Education Savings Acccounts Landscape Analysis
Danny Torres in conversation with Robin Chait and William Berry
William Berry:
ESAs sort of constitute a very young and developing policy space. And the trends point towards ESAs growing rapidly and massively over time. I think it’s important for the research community to establish sort of baselines of information around ESA, sort of like participation, and achievement now, so we can track these trends over time.
Danny Torres:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices, shaping innovations and applying rigorous research in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. I’m Danny Torres. I’ll be your host.
Since 2011, education savings accounts or ESAs have expanded across the United States. These accounts allow state education funds, originally allocated for students to attend public school, to be redirected to families to use for educational services of their choice. This funding model enables parents to choose from a broader range of educational services, such as private school tuition, tutoring, learning devices, and distance-learning options.
So how do ESAs work, and how are states ensuring accountability in their ESA programs? Recently WestEd conducted a landscape analysis that provides a policy snapshot of state ESA requirements for accountability and transparency. The analysis also establishes a fact base of ESA data and reporting practices across states.
Today, we’re joined by the authors of the analysis, William Berry and Robin Chait. William is a research associate with WestEd’s Charter and School Choice Team. His work spans both qualitative and quantitative research as well as data analysis on a range of educational initiatives. Robin is a project director with our school choice team and leads initiatives that provide professional development and technical assistance to charter entities at the state and local levels. She also develops resources and provides technical assistance to state departments of education and local education agencies in a variety of content areas. Robin and William, we’re glad to have you on the program.
Robin Chait:
Thank you. Glad to be here.
William Berry:
Glad to be here.
Danny Torres:
So Robin, can you explain what education savings accounts or ESAs are, and who are they intended for?
Robin Chait:
Sure. So, education savings accounts provide families with state education dollars to use for educational expenses. Families use them for things like private school tuition, but also for things like tutoring, academic enrichment programs, supplemental education programs, and states generally have requirements for how the funds can be used, but they are generally very flexible funds. There’s also variation in the students that are eligible for these programs. Some programs are targeted to specific student groups, and some programs are available to all students, called universal programs.
Danny Torres:
What trends or shifts have you observed in the growth or popularity of ESAs over time, and to what would you attribute those changes?
Robin Chait:
Sure. There’s been rapid growth in ESA programs from only four states having those programs in 2019 to 18 states having them now. And in addition, a number of programs started out as targeted and have become universal in recent years. And it seems that there’s increasing support among the public and politicians for these programs. And I think that’s just because there’s a lot more support for families to exercise choice in their students’ education and to have more flexibility in terms of the types of education programs and services that their students are able to participate in.
And this has really taken off since the pandemic when many families had a front-seat view of their children’s education, and some weren’t entirely comfortable with the education they were receiving and really wanted more control over the kinds of educational programs and services their students were participating in. So that’s why I think that this whole idea of school choice and flexibility and how education dollars are used has become a lot more popular in recent years.
Danny Torres:
So William, are there any notable differences in the way ESAs are structured from state to state?
William Berry:
In general, we found that ESAs seem to have more in common with each other than anything else. Almost all of them require some sort of norm-reference testing of participants, some sort of financial spending guardrails around what families can actually use ESA funds for, and some kind of reporting of some sort around ESAs and how they’re used and who is using them. However, there are a few key differences across states. Some ESAs are universal, meaning that all students in the state can apply for them, specifically for students with disabilities, and some are for students in certain low-performing school districts.
ESAs are managed by different types of organizations. In some cases, it’s the actual State Department of Education, in other cases, it’s an independent not-for-profit organization, and in other cases, it’s the Office of the Treasury Secretary. And then, ESAs sort of take different forms in how they’re actually used sometimes. Families will just receive a debit card that they can spend mostly freely on expenses, but of course they’re closely monitored. And then in other cases, there’s an online portal with services provided by pre-approved vendors.
Danny Torres:
So, your landscape analysis provides a systematic analysis of accountability provisions within state ESA statutes. So from your perspectives, why does accountability for ESA programs matter, and what accountability measures have states established?
Robin Chait:
Accountability matters because you know, as I mentioned, the programs are expanding really rapidly, and they use public education funds, typically state-education dollars. So it’s important to ensure that the programs are achieving their intended purpose and serving students and families the way they’re intended to.
Through our analysis of state statutes, we developed a framework for accountability measures and we grouped them into three categories. So, one is academic accountability, financial accountability, and then data and reporting accountability. So, I’ll start by talking about academic accountability and then turn it over to William.
So, academic accountability refers to using test scores and student performance to demonstrate the effectiveness of private school choice programs. And we found that most ESA programs have very flexible assessment requirements. In fact, 14 of the ESA programs that we looked at had some sort of requirement for students to take either a state or national norm-referenced assessment, but they didn’t have a specific benchmark that students had to meet. And we also found that the testing results were largely meant to provide information to parents and the general public who would then draw their own conclusions from it. So only one state.
As I mentioned, most states don’t have explicit benchmarks. We only found one state that did, and that was West Virginia that had explicit benchmarks for students to meet when taking these assessments. And then finally, a few states allow student academic portfolios to meet the academic performance requirements. So, the ESA statutes for New Hampshire, Utah, and West Virginia allow for portfolios of student work to demonstrate academic performance.
William Berry:
And in regards to financial accountability, as I mentioned before, we found that almost all states established some sort of guardrails around what ESA funds could be used for. And generally, examples of allowable uses of funds included things like private school tuition, tutoring services, textbooks, specialized speech and behavior therapies for students with disabilities, and more. And one thing that may actually surprise listeners is that sometimes, allowable expenses included services provided by traditional public schools such as extracurriculars and specialized coursework. And in states that typically gave lists of what funds were not allowed to be used for, commonly listed items were consumer electronics that did not have a clearly educational use, so no video games, and then also consumable supplies such as markers and art supplies, and then items such as snacks and refreshments and clothing.
And then beyond this, almost every ESA statute explicitly mandates that the program undergoes some sort of audit, whether it be annual or random or quarterly or some sort of combination of those. So for example, a yearly random audit. And then, in terms of data and reporting accountability, we saw that ESA statutes typically require some sort of data collection on ESAs, and then the data is typically reported to state legislatures or a state’s governor, are published online for the general public to take a look at.
Danny Torres:
All right. So, what do states share in their annual or quarterly reports that you mentioned?
William Berry:
In general, the data that states made public in ESA annual reports focus on the characteristics of students who use ESA funds, and commonly reported characteristics included students’ race and ethnicity, their student grade level, and the geographic location of where students come from, typically ZIP codes. And then in some cases, there are other interesting types of student-characteristic data. For example, a student’s participation in an ESA program in the previous year. So whether they did or they did not. Or also the type of school that a student attended in the previous year, whether it’s a traditional public school, a charter school, a private school, homeschooled, et cetera. And then also for ESAs that focus on students with disabilities, sometimes they have data on the types of disabilities that students have.
Danny Torres:
So Robin, are these states doing unique things in terms of accountability? And how are state leaders measuring the impact of ESAs given the variety of schooling options and the flexibility inherent in these programs?
Robin Chait:
So, we did find a couple of states that are doing some unique things in our report. For example, West Virginia’s program, it’s called West Virginia’s Hope Scholarship Program, has more specific academic accountability requirements for students that are participating in individualized instruction plan. So those are students that are being educated outside of a traditional public or private school, and they’re participating in this ESA program instead.
So, those students have to actually take a nationally norm-referenced exam, and they have to meet a specific target, and as I mentioned before, most of the state ESAs don’t require students to meet a specific target. They just require them to take an assessment. So that is unique. The statute doesn’t explicitly say what’ll happen if the student doesn’t meet the target, but at least they do specify a target. And West Virginia students also have the alternative of completing a portfolio of student work and submitting it to a teacher to review. So that was unique.
William Berry:
And then also, as Robin mentioned, New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account allows for students to provide a portfolio of student work to the ESA management organization. And the statute states that these portfolios can include, and I’m quoting verbatim here, “writings, worksheets, workbooks, and creative materials used or developed by the student,” and, ending the quotation here, and then the portfolio can then be formally approved by either a certified teacher or a private school teacher. And again, as Robin mentioned, Utah and West Virginia are two other states that allow for portfolios of student work to count towards the accountability requirements, but the New Hampshire State statute goes into much more detail than the others.
And I do think that this is particularly interesting because in the field of education as a whole, I’d say educators and just policy organizations in general are sort of looking into alternatives to traditional standardized tests. Any sort of innovative portfolio-driven assessments are interesting topics that could be theoretically explored further under the mantle of ESAs.
Danny Torres:
Well, William and Robin, thank you very much for sharing what you learned in your analysis of ESA programs. So, as we come to the end of our time together, do you have any last thoughts for our listeners today?
William Berry:
Sure. I would say that ESAs sort of constitute a very young and developing policy space, and the trends point towards ESAs growing rapidly and massively over time. And that means that ESA reporting will yield even more comprehensive and complex data in the future. And I’m putting on my researcher hat here. I think it’s important for the research community to establish baselines of information around ESA, sort of like participation, and achievement now, so we can track these trends over time.
Robin Chait:
So, I completely agree, and I think states should really consider how they can monitor the programs and the students that are participating. It’s really hard to have true accountability measures for these programs given the flexible nature of the funding. So, families are using the funding for all kinds of things. We don’t know what the dosage is. We don’t know how much students are participating in the programs that they’re taking advantage of. And so, it’s really hard to get a measure of the impact of the programs, but it’s still helpful to know how families are using the funding, who’s participating, and how it’s impacting the rest of the educational ecosystem. So, I would encourage states to try to collect and monitor that data to answer those questions.
Now, I also think it’s important to have some information about participating students’ academic outcomes. And as I mentioned, most states do require students to take a test, either norm-referenced or a state-standardized assessment, and I think that’s a good thing, and that they should continue to do that just to monitor how these students are doing, even if you can’t necessarily make a connection between the program and student achievement.
Danny Torres:
So, how can people find you online and reach out to you if they have any questions about this work?
Robin Chait:
Sure. Well, they can email me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn. If you search for Robin Chait at WestEd, you can find me easily. Also take a look at the Charters and School Choice website to get more information about our team and the work that we do at wested.org/school-choice.
William Berry:
And you can reach me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn. And as I learned recently, there are a lot of William Berrys out there, so please search for William Berry WestEd to find me.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, William and Robin for being on the program, and thank you to all our listeners for joining us today. The education savings accounts landscape analysis we discussed in today’s program can be found online at wested.org/esa-landscape-analysis. There is also a link in our show notes.
You can find this and past episodes of the Leading Voices podcast online at wested.org/leadingvoicespodcast, or on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Spotify.
This podcast is brought to you by WestEd, a national nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. At WestEd, we believe that learning changes lives. Every day, we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for youth and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on one really important facet of the work that we do at WestEd, and I encourage you to visit us at wested.org to learn more. Special thanks to Marleah Arechiga and Gretchen Wright for their collaboration on this episode, and to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer. Thank you all very much for joining us. Until next time.