In its third era, public education aspires to expand equal opportunity by helping families and educators provide every student with an effective and efficient customized education through an effective and efficient public education market. We cannot achieve this aspiration without successfully implementing education savings accounts (ESAs).
ESAs are publicly funded flexible spending accounts that enable families to purchase the educational products and services they need to provide their child with a customized education. While ESAs are necessary to meet the unique educational needs of each student, we are still in the early stages of understanding how to best regulate and implement them.
Successful ESA implementations enable families to make purchases without unnecessary transactional friction. In this context, transactional friction refers to obstacles, complexities, conflicts, and inefficiencies that frustrate families and educational providers when they try to execute simple business transactions. These tensions come, in part, from needing to assure the public that every purchase is appropriate while not undermining customization by unduly limiting what families can purchase and/or overwhelming them with excessive bureaucracy.
Determining eligible ESA purchases
Determining the eligibility of families’ ESA purchases is a primary source of friction between families, providers, and ESA administrators. This school year in Florida over 500,000 families will spend about $3 billion making up to 2 million educational purchases for their students. Florida’s ESA administrators are responsible for ensuring each purchase is appropriate. Appropriate meaning consistent with state law and the unique needs of the student for whom a purchase is intended.
Determining if a purchase is appropriate for a specific student can be time consuming, which is problematic when an ESA administrator is reviewing millions of purchases annually. Families usually disagree when a purchase is denied and often initiate appeals through administrative, political, and media channels that can be time consuming and expensive to resolve. In Arizona, families are entitled to a formal administrative hearing when appealing a denied purchase. Often these hearings cost taxpayers more than the denied purchase.
When President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975, school districts, schools, and classroom teachers were required to work with families to create customized learning plans called Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) for special needs students. This was the first instance of government requiring public education to provide students with a customized education, and the results have been mixed. For many families, the IEP process works well. Others feel schools and school districts erroneously deny students needed services, leading to contentious appeals that sometimes result in litigation.
Despite these tensions in the IEP process, I suspect most ESA administrators will eventually use certified educators and accredited public and private educational institutions, with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), to help determine which ESA purchases are appropriate for each student. This approach should be less contentious than the IEP process since ESA families must use their students’ ESA funds, and not school district resources, to pay for services. This includes any services their students receive from school district staff.
Reimbursements and transactional friction
In some ESA states, families may purchase pre-approved educational products and services through an e-commerce site or use their personal funds and submit receipts to their state’s ESA administrator to get reimbursed. Reimbursements provide families with access to products and services not included on their state’s e-commerce site and allow for timely purchases. If a student needs materials to finish a science project that is due tomorrow, the family can make an out-of-pocket purchase and hope to get reimbursed.
While reimbursements provide families with purchasing flexibility, they come with complexities that generate transactional friction. Families must submit receipts showing each purchased item and its cost. These receipts are sometimes blurry and difficult to read, or the item descriptions are too vague for ESA administrators to determine whether they are eligible, requiring families to spend time getting new receipts.
Determining a service provider’s eligibility to receive ESA funds also often complicates reimbursements. A family may think a speech therapist is eligible to be compensated by ESA funds, but when they submit a receipt, the ESA administrator has no record of the therapist’s license. This causes delays while the therapist submits her current state license to the ESA administrator to establish or reestablish eligibility. Many families cannot afford waiting several weeks to get reimbursed or pay the additional credit card interest caused by these delays.
To reduce and eventually eliminate reimbursements, some ESA administrators are exploring creating standardized commodity codes that will enable families to buy pre-approved educational products and services using debit cards. This solution, which will probably take a few years to fully implement nationally, will be like Health Savings Account (HSA) cards. If enough states join this effort their collective market size should be sufficient to convince most vendors to participate.
In the interim some states are using or preparing to use technology such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate reimbursement processing. This automation will expedite the processing of reimbursements that do not require an educator to determine if a purchase is appropriate for a specific student.
Arizona is using risk-based auditing to accelerate its reimbursement processing. This involves automatically approving all ESA purchases under $2,000 and then auditing those purchases that have a significant probability of being ineligible. If an audit determines a purchase is ineligible the family must repay their ESA account. And in Florida, Step Up For Students is making excellent progress processing reimbursements more effectively and efficiently using technology and better workflow processes.
These interim solutions are an important bridge to a future in which debit cards and statewide networks of certified educators and accredited educational institutions enable public education to provide an effective and efficient customized education to millions of students with little unnecessary transactional friction.
Some transactional friction will always exist in public education, and it should. How well we manage this friction will help determine how successful we are.
In this episode, Tuthill speaks with the chief executive officer and founder of GreatMinds, an organization focused on developing world class, content-rich curriculum for PK-12 students. A group of education leaders launched GreatMinds in 2007, and now 75% of its employees come from the teacher ranks. GreatMinds curricula aim to inspire joy in both teaching and learning, giving teachers the tools they need to help students achieve success.
Tuthill and Munson discuss how a knowledge-rich curriculum moves away from a rote memorization learning style toward a holistic and comprehensive understanding of English, math and science. One of the original proponents of Common Core standards, Munson recalls decades-long political curriculum battles. Amid the global pandemic, she believes more than ever in the power of knowledge-rich curriculum.
"There's a shocking amount of change going on … a lot of hope out there. By and large, the momentum of having done things (one) way for so long is our greatest enemy."
EPISODE DETAILS:
How “drill-and-kill” style textbooks and curriculum can disempower student learning
The politics of Common Core
GreatMinds’ use of technology to follow rather than co-opt instruction
Plans to develop curricula for social studies and history
LINKS MENTIONED:
Charter schools. The exorbitant payouts to the principal of a failing Orange County charter school are behind legislative efforts to tighten charter laws. Orlando Sentinel.
Privatization. The Volusia County school district considers outsourcing 500 custodial and grounds maintenance jobs, reports the Daytona Beach News Journal. The Bay County school district considers bids for privatizing the district's transportation services, reports the Panama City News Herald.
School choice. Vouchers and tax credit scholarships can make private school more affordable. Panama City News Herald.
Forget the furloughs. The Pasco school district finds the $3 million it needs to keep from making employees take two unpaid days off, as originally planned. Tampa Bay Times.
Raising the bar. Don't set it too high with graduation requirements, a high school principal tells the House K-12 Subcommittee. WTXL.
Educator conduct. Prosecutors drop fraud charges against a band teacher who was accused of using nearly $15,000 in school funds to pay for relatives who accompanied the band on a trip to Paris, reports the South Florida Sun Sentinel. More from the Palm Beach Post. An assistant football coach in Manatee County is accused of improperly touching a student and asking her for naked photographs, reports the Sarasota Herald Tribune. More from the Bradenton Herald. A Hernando middle school teacher with a history of off-campus incidents - including three DUI arrests - returns to the classroom after his latest DUI, reports the Tampa Bay Times.
Substitutes. The Marion County teachers union is accusing the district of using "full time" subs to avoid paying benefits. Ocala Star Banner. (more…)
Vouchers and testing. A new report from the Fordham Institute finds that mandated testing - and even public reporting of test results - isn't that big a concern for private schools worried about government regs tied to vouchers and tax credit scholarships. Coverage from redefinED, Choice Words, the Cato Institute's Andrew J. Coulson and Gradebook. AEI's Michael McShane says Florida's tax credit scholarship program (which, altogether now, is administered by Step Up For Students, which co-hosts this blog) finds the "sweet spot" with its testing and financial reporting requirements: "These regulations don’t sound too crazy to me; they seem to strike a good balance of accountability for safety, fiscal responsibility, and academic performance without being overly dictatorial in how schools must demonstrate any of those."
Shooting rockets. Senate President Don Gaetz tells the Associated Press that Florida needs to slow down on ed reforms until it rights the new teacher evaluation system and other changes in the works: "We need to quit shooting rockets into the air. We need to give schools and school districts, teachers and parents time to institutionalize the reforms that have already been made. We need about a two-year cooling off period."
Ford Falcons. Schools need competition. EdFly Blog.
School choice. Education Commissioner Tony Bennett says at a National School Choice Week event in Tampa that some Florida districts deserve credit for expanding public school options such as magnets and career academies, reports redefinED. More from Tampa Tribune.
Charter schools. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools ranks Florida fifth for its charter laws. SchoolZone. Gradebook. South Florida Sun Sentinel. StateImpact Florida. The Pinellas school district postpones a decision on whether to close a long-struggling Imagine school in St. Petersburg, reports the Tampa Bay Times and Tampa Tribune. The Volusia district's decision to shut down a struggling charter in Deland is headed to appeals court, reports the Daytona Beach News Journal. (more…)
A Florida Board of Education member proposed today that the state end its textbook adoption process, saying teachers and principals are best equipped to decide which materials are needed to help students.
Roberto Martinez of Miami said the time is right for that step, given Florida’s education reforms - tough standards, a tough accountability system and big changes to the teaching profession – as well as digital learning advances that are easing access to high-quality instructional materials.
“It seems we’re now at the stage - and certainly will be at the stage in the next couple of years - where the teachers and principals working with the districts should then be able to have the freedom to do as they deem appropriate, based upon the exercise of their professional judgment, to use whatever materials they want,” Martinez said at a board meeting this morning. “If they want to use textbooks, let them use textbooks. If they want to use primary source material, fine. Digital? Fine. Whatever it is. But I think we’re at that stage where we can give them that kind of freedom to accomplish the outcomes that we want.”
Martinez said he wanted the board to add elimination of textbook adoption to its legislative priorities for next year. He did not offer a timeline for ending the process, but in a letter to board members Monday he wrote that the Department of Education needed to work with school districts to develop “an effective transition plan.”
“These changes would get rid of the expensive and unnecessary burdens that impede the ability of our teachers and students from accessing the latest, most advanced, and best educational materials, many of which are, or will become, available through digital learning,” he wrote.
Martinez’s proposal isn’t entirely new; last year, the board discussed a plan to make Florida classrooms all digital within five years. Nevertheless, Tuesday’s comments drew an enthusiastic response from fellow board members and two superintendents in attendance. (more…)
In a recent interview with Slate, Khan Academy founder Salman Khan is asked how he gets the education establishment to go along with his vision (and the vision of many others) of using technology to better customize learning. His answer doesn’t include the term “seat time," but he suggests most of “the establishment” (he uses air quotes, too) already agrees the practice is obsolete. Here’s his response in full:
I actually think the majority, almost everyone we talk to who are part of the establishment, are in violent agreement with us. And if anything, they’ve been frustrated, because they’re all well meaning, intelligent, talented people who care about kids. But they’ve, they’ve – sometimes not even been able to articulate it – but they’ve felt hampered. They say, yeah, I see that kid does not understand basic multiplication, but I need to forward them. In the existing system, it kind of was what they had to do. So I think a lot of them view this as a chance almost to get liberated. I think the stuff that – I wouldn’t even say threatens – I think the stuff that the infrastructure that will go away is this whole infrastructure around what is, what has to happen on Day 18 in the seventh grade in California? Or Day 28 in the sixth grade in Louisiana? That whole kind of scaffolding of state mandated curricula, I think that’s probably - I think will go away. And really, I haven’t seen anybody really defend that.
Also in the Slate interview (there are two other short videos), Khan mentions his company’s partnership with public schools in the Los Altos school district - and the incredible impact its approach is having on student achievement. Khan Academy also has a partnership with Step Up For Students, involving 10 private schools in the Tampa area that serve low-income students with tax credit scholarships. More about that here. More about the erosion of seat time here.
