The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Shown Why We Should Fund Students, Not Systems

The same survey also found that 86 percent of parents with school-aged children now support funding students directly through education savings accounts. Education savings account initiatives would allow families to use a portion of their children’s K-12 education dollars to cover the costs of approved education providers, including private schooling, homeschooling, micro-schooling, pandemic pods, tutoring, and special needs services.

This realization that we should be funding students instead of closed buildings is also leading to real action in a majority of state legislatures across the country.

Legislators in 27 states have introduced bills to enact or expand programs that would fund K-12 students as opposed to institutions. As of this writing, seven of these states—Iowa, Arizona, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia—have already passed school choice legislation out of a chamber, and five others—Florida, Georgia, Montana, Idaho, and Oklahoma—have passed bills out of at least one committee.

The proposals differ in size and scope, but they would all be a step in the right direction towards expanding educational freedom — and some of them would be groundbreaking. For example, over 90 percent of the school-aged population would be eligible for the proposal that passed out of the West Virginia House of Representatives. And under a bill in New Hampshire, nearly all of the school-aged population would be eligible for their proposal to fund students instead of systems.

Additionally, one of the two school choice proposals that passed out of the Arizona State Senate would roughly triple the number of families eligible for their education savings account program from 22 percent of the school-aged population to an estimated 65 percent to 70 percent.

Legislators in some states—including Illinois, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—filed bills that would allow families to take their children’s K-12 education dollars elsewhere if their schools didn’t reopen in person. These bills suggest that much of this momentum is driven by prolonged school closures. Georgia’s proposal to fund students directly has several eligibility categories, one of which is students assigned to public schools that do not offer full-time, in-person instruction. North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop similarly introduced a federal bill to allow families to take a portion of any future K-12 education relief dollars to the approved education provider of their choice if their public school doesn’t reopen in-person full-time.

We already fund students directly when it comes to Pell Grants and the GI Bill for higher education. The same goes for taxpayer-funded pre-K programs such as Head Start. Food stamps and Medicaid funding similarly go to families who have a choice of where they want to spend their grocery and health care budgets.

We should apply the same logic to K-12 education and fund students, not systems.

A version of this column previously appeared at the Daily Caller.