Tim’s Take: An Education Reform Stalwart Takes a Curious Look at Homeschoolers With ESAs

[00:00:00] Mike Goldstein: Hello, it’s Homeschooling Journeys with Curious Mike, that’s me. I am here with Tim Daly, wonderful guy that we’ll learn a bunch about. Tim is the founder and CEO of EdNavigator, which is a non profit that helps parents to find the right school.

He and I both come from the same tribe, this kind of a politically moderate group of education reform, where over the years there’s been a lot of backing both from people like George Bush and from people like Barack Obama.

Right now, we’re both, Tim and I, feeling a little bit lonely.

Politically, blue states have moved away from what was called education reform.  That would include improving teacher quality, Teach for America, Tim’s former non profit called TNTP (where he was CEO), fixing school districts, charter schools – moving away from that stuff.   Moving to: let’s simplify this, let’s just pay teachers more.

And then on the flip side, more red states have been moving towards education savings accounts and different types of school choice. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today. Welcome, Tim.

As you know, I’ve been talking to a bunch of moms who are homeschoolers using education savings accounts.

I’m curious, from your perspective, what do you make of all this?

Tim Daly: It’s clear that things are changing.

It used to be true that folks that opted out of traditional public schools, particularly for homeschooling, had a set of reasons for doing that, and oftentimes it was their preference to teach religion.  Sometimes it was an objection to what they saw as a certain political leaning of schools.

Now with the widespread availability of ESAs, we’re starting to see some other reasons for folks doing (leaving public schools) – (desire for) customization. And I’m very intrigued to learn more about that because it’s not something that I necessarily knew about before.

Mike Goldstein: Yeah! I’ve been fascinated too.  Where does homeschooling at all fit into your work at EdNavigator?

[00:02:49] Tim Daly: It doesn’t come up that often. That’s the short answer. The majority of what we do is to help families navigate traditional public school systems. And we take referrals from pediatricians who meet folks in their office visits who they believe are going to need assistance getting their kids evaluated for special education. And so that definitely skews more towards traditional districts or potentially charter settings where they are all subject to special education law. Private schools are not in the same way.

And so, most of the families that we are supporting, we are seeking special education services in a public setting.

[00:03:23] We also help families with enrollment, which they are legally entitled to enroll in their local public school.

We do run across families, though, that unintentionally are homeschoolers.  What I mean by that is they’ve had so much trouble trying to get their young ones enrolled in school that they are at home, and so sometimes they’ve spent some time out of traditional public school systems, not because they chose an education savings account or have access to one of those, but because they’ve been so frustrated by trying to get their kids in.

[00:03:57] Mike Goldstein: Tim, what’s like a common story of a frustrated parent trying to navigate red tape?

[00:04:18] Tim Daly: A super common one would be a child that is turning three years old, they received early intervention in their home for speech before they were three. Clearly, their pediatrician thought that was something that wasn’t developing appropriately and prescribed intervention, and that intervention was received.

[00:04:36] But when the child turns three, there’s no more of these home visits, so the family needs to go and get the child enrolled with their local district.

You’re based around Boston. We do a lot of work there. A typical story is that the family goes to enroll in the district, and the child needs a speech evaluation, so they need a speech pathologist, and the family speaks Spanish, and so they need a Spanish speaker, and the district says, oh, we only have one person available to us who does speech pathology and can do an evaluation in Spanish, and that person just took a medical leave. And the process will just stop right there.

They just stop talking!  Essentially what the district means is, The child is going to get an evaluation when this person comes back from medical leave.

[00:05:21] Well, when are they going to come back? We don’t know. And, so meanwhile, the child is three.  These are the years when speech intervention could do an enormous amount of good for their development. Parents may spend all of the year that they’re three, trying to get the kid evaluated.

Maybe they’ll get services when they’re four.  Maybe the family will give up and the child will come back to school as a five year old and they’ll have had no services whatsoever at age three and four.  Our Ed navigators work through those sorts of issues all the time.

I would say the typical experience is this. Districts believe that the law is, they need to make their best honest effort. Whatever the law says they need to do, they would say, sometimes we can’t do that because there are these barriers. As long as we make a good, honest effort, we’re complying with the law.

[00:06:09] Mike Goldstein: Got it. So, whereas, like, you and I (as parents), we’ve got a lot of social capital.

So, if somebody says, your kid needs X service, and then somebody’s supposed to provide that service says, “Sorry I made a good effort, but what am I going to do? My provider is out on leave”….

Our answer would be: You have to go find another good, talented person who can serve my kid. And we would sort of take the fight, if it was the fight, to the school system.

So you have a lot of situations where maybe the parent doesn’t know how to do that.  And your Navigators come in and they’re like: “Let me stand side by side with you versus the district. I’m just better at this kind of good cop, bad cop.”  We say both: we appreciate the district for trying, but we’re also the bad cop if you don’t do this.  You face legal action, we could embarrass you publicly, you better provide the services that this kid needs.  Where the mom might be afraid to say those things.

[00:07:32] Tim Daly: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So the first thing to understand is that families that have less experience pushing back against systems that hold much more power than they do.  They just take no for an answer.

Affluent privileged parents do not take no for an answer.  The second thing is they don’t grade based on effort or intent. They grade based on results.  They very quickly can access friends, family members that know what the law is. They know people that work in schools. They make two phone calls and find out, no, the district HAS to do that for you. (Parents with high social capital) go back to the school district and say, “If you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, we’re going to hold you accountable and liable.”  All of a sudden the wheels start turning.

Mike Goldstein: So one thing that was hopeful to me were homeschoolers that would identify a need.  They tried their kid in a traditional public school and it just wasn’t working for the kid.   The mom’s like: my kid can’t read.  And the school system says: Yeah but we’re trying. Like, be patient or something.

And so the parent was able to take their education savings account, in some cases, and just directly buy access to that expert. So, somebody needs Phonics instruction and parents somebody who is not just professional and skilled in phonics, but somebody who: can meet at the right time; who their kid happens to like.

If she didn’t have that government cash (ESA) and she was trying to cough up $3,000 a year out of pocket, that might be a big stretch financially.

So some of these homeschoolers are solving the same things that you’re solving by helping them navigate better a reluctant system.

Tim Daly: Yeah, that’s what I’m curious about. Like the ways that folks are adapting to have their needs met. And, what it sounds like to me is that, the school systems have sort of dared them to go outside.

Some of them have the option. Some of them have the agency. Some of them are ready to do it. Some of them are reluctant, piecing it together, as you said, trying to find solutions for this. Takes a lot of stamina and a lot of effort.

Mike Goldstein: Tim, one of the interesting things that I think homeschool advocates and critics generally agree on is there’s not really great empirical data on how well homeschool kids are learning.

In other words, homeschool advocates will say, yeah, well, we know there’s selection bias in who chooses to homeschool.  And there’s not like a NAEP national exam that everybody takes.

So we hear a lot of good stories of like, hey, here’s some homeschool kids that have gone on to do great things.

Homeschool opponents sort of say, well, here’s some bad stories.

But stories don’t add up to be really good data (Andy Rotherham: The plural of anecdote is not data), so we don’t really know what’s going on inside of the homeschools.

What do you expect will happen if more and more parents that considered homeschooling before but maybe chose not to, are now enticed by homeschooling with the Education Savings Account?

There’s always tension between public spending and measured accountability.

Tim Daly: Parents are generally not maximizers for Academic Performance, especially in the short term.

So if the parents did pull their kids out of school because they wanted them to have higher test results or better reading or something, and they maximized for that, homeschooling probably could accomplish that because you could have the kid with eight hours of time on task a day, the same way that you might maximize, for example, for like Tennis training.

I think homeschoolers are maximizing often for other things.  Values alignment.  Or time spent with their kids.  Or flexibility so the child can work in the family business or helping on the farm.

To your point, though, about what happens, the more money that goes into it, the more pressure there is going to be for there to be accountability and oversight.  The more there’s a perception that it’s diverting resources from traditional districts, traditional districts are going to want some sort of accounting tha  holds the homeschooling ESA families to a standard that they think they’re being held to.

The folks that want to see more ESAs probably want it because it gives family a lot more freedom and they would also say we don’t want a lot of red tape and bureaucracy.

Me personally, having tried to escape the red tape, my guess is ESAs will have limited luck with that.  If it turns out that this is really popular and there’s a lot of money involved, there’s going to also be more oversight.

Mike Goldstein: What I’ve seen so far, Tim, is actually the existing red tape already is very constraining on the homeschoolers, in a way that, in my opinion, feels unfair to the homeschoolers.

In other words, for every dollar of waste being protected, they’re creating 99 dollars worth of annoying headache to a good faith parent just trying to buy some math help or an extracurricular soccer program or a science curriculum.

I agree that there’s going to be this big fight, although what’s interesting is these ESA programs are only being passed in red states.

Tim Daly: The states that are agreeing to do this are more open to the argument of: we want light regulation.

Mike Goldstein: Or they’re more open to the complaint of, you’re, killing the whole idea the more you try to measure it.

As who’s gone through the charter school experience, where I felt like the state of Massachusetts became more and more constraining of the freedoms that charter schools had, and the end result at this point is most charters then have become indistinguishable from the regular schools. Like, I think I’m cheering for the anti regulators to beat out the regulators.  We’ll see who wins across these states.

Tim Daly: Yeah, we’ll see. And also, let’s not forget that, school systems have struggled with fraud, embezzlement, and the like for decades.

Schools often have major scandals where money is flowing around in different places and some of it goes missing. So, there’s reason to worry. Bad actors can show up in this homeschool space, and I think regulators are just trying to get ahead of that.  Because the first (bad story) that happens with ESAs, and there’s millions of dollars involved, there’s gonna be pressure for a crackdown.  Could be wrong (on the merits), but I just think it doesn’t take very many examples of abuse for it to, for the public to feel like that’s necessary.

Mike Goldstein: You led an organization called TNTP. What did TNTP do?

Tim Daly: Our main focus was ensuring that schools that serve low income kids could recruit and retain really good teachers.

Historically, the patterns were very clear that the best teachers taught the wealthiest and highest performing kids.  The students who most needed (Best teachers) typically got those in the worst position to do it.

Mike Goldstein: I recall fondly that TNTP would publish research to irritate the people in the system.  You published The Mirage, which said “The System makes all these fancy claims that you’re training teachers and you’re making teachers such skilled professionals.  But when we look under the hood at what’s really happening, the evidence shows none of this kind of teacher training really pays off.”

And I bring that up for two reasons. The first is, there’s a lot of frustrated teachers out there.  What are the common frustrations to a classroom teacher?

Tim Daly: I think one of the things that wears good teachers out over time is that they’re completely ignored. So the better you are, the less you matter, really, because the systems tend to deal with teachers that are new and need a lot of support, or who aren’t very good. So there’s very little upside to being excellent. It’s scarcely going to be noticed. That’s one.

Two is we go through educational fads all the time.  So if you’re a great teacher and you stick around long enough, you’re going to endure these fad cycles every couple of years.  They come in and tell you that you need to change the way that you teach or there’s new set of standards or things like that. And you redo a bunch of things for meaningless cosmetic reasons because the administration has decided that’s the new direction.

And it may be completely unnecessary because you’re a STAR teacher. The way that you were teaching Algebra 1 worked 10 years ago. It worked 5 years ago. It works now. It’s going to work 5 years from now.

A third thing is for teachers in a very challenging environment, a low income school.  There’s so much turnover. You have this brand new cast of characters all the time. The teacher with good classroom management gets exhausted because the teachers that can’t manage their classroom are constantly sending kids down the hall, or knocking on the door and saying, “hey, can you take this student?”

[00:20:57] Mike Goldstein: Yeah, and so one of the things that I found as we did these homeschooling journey stories I heard a few different teachers, they were able to build the teaching world that they wanted to live in.

[00:21:13] So, Tony and Uli, this husband and wife science teaching team from Surf Skate Science, they’re free of the constraints of a typical school.  They don’t have boring staff meetings.  Yes, you have some friends among the typical teachers, but we also have a couple annoying colleagues who are always complaining (they avoid that by serving homeschoolers with ESAs).  A public school teacher wants to do some exciting stuff with the kids, but then the principal’s like, no, you gotta follow the curriculum.

[00:21:44] So Toni and Uli were able to unlock from that.  They just say, here’s my vision, here’s exactly what I want to do. With how many kids on the following weekly calendar, at the following locations, in their case like a skateboard park and an ocean, for their version of learning science through surfboards and skateboards, and it’s cool, like you get to be entrepreneurial as a teacher and you get to leave behind some of the pain points.

Tim, I’m curious if you think that this may become more attractive to more teachers over time, that pull some of the more creative and constrained teachers inside of a school system into the world of, hey, I can charge parents, they’ll pay me with their education savings account, I can earn what I would have earned otherwise, and now I’m, like, every minute of every day I’m doing more of what I love.

[00:22:51] Tim Daly: It sounds to me like what you’re describing is that they’re homeschooling themselves.  They’re not pulling their kids out of the school system. They’re pulling themselves out.

[00:23:00] Mike Goldstein: Yeah! I think that’s right. They’re pulling themselves out and they’re getting to specialize and say the following is what I love to do. But they’re each flexing on different details. I think for some of these specializers that are serving, educators serving the homeschool market, they might just go deep in a particular subject area, but other ones are just they’re like, you know what I always found frustrating is my class size was 24.

[00:23:28] I don’t know. And I never felt like I could help all the kids enough.

[00:23:34] And now I’m running a little micro school or something, and I’m helping, I set the class size. And I’ve decided it’s going to be 12 kids.

[00:23:44] And that just feels right to me. And I might be giving up some amount of cash, and I’m giving up Health insurance and

[00:23:51] certain benefits and retirement.

[00:23:52] I’m giving things up to get an hour by hour teaching experience that makes me be my best and most satisfied.

Tim Daly: This is an entrepreneurial form of teaching where you’re setting your conditions and you’re specializing and that’s sort of the, something that’s almost been antithetical to teaching where you’re, you sort of accept who comes through the door, like that’s one of the badges of honor almost, right?

Like, you, those things are determined for you and then you sort of, manage it the best way you can.

One thing I can say that we learned at TNTP: few teachers are amazing at every single skill.  And the teachers who serve homeschoolers with ESAs, they play to that.  I do think that this opens up the door to specialization (and playing to each teacher’s strengths).  We’ll probably see some things that we’ve not seen before.

[00:25:07] Mike Goldstein: Tim, what lessons can we take from the growth of charter schools from the last 20 years of charters?

Tim Daly: The lesson of humility, and the lesson hubris. How about that?

Don’t forget that sustaining something over time is really hard. And the early charter schools had lightning in a bottle because there was enormous enthusiasm. And there were teachers that were dying to get out of the traditional school system. And there were parents that were dying to get out of the school system. And so there was just so much energy and these teachers are willing to work long hours. And the kids were willing to stay longer days and come in on the weekends. And it was just a, it was a coalition of the willing that, that had so much heart.

But when, whenever you try to sustain something for 10 years and 12 years, and you have to bring in more teachers, and some of the original teachers left.

One of the lessons of charters is that, the hard part isn’t “getting it right” – the hard part is “keeping it right.”

Second, there was an early sense, I think, among the charters that when they got outsized results, they were just better than districts, and they always would be better than districts. In some places, those gains have not stayed in place.  Hubris.  Also: charters also were distinct.  They were unique. And I think that if you lose sight of what makes you unique, if you allow yourself to become very bland, like some of the district schools, you lose what makes you special.

Too many of the charter schools are really average, they’re really bland, they’re not special, they don’t have special teaching and learning, they don’t have a special culture. There’s nothing that would make a family feel like this is an exceptional opportunity worth, pulling their kid out of the traditional system to go to.

Remember, charters need defense at the political level, and I think they’re not special enough for the elected officials to defend.

Mike Goldstein: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this new wrinkle of teacher absenteeism in traditional schools.

[00:30:58] Like, what’s causing it? How pervasive is it? Is that going to be something that over time causes more families to flee the system?

Tim Daly: So first of all, teacher absenteeism is almost never discussed.

Student absenteeism gets an enormous amount of attention. Teacher absenteeism gets very little.

Very few states report on it. Illinois is one. Rhode Island is another. So it’s very helpful that we have a few states where the data is comprehensive.  Teacher absenteeism has gone up dramatically since COVID. It’s true across all different types of district settings, so this is not like the center city district. Chicago has teachers that don’t show up for work, but all the suburban school districts do too.

Mike Goldstein: you’re seeing across both states that you’ve looked at, Rhode Island and Illinois. It doesn’t matter if it’s a suburban school, inner city school, teachers are absent.

Tim Daly: Much higher rates than before. We know that it has a profound effect on student learning, because substitutes are much less effective than, than, fully trained teachers of record are, and so teachers who miss lots and lots of days, it really does start to become a drag on the student experience. And it’s also expensive for school districts because hiring substitutes is very costly. it’s possible that to some degree it is driven by a culture where so many students are absent so much that it makes the teachers feel like they don’t need to show up as often.

There’s also folks that say, you’re missing the point here. A lot of teachers are parents, and their kids are sick more often, or not going to school, and so they have to stay home with them.  I have my suspicions about that, but I can’t dismiss that one with data.

The biggest cause, though, that everyone points to is burnout. The sense that teachers made it through COVID, but they’re exhausted, they’re dealing with more behavior challenges. Essentially they need their days off.

A second thing that principals will happily talk about off the record is it’s easy to miss days now because there’s no threat that you’re going to get dismissed.   Nobody thinks that there’s a teacher to take your place (because of shortages).

Even probationary teachers in their first years who, who are, who don’t have tenure yet can happily miss 20 or 25 days of school because they know they’re going to get renewed anyway.

Your question was, Does this teacher absenteeism to an erosion of confidence in school districts?  (Which would trigger more homeschooling).

I would say, without question, there’s a whole basket of things that have happened in the last five or ten years that I think have eroded confidence of many parents in their local school districts. And this is certainly one of them, because I can tell you, parents know about this.  How often their kids are having subs.

Mike Goldstein: It came up last night so at the dinner table with, our two high schoolers.  They’re recounting their day.  “Oh, well, we didn’t do anything in math class or history because the teacher was out.”  Wait, it’s only November, and that teacher’s out again and again.  The norms of professionalism have massively changed.  In our local school, they don’t even use subs anymore. Basically you go to the cafeteria; it’s study hall time.

Our door opened at 11 a. m. the other day.  I wonder who’s barging into our house at 11 a. m.? And it was the 14 year old.  “I have two teachers absent.   So I’m missing period three and four.  So I just snuck out of school, came home to like pet the dog and get a little downtime, and then I’ll sneak back into school.”

Tim Daly: We didn’t know when COVID started that the long term effect was going to be making school feel non essential. We just had no idea. It was impossible to foresee that.

We said you can do it from home, you can do it on Zoom, you can just be given a few worksheets and assignments and go.

And then we thought that when kids came back to school and adults came back to school in person, that non-essential feeling would just go away.  The sense that school’s optional and flexible would disappear.

But your 14 year old was the embodiment of it, right? Your 14 year old is essentially saying, I don’t need to be at school for this. My teachers aren’t at school.

Mike Goldstein: Tim, charter school political advocates, who of course I loved, they were helping our schools survive and flourish, but some of them had overly positive views of what our school really was.

[00:36:49] They were advocates: charter schools are amazing! And so we’d say, “Um, we’re good but we got a lot of problems.”

I see this in this education savings account world, where the policy people, to their great credit, they’re making this stuff happen, and it’s hard.  They have to be positive.  But some of them have drank the Kool Aid too much.

And they’re missing a lot of homeschooling moms who themselves are filling up Facebook boards saying: I think I’m failing, or my kid won’t do any school work with me, or I don’t know what I’m doing here.

How do you react?

Tim Daly: What fires for me actually is sort of a defense of the school system.   The district people will say: Homeschoolers gave it a try, for many it doesn’t work, you’ll send the kid back to us, and now we have to clean up the mess.

Homeschooling advocates should attend to that argument.  Like, figure out how to make up that lost ground, and where are the resources going to come for that?

I bet advocates would be dismissive of it and say, oh, no, it’s not, it’s not going to happen.

It’s like all the people that got pets during the pandemic because they didn’t want to be alone and they got rid of them a year later.

[00:39:07] Mike Goldstein: We’re never getting rid of Grizzly, our pandemic pup.

Tim, thank you so much for joining to reflect a bit on these Homeschoolers with Education Savings Accounts. Thanks for all your work on behalf of parents in the lanes that you operate in; appreciate it.

[00:39:31] Tim Daly: Thank you. Take care.