Erin Norman is the Lee Family Fellow and Senior Director of Communications Strategies at State Policy Network.
During the pandemic, educational choice programs got a serious boost. The first full year post-COVID was declared The Year of School Choice. That momentum continued into 2022 and further into 2023 when seven states enacted new choice programs and 10 expanded existing ones.
Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are publicly funded savings accounts that can be used for K-12 educational purposes such as private school tuition, online education programs, instructional materials, and in some cases transportation or extracurricular activities. The main goal of ESAs is to let parents use the money allocated for their child’s education—even if they prefer a non-public school option.
While the legislative appetite for school choice programs has been high and growing over the last few years, research from State Policy Network shows that there is work to do in growing demand and even awareness among families.
In a multiple-choice question, just 19% of voters in ESA states1 could correctly identify the program’s definition. The most frequent confusion was thinking an ESA was a tax-free way to save for college. Indeed, a quick Google search of “education savings accounts” brings up information about 529 and other college savings plans within the first few results:
However, the most common response to the SPN polling question was “don’t know” with 40% of voters nationwide selecting that option.
The good news is that while few voters know what ESAs are, when you give them a definition, they support it by a greater than four-to-one margin. There is also a significant portion of the electorate who aren’t sure about ESAs. These “moveables” represent a good target for further education.
Education efforts will be most effective in states where ESA programs are already established. In the most recent research from State Policy Network, we looked at Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia as states where existing programs could benefit from greater awareness. In total, 35% of voters in these states are unsure how they feel about ESAs, even with a definition of the program.
Voters who haven’t made up their mind on ESAs are as likely to have children and to have those children in public schools. This shows that opinions on ESAs are not tied to program usage in school choice states—if it was, the data would show far less of those with their minds made up using public schools but that is not the case.
Those who are unsure about ESAs also tend to be slightly younger than those who have a strong opinion about the choice program. This is a key demographic for educational efforts. Qualitative research conducted by SPN shows that parents feel huge switching costs once their children are enrolled in a school, even if they think a different option would be a better educational fit. Considering this, the fact that younger parents are less sure about ESAs presents a challenge. If they don’t know about programs before their children start school, it is less likely they will ever take advantage of those programs.
To protect existing ESA programs and spur the passage of new ones, the programs must be used to capacity. In order to do that, educational freedom allies must work to generate greater awareness of the programs, specifically focusing on young families with children who have not yet started school.
1 AR, AZ, FL, IN, IA, NC, OH, OK, UT, WV n=498
