The Public School Benefits of Education Savings Accounts

Link: The Public School Benefits of Education Savings Accounts: The Impact of ESAs in Arizona

Summary: Known more informally as education savings accounts, Arizona’s ESAs take part of what the state would have spent covering the cost of a student’s education in a K-12 public school and instead deposit that money into a personalized account that allows the child’s family to use the funds for tutoring, educational therapies, private school tuition, curriculum materials, and other teaching tools.

Today, the program enrolls more than 800 children in Arizona whose parents serve on active duty in the military or have fallen in the line of service, making them the single largest group of ESA beneficiaries outside of special needs students. And adding up the 3,700 special needs children and hundreds more from the foster care system, Native American reservations, and failing schools—all of whom also qualify for the program—ESAs served more than 6,400 students this past year alone.

Some key findings from the report:

• ESAs complement existing public school choice options: District schools are 15 times likelier to “lose” a student through competition with another public school than to an ESA, among eligible populations.

• ESA families received an average award of $6,148 for non-special needs students in FY 2019, requiring substantially less in taxpayer funding than Arizona’s $10,120 public school average per pupil spending the same year.

• Arizona’s FY 2020 budget directs $3 million of ESA savings to overhaul the state’s IT system used to calculate the payments to every single public school in the state, benefitting over 1.1 million public school students.

• ESAs increase per pupil public school spending by redistributing state and federal dollars back to remaining public school students. From state sources alone, ESAs redirect over $600 per participant back to remaining public school students for teacher pay and other operational uses.

• ESAs ease the costs of enrollment growth and school construction in Arizona’s public school system, which currently increases state taxpayer costs by over $180 million per year, limiting the funding that is available to increase per pupil expenditures.

• ESAs often reduce budget pressures on public schools by serving students with severe disabilities, one of the most high-need, high-cost populations, whom districts state they can serve only by redirecting funds from other students’ instruction.

• Despite headlines to the contrary, Arizona’s ESA program has proven remarkably effective in deploying public funds toward children’s educational needs: Roughly 99 percent of ESA monies are used as intended, with alleged program misspending often involving educational purchases previously approved by the Arizona Department of Education.

Submitted September 05, 2019 at 08:42AM by punkthesystem https://ift.tt/2zVGoFS