschoolers), whose arguments I think supporters of SB 233 should take under consideration. The article is titled “The Great School Choice Double Cross,” and succinctly summarizes some common complaints, from a group one might think would otherwise be politically supportive of school choice:
Government gives education money to some homeschoolers along with accountability regulations.
Non-funded homeschoolers erect a protective legal barrier to prevent the accountability regulations from spilling over onto them.
Government dismantles the protective legal barrier.
All homeschoolers become subject to the accountability regulations, even if they do not take the money.
There really is some theoretical risk here. Laying out annual testing requirements in SB 233, and requiring GSFC to list the acceptable tests, will keep some number of families away. The way the bill is currently written there are not really consequences for performance, and the format (nationally-normed standardized tests) is at least a defensible setup. The bill requires GSFC to approve at least 3 tests. But if the purpose of the bill is to be really expansive, and allow creative and tailored education arrangements to emerge, a list of, say, the three biggest tests might constrain that to some extent. It would be good to include something like the new CLT elementary grade and other tests, but even doing that won’t cover every base. A lot of the families using hybrid schools, or even more informal co-ops, or fulltime homeschooling, are just playing a totally different game, and using a huge variety of curricula with a huge variety of expected outcomes. Some might be willing to submit to testing and just ignore the results of tests that don’t line up with their curricula…but will the GSFC and future legislators? Accountability in this area is still a huge question mark for hybrid schools and microschools and many of the new ESA bills that are passing around the country, even among supporters. (In fact, we are devoting time to talk about this exact issue at the 2023 National Hybrid Schools Conference in April. If you want to be a part of this conversation, you should register to come!)
We can all hear a legislator at some point in the future saying something like, “If Promise Scholarship kids are registered as homeschoolers, and we’re making them take tests, we should make all the other homeschooled kids take tests too. It just makes sense.” Or, “If some kids in a building are getting Promise Scholarships and have to test, then every other kid in that building should have to take the same test. It just makes sense.” Or, if there are complaints that the allowed test list is too narrow: “The GSFC has approved 7 tests and they’re only required to approve 3. Enough is enough. We can’t make everybody happy.” (And GSFC isn’t perfect. I wrote about a policy implementation issue around homeschoolers, hybrid schools, and Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship which provides college tuition for Georgia high school graduates in Little Platoons).
I have written about this before, but it is very important in the policy implementation stage of all of the bills, for legislators and state-level officials who are making the rules to orient themselves correctly. It is a huge mistake to think of things like SB 233 as a really creative new way of doing schooling. If we conceive of Promise Scholarships as being the latest step on a straight line from magnet schools to charter schools to tax credits to ESAs, that mode of thinking brings a lot of assumptions with it. That mode suggests that SB 233 is the latest way to get more kids into conventional schools, and measure them with conventional measures. Maybe some families, this thinking goes, will do some oddball things, but those are exceptions. To the extent families don’t fit into this new box, it’s a logistical problem to be dealt with, maybe through exceptions in the law, maybe through exclusions.
A better way to think about the possibilities SB 233 could open is as an outgrowth of homeschooling. Fulltime homeschoolers (and specifically HSLDA’s work over the years) is, mechanically, what is a making a lot of the more recent school choice advances possible.
Homeschoolers can be protective of their turf, but there is good reason for that. See this event at Harvard on the Post-Pandemic Future of Homeschooling from the spring of 2021 (and specifically the session called “Is it time for a change to homeschool law?”).
The oddballs and complications aren’t logistical problems; they’re the point of the whole arrangement. The gray area is the point. Most state legislators everywhere, and certainly most state-level officials, who will be making important decisions on the ground, are still very used to accountability and regulation arguments, and in the school choice modes of the last 20 years. Supporters of ESA-style bills, in any state, will need to get into a different mode of thinking if their ideas are going to be carried out successfully. Homeschool laws allow for a lot of the flexibility they need to work. Recognizing that is an important first step. But lots of families want to keep *all* of that flexibility, and to stay apart from these new government programs. That should be respected, and homeschooling should remain protected as these policies develop.