Travis Pillow

3 weeks ago | nextstepsblog.org | Travis Pillow

Florida has passed a historic milestone. The majority of all students now attend a learning option chosen by their parents. The future of education is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. And it’s concentrated in Florida. School districts are a big part of this story. Between open enrollment, magnet schools, career academies, and more, school districts educate more than 700,000 of Florida’s choice students.

4 weeks ago | nextstepsblog.org | Travis Pillow

Two numbers are helpful for thinking about the future of education. $946 billion. That’s the amount of funding for public education in 2023, according to the latest figures from the Census Bureau. $5.4 billion. That’s about how much funding parents directed through education savings accounts and ESA-like tax credits*. In other words, right now, parents direct a little over one-half of one percent of all public education funding. What will that percentage look like 10 years from now?

1 month ago | nextstepsblog.org | Travis Pillow

The National Microschooling Center has released its latest nationwide analysis of the sector, which it estimates accounts for roughly 2 percent of all K-12 education in the U.S.The full report is worth read, but here are five charts that show how these small learning environments break conventional assumptions about schooling. Microschooling is often an extension of parenting. Nearly half of microschool founders are, or were, educating their own children.

1 month ago | nextstepsblog.org | Travis Pillow

This week, a congressional committee signed off on a budget bill that includes the first-ever nationwide education choice scholarship program. Trimmed in half to $5 billion per year, the Educational Choice for Children Act would offer tax credits to donors who contribute to eligible nonprofit scholarship funds. (Step Up For Students, my employer, is the country’s largest such scholarship organization.)Here are a few ways to gauge its potential impact:It could triple tax credit scholarships.

1 month ago | nextstepsblog.org | Travis Pillow

Education savings accounts and ESA-like individual tax credits are sweeping the nation, allowing more parents to direct public education funding. But some states give students vastly different funding amounts depending on where they learn. Some, like Florida, Arizona, and, most recently, Idaho, fund all students through the same formula. But others, like Oklahoma and now Texas, offer far less funding to students who aren’t enrolled and paying tuition in a full-time private school.