Texas pays $10,474 to parents who choose an accredited private school through the state’s education savings account (ESA) program. If you are a parent of a child with a disability, then that amount can increase to a maximum of $30,000. But if you are a parent of a homeschooler, the Lone Star State pays only $2,000 to support that young learner.
Alabama’s ESA program awards $7,000 per student toward private school tuition and $2,000 for a “home education program.” In Alabama, homeschooling families are capped at $4,000 even if they have more than two school-age children.
Florida and Arizona took a different approach. The base funding amount, which typically ranges between $7,000 and $8,000 is the same whether parents choose homeschooling or private school.
More states, who offer ESAs to families with school-aged children, are like Texas and Alabama than Florida and Arizona, if they offer any financial support to out of school learning at all.
New data from the Rand Corporation, which appeared last week in The 74 (3/19/26), offers insight into what public school parents would prefer moving forward when it comes to school, and more importantly, learner choice. The Johns Hopkins University Homeschool Research Lab asked the Rand Corporation to include questions pertinent to school and learner choice as part of Rand’s American Life Panel, a nationally representative sample of more than 2,400 parents with K-12 students.
Answering the question “Does your state provide access to any public funds for homeschooling?”, 52.7% of parents sampled answered “No,” while 22.5% said “Yes” and 24% said they did not know.
If they said “Yes” to the state funding availability question, 63% of the parents sampled said they were currently using public funds for homeschooling while 37% said they weren’t.
And, if they said “No” to the state funding availability question, 70.6% of parents sampled said they would use public funds for homeschooling if they were made available, while 29% said no.
“Erin Flynn, lead instructor at Hedge School Collective, an Austin, Texas-area microschool for seventh through 12th graders, said she’s received several calls over the past few months from homeschooling families inquiring whether she will be accepting Education Freedom Accounts (Texas’s name for ESAs) for tuition.”
“Operating out of a converted house with a large porch, she offers a twice-a-week option for $600 per month and a full-time program for $950. She described the curriculum, which focuses on humanities, STEM and art, as ‘self-directed.’”
“’We want to put the power back in students’ hands so that they aren’t just learning the canon; they’re learning how to identify what it is that they love,’ said Flynn, a former English teacher….”
More state legislatures need to model their education savings account programs after Florida and Arizona.
More states need to initiate a parent education program so that all parents, especially those who are black, brown, and poor, understand their options when it comes to choosing an educational program for their child(ren).
More adult learning leaders need to be trained to create robust learning plans, with their young learners and their families, so that kids learn how to own their own learning – defining, planning, executing, and evaluating.
More money needs to be spent so that young learners improve their reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development skills.
And finally, we need to stop talking about school choice, thinking that schools are the only unit of improvement when it comes to learning, and begin talking about learner choice. Today, the world can be each individual young learner’s classroom. What are we waiting for?
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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