This week on Homeschooling Journeys, we meet Tiffany Hoben from West Virginia. Curious Mike chatted with her twice: once in June 2024, and again in October 2024.  This October episode shows the nature of homeschooling: plans change.  That cuts both good and bad.  One cool opportunity disappeared; but at roughly the same time, a new need emerged, as well as the perfect educator to solve that problem.  Tiffany, like other homeschoolers using Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), has a variety of experiences: she gets to personalize her son's education, but in doing so, experiences friction that comes both from DIY and from the red tape of actually making purchases (software challenges and bureaucratic hoops).  Her $4,900 “Hope Scholarship” is used for her son’s biology curriculum, rock climbing, an AI-aided writing class, and above all, a specialized phonics tutor.  She is optimistic about the future of ESAs for homeschoolers in West Virginia.  

This policy brief urges Massachusetts policymakers to encourage the proliferation and progress of non-traditional models that offer families creative, flexible, personalized and low-cost private education options.

This report shows that education tax credits grew increasingly popular in 2021, with four more states enacting programs. There are now 28 tax-credit scholarship (TCS) programs in 23 states, and they serve more than 325,000 students.

After steadily increasing for years, the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children skyrocketed during the pandemic, and policy makers should do more to acknowledge homeschooling as a viable option, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

Tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policies create an incentive for taxpayers to contribute to nonprofit scholarship organizations that aid families with tuition and, in some states, other K–12 educational expenses. This paper explores the central design features of TCS policies—such as eligibility, the tax credit value, credit caps, and academic accountability provisions—and outlines the different approaches taken by the TCS policies in each state. The paper also offers suggestions regarding each feature for policymakers who want to design a TCS policy that most likely to succeed at its central purpose: empowering families to provide their children with the education that works best for them.

Private and parochial school students in Massachusetts have been denied well over $10 million in school nursing services to which they are entitled under state law.

While U.S. academic performance has declined since the broad implementation of Common Core, school choice programs are increasingly hamstrung by regulations that require private schools to adopt a single curriculum standards-based test as a condition for receiving public money, according to a new study published by Pioneer Institute.

This paper examines Cristo Rey schools, why they work, how they work and what parts of their education/business design can be successfully transferred to other Catholic high schools. It will look at the Cristo Rey Network, a cooperative organization formed to standardize the Cristo Rey approach, offer resources to the individual schools and help promote the spread of Cristo Rey schools to cities that can support them.

This report summarizes the research-based truth about Massachusetts charter public schools, focusing on the ideas that were most prominent in the charter school ballot initiative debate. The data that follow are taken from a series of papers published by Pioneer Institute over the course of 2016. This report illustrates that Massachusetts charter public schools do not drain resources from district schools, they outperform the school districts from which their students come, and have attrition rates that are lower than or equal to those districts.

The following paper describes how charter schools in Massachusetts and especially in Boston enroll and serve English language learners. Another report in this series provides similar information about students with disabilities. This paper provides enrollment, attrition, and achievement data for English language learners in charter schools across the Commonwealth, with a concentration on Boston and Gateway Cities such as Lawrence.