Mountain State Modifications: Tiffany Uses ESA Flexibility to Pivot Quickly For Her Son’s Education

Homeschooling Journeys with Tiffany Hoben in West Virginia

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: You’re listening to Homeschooling Journeys with Curious Mike. I’m here with Tiffany Hoben.

You and I talked a couple months ago before the school year started, in both of your contexts: as a mom of young Wesley, and as a policy person for Cardinal Institute in West Virginia, a think tank that works on these issues of homeschooling and education savings accounts and so forth.

[00:00:35] Tiffany Hoben: Thank you. It’s so nice to be here. I’m glad to catch up again.

[00:00:38] Mike Goldstein: So you and I have stayed in touch since our first conversation. And what I wanted to bring immediately to the listeners was something about the best laid plans can go awry. At the time we talked, what I recall four ways that as a homeschooling mom you were planning on spending your $4,900 education savings account to enrich Wesley’s education.

And those four things included some type of writing course using AI; some type of literature class focused on the Chronicles of Narnia; some rock climbing to get him more active; and some math tutoring.

And some of those plans have changed around, from our chat in August to now, October.  What’s really happening over there at your home in West Virginia?

[00:01:39] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah, thank you. The best laid plans indeed. Well, so the Narnia class was probably the thing we had our heart set on. Cause we, we both felt strongly. Wesley and I love, he loved those books. And the plan was like, I’m going to take something that he already loves, right? And we’ll put him in this class and that will sort of like make him a more independent reader and he can take some of it on his own.  I was excited to make that transition.

(But then the teacher, before the school year, cancelled the class offering).

And then a policy friend of mine in another state sent me a link to the podcast, Sold a Story.  If listeners don’t know Sold A Story, the Reader’s Digest version of that is educators stopped teaching how to sound out words, right?  Stopped teaching phonics.

They – and we (I was a schoolteacher for many years) – were using some other methods that had short term gains, but long term, not so great.

I was listening to Sold A Story and I was like, oh boy, this is my son, this is Wesley, he skips words when he reads, he’ll leave out syllables in a word when he’s trying to sound it out.

And so when we couldn’t get the Narnia class, I was like, maybe this is actually a blessing.  He needs to go back and learn to spell and sound out words because he’s going to hit a wall. With some complex texts at some point, right? And I knew this as a teacher because I had 7th grade students that I was trying to teach the Constitution to that weren’t reading well, I could see the symptoms.

I found this fantastic tutor here in West Virginia. She uses the Barton Method of phonics. You’re not too old ever to go back. So my, my middle schooler is going back twice a week for an hour with this tutor and like relearning how to spell and how to sound out words and the tricky parts of the English language.

He loves her. She probably is the highlight of his week. He thinks that she’s the best and I get to pay her through the marketplace, with my education savings account. And so that’s gone really swimmingly.

[00:03:45] Mike Goldstein: Pause there because I want to unpack. This is such a rich story at a few different levels.

Additional background, you lived in Florida. You worked for many years as a teacher, educator, school leader in Florida. Your kid went to regular schools in Florida. You move up to West Virginia, you’re starting your homeschooling journey. And one of the things that had you and Wesley excited was like, hey, kid’s not really that into reading.  Narnia is such a great, rich tale, he loves it, and wow, I found an English class that’s literally all of Narnia. I’m gonna go deep on Narnia.

So you and I talked, that sounds cool. Along the way you have this minor coronary where you hear a podcast that the U. S. education world is waking up to this 20 year bad dream we’ve had, where we haven’t been systematically teaching phonics to kids. And somehow the perfect storm hit: National Public Radio, with the Sold A Story podcast, weirdly has for the last two years been turning the elementary school world upside down and saying, you guys have not been following the science. You’ve been teaching this crazy way to learn reading and a lot of kids have fallen through the cracks.

And so then Tiffany, you hear it, and it hits your pragmatic brain. You’re like, I used to know seventh graders like that who couldn’t read. And it hits your maternal brain like, oh my God, that’s my kid, I got to do something.  I’m going to find a local tutor who’s really good at phonics.

Tell us just about shopping for that person that it’s turned out you’ve made a good choice. But like, how do you find that? Do you just Google phonics tutor West Virginia?

[00:05:45] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah, and I gotta tell you, it hit my maternal brain like a Mack truck because you just you see these kids when you’re teaching in middle school and you’re like, what is going on?

But then like you’re telling yourself a story, too. As a teacher, I was telling myself a story that I read to Wesley all the time. Like, I was reading to him in the womb, right? My kid’s gonna be fine. He’s gonna know how to read. And it’s just, no, it’s more complex than that.

[00:06:11] And there are really specific skills that you need to have early on in the beginning, and the schools are skipping them, right? Even really good schools, like the one he was in, cause it, I mean, we were in a top rated public school. And the reason I discovered it was because when we moved here, for one semester, he did virtual school.

And so he needed a lot of help from me and we read together a lot where he had to read out loud and I was like, man, I really thought this was going to get better. Like when he couldn’t spell in second grade, I thought there was going to be a huge improvement over the next couple of years, like second graders can’t spell, right?

But by fifth grade, and then we were in fifth grade and it just wasn’t any better and like all of these worlds collided because I listened to this podcast and There’s policy implications, there were familial, like you said, maternal implications, and just as a teacher, like, man, so I, what I did was I, I Googled and did some searching on what are the methods.

That one would use, right? And I found the Orton Gillingham was one, right? And that, that Barton was the other. These are the two sort of top tier. If you can find somebody that’s trained in these, that’s the way to go. And I said, okay, I’m just going to go in the marketplace first and see if I can find anything that’s flagged as reading.

[00:07:35] Mike Goldstein: The marketplace, meaning, Hey, here’s a place where if you’re a West Virginian with a Hope Scholarship, you can go look at a bunch of providers that are pre approved –  to be able to be paid with education savings account dollars.  So if you like them as a service provider, you can say, okay, “you’re going to help my kid two hours a week or whatever, and then I’ll hit a button and you’ll get paid.”

[00:08:03] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah, I really, I’m trying to be really as authentic as I can about being on this ESA because I understand that the majority of parents that are utilizing the ESA, and maybe especially in West Virginia, but I think just generally, you don’t have the money to stroke checks for $90 a week to have your kid tutored.

And even if I had that kind of money, I don’t want to do it that way. I want to find someone in the marketplace (where there isn’t a need to pay first and then request reimbursement). So then I can say to other West Virginia families, “Hey, this lady is really awesome. You can go in the marketplace and pay for her. You don’t have to take money like out of pocket and ask to be reimbursed and all of that nonsense.”

So. I found, I really got lucky, honestly, cause my first hit was a place in West Virginia called Brick by Brick Reading. And I, so I called her and I said, “I think we got a problem here. What is your approach?”

And she said, “well, first we would meet and I’ll just do a evaluation and I’ll tell you what I think.  And then I’ll, we’ll prescribe whether we need to move forward on this or not and where you’re at.” And her initial feeling on it was. You know, we’re certainly not too far gone. He’s super smart. He’s going to blow through this. It’s rote memorization. Like we just need to do these things over and over again.  You have to practice these sight words. And so I didn’t look any further than that. I felt like I had a strong connection with her as a mom and an educator. And I was like, done, sold. So that’s what we did.

[00:09:37] Mike Goldstein: So many things are interesting to me about your story so far, Tiffany.  One is, you have the plan for Narnia.  You find a different path forward. Also, the Narnia thing, it turns out, wasn’t available for this particular school year. There’s all this friction about actually deploying the resources.  One thing about schools, as inefficient as they are sometimes, once your kid shows up, they go more or less from class to class to class. It happens.

And here, as the homeschooler armed with the education savings account called the Hope Scholarship, you’ve got to manufacture that.  It’s not always easy. You say, hey, I want X, but X might not easily be available for you. That’s a contrast to a kid will pretty much have math, English, science, history delivered to them once they walk into a traditional school door.  So, that’s been part of your story here.

[00:11:03] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah. And I’m, as an, as a former educator, I’m letting some of that go, right?  (The structure).  My brain is set up that way too. I spent 20 years in public school. So I want to do math and science and reading and grammar and separate it all out and have this, did I cover all my bases? And I think a lot of homeschool moms worry about that. They want to make sure they’re being as comprehensive as a school.

But what I would argue, and I think it’s extremely a clarion point in my example is. The traditional school cannot be nimble and turn around and stop and remediate in a meaningful way when there are issues. I can as a homeschooler, right? I’m nimble enough to be like, alright, everything else is being put on a screeching halt.

[00:11:48] Mike Goldstein: Yes.

[00:11:49] Tiffany Hoben: Until you know how to read and spell properly and then we’ll move on because the reality is none of that other stuff matters if he can’t read. Yes. Right. So it is hard to find the right parts and pieces, but you’re in a better position to identify what those are than the public school, because I can tell you right now, they never would have identified Wesley as a struggling reader because he comprehended everything he read.

[00:12:17] He just wasn’t spelling well, and he wouldn’t sound out a word when he got to it. And so to me, what that means is his comprehension level probably would have stayed Midland, but as the texts became more complex, what do you do when you get to Shakespeare? And it’s an iambic pentameter, and there’s a bunch of words you’ve never seen before.

[00:12:34] If you don’t know how to spell them out phonetically in your head, you’re going to hit a wall and then you’re going to stop reading. So I think it would have caught up with him years from now, but instead I can be We’re fixing this today.

[00:12:47] Mike Goldstein: Yeah, and so, like, the final thing on this, because we have so much to get to, is when I started at charter school and it served kids who arrived to ninth grade far behind grade level.

I asked: why don’t we stop everything about high school and literally have four different English teachers all kind of teaching kids to read?

What happens is institutionally it’s hard to move in that direction where you drop everything and you focus on one thing.  People object.   Well, the state requires you to teach history and science and a foreign language and this and that.  So there’s state machinery that drops you from saying that in the pragmatic way you have as a mom with your son.

What a lot of charter schools did effectively, we were able to pull that off, where basically we were doing double English, double math, and hand waving around science and history and some other stuff.  Let’s put our resources against the big problem, the elephant in the living room. And so I’m glad you’ve been able to launch that, I’m glad it’s going well with your kid.

There’s another thing you mentioned that I think you’ve launched, which is learning about writing with AI. Can you tell us about that?

[00:14:29] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah, this class is so cool. This micro school in Alabama, Little Log Cabin schools, schoolhouse. And it’s in a class where, you know, what he did initially is she’s got these videos and it walks you through how do you set up an AI account, right?

[00:14:50] And then she creates these frameworks for these are the questions that need to be asked. And have AI write you a set of questions. Who are your characters? Okay, AI. Hey, I want to write a story about blah, blah, blah. Can you give me a list of potential characters? And then, so they’re generating these ideas, but then along the way as they’re doing that, she’s also saying, okay, you’re going to have to narrow this down.

[00:15:17] In a storyline, in an arc, there’s, there’s the Frodo, but then there’s also the Samwise Gamgee, and you got to have a best friend, and you have to have a conscience, right? Because Sam is the conscience. And so it’s just been so cool because he’s seeing all the different roles that these different characters play.

[00:15:35] He’s thinking about the hero’s journey thematically, what obstacles the hero needs to come up against for it to be like about like a compelling story. He’s And he’s just doing it, man. He’s in there every day asking AI. And what’s interesting to me is we all learned how to use Google, right? Like people our age were like.

[00:15:57] How do you do this Googler thing? Like give me what I want, right? Cause that was always really hard. And with this, I think what she’s doing, one of the things she’s doing is teaching them how to engineer prompt that produce what you want instead of like, maybe what the machine wants to give you, or maybe it’s not quite refined enough.

[00:16:18] So you push back and say, okay, well, that’s really great. I like one, three and five. Can you rewrite those in this format? And. We had, we had some conversations in our household because my husband was like, so wait, you’re, you’re like teaching him to use AI to write his stuff. And I was like, no, there’s a, there’s like a fine ethical line here.

[00:16:39] And she’s teaching these kids to toe that line, right. To be really hyper aware of where it is and what would constitute being like just outrageously plagiarism. what is like having a companion where you can be like, Hey, I had an idea. What do you think about this? And can you expand on it? And it’s just been really cool.

[00:17:01] He’s, if you can imagine that every idea is his, and so he’s sort of. Like married to it or passionate about it. He has this vision of a world in his head that looks like Lord of the Rings or Narnia or like the worlds that these authors build. And he’s doing that in his head. So every time he engages with Chad GPT to expand that world, what it gives back to him, he also loves.

[00:17:28] Mike Goldstein: Yeah.

[00:17:29] Tiffany Hoben: Because it’s built on something he already fed it and it’s just a cool thing to watch. And I know that so many kids are not getting that.

[00:17:39] Mike Goldstein: Totally. A buddy of mine did a summer camp like that and I was amazed at what kids were able to produce.  The very nature of AI created a whole bunch of on ramps to have pretty interesting discussions about the themes that you’re describing. So, again, Tiffany, the educator, is loving it. Tiffany, the mom, is watching her kid, is loving it.

What about Wesley? Does he love this? Does he hate it? What does he think of this class?

[00:18:03] Tiffany Hoben: I think it’s a little mix. He, reading is still frustrating. And so one of the things that happens is AI is not afraid to write. Like it’ll, it’ll write you a nice long description. And so he’ll say, I need these characters. They need to fit into this like kind of predetermined world that I’ve made. Give me some feedback on who these people are and help me understand them better. And now he’s got to read all of that. Right? And he’s going to organize it all into a OneNote notebook.

[00:18:34] So he’s got to copy and paste and add his additional thoughts. And so it’s, there’s the creative, interesting, this is my brain child kind of part that’s exciting and fun. And then it’s, it’s also work. You’re writing a book. And it’s got to be your product. So he’s really got to read a lot and pay attention to how all the pieces will ultimately fit together in his own words. And we’re not quite there yet. Yeah. It’s still pretty early in the class, but I see that frustrating him more, but I think it’s like, as an educator. I would say it’s like just the right amount of frustration.

[00:19:11] Mike Goldstein: Yes, love it. All right, so the AI class is going more or less as we had talked about a couple months ago. It’s what you hoped. It’s really working. The Narnia class is on hold. The math tutoring has been on hold and the focus has shifted to phonics. That’s from a local provider, whereas Narnia is from the Alabama online log cabin.

And then, tell us also about the rock climbing investment you were thinking of making with the Education Savings Account.

[00:19:40] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah, well, I’ve been taking him there and just and paying for it because that’s what I was interested in.

But in the last maybe two weeks, I noticed that local place got set up in the marketplace. Like when I go in and look at their tab, it says buy now as one session, which is what we’ve been doing. We just drive down there and buy an hour.

I’m not paying to take him there out of pocket anymore. I can go in and buy one session inside the closed marketplace and get access to it. So that’s his outlet. That’s like our PE right now.

[00:20:28] Mike Goldstein: Yes. And so let’s, I think we got the story on Wesley. So it’s sort of like some stuff has worked out. Some you’ve had to change on the fly. Makes sense. And your point in. Look, as a mom with a class of one, you can pivot very aggressively, very quickly, and you can go really hard at this key question of, as a mom, I’m evaluating program quality by eyeballing it.

I believe in this phonics tutor because I see what’s happening, I see how my kid is improving, and in that case, the kid loves it. So it’s like 10 out of 10 win.

With the online AI thing, I can also see all, like, you know, it’s productive struggle, and I like what I’m seeing. My kid some days would love it, some days would hate it, but that’s because it’s productive struggle. And so that’s another win.

And then you’re saying when we have access to certain types of tax credits and whatever, fairly easy for our family to float the cash and get reimbursed. On the other side, for a lot of families in West Virginia, that’s really hard.

People miss that sometimes when they look at the mechanics of an education savings account. There’s a big difference between saying to a provider, a teacher, or a rock climbing gym: “You’ll get paid instantly by the state” versus “You gotta provide me the service and then way down the line the state will pay you back.”

That sucks if I’m a business or a phonics tutor. I don’t want that.

And then similarly, if a parent is living paycheck to paycheck, and then you’re saying, “yeah, you got to pay the $90 out of your checking account every week for the tutoring, and then you got to wait and navigate a bureaucracy before that money comes back to you” – very unappealing.

How is the big picture going as a Cardinal Institute public policy person in West Virginia for homeschoolers who have like the advantage of access to these ESAs, but also the friction of it? What do you see happening big picture? Would you say ESAs for homeschoolers are going well? Would you say it’s mostly troubled? What’s your take and why?

[00:23:15] Tiffany Hoben: Well, I am going to answer that question. I also just wanted to say, not everything went perfectly either. We got a math class, and we got a biology class, and they’re like self paced, asynchronous, and they’re like, meh.

[00:23:26] Mike Goldstein: You bought them also with your ESA? And you’re like, I don’t know about the quality here.

[00:23:34] Tiffany Hoben: Right. Will the next time be exactly the same? Probably not. It’s not the best. We’ll pivot on that. But again, as a mom, I got to say, well, in math and science are not emergencies right now.

[00:23:48] Mike Goldstein: Right. My friends that are teachers will say, “Hey, we’re trying a new curriculum this year. It’s not going well. We’re probably locked into it for three or four years before the next bureaucratic cycle of choosing curriculum pops up in our school district.”

You’re saying the latest change as a mom is probably next school year. And the biology, we might change a lot sooner than that.

[00:24:23] Tiffany Hoben: Biology will end in December, and then we can try a totally new thing for science in the spring. Yep. Yeah, so not everything’s gonna go just so according to plan, which the successes illustrate that, but the kind of the meh, or maybe you could even consider failures are like that too. We thought these would be fine. They turn out to be like, not as great as we thought, but that’s okay because we’re going to fix it in a couple of months.

[00:24:48] Mike Goldstein: Another failure that happened along the way, just to clue listeners, I had recommended to Tiffany a tutoring company called Cuemath.  They tried to get onto the marketplace (I worked for them) and there’s all this friction.

From the company’s point of view, for five potential customers in West Virginia, are we really going to put the time in that it takes to deal with the treasurer’s office of the state of West Virginia? Oh my God. So there’s like the whole bunch of stuff that homeschoolers are experiencing plus the vendors  experiencing on their end as well.

[00:25:26] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah. And that, so that goes back to the question that you asked before, right? So it’s like, we wanted Cuemath, but it didn’t work out because the mechanics of a vendor getting into the ESA are complex, and that I had to pivot on that too as a parent, and just say, well, this is not an option and we got to get rolling here with math, so we’re going to do something different.

[00:25:51] Mike Goldstein: Yep.

[00:25:52] Tiffany Hoben: The 50,000 high foot view is about 80 percent of our parents, and that’s an estimation on my part, use the HOPE scholarship are using it to go to a private school, or a micro school, right? They’re not even seeing the full marketplace.  “I want my funds sent to XYZ Academy or ABC Christian school,” one payment and done. And for those people, Perfection.

Maybe the next tier of people might be homeschoolers like me who were like, okay, I have a kid who I have a full time job. I can’t be everybody’s everything. He’s also learning to be independent and manage his time and get through his homeschool day – with me just facilitating and helping now and then. And so in those cases, I think it also went pretty well, right?

So we discovered some, like what you need to do in the system to get to where everybody’s on the same page. And so that was really useful from a policy point of view, but I had relatively few hiccups because I think I had fewer purchases than a lot of other homeschoolers. I bought these five high level things and then a couple of notebooks and I was good to go.

I think the friction that we’re seeing is with this kind of minority of parents who are maybe doing something like I would call the OG homeschool? Yes. I need to buy Petri dishes and notebooks and crayons, but also maybe some ancillary stuff.  (The more purchases, the more friction).

If they’re teaching their kids to cook, can they buy cookware?  What about alignment of values.  Does everyone agree that a kayak is, or is not something you should be able to buy?  And so West Virginia in particular is on the bleeding edge of all of this.  What should you be able to buy? And I think that has caused some friction too.

Still it’s a pretty small percentage of (all Hope ESA recipients) and I’m confident that we will be able to continue to assemble the plane as it goes.  And have parents support each other and, and point each other in the right direction. So, I think it’s coming along.

[00:29:20] Mike Goldstein: With any new public policy, there’s hiccups along the way. And sometimes it all works out, and sometimes it dies of its own weight and so forth.

You had your estimate, 80%, I agree, mine across the country is 90 percent of people just buy private school with an education savings account. It’s very simple, it’s easy to understand, and you have this leftover group of homeschoolers….but they also have the most interesting ESAs, right?

If I was advising a typical parent, I would nudge them in the direction that you’re going, Tiffany. Buy very high quality services that your kid is responding to.  Spend the ESA in bigger chunks, for the best services.

[00:30:13] Tiffany Hoben: Yeah.

[00:30:14] Mike Goldstein: But like you said, part of how, part of the beauty of how homeschooling got to where it needs, where it is now, is the OG, where I’m doing it all myself.

They’re not used to this idea of outsourcing. “Wait, what? I’m going to hire somebody for $2,000? Yeah. Cause you have $5,000 or you have in Florida $8,000….so hiring an expert lady who’s spent a whole career becoming really good at teaching kids phonics, that’s a good expenditure.

That pivot to quality services over stuff hasn’t fully happened yet.

There’s a lot of “Will they pay me $30 for a printer cartridge?”

We’ll give you the last word, Tiffany. Where do you predict, in a year, will more homeschoolers be using Hope Scholarships?

[00:31:17] Tiffany Hoben: More.  Not necessarily next school year 2025, but the school year after 2026, when it’s legitimately universal, open to everyone.

More people doing what I’m doing with ESAs? I don’t know, right? That’s a very narrow group of people who have the desire and the initiative…but broadly more for sure, because it’s going to be so easy to do.

[00:32:03] Mike Goldstein: Love it. It was great to have you back.

[00:32:06] Tiffany Hoben: Thank you.

[00:32:06] Mike Goldstein: I think the larger message is “This is going well. There’s friction both on the buying side and on the “how do I do this as a home educator” side. But it’s probably going to trend up. And let’s leave it there. Tiffany, thanks for joining us on Homeschooling Journeys.

[00:32:25] Tiffany Hoben: Of course. You’re so welcome.  Thanks for having me.