91涩漫

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 91涩漫 Newsletter

Conversations about Education Savings Account programs seem to start in the same place: the money. Where is it going? How is it being used? Who is benefiting?

Understandably so. When taxpayer money moves, people talk. 

But being on the frontlines for several years as a certified literacy specialist 鈥� working with families, taking the calls, doing the assessment, tutoring the kids 鈥擨 can tell you that the conversation we are having about ESA funds is missing the mark about what is driving families to use them. 

This is not a school choice conversation. This is a literacy crisis conversation. 

Almost every call I get starts the same way.

A parent tells me their child was in public school through first, second or third grade. Somewhere in there, they started to realize how far behind their child was falling. They tried to get help. They were told to wait. Wait for what? Wait for the multi-tiered support process, wait for the evaluation, wait for the individualized education program to be finalized. 

By the time any of that happened, it was too late. The foundational gap grew wider. Another school year was over. In some cases, time to move to middle school, where support services tend to decrease rather than increase.

Eventually, they made a decision knowing they had to do something different. They pulled their child out and started homeschooling. Not because they had a philosophical objection to public education. Because their kid couldn’t read and nobody was fixing it.”We’re not looking for homework help,” they would tell me. “We need someone to fill in the gaps that were never built in the first place.”

Let me be clear. This is not one family. This is almost every family. And my company has served hundreds of families nationwide. 

The data backs up what I’m hearing from parents. 

According to the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, only 31% of fourth-grade students nationwide are reading at or above the NAEP Proficient level. This is a four-point drop from 2019. Forty percent of fourth graders are now scoring below even NAEP鈥檚 Basic level, the highest percentage since 2002. The National Literacy Institute puts it another way, 64% of American fourth graders are not reading proficiently.

These are not numbers from a recovering system. These are numbers from a system that has not figured out how to reach the majority of its students. Specifically, the students who don’t learn to read through standard classroom instruction.

Traditional Schooling vs. ESA Option

The IEP process, which is supposed to protect those students, is moving too slow. The multi-tiered support system, while well-intentioned, has in many cases become a years-long waiting room. 

By the time a child’s eligibility is determined, the window for easiest intervention may have already closed. Research on neuroplasticity tells us that the brain is significantly more responsive to literacy intervention before second grade. Families who wait three years for a formal IEP are not getting what the system promised them.

ESA programs are not, for most of these families, an ideological statement. They represent a funding tool that finally lets them stop waiting and allows them to take fast action for their kids. 

By the time families reach me, they are looking for something very specific. A certified educator who can assess where the gaps actually are, build from there and move at the pace the child is ready for. Not a program. Not a curriculum. A person with the training to deliver genuine academic intervention.

What are they getting? Depending on which state they’re in and which vendor they find this varies greatly.

Here’s the part of the ESA debate that nobody is talking about. There are varying credentialing standards for tutoring vendors in most state programs. “Tutoring” is listed as an approved expense, but the definition of who can deliver it ranges from a certified literacy specialist to college students who believe they can teach based on their expertise and interests. 

Some states do better. For example, Tennessee and Georgia, require either a state-issued teaching certificate or an accredited tutoring company. But many states only require a bachelor’s degree, a threshold that is sufficient for homework help, not for delivering structured literacy intervention to a child with dyslexia.

In states with reimbursement models, the oversight is even thinner. A parent can pay anyone, submit the receipt, and receive reimbursement. 

This matters because the families using ESA funds for tutoring are not looking for a supplement to a strong educational experience. They are looking for intervention. Their children have real learning differences. They need real specialists.

The results are significant when families find the right match, when they get a proper assessment, an individualized plan and a certified educator who actually understands what’s happening in the child’s brain. These kids grow. Oftentimes dramatically.

That is not an argument for ESAs as a policy. It’s an observation about what happens when the right intervention meets the right student. Not only that, but the relief it provides for a family who has been attempting to get help for their student through their trusted local school district for years. 

The question I’d put to anyone designing or reforming these programs is this: if we’ve agreed that tutoring is a legitimate use of ESA funds, and we know that families using those funds are overwhelmingly seeking academic intervention for children with learning differences 鈥� shouldn’t we have a clearer standard for what intervention actually requires?

Homework help and academic intervention are not the same thing. A knowledgeable family member can help a child practice multiplication tables. But a child who is three years behind in reading because of unaddressed dyslexia needs a certified, trained specialist, not just someone who is willing to sit with them. This is not just 鈥渢utoring.鈥� 

The families calling me already know the difference. The programs paying for it haven’t caught up yet.

Did you use this article in your work?

We鈥檇 love to hear how 91涩漫鈥檚 reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.