by (in alphabetical order) John Garrett Clawson, Reynaldo de la Garza, Victoria Keller, Sarah Pollock, Laurie Roberts, 

Started: September 6, 2016. Last updated: September 20, 2016

Table of Contents

Definition

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are a /wiki/spaces/edpolicy/pages/27033626 mechanism that puts state funding for educational expenses in the hands of parents. Funds are calculated based on the amount the state would have spent on a given student in their public school. That money is placed in a debit account, from which parents can access and use the funds for a variety of public and private education services.

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The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, has been a proponent of ESAs with the specific understanding that they provide a work-around to a given state's "Blaine Amendment." They noted in a recent report titled "Education Savings Accounts: Advancing Choice in States with Blaine Amendments" that:

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"The defining feature of ESAs—that parents can make multiple choices for their children’s education—helped them survive a Blaine-based legal challenge in Arizona where the state supreme court had deemed a voucher program unconstitutional. In the 2013 Arizona Court of Appeals’ unanimous opinion, Judge Jon Thompson wrote that '[t]he ESA does not result in an appropriation of public money to encourage the preference of one religion over another, or religion per se over no religion. Any aid to religious schools would be a result of the genuine and independent private choices of the parents.'" (Burke & Butcher, 2016)

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O'Dell, Rob, and Yvonne W. Sanchez. "State Money Helping Wealthier Arizona Kids Go to Private Schools." The Arizona Republic. Last modified July 7, 2016. http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/politics/education/2016/02/23/state-money-helping-wealthier-arizona-kids-go-private-schools/80303730/.

“School Choice in America,” EdChoice, last modified Oct. 28, 2016, http://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/school-choice-in-america.

S.B. 1178, Texas 84th Cong. (2015).

S.B. 2695, Mississippi 114th Cong. (2015).

S.B. 302, Nevada 302nd Cong. (2015).

S.B. 431, Tennessee 431st Cong. (2015).

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