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What is an Educational Savings Account (ESA)? How can you keep up to date on what’s happening in your state? Learn all about ESAs and the important school choice legislation that is making its way across the United States in today’s episode with guest Matt Beienburg from the Goldwater Institute in Arizona.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:

Welcome again to Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have Matt Beienburg with us. Did I say that, right, Matt?

Matt Beienburg:
Yup.

Marlin Detweiler:

One German to another. We should be able to pronounce your names. Welcome, Matt. Great to have you.

Before we talk about your work at the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, an education, well, you can describe what it is better than I can, so I'm going to leave you to do that. But tell us a little bit about yourself first. Your personal background in education and that sort of thing.

Matt Beienburg:

Sure. So, yeah, I'm the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute and also the Director of our Center for Constitutional Advocacy. We're based here in Arizona. I'm from Arizona, grew up in the Phoenix area, studied economics in college, worked in the private sector, studied public policy for graduate school. I have worked in public, private, government, spent a few years working for the state legislative budget office, looking at education funding and finance for K-12 and higher education. And now working on the policy side here at Goldwater.

Marlin Detweiler:

Wonderful. Tell us a little about yourself personally. Are you married? You have children?

Matt Beienburg:

Yep. Yep. I'm married with kids. So these are issues that are not just professional and kind of abstract, but actually have an impact on my personal desire to see the education system in the United States be something where kids can thrive.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, nothing motivates like personal circumstances. That's great. How old are your children, if I may ask?

Matt Beienburg:

Three and one.

Marlin Detweiler:

Okay. So you are just getting started. Those two are younger than any of my grandchildren. Okay, well, good! So I know you focus on a number of different things. I'd like to focus our conversation today on education. And that's where we are. That's where we live and breathe. What are in general are the things that you have been working on at Goldwater?

I know we'll talk about education savings accounts and how the opportunities have presented themselves in very significant ways the last few years on a state-by-state basis. But what in general are you focused on in education?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah, several areas, from school choice to transparency in public schools to make sure parents can know what they're walking into if they choose to send their kids to a public school about the curriculum in the content that's being taught. Issues around free speech. Pushing back on a lot of the radical diversity, equity and inclusion mandates in higher education that really repudiates the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution. So pushing back on that. Defending free speech. We actually just announced recently we're working with a group who's going to be releasing a United States history curriculum for high school students. So that'll be something available for public schools, private schools, homeschool families. So, yeah, we're working kind of across the board to make sure that there are opportunities for families to explore options and then that they have the information to navigate that and then the resources to use within those opportunities.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I realize that you're working in a much broader area than we are. We're focused on the classical Christian education community, whether that be the homeschool world or the private classical Christian school world. And you're working in a much broader area. There are obviously some areas that have created some real significant challenges for you and for parents. And we find a lot of parents are running to us when they see what's really going on and have seen in the last three years has been very eye-opening for what's going on in the schools.

I don't imagine that was a surprise to you, though, was it?

Matt Beienburg:

Well, I think, you know, we were raising the alarm bell about content in the classroom even before COVID hit. But obviously, parents getting to see their students learning via Zoom and seeing the content just in their living room and finding out some of the things – not even political, but just recognizing, hey, my kid doesn't seem like they're actually being taught to read.

You know, we've seen a lot of news stories coming out that the public schools, thousands of schools and districts across the country, were using material that actively damaged kids' ability to read. Like they weren't pushing phonics. They were they were pushing these things about sight reading, having kids just memorize pictures, essentially. Actively making it harder for these kids to become readers.

And parents saw that and said, “This doesn't seem right,” and that's on top of then all the content that parents saw and said, “Well that seems a little political or sexualized this is not content that seems appropriate for a second grader to be exposed to in class.” And so for various reasons, whether it's just academic failure, the kids being treated as kind of an afterthought to the teacher's unions, and the political agenda on that front.

Yeah, a lot of parents said, you know, enough is enough. I'm already de facto homeschooling my kids because you're not opening the school. And hey, you know what? This is working. And so for all sorts of different paths. But yeah, we definitely have seen the most dramatic generational harm on kids as a result of not COVID, but the response to COVID, the policy decisions that were made predominately by the unions and those whom they influence.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, this isn't there is reason that we're doing this, but I think I'd be remiss to not to say that the public education that I got– I graduated high school in 1974– was already on course to produce what we're dealing with now. It's not something that's happened in recent years. We can get into the history and the philosophy of that and what Dewey was trying to do and even what Horace Mann was trying to do and find that education in America has not been really what it could be. And that's one of the things that we're really trying to do something about. And in another area of your work in education, you're really working on something around Education Savings Accounts. Describe what is meant by that term. This is a this is such a significant occurrence and I only became aware of it earlier this year. So maybe some history as to when it got started. You would have thought that I would have been a bit more familiar, but I wasn't.

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah. So ESA stands for Education Savings Account, or in Arizona, we call them Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. And it's actually a policy idea that Goldwater came up with and got the Arizona legislature, the first in the country to enact back in 2011.

Marlin Detweiler:

I want to make sure that we don't go past that too far. So the institute, the Goldwater Institute, is the originator of this idea and is the source of the beginnings of this. I know Arizona was the first, but it came out of the organization that you're working for?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah. So there were white papers, research papers at the institute put forward kind of in tandem with this in terms of the history and I won't go too much into this, but there were other private choice programs that were struck down by the courts in Arizona because the state constitution has limits about funding being able to be used at private schools.

And so there were discussions about saying you would be allowed to provide funding to families if they could have a wider opportunity for it to use that, if they didn't have to use it at a private school. So for legal reasons, that was also a kind of discussion happening in the courts as well. But essentially what you had happen for how this program came about and what it is, the ESA’s are very simply a program where the state of Arizona in this case and others who've now followed says, look, we're typically going to be spending 12, 13, $14,000 per students to send you to a public school. If instead of that, you, the family would like to opt out of going to your district school or even a public charter school, we will give you a portion of what the state was going to spend educating your kid. We will put that in an account for you. And now you can use that for your child's education. If you want to send them to a private school, you're welcome to do that.

If you want to do at home education, you can do that. You can use your ESA funds for tutoring, for special education, therapies, for books, for all sorts of educational resources. And essentially what this did is it said, look, the state was already going to guarantee full funding for any student who walks through the door of a public school.But for a lot of families, if that's not going to be a good fit, for whatever reason, we're going to say, look, it's going to cost us less than sending your kid to a public school. You're going to benefit from it more. Your student is going to benefit from it more. We're going to offer you this alternative route.

And so we've seen this huge growth; this program, which again, served about 100 kids the first year in Arizona, only students with special needs, has now expanded to states across the country and students from all backgrounds.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, I'm aware of a number of states that are working on this program, some that have already adopted it. Florida, I believe Iowa has this, is Texas approved yet?

Matt Beienburg:

They're actually in the midst of having debates over the policy issue right now. So there's about 15 states now that have some version of an ESA, and almost 10 of those have universal ESAs, meaning any kid is eligible. Some of the states, it's still limited to only kids from a certain geographic region or only students with special needs.

But in the wake of COVID, there's been a big movement to say, why is it that we're picking winners and losers? Any kid can walk into the public school system, regardless of their background, regardless of their income, you know, no questions asked. There's no reason we should be trying to say, well, you're going to get locked into this system.

Instead, policymakers looked at this and said, yep, we're going to offer this program. We think that it's putting parents in control of their kids' education. We're not going to say who is or isn't allowed to use this. And and now we're seeing that the demand for the program soaring in Arizona and elsewhere.

Marlin Detweiler:

So the state's motivation is we save money. The parent's motivation is we get to choose, and we don't have to pay for education twice. We've paid for with our taxes. Now that money is available to us, but it's still directed toward education. That would have had a cost one way or another. We just get to determine where it's spent.

Matt Beienburg:

And to the states’ interest, if something is providing an education at a lower cost and to the extent when you look at, you know, proficiency rates in reading and math, the public school system has not produced results. Right? We have literally doubled the amount that is spent on public school students in the United States over the last 40, 50 years. Even when you adjust for inflation, we're spending twice as much as we were, and yet the outcomes are basically flat. And so the public school system is spending more, and it's not moving the needle. So policymakers look at this and say, “Yeah, I'm open to innovation.”

And we've actually seen for those who are familiar public charter schools, which are still public schools, but they operate independently of the school district, those are something that didn't didn't exist 30 years ago. They just started in the 1990s and in Arizona and elsewhere. They have led to academic gains and more choice for parents. And so it's a it's a win-win.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I've been involved in education and educational pursuits, starting a school, a couple schools, actually starting a business for more than three decades. And the one thing I know is it's not primarily about the money– meaning when I hear public educators saying public school, sometimes we refer to them as government schools, “We need more money to do these things.”

The one thing I'm certain of is that's not the big E on the eye chart. As I like to say, that's not the biggest problem. But you found a way. The Goldwater Institute has really been an author of sorts of an idea that's really catching on. In Arizona, do I understand that the funds available are generally in the $7,000 range, or am I confusing that with another state now?

Matt Beienburg:

That's right. For your typical student, it's about it's a little over now, $7,000. It's a little bit more for high school students. It's less for a kindergarten student. And if you're a student with special needs, just like in the public school system, if you have kids with severe disabilities in the public school system, they can generate $30,000 plus dollars for that student.

So if you're a student who has special needs in the ESA program, you also kind of get that multiplier. It's still less than you would have gotten in the public school, but it's enough to say, “We understand that there's going to be a lot of very intensive therapies and treatments and all sorts of stuff that they're involved with this.” And so the ESA program is built around accommodating that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, Well, our parents, I think it's fair to say, and the schools that we serve are primarily interested in not paying for education twice, getting what they want. And I can tell you we have some scholarship funds available for our online school, but we always have requests that are, I think, at least twice what we can serve in those requests and this kind of thing, making the kind of education that a parent wants available because they can now afford it is a huge, huge coup.

What do you see as downsides? Are you at all concerned? How do you address the concern that the states are going to start enforcing standards or things that people have already tried to get away from by coming to us or other private options?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah, and that's an important issue. And so in Arizona, for instance, the ESA statutes, the laws that created the ESA program are crystal clear and say this does not give the state any power to regulate or supervise private schools or homeschools – their curriculum, their creeds. You are not allowed to go in and start saying you have to teach X or Y or can't teach that.

You might be doing an at home education with the kids. They're not required under the Arizona program, for instance, to take the state test or to take testing of any sort. Ultimately, the accountability rests with the parent. So, yes, there are obviously folks predominately on the left who say we don't trust parents, right? This is unaccountable.

We don't know what they're teaching – not that a lot of these kids are being taught anything in a public school setting, but they try to basically paint parents and say, “Oh, this is an unsafe environment for the kids. They're not learning. We don't know what's going on.” All these attacks which really are just political attacks.

Marlin Detweiler:

They're not based upon actual information.

Matt Beienburg:

And we hear that whether it's at home education or private schooling. Right. And yet we see these same folks on the left who then turn around and send their kids to a private school, for instance. At the same time, they're saying that it's unaccountable. So it's not a serious complaint, but it is one that they make over and over.

So for the families on our side, because this is an important conversation, we have folks on the ESA program who are sending their kids to a private school or who are doing, you know, were a homeschool family and our continuing at home education through the program to do that. One of the important issues, and we've had this conversation with folks in Arizona, for instance if you are a student who is homeschooling, you can continue as you have for years.

You basically sign an affidavit that says, I'm homeschooling my kids. Done. The government's not doing anything else. That's it. Alternatively, if you would like to join the ESA program, you sign essentially the contract that says, yes, here is the dollar amount that you're going to get. Yes, you agree to only use these funds for broad educational expense.

Again, it doesn't say you have to use this curriculum or that, but it says this is for curriculum, this is for tutoring, this is for broad categories of education.

Marlin Detweiler:

Not vacation to Mexico.

Matt Beienburg:

Right, Right. So like, for instance, they can now use it for limited transportation funding. If a student wants to get a bus pass or something. But all these things are there. And so for families who said, look, we have concerns that what if they start packing this with a bunch of regulation on us? What if they try and tell us that in order to do this funding? And that's a risk in the future.

There's nothing that stops the left from shutting down school choice or ESAs or anything or homeschooling at all. But we have created this where there's two categories so that for a family who says, I'm just a little nervous about getting involved with something where there's any state involvement whatsoever, even if down the line someone comes in and tries to attack the program, well then you can always say, I'm just going to go back to being a homeschool family.

I'm going to sign that affidavit instead and not participate in the ESA program. Right. No one's required to do this, but we're saying let's have that fight ten years from now. If you know, if the left wants to take over and try and attack us, as opposed to just prematurely surrendering and saying we're going to continue forcing these families to pay twice and have a lot of them who would like to do homeschooling or private schooling, but they can't afford it. And so they're forced to get tracked into the public school system. So we've looked at this and said we are very clear-eyed about the threats and the dangers, and it's going to require eternal vigilance. But this is something that provides an opportunity for families to pursue the kind of education you guys are talking about.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, it really does. And my sense is that these kinds of things, when they morph into something unfamiliar to us or completely uncomfortable to us, it takes enough time to where the family that starts homeschooling with funds like this today they are likely to be safe. Because I think you're right, it picked a ten-year time frame. I don't expect problems like that. Yeah, it's hard to know, but it takes a while for those kinds of things to morph into something unrecognizable because it tends to happen slowly. Not always, but schools could be forced with certain things. And I know that they're concerned about that in their accreditation organizations that will say no to this kind of funding and that sort of thing.

What advice do you have to them? You've said, Hey, we're doing the best we can, but we have to be perpetually vigilant. But are there other things that schools, for example, or maybe even homeschools can do to protect themselves from those downsides?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah, I mean, one thing is, is being actively involved. You know, I mentioned the teachers unions. They're one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country. They are disciplined. They are organized. When you talk about parents and private schools, there are obviously homeschool associations or groups or private schools, but that side is not as well organized as the left.

You have the National Education Association, which can send its marching orders to chapters and teachers union groups all across the country and have them showing up, testifying, talking about how we're waging a war on public education, etc., etc.. Parents, you know, we're just trying to take care of our families. We're not running a big advocacy group in that way.

And so a lot of it is to say, have those schools, have those parents be engaged and recognize that you can't just trust everything to stay on autopilot. You have to be out there, share your story so that when the left is attacking, saying these programs are just siphoning money away, etc.. No, there's real forces behind who's benefiting, who's being able to pursue a great education here.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that's that's wonderful. Yeah, I know there are a lot of people out there who will simply say, no, I don't want any attachment. I have been on both sides of that. And I must say that I see families paying their taxes and hurting and not being able to afford the kind of education they really want for their children.

And with that happening, it's a bit more of the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer because they can't afford to do what they know is best for them. And in this sense, that's changing, and this could be a real game changer in a number of different areas. How many – five years from now or ten years from now, you pick the time frame.

How many states do you expect will have adopted an education savings account type of legislation?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, there were none back in 2010, Arizona was the first. And then you had a handful of states kind of come on board. In the last few years, you've seen that number now rise to 15 states, but half of those are universally available. I think you're going to continue to see momentum, at least in the red states in the next 5 to 10 years.

I think as this program becomes established and states look and see their neighbors saying, hey, you're providing this for your families, why is it that we're not? States are going to have an incentive if they want to keep and attract families, to say we're going to prioritize the education options that you want most.

If you're a family looking and saying, “Hey, I can choose between this state or that state. And one of these has an education system that's not really pushing the core academics or the values or whatever it may be. But over here, I can go and I'm not going to get punished financially to pursue an education that works for my family.”

I think you're going to see that. And so I think that over the next several years, you're going to continue to see that trend that certainly most red states will have programs like this.

Marlin Detweiler:

I haven't even thought about the fact that people will vote with their feet. And what I mean by that is when they need to move, their choices of what they're going to do about moving will be affected by this as well. That's a really good point.

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah, I've spoken to multiple people in Arizona who've taken job opportunities coming and saying, “Oh, I heard about this program,” and they're interested in that. And so that's absolutely something that I think is going to be part of people's calculus about, hey, am I going to go? And and, you know, in Arizona, we're already very lucky to have a very strong charter school sector which has classical schools like the Great Heart Schools.

That's a draw for families, both staying in the Arizona or coming from elsewhere. And so now you're expanding that and saying not only do we have these public charter schools, we have at home opportunities, the Great Hearts has expanded and now has private Christian classical schools that are funded in part with families who are able to get these ESA funds.

And so it expands. You're seeing growth there. And I think, yeah, you're going to continue to have that be an increasing attraction for families coming from around the country.

Marlin Detweiler:

Interesting. Yeah. Do you keep a list on your website of the status of each state with regard to legislation and initiatives being taken? Is there a place, a central place, you can send our listeners, the Veritas families, and other people to be able to know what the status of their state is?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah, actually, one of our partner organizations, Ed Choice, has basically a map and you can go on for each state and see what are the choice options. It'll have everything from the ESAs to other tax credit scholarship programs. So you can kind of look for your individual state and see, Oh, here's the one program or here's the three or four programs, here's the eligibility. So Ed Choice, I would say, is a really good resource for people.

Marlin Detweiler:

So www.edchoice.org. So if somebody wants to, they can start there, probably find information on the status of their state. That's wonderful. Why would you say educational freedom like this is so important? That seems like almost a silly question. We kind of know it intuitively, but my experience tells me if you don't talk with specifics, you don't ever really finish something. So why is this so important?

Matt Beienburg:

I think educational opportunity is the engine of America in a sense. That if kids are able to get a strong education, that's the foundation, right? We believe in equality of opportunity, not the equality of outcomes. And so getting every kid the grounding and the foundation that they need to set them up rather than again, the left tends to say, “We want to equalize the outcomes. We're going to do affirmative action or quotas or something over here to try to balance this out,” force equality for sameness as opposed to saying, “No, we want to get in at the early years and say every kid, let's get you a foundation in reading and math and formation of your character.” I think that's where you see the opportunity.

And so, again, over the last 50-plus years, we're not serving kids as well as they need it. And so I think something like Educational Freedom says this is important because it provides families the ability to pursue the best education for their kids. It no longer traps them into saying, well, your education for your kid depends on where you can afford to buy a house.We're going to separate that. But your educational opportunity isn't tied to what your income, what neighborhood you can get into. It's any school, anywhere. You now have the flexibility to do this and you can pursue schools that are going to align with your academic hopes or, in the case of classical or religious schools, the values. So I think all of these things are important.

So it's academically and the radicalism of the public school system. You know I don't think it's an overstatement to say a lot of parents have just lost faith in the logic and the sensibility of public schools pushing things like radical gender, ideology, anti-racism, these things that even though sometimes the labeling on it sounds good.

DEI, diversity and inclusion. These are nice-sounding words. But then a kid comes home and talks about why they're embarrassed about the color of their skin or their privilege. And so the stuff that we're seeing in the public schools is giving parents an escape hatch and saying, you don't have to do that, I think it is hugely important.

Marlin Detweiler:

The experiences that we have tend to become what we think this is normal if it's been the case for our parents and now, in some cases maybe our grandparents. But experientially, we don't extend more than one generation or a fraction of another back there. I remember hearing stories of what my grandfather on my father's side did during the Depression. He drove a delivery truck because he couldn't build homes. He was a homebuilder prior to that. He made changes. But we have today, based on international standards, standards in education that are far less effective than in many countries. I'm not sure of recent tests. The one I remember was in math. We ranked like 26th.

We don't like to be ranked that low, and yet parents operate with a default sense of thinking We're doing better than we are. Are you all dealing with academic standards at all, or is that fall outside your purview?

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah. So we've actually released a report earlier in the year looking at the Arizona State standards, for instance, in social studies, and basically pointed out that, when we talk about standards, that the state adopts these state standards which are sort of broad goals about we think kids should know this by third grade, this by fourth grade or study these concepts. They don't explicitly say you must use this textbook or that resource, but there is sort of the broad outline of what's expected. And we pointed out that in the Arizona standards, for instance, it's using terms like Latin-X, which is the sort of increasingly discredited left-wing version, which says we're going to force this changing of terms on the Hispanic Spanish-speaking people and say Latina is not gender neutral. We're going to force Latin-X on this. You see terms like that appearing in the standards.

And then you turn around and you see folks like Abraham Lincoln are listed among basically optional characters to be discussed in one of these high school classes. It's stuff like that where it's just almost hard to believe. And so one of the things that does need to be improved are these standards to make sure that we believe strongly in school choice and in parents having flexibility to pursue this.

But when it comes to the government-operated schools, yeah, it's not unreasonable to say there should be a basic floor of what you should be able to impart to the students. And we're seeing that the left dumbed down standards, and we're seeing the left dumbed down things like gifted programs to say we want everybody to be the same.

We can't have any variety or any difference because, ultimately, they are more concerned about this notion of equality as sameness and uniformity.

Marlin Detweiler:

As we established academic standards at Veritas, we looked both to international standards and historic standards, and that was really eye-opening for me. What some of the Asian children do mathematically compared to American standards in their countries is truly remarkable. I had a young Chinese man with his father in my office years ago, and I asked him, “When do you expect that Algebra I would occur in a Chinese education?” He thought about it for a bit and this was a kid that was in high school, says “Probably in fifth grade.” In our typical public school, the standard now is ninth grade, private school might go to eighth grade. And we've tried to be a little bit different than that, at seventh grade. But it is a really challenging thing to help parents understand that the standards that we've grown up around may not be all our kids able to do or should be able to do.

And so I applaud you for work there, too. But I am so excited about what's happening with educational savings accounts. I am so grateful for the work that you're doing. Anything you'd like to say that I didn't ask you about before we go? We're about out of time.

Matt Beienburg:

Yeah. Just to add that this is a movement that we're seeing momentum across the country and that it gives families, regardless of whether or not they're looking for a private school or at home education, the flexibility and the opportunity to to pursue that as opposed to just saying you've got to go to the public school or you got to pay double to get something that you think is going to be better.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, I appreciate the work that you're doing. And as you said earlier, I'll repeat it again, www.edchoice.org is a place where our listeners can go to find out the status of their state. We're already working with many families who have taken advantage of this, and it's really fun for us to see families be able to get the education they want from us because now it's affordable to them.

Thank you again for what you're doing, Matt.

Matt Beienburg:

Thank you for having me on.

Marlin Detweiler:

Folks. You’ve been with us at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Thank you for joining us.