, an Iowa lawmaker proposed legislation that would require universities to balance the number of Republican and Democrat-professing professors that schools hire. A bill so narrowly focused on universities’ employment practices leaves room—as well-intentioned legislation often does—for unintended consequences. Based on the polling above, there may not be enough professors on the right of the political isle to fill such a quota.

Lawmakers in Iowa—and Ģ����Ƶ—should consider a more fundamental issue: Protecting free speech on campus, no matter where you place yourself on the ideological spectrum. Disagree with many people in class? Engage in debate and discover the power of ideas and value of persuasion. So far this year, lawmakers in at least four states are considering resolutions or legislation that protects free speech on campus (Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Illinois). The new bills are modeled after by Stanley Kurtz from the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Jim Manley and myself from the Goldwater Institute.

The model legislation takes a comprehensive approach to protecting free expression on public college and university campuses. The bill prevents universities from designating so-called campus “free speech zones,” which actually limit what you can say and where you can say it. The bill allows individuals to speak and act freely on college grounds, as long as they do not interfere with others’ ability to do so. The bill also requires public universities to adopt mission statements in favor of free speech and make sure this material is available to existing and prospective students and faculty. Schools will be required to release an annual report on the condition of free speech on campus.

Colleges should be neutral on the issues and provide space for students and faculty to debate. Once students have left the college bubble, they are destined to encounter people with different opinions. Getting along and working peaceably with—and yes, when the time comes, even amicably disagreeing with—such people is a part of adulthood. No better time to practice these skills than when in college.

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A new report from Mississippi finds that parents using education savings accounts report high levels of satisfaction, consistent with surveys of a similar law in Arizona. Ninety-one percent of respondents reported some level of satisfaction with Mississippi’s accounts, and 98 percent of respondents reported being either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their educational choices after using an account. Seventy-one percent of parents in the survey reported being “very satisfied” with their choices.

Similar to accounts in Arizona, Florida, and Tennessee, the education savings accounts in Mississippi allow parents to buy educational products and services for their children using a portion of their child’s funds from the state funding formula. Parents can make multiple purchases simultaneously according to their student’s needs.

Mississippi lawmakers gave parents of children with special needs this flexible option in 2015 after years of criticism of state services for these students. Empower MS’s Brett Kittredge says, “It was clear that many of Mississippi’s most vulnerable children were being left behind and this pattern would only continue unless policymakers took action.” In 2014, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that just 23 percent of Mississippi children with special needs graduated from a state high school.

Kittredge explains how Mississippi’s accounts are helping children like Lana Beard, who doctors diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and visual perception disorder. The accounts helped the Beard’s access a school that has specialized services for children like Lana when her assigned district school was no longer the right fit. Her parents used the account to help cover tuition and services at the new school.

Thousands of families across Arizona and Florida have similar stories. In some cases, families use an account to help pay for personal tutors, online classes, home educational needs, and even college savings plans. In Arizona, where students from failing schools and military families are eligible for the accounts, along with children with special needs, are using their account for more than one learning option.

In 2013, and also found parents were pleased with their choice to leave an assigned public school and use an account. All parents in the survey reported some level of satisfaction, and 71 percent of participants were “very satisfied,” even among the families that were satisfied with their child’s previous public school. has also found similar satisfaction levels.

Ģ����Ƶ policymakers preparing for the 2017 legislative session should use the growing research evidence on parent satisfaction with education savings accounts to support efforts to give state families similar options.

Even though Mississippi’s program is still in its infancy, Kittredge reports the number of applicants for the accounts in 2016-17 exceeded the state’s cap of 425. He says families are now on a waiting list for a chance to participate next year.

“Parents are the ultimate accountability rating,” Kittredge says. “That is why we believe understanding parental satisfaction with [education savings accounts] is so important in judging this program.”

Jonathan Butcher is a contributing scholar at GCO in addition to his role as the education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

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Education may not be in the headlines now, but learning is front and center for parents and families across the country every day. And no matter who is elected, states and the federal government stand to ask taxpayers for another $ or more next year to cover the educations of some 50 million students.

So, what could Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s education proposals mean for taxpayers and parents?

In September, Donald Trump announced that he is in favor of school choice. Before we celebrate, know that Trump volunteered taxpayers to pay $ to provide more choices in education for low income students. The money will purportedly be repurposed federal funds—not requiring new money—yet this proposal is a stretch.

The largest portion of federal money for K-12 is directed by Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Washington’s education law, and totals approximately $, a figure close to the amount Trump plans to redirect. Last year, Congress fought for months over whether Title I could be repurposed as a school choice option for families. The proposal eventually failed.

Thus, Trump says he can do what Congress couldn’t with a significant sum of federal education money. Herein lies the problem with federal officials trying to meddle in issues best left to states, like education: It’s easy for a Washington lawmaker to overestimate his ability to build consensus around ideas he may like and underestimate the drudgery of the deliberative process.

Such drudgery has a purpose, namely to protect individuals and their interests by requiring lawmakers to engage in intentional, consensus-building efforts first. Even if he can build a consensus in Congress, Trump would have to convince state leaders that his idea would not interfere with states’ school choice programs, like Ģ����Ƶ’s tax credit scholarships or Special Needs Scholarship Program.

Furthermore, regulations inevitably follow money from Washington. President Obama signed ESSA in December 2015, and education officials around the country are still deciphering what the law means for states. We may not see the full litany of regulations , nearly a year after Congress voted on the law and the president made ESSA official.

Hillary Clinton at the pre-kindergarten, K-12, and postsecondary levels. She plans to require taxpayers to pay for preschool for all 4-year-olds, regardless of a child’s learning needs at that age; spend more taxpayer money on computer science and school facilities; and allow taxpayers to pay tuition for college students coming from families making $125,000 or less.

While Trump’s promises are too broad to help states’ different needs (and expensive), Clinton’s are too specific (and also expensive). The job market changes too fast and Washington moves too slowly to adequately forecast future needs. Meanwhile, ideas like more money for school buildings are hardly innovative but surely expensive. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henniger wrote recently that amount to “pouring more federal money down the public-schools mine shaft.”

Regardless of what happens November 8, parents and state lawmakers should not expect the White House to solve the problems presented by only . Parents need quality opportunities to prepare their child for the future, whatever it may hold. State lawmakers should continue to broaden students’ horizons with education savings accounts and and protect existing learning opportunities like charter schools and private school scholarships.

Lawmakers’ responsibilities—especially state lawmakers’ responsibilities with respect to Washington—are to protect individual liberties and restore them as needed, no matter who sits in the Oval Office. Or perhaps because of who sits there.

Jonathan Butcher is a contributing scholar for the Ģ����Ƶ Center for Opportunity and Education Director at the Goldwater Institute.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Ģ����Ƶ Center for Opportunity and are not intended to aid or hinder any political campaign or the passage of legislation before the US Congress or the Ģ����Ƶ General Assembly.

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At the end of July, the Nevada Supreme Court on the state’s nascent law. In 2015, Sen. Scott Hammond sponsored SB 302, and Gov. Brian Sandoval’s signature made all 450,000 Nevada public school students eligible to apply for an account. The ACLU filed a lawsuit to take children’s educational choices away shortly after the law’s passage. The group charges that the accounts violate the state constitution (a group of parents filed another suit taking away parents’ ability to choose how their children learn, saying that the accounts would be illegally funded from a state source dedicated to public schools).

Nevada’s account law is the first such law to allow all public school students the opportunity to use an account to buy a variety of educational products and services. is no longer rare in the U.S., but many of the laws that give parents options between public and private schools are limited to students that meet select criteria. For example, Tennessee and Mississippi’s education savings accounts, also enacted in 2015, are only available to children with special needs. As many Ģ����Ƶ parents may know, the Peach State has a private school scholarship program exclusively for children with special needs, while Louisiana and Ohio have private school voucher options for children from failing schools. The situation is similar across more than two dozen states.

A ruling in favor of parents and children from Nevada’s Supreme Court would boost efforts in other states, such as Ģ����Ƶ, Texas, Delaware, and Missouri, to name a few, where lawmakers have considered the accounts in recent years. In 2011, since its enactment. Arizona children with special needs can apply for an account, along with children from failing schools, adopted children, and children living on Native American reservations, among others. Nevada is the first state to give every public school child this opportunity from day one.

Education savings accounts have also attracted national attention. Republicans included education savings accounts in their (as for Democrats, who the Wall Street Journal says has a built-in “” education savings accounts were noticeably missing from their party positions).

In March, introduced a bill to allow all children attending Bureau of Indian Education schools access to education savings accounts. Politico highlighted these students’ need for quality educational options in November 2015 with a feature headlined “” Former presidential candidate and introduced a bill in January that would make all Washington, D.C. children eligible for accounts.

As a result, federal and state lawmakers across the country are watching what happens in Carson City, Nevada. Arizona’s Supreme Court in 2011 after the state teachers union and other associations brought a lawsuit similar to the ACLU’s charges in Nevada (the Goldwater Institute defended the accounts alongside the Institute for Justice, the group defending Nevada’s accounts). A victory for students in Nevada would mark the second victory for the accounts over challenges that the accounts violate state constitutional provisions that block the use of public funds for private or religious schools.

Five states have passed the accounts so far, but the accounts are turning into a movement offering families flexible opportunities in education. The successes of these programs, and the lifelong knowledge and skills gained—won’t just stay in Vegas.

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And that was just in one week.

As we’ve documented on this blog, fraud is an unfortunate reality in our nation’s schools. For that matter, it’s an unfortunate part of providing quality services in across a variety of social needs. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the indictment of state and local authorities in surrounding the locality’s water crisis. Yet the paper lamented that federal officials—those getting their paychecks from Washington, D.C.—at the EPA and in the U.S. Office of Veterans Affairs were not being held to account for ignoring warnings at the Gold King Mine (where a flooded mine ruined a water supply in Colorado last year) and in medical malfeasance, respectively.

Fraud is a serious issue at all levels of government and enforcement is inconsistent, at best.

In 2009, Apple started advertising what was, at the time, breakthrough technology in its latest iPhone by saying, “,” with “that” being whatever you needed. From finding a restaurant to playing the piano on your phone, developers were building mobile applications that allowed you to access virtually anything you needed at your fingertips. Today, programmers are building applications to

In some states, taxpayers can event submit photos or videos along with anonymous tips about misuse of taxpayer funds. The applications may cost as much as $10,000 to $20,000 to develop, but with the potential losses from fraud totaling in the hundreds of thousands or even millions in taxpayer resources, the upfront cost is worth it.

Furthermore, the next generation of parents and taxpayers, Millennials, are the generation that is most likely to carry and use a mobile device—making these apps a natural fit. The Pew Research Center reports that to “use their cellphones in public places for a variety of reasons,” and Nielsen says Millennials “” This means the availability of such mobile applications is coming at an excellent time.

Is Your Mobile Phone a Smartphone?

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Consumers and Mobile Financial Services, March 2015,”

While mobile apps won’t prevent fraud, such developments will help to limit the losses that bad actors cause. explains how mobile technology and education savings accounts, spending accounts that give parents choices for a child’s education, are both coming of age at the same time. Approximately 840,000 children across five states are eligible for the savings accounts. Ģ����Ƶ lawmakers considered legislation in the last session.

Millennial parents are the generation that grew up alongside mobile technology and are already using apps to get a ride from the airport or check a bank account. Flexible spending accounts that allow families to pay for online classes, public school services, private school tuition, or save for college should be designed so that parents can report fraudulent use of such accounts, check their child’s account balance, and make a purchase for a textbook, all with their mobile phone. In traditional schools and programs that give parents choices in education, taxpayers should be able to help protect students with easy, reliable ways to report misuse.

There’s no app for the American Dream, but mobile technology can help protect taxpayer resources and make sure education funding is used as it was intended—to help children succeed.

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Writing in his book Endurance, Alfred Lansing says the crew had “a feeling of astonishment which soon gave way to a sense of tremendous relief.”

A century after Shackleton’s adventure, Ģ����Ƶ parents should know the feeling. A state supreme court ruling almost disbanded many of the state’s charter schools due to a lawsuit five years ago ( that resolved the issue). In 2013, the Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent said n in the city until a pension lawsuit was complete. Charter schools have served the city for years, and, according to a Ģ����Ƶ Department of Education report, are located in metro Atlanta (the two years later).

Having weathered these storms, parents and policymakers would welcome the sight of land in the form of student success.

Yet charter school achievement does not always have a simple explanation. This is especially true in Ģ����Ƶ, where charter schools fall into four different categories. Raw test score analyses benefit from comparisons of similar students and schools (and random student assignment to schools if possible).

Even without such data crunching, there are strong results that vary across school types and grade levels that should give students, parents, and lawmakers hope for the direction of state charter schools.

First, on the nation’s report card, more low income Ģ����Ƶ charter school 8th graders scored at the “Basic” level or above than their peers in district schools (Figure 1). In reading, 82 percent of charter students score at Basic or above, while 69 percent of their peers in district schools scored at this level. In math, 65 percent of charter 8th graders scored above Basic, compared to 63 percent in district schools. Fourth grade students are behind their peers in reading and no data are available for math.

Source: National Center for Educational Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress Data Tool. Author calculations.

These results mean a higher percentage of low-income 8th grade Ģ����Ƶ students attending charter schools demonstrated at least the basic skills necessary in these subjects. using Arizona charter school data (with even more positive results) and in the ’s annual report card.

The complication in these data is that Ģ����Ƶ charter schools (the number of schools of each type is in parentheses):

• “Start-up” (77): These are the independent public schools most policymakers and parents are familiar with. Teachers and community leaders form these schools as an alternative to assigned district schools.
• “Conversion” (18): A “converted” public school, as the name implies, is a school that changed its status from a traditional public school to a charter school and given more operational autonomy in exchange for higher levels of accountability.
• “State start-up” (): A state commission authorizes these schools (the state supreme court ruling mentioned above threatened these schools).
• “Charter systems” (326): These school systems are traditional districts given more autonomy so that the rules under which the schools operate resemble charter school regulations.

More test scores are available in the the state department of education’s . According to end of grade test results, converted charter schools and start-up charters are well ahead of their district peers in nearly every subject in 8th grade in the percent of students exceeding the state standard (see Figure 2 for an example of 7th and 8th grade comparisons; for more results, see the link beneath the chart for the full report).

Source: Ģ����Ƶ Charter Schools and Charter Systems, 2014-15 and 2015-16, Ģ����Ƶ Department of Education, p. 44,

The most encouraging finding is that the average results for all charter schools (the orange bar in Figure 2) are higher than non-charter schools (light blue bar) for every subject, in every grade except 8th grade Social Studies and Math in the state report. Charter high school students also out-performed district peers in English, geometry, biology, and economics.

Ģ����Ƶ charter schools should have parents breathing a sigh of relief. The project of creating and sustaining quality schools so that every child has the chance to succeed is never finished, but Ģ����Ƶ has given parents several ways to do so. With all that Ģ����Ƶ charter school families have been through, this success is welcome.

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Virginia’s proposal is similar to laws enacted in Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Education savings accounts in these states allow to customize a child’s learning experience with online classes, private school tuition, curricular materials like textbooks, and, critically for children with special needs, educational therapy like speech and occupational therapy.

In Virginia, 13 percent of students——have special needs and could use an account to find educational services to help them succeed. As this blog has explained previously, Arizona families are hiring individual tutors to help children with autism, students who were struggling to learn basic skills prior to using an account. Others are combining public school extracurricular activities with home-based instruction, which gives children the chance to interact with their peers and learn in a setting that meets their needs. Such opportunities give hope to children and their parents.

Education savings accounts also provide lawmakers with a solution for large, statewide policy issues looming on the horizon.

Research from Matthew Ladner, Ph.D. at the Foundation for Excellence in Education finds that Virginia and Ģ����Ƶ have something in common: High age-dependency ratios. For Virginia, their score of +19 means the state has a “high percentage of people out of the workforce and a relatively small percentage of people trying to cover the costs of their education, retirement, and health care.”

The U.S. Census projects that Virginia’s public school enrollment will increase by 300,000 students over the next 15 years while the population of adults over 65 will almost double. The expansion in these two sectors will put a strain on taxpayer-funded services in education and health care.

Ģ����Ƶ finds itself in a similar position. Ģ����Ƶ’s +16 score is slightly below the national average of +17, but still points to a future where fewer people are pulling the cart of social programs and increasing numbers are sitting in the cart. The Census estimates Ģ����Ƶ’s student population will increase by a half-million students, while its elderly population will increase by nearly 1 million.

Education savings accounts and other private school choice options like tax credit scholarships (already available in Virginia and Ģ����Ƶ) will help ease the pressure on taxpayers who would be asked to pay for new district school buildings and public school staff. Parental choice in education comes at a significant discount compared to district school services. In Arizona, education savings accounts for children with special needs are worth 90 percent of what is spent on these children in traditional schools while, on average, mainstream students’ accounts amount to 50-60 percent of what taxpayers spend per child in district schools.

Virginia and Ģ����Ƶ badly need solutions like these. Education savings accounts improve the quality of life for participating families and can provide students with choices as the demands for public services increase.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

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Unfortunately, mongoose are active during the day, while rats are nocturnal. The mongoose did not quell the rat problem but even now the mongoose severely impact ground-nesting birds, including Hawaii’s state bird, the Nene, and endangered sea turtles. The mongoose is considered an invasive species in Hawaii.

We cannot always predict the outcomes of our decisions in the natural world, and history proves that the same is true in public life. Want the rich to pay more so we can balance the budget? . Want to increase the sales tax so people will smoke less? .

As the late Yogi Berra instructed, it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.

Still, in education, we all want every child’s future to be marked by success and achievement. This blog has explained how education savings accounts can provide Ģ����Ƶ families with opportunities to inspire their children to learn and find quality educational options. With these flexible accounts, families can make multiple decisions about what is best for their child’s education today and save for the future.

However, with every new law, rules and regulations must follow. These rules are important to help .

Families that use education savings accounts must be protected from fraudulent educators and taxpayers must be protected from mishandling of the accounts. But these rules should be written carefully, otherwise regulation may limit what students can achieve using an account.

In Arizona, where education savings accounts have been available to families since 2011, state policymakers adjusted the law after its enactment to include fraud protection provisions. The Arizona Department of Education must conduct regular account audits to stop misuse so that it does not become widespread.

Yet the department has still not used other measures, such as updating the cards’ technology to prevent a family from buying educational materials at an approved store (such as Walmart) and also purchasing something that has nothing to do with their child’s education, like a TV.

In Florida, lawmakers have enacted strict rules that often require parents using education savings accounts to spend their own money first and then apply for reimbursement from the state. It’s too soon to tell, but Florida may be too cautious with their rules, while Arizona is not cautious enough.

Three lessons are readily available to Ģ����Ƶ lawmakers:

1. Make deposits into education savings accounts quarterly, then audit every quarter. Families using an account should receive deposits every fiscal quarter. If there is misspending, either accidental or purposeful, quarterly audits will prevent the problem from growing.

2. Students should be allowed to use their education savings accounts at educational institutions and for educational products—but nothing beyond these purchases. We have the technology to limit the use of a debit card so that only educational items can be purchased. Policymakers should tell the financial institution distributing the cards that lessons from other states demonstrate this technology is vital in order to protect students and taxpayers.


3. Learn from other states’ mistakes. In , , and all other government programs, fraud is a fact of life. But that means we must use all the resources available to allow vendors and individuals to report fraud over the phone or online and ask participating educators to help catch misuse. has available to lawmakers.

Education savings accounts have the potential to help students from different walks of life succeed in their education and beyond. The proper rules must be in place to allow for flexibility while still protecting students and taxpayers. If we are not careful, the rules may stifle innovation and student success. Lessons from states already offering education savings accounts will help to limit unintended consequences.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior Fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

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Today, students across the globe can learn in more ways than we can count, from books to to hosted by Harvard and MIT to computers installed on the sidewalk (even ). To better prepare every child for a successful future, parents, lawmakers, and educators need a new definition for what it means to learn. And one classroom might not be enough for a student.

Had Pugliese’s teachers recognized he was bored, clearly they would have tried to make their lessons more useful for the “real world.” No educator wants his students to be unprepared for life. Horace Mann inscribed the mission of generations of educators when he called education the “great equalizer of the conditions of men,” a phrase U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would repeat some 150 years later.

Yet how can education fulfill this noble treatise if schools can’t keep students in the classroom, or the very least, interested in the classroom?

Today, public education’s challenge is not just to limit the number of students dropping out of school, though that is critical. The percentage of students dropping out has been nearly cut in half since 1990, .

The implications of this decrease are profound. For example, black men of working-age (20 to 34) without a high school diploma are more likely to be in prison than employed, according to Pew research. A diploma may have far-reaching effects for these men.

But just attending school or even finishing high school isn’t enough. Students need to be challenged and inspired by learning experiences that meet their needs so that they can have a chance at the American Dream.

Education savings accounts provide parents and their children with the flexibility to choose from multiple learning options at the same time. As this blog has explained, education savings accounts, now law in five states, are bank accounts complete with debit cards that allow families to buy educational products and services for their children.

In Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Nevada, eligible families have more educational options than just their child’s assigned public school. The state deposits funding in each account, and families can pay for personal tutors, textbooks and curricular materials like science kits, online classes, private school tuition, and college classes. Families can even save money from year to year.

In Arizona, uses Nathan’s account to pay for tutoring services and private school tuition. The Visser family educates Jordan at home, swiping his education savings account card with different vendors in order to combine therapy services and educational instruction. The McMurray family uses the accounts to participate in extracurricular activities offered by a public school. that more than one-third of accountholders use their education savings account for multiple learning options.

This is the future of learning. For some students, it may just be a new school. Or a tutor to help them keep up with their classmates. For others, it could mean enrolling in classes offered on the other side of the world or using an iPad—with a data plan—to learn math with an app.

Education savings accounts allow for one or all of these options. Every Ģ����Ƶ child should have access to the future of learning.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

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Perla is like every mom—she wants the best for her children in and out of school. Fortunately for Perla and Albiery, they live in one of five states where lawmakers have allowed students to use education savings accounts to find unique learning experiences that may include online classes, personal tutors, private schools, public school classes, and college savings plans, among other uses, all with the same account.

With an education savings account, the state deposits public funds in a private account that parents use to purchase educational products and services for their child. In 2015, that would have allowed state families to use the accounts, but the legislation stalled.

Albiery’s new school has brought out his interests in new subjects, and Perla is excited to use his account to support him with whatever he needs to succeed. “He wants to be an architect, and I’m so happy for that,” Perla says.

In this three-part series, the Ģ����Ƶ Center for Opportunity will explain why Ģ����Ƶ needs to give parents this flexible educational option, how education savings accounts change the way we think about learning, and how the accounts work in states that have already enacted laws: , Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Nevada.

Ģ����Ƶ families, like those all over the country, need better learning options. Student achievement scores should trouble Ģ����Ƶ parents. According to researchers, . Among families where at least one parent finished college, students from 31 nations perform better than Ģ����Ƶ students.

In reading, . By eighth grade, nearly 70 percent read below the basic level.

Yet in a in January 2015, 30 percent of respondents rated Ģ����Ƶ public schools as “excellent” or “good,” while another 38 percent rated them as “fair.” Sixty-eight percent of Ģ����Ƶ schools cannot be doing a fair job or better if almost three-quarters of their students aren’t.

Every child should have access to a school that will challenge him and prepare him for the future. But the labor market is changing quickly. The skills individuals will need to know in order to have a successful career are impossible to predict over the long term.

A recent study by Young Invincibles, a group that researches trends among Millennials, found that the jobs most likely to set Millennials up for success are physician’s assistants, actuaries, statisticians, and biomedical engineers. These careers will require a solid educational background in K-12 and college and even graduate school.

Families can use education savings accounts to save money from year to year, pay for college classes before and during their student’s postsecondary years, and pay for graduate school. This way, students can learn skills before, during, and after college that will help them in their careers.

This feature of the accounts is why families like Perla and Albiery’s can talk about college. And life after college. “I think it has been very good for our family,” Perla says.

Ģ����Ƶ students deserve the same opportunities to find success in school and in life. Education savings accounts can help give this chance to every Ģ����Ƶ child.

Jonathan Butcher is education director at the Goldwater Institute and senior fellow at the Beacon Center of Tennessee.

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