A Magic Moment for Educational Freedom: Jonathan Williams, ALEC Chief Economist & EVP of Policy

ALEC Executive Vice President of Policy and Chief Economist Jonathan Williams discusses the ongoing steps for education freedom and providing students and parents more choices on the education front.

Today we are witnessing really a magic moment for education freedom across the United States, in reimagining of K-12 education in America. For decades, we have unfortunately used a one size fits all model that assigned students to a public school based on nothing more than a zip code in many cases. The result is that many students get trapped in a public school that simply is not the best for them.

Today, a growing number of states have greatly expanded the options available to families when it comes to their student's education. This includes breaking down regulatory barriers to homeschooling, permitting micro schooling, authorizing more charter schools, and modifying state laws so that education dollars follow students, not systems in formal education scholarship account ESA programs.

Despite the best efforts of the big government education bureaucracy, in the self-serving special interests, like the teachers' unions looking to protect their term, real choice and education freedom is on the march in the states. The state ESA educational freedom programs give families maximum flexibility with their children's education by allowing state education dollars to flow into controlled accounts where spending is directed by the parent as it should be authorized expenses that can be paid out of the ESA include school uniforms, standardized testing this private school tuition, books, supplies, and in some cases, even transportation to and from school.