[00:00:00] Ethan Demme: Funding is tied to a specific system, whereas now we have learning is much more flexible. With that, we also see parents who have concerns with the rapid pace of change they see in the world. They see the time they have to connect with their kids is becoming chipped away at, both with school, but also screens and social media.

[00:00:28] Gretchen Roe: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show, and I am very privileged and excited to welcome Ethan Demme today to have a conversation with me about ESAs. Educational savings accounts have changed the face of education across the United States, and they have really been a game changer for families who might not have been able to see themselves in the role of guiding their children’s education. Ethan’s got a lot of things to say, and I can’t wait for you to hear him. I’m going to let him begin. Ethan?

[00:01:03] Ethan: Well, thank you, Gretchen. Thanks for having me. I know we have a lot of great guests on The Demme Learning Show, so I’m always happy to get a chance to jump in. I would describe where we’re at in the education history of America, we’re at a bit of a transition point. For most of American history and education, we had education that was tied to both a building as well as later on a zip code. Based off of where you lived, those were the options you had. You either had the local brick-and-mortar publicly funded school, and you didn’t have many choices beyond that other than private education.

As we moved into the 70s and 80s, this think or homeschooling started to appear as well as a couple other options. We’re now hitting this inflection point where there’s a lot more options popping up. Multiple states are doing different things. What I want to talk to you a little bit about today is what does this look like as we shift from education as tied to a space and a building? Funding is tied to a specific system, whereas now we have learning as much more flexible. With that, we also see parents who have concerns with the rapid pace of change they see in the world, whether that’s education changing, whether that’s AI to robots, or economic uncertainty. We have pandemics.

They see the time they have to connect with their kids is becoming chipped away at, both with school, but also screens and social media. There’s families, whether you homeschool or don’t homeschool, who spend most of their time as the Uber driver to their kids, driving them from event to event, just trying to cram in all the good things that are out there. I have four kids, and we have TaeKwonDo tonight, so I’ll be shuffling my kids off to another event. We try to keep those limited at our house, but there’s always that everyone’s aggressively trying to get your attention of both you, your family, and your kids. Parents are seeing that precious time for connection slip away through the cracks as everything jumps into it.

[00:03:12] Gretchen: Some things don’t change, Ethan. Back in the 90s, I had a bumper sticker on the back of my suburban that said, “If a mother’s place is in the home, why am I always in my car?” because I was always driving a kid somewhere for something. We limited our kids to one extracurricular per child, and it was still an enormous amount of driving when you were carting six kids around.

[00:03:33] Ethan: There’s been some interesting studies on this. When you look at what do parents want versus what parents are currently choosing, we have a bit of a breakdown. Four out of five American students attend a traditional brick-and-mortar public school, but only four out of ten parents say that that’s their preferred priority. About 60% of parents would prefer some other form of education, whether that’s private school, homeschooling, charter schools, or some other micro school or alternative. The main barrier of entry into those options is usually cost and transportation. Those are the two big pieces.

This really isn’t a debate about whether parents want additional choices. They clearly do. The real question is whether we should have a public policy that gatekeeps those choices and says, “Hey, the educational opportunity is only for those who can afford it, who either can afford to move to a location with a school that they like or can afford a private or homeschooling option.” All of those pieces are for the folks who do choose private school or homeschool, and you have to take a wage earner out of the workforce, or you’re able to, on one income, be able to raise multiple kids. Those people have those choices, and then everyone else is stuck where they’re at, which is, “Hey, here’s my zip code. I really don’t have any choices beyond that.”

Wealthy families have always had that choice. They can move, they can pay tuition, they can hire tutors. What we’re seeing with these education choice options, ESAs is the most recent flavor of the month on those. They’ll probably be called something else in a few years. It’s a way to distribute that power from a centralized system of a brick-and-mortar place and funding tied to that system to the funding is tied more closely to the parent. We’re seeing that shift to where the parents are making those choices and are able to, now that they have that extra income, they can make more choices. Folks who are single parents, folks who don’t have enough income with one wage earner to be able to homeschool full-time, they can now seek multiple options. It’s the bigger shift from system-centered to a family-centered education choice.

[00:05:46] Gretchen: Ethan, I know that that’s something you’ve been advocating for a number of years. Tell me where your enthusiasm has arisen for this, because although it is a different flavor, I see that you have said it’s a continuation of the fact that you have advocated for choice for parents for a long time.

[00:06:06] Ethan: I would say the advocacy piece for me was caught rather than taught. Back in the early 80s was when my parents, my dad attended a conference and learned about homeschooling. Back then in the early 80s, late 70s, homeschooling with this very fringe idea that wasn’t legal in most states. You had Raymond and Dorothy Moore, the pioneers of home education, start to advocate for this idea that, “Hey, maybe you don’t need to start school as young as you do. Maybe you should follow the pace of your child’s development, individualize to their approach, look at that sort of what’s the developmental readiness of your child and what’s the real-world learning look like.”

Parents are actually fully capable of teaching their kids at home. My parents heard from Raymond and Dorothy Moore, started attending conferences. We were in Georgia at the time. My dad was a pastor, so we moved around. Then he started advocating to change the law in Georgia to allow homeschooling to be legal because back then when you would go to a homeschool conference, you wouldn’t give your last name to the person you met because you didn’t know if they were going to turn you in to the truant officer. It was very much an underground world back then. This was before we had the internet and chat rooms and all these pieces. We had to organize. How did you organize? My dad started a group called the Minute Men and worked with the state organization and went lobbied the governor in Georgia. I knew that when we were lobbying on a bill, we didn’t answer the phone between five and six o’clock at night because my dad would record a legislative update on our answering machine, the old tapes. People would call in, get a legislative update, hang up, and the next person would call in. The phone would just constantly ring. That’s how we got the word out. You had phone chains of like, “Hey, you call this person and you call and support this bill.” That’s how we got it legal in Georgia. My dad was part of that. That was my family upbringing was, “Hey, if you don’t like the way things are, you can advocate for change.”

[00:08:12] Gretchen: That’s a powerful message to model for your children.

[00:08:15] Ethan: I was recently working with Lenore Skenazy, who is on our podcast, on a bill in Pennsylvania. I got to go testify before the Children and Youth Committee on making it legal for parents to let their kids play outside unsupervised. It shouldn’t have to be a law, but unfortunately, that’s the world we live in.

[00:08:33] Gretchen: Yes.

[00:08:34] Ethan: I got to show my kids the video of, oh, there’s your dad up there. Then we’ve done that at the local level too. We’ve done some volunteer stuff with our fire companies. I took my kids to a parks board meeting and said, “Hey, here’s how you can advocate to put on a 5K in a park.” They drew a map, and they talked to the board, and we got it approved. Yes, we’re still very involved, whether it’s a local issue or a state issue, and my kids get to go along.

[00:09:02] Gretchen: It seems fun. You wonder if your dad envisioned how far down the rabbit hole his advocacy would go, that now his grandchildren are experiencing advocacy in a similar but different way. That’s cool.

[00:09:20] Ethan: Yes, we got a picture last year. Our local state organization, CHAP in Pennsylvania, has a homeschool day, as most states do. We got three generations, a picture of the three of us, of my dad, myself, and my two daughters were able to go that day. We were up there at the Capitol, so we got the picture. It’s like we’re just keeping it going for the next generation.

[00:09:42] Gretchen: I think that’s one of the things that we need to recognize as parents. The freedoms that we enjoy today as homeschool parents, or that I enjoyed until my youngest graduated, came at sacrifice from someone. I think a lot of people believe now, well, this is the way it’s always been. No, it’s not. Even in the late 90s when I began homeschooling, my children were taught not to answer the door during the day because you didn’t know who was going to be on the other side of the door.

[00:10:20] Ethan: We had to stay out of the front yard until the yellow bus drove down the road. Then we could start playing in the front yard. You’d memorize your little speech because you’d go grocery shopping, “Why aren’t you in school?” Then we’d have to say, “Well, we homeschool.” You’re always answering those questions. Now it’s thanks to all the advocacy of those early pioneers like my parents and Raymond Moore and then early institutions at each state level, it’s now just another choice. When I say, “Oh, I homeschool my kids,” everyone’s like, “Okay.” Where they see us out walking, we go for walks every morning, and they go, “Oh, you must homeschool.”

[00:10:59] Gretchen: Absolutely.

[00:11:00] Ethan: It’s like, “What gave you that idea?” The fact that my kids can just come up and randomly talk to strangers and ask them questions about their dogs.

[00:11:10] Gretchen: Which is probably pretty cool. Ethan, tell me a little bit what you see as far as the education policy landscape. I know we discussed a little bit of this in our planning meeting because you actually enlightened me to some things I didn’t realize. For instance, I didn’t realize that Alaska was the first place to create this kind of compensation for parents to educate their children. It’s grown from there, from that model.

[00:11:42] Ethan: Yes. Alaska, I’ve had the opportunity, as I think you have as well, to go to the home education conferences in Alaska. There’s different ones all over. It’s a great time. I love going up to Alaska. Alaska is probably, I look to, my personal view is I love Alaska’s model. Alaska has, and I’ll talk a little bit about that, but starting even back in 1939, Alaska had correspondence schools. They had a centralized correspondence study program because you had a lot of folks who were remote and off-grid. The roads are all closed. You couldn’t even fly into most places. It was, “Hey, you do all your work through correspondence. You’d mail it into a teacher. It’d get graded. It just came and went with the mail, usually–

[00:12:27] Gretchen: That’s right. I worked for one of those correspondence schools for 10 years. Calvert School had done that and pioneered in Alaska and in foreign locales all over the US since 1907. It was a long history, and a storied one.

[00:12:43] Ethan: That’s the long history in Alaska. Then in the 1970s into the 80s, they started to centralize that correspondence. It’s one state-run program. Then they started to do what’s called district-based innovation. Jugok School District was the one that started to play around with that idea of, “Hey, our individual school district can actually administer this distance program.” Then in 1997, they started doing what’s called IDEA, which was the Interior Distance Education of Alaska, using the Galena School District, which is still one of the larger school districts from an enrollment standpoint, even though it’s a very small physical school building.

That’s also in 1997 when they updated the homeschooling legislation as well and deregulated as much as you can get. When people ask me which Pennsylvania is where we live, it’s a high-regulation state, mainly because Pennsylvania passed its legislation in the mid-80s when it was still new. When it was brand new, the state legislatures would put more restrictions on. As it became more accepted, the later states to legalize started to be much more lax. In 1997, the rules for homeschooling in Alaska are, if you do it, you’re exempt from all the rules.

[00:14:06] Gretchen: Yes, I wondered if you were going to say it that way.

[00:14:08] Ethan: There’s no notification requirements. You just stop going to school. You don’t have to track days. You don’t have to track subjects. There’s no testing requirements. Nothing. You just stop going to public school. It’s probably the most deregulated state from a homeschooling standpoint. That’s my preferred model for here’s how you homeschool. It’s like, “Hey, you trust the parents. They set up the program. They decide whether it’s successful or not.” Then they started to update their correspondence program formally in the early 2000s and then solidifying a little more about 12 years ago with a funding allotment.

What Alaska’s model does is you can choose the homeschooling lane, which is, hey, you just teach your kids at home however you want. You choose. That’s that base freedom that I think every state should advocate and try to have. That’s your base because that gives the parents the full flexibility of, hey, if you don’t like any of the rules or strings that are attached to money, because guess what? Strings are attached when there’s money coming from the government. That’s just the way it is. If you don’t like it, you always have the option of just DIYing it, which is like the old school pioneer homeschool model, which I love and my parents did. It works great.

For the other parents that I’ve talked to up there, you can choose which– It’s physical brick and mortar schools. I have school districts in Alaska. Each one of them can administer a distance education program. They choose which way. Some of the school districts say, “All right, if you enroll, you’ll meet with a teacher maybe once a month. We have our testing requirements. You have to track your days. You have to build your program.” It’s pretty hands-off. You get a higher allotment of money directly to you. The school keeps a piece of it for administrative oversight, which means those schools have really nice turf fields for their football teams.

Then you have other schools which are, hey, we’re specializing in if your students have special needs, and you have higher requirements, and we’re meeting weekly with the parents and the students. You get less money, but there’s a lot more support from that school. The parents can choose anywhere in Alaska which public school they want to enroll in through the distance program.

[00:16:30] Gretchen: Which I think is really fascinating because I met folks who lived in Anchorage but chose the Galena School District because Galena’s program offered them what they wanted. It’s not like you could drive down the road to Galena either.

[00:16:52] Ethan: Then there’s folks who still do full independent homeschooling that aren’t doing part of that distance enrollment. You have the turf wars of, hey– Some of the folks there, not all of them, think that, hey, everyone should only do full-time independent homeschooling. You talk to the parents who are enrolled in these distance schools, and you have some parents who are like, hey, I’m enrolled. My kids have these special needs. This school district provides excellent support for kids with dyslexia or autism spectrum disorder.

You have a lot of options, and the parents are like, if I don’t like that school district, I can just choose the next one over that maybe has a little more lax requirements, a little more hands-off, and I pretty much do it on my own. The school districts are competing for the parents to choose their school district. The competition creates a lot of really good options for those parents of, hey, here’s a higher touch option with special services. Here’s a low touch option that gives you as much flexibility as possible.

Then there’s unique ones in between where they’re carving out a little niche that the parents can choose, here’s what’s best for my student this year. We’re going to have a parent who has two kids, and one’s enrolled in one distance program, and the other one’s enrolled in a different distance program, depending on what their needs are for those students. The Alaska model runs that way. It’s been running very well for a long time, but it started back in the 1930s and is continuing to today.

[00:18:24] Gretchen: How are you seeing that rollout in the lower 48? Because we’re seeing all sorts of things now. How many states actually have some form of compensatory reimbursement?

[00:18:37] Ethan: I don’t know that one off the top of my head.

[00:18:40] Gretchen: I don’t either. I googled this morning because I thought, “Okay, I’m going to get this answer.” I couldn’t find a clear answer. Apparently, I didn’t have the perfect definition to be able to recruit that, but I could find 17 states that have some sort of compensation for that. It appears from the article that I read this morning that is growing. If there’s a parent out here in the audience who is finding themselves hearing you and thinking it’s attractive, but you don’t live in a state where that’s presently an option, it doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for that.

[00:19:25] Ethan: There’s other options besides the ESAs. California’s had their cyber virtual charter schools for almost as long as they’ve been around since the 70s, 80s. That’s also a blend of it’s a state-regulated charter school, but you’re essentially doing a cyber option, so distance learning. You’re doing that at home, plus online and teacher support. Then there’s stipends of, hey, you can order curriculum that’s then paid for by the school, whereas in Alaska you could order. Each state’s different. Each state’s different has multiple ways. In some states, it’s you place an order and then the funds come from the school district. Other times, the parent shells out the cash and then puts in a voucher request to say, “Hey, here’s my receipts. I need reimbursement for this.”

[00:20:15] Gretchen: Sure.

[00:20:15] Ethan: It’s even difficult as a business selling– No business can tell you that they don’t sell to any state-funded program because you don’t know. You’re getting funds directly from a parent in many cases that are getting reimbursed. Other states have centralized systems. Other states run it through virtual charter schools. There’s a whole mix in between. Then there’s some states like Pennsylvania, which doesn’t have a reimbursement program like an ESA, but we have state-run cyber charter schools.

We have a couple options, not very many of them. We have school district-run cyber charter options. Then we also have, you can do enrollment in a private school or in a hybrid school where your student, based off their income, is eligible for scholarships, which are funded by private companies and individuals who then get a tax benefit. There’s a lot of states that don’t have a direct reimbursement program, but they do have tax options.

You decrease your income tax in the state by the same amount that you donate towards an opportunity scholarship program. That opportunity scholarship now is eligible for students to look for. Those students may be homeschooled. In those cases, it’s one of– This is where you get into the weeds of public policy arguments, is, is it state-funded if it’s a tax credit? What if it’s a refundable tax credit? What if it’s a direct voucher? What if it’s a voucher that’s paid to a school versus paid to a parent? All those in there.

Most of those come from– In the American historical system, there was a senator, Senator Blaine, who came up with the Blaine amendments. They tried to do a constitutional amendment to the whole country to say, “Hey, you cannot use taxpayer dollars to fund parochial schools.” He was very anti-Catholic in his viewpoint. Didn’t get done at the federal level.

There’s about 20 some states that have explicit constitutional amendments forbidding that because a lot of the desire to control education early in American history was a way to try to keep non-Protestant education options away from parents. Back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early days with the Puritans, it was about how do we keep parents from teaching their kids at home because they might teach them a religion that we don’t agree with.

[00:22:52] Gretchen: Interesting.

[00:22:53] Ethan: The whole concept of mandatory education and you have mandatory enrollment all comes from the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay. For most of American history, it was a very anti-Catholic sentiment, which was like, “Hey, we don’t want parents to have these options. We want to force them into the local public school and keep those dollars away.” States have been changing those rules, and the Supreme Court has been chipping away at those amendments, calling them functionally unconstitutional at a federal level.

That’s part of what’s opened up these states to be able to now create these education savings accounts as you go through. I think Arizona was one of the first states to start testing it. Most states have tested it with, “Hey, we’re going to roll out if your student has special needs, or you’re enrolled in the military and you’re moving around. We have these education savings accounts,” and they’re testing it with that. The feedback is when parents get those choices, and they get those opportunities, they love it. The feedback’s really well. It allows them to really customize what their student needs. Then because it’s popular with the parents, they roll it out more broadly.

[00:24:08] Gretchen: That makes sense because part of the joy of this journey is being able to trust yourself to be able to provide the best possible education for your children. I know each one of my children’s education was wildly different, but each one of them had the tailor-made experience of an education that fit them. That was enormous.

[00:24:36] Ethan: Yes. As we see this sort of rise in education, you get that tailoring for the education outcome. I think there’s another underlying piece there, which is it’s not just, “Hey, I get the choice of the right education, and I can tailor it in.” This is my view as I talk to parents. What I think there’s an underlying drive here is parents are looking for the educational option that not only delivers good results, but more importantly delivers, “Hey, I want an education option where I can connect with my kids.”

That connection piece is what they’re looking for of, “Hey, I need this specific therapy, equine therapy in Arizona, and my student can get it.” That’s great. What they’re really looking for is, “I want my student to be able to not be super stressed in the school that they’re in, so that we can have a really good parent-child relationship and connect with them, and I can help them meet their needs, and they know that I’m a safe person that they can talk to.” That, I think, is the underlying piece that parents are really looking for.

It usually comes out as, “Hey, I want these choices,” but why do you want really good choices for your kids? It’s not just so that they can leave my house as soon as possible and make a living. There’s some benefit to that. You hope that they leave at some point, but you really want them to leave with a solid relationship with you. That’s what parents are really looking for is what builds that relationship with me, the parent, so that it lives past whatever school they’re going to at the moment.

[00:26:06] Gretchen: Ethan, as long as you’ve been at the helm at Demme, you have been advocating for parents to have those kinds of choices. Can you tell us a little bit of what went into your mindset to– Gee, it’s been probably 12 years since you hosted a Trust Parents seminar, but you have done those kinds of things. Why have you done those kinds of things?

[00:26:34] Ethan: My upbringing, being traditionally homeschooled, I got those choices and opportunities, which I loved. My parents were able-– they made sacrifices to do that. We didn’t start off wealthy. I like to tell people I’ve lived on both sides of the tracks. I prefer this side. We made sacrifices in order to homeschool. My parents did, and I appreciate the sacrifices that they made. When I talk to other parents, everyone’s looking for those different options.

Those options look very different. I’ve talked to homeschool leaders in states who were embarrassed to tell their other state leaders that they were going to pull out their high schooler and enroll them in the local public school because they talked it over with their high schooler and based off their career path, they’re like, “This is the best choice for our son this year is he’s going to go to public school as a junior.” This homeschool leader was scared to death to tell the other state leaders because they would have viewed her as quitting.

[00:27:32] Gretchen: Yes, I walked that ground. I have to say that we just made the decision to do for each one of our children what was best for them. In retrospect, when we look back, we made the best choices that we could for them. When you go to those kids who are now all adults and say, “Did we make the right choices for you?” They would all tell you yes.

[00:27:52] Ethan: Yes. Those choices, I think, are the parent is the expert on their kid. You can’t necessarily take the average parent and say, “Now go into a classroom with 30 students and teach all 30 students.” That requires a specialization in education to be able to do that. A lot of that’s crowd control. How do you manage it? How do you work with that many kids? You also can’t take a public school teacher and put them in your house and say, “Raise my kid.” Because they have no idea.

The training is very different. I view it as the parent is– by the time a kid is the age six, you’ve spent over 10,000 hours with your kid in direct one-on-one coaching instruction. That’s the average American parent has spent that much time. If you put your kid in a one-room schoolhouse at 6 and they graduate at 18, and they have one teacher the entire time, that teacher will not get that much face time with the student for their entire academic career.

There’s no way that a teacher can get that level of closeness and understanding and expertise on one child that a parent just has just through the nature of being a parent. That expertise is one of– I’ve always said I trust that parent. My parents did the same thing. Yes, we homeschooled all the way through. Each year, it was, “Well, what’s the best thing we should do for our family and our kids this year?”

[00:29:16] Gretchen: As that a collaborative effort with you boys, as well as your parents, as you got older?

[00:29:24] Ethan: Yes. Especially as we got into the high school years, it was, “Hey, here’s the options. What would you like to do?” I liked being able to finish school by eleven o’clock if I paid attention and went to go play outside in the woods for the rest of the day. Then some days I goofed up, and I wasn’t done school till 6:00 PM at night because reasons.

[00:29:45] Gretchen: Yes, we call that practicing Stephen Hawking’s theory of time expansion in our household. [laughs]

[00:29:51] Ethan: Exactly. I wasn’t always the best student. I’ve also played hooky from homeschool, where I snuck out the window and played in the woods and then snuck back in. My parents learned some things.

[00:30:03] Gretchen: I’m surprised your dad didn’t nail the window shut on you. [laughs]

[00:30:10] Ethan: We adopted all four of my kids, and they were in foster care before that. In foster care, we don’t have choices, and I’ve had other kids in foster care, depending on the ages. I’ve had kids who are in private Montessori schools for preschool. I’ve had kids who are in the local public school. I now have kids who are homeschooled, and we take it year by year what the option is that we think is going to be best for each child. That’s what I’m seeing a lot of parents do. There’s multiple times when I’m speaking with parents at a homeschool conference, and they’ve got one kid that they’re full-time traditionally homeschooling.

They’ve got one kid enrolled in some cyber charter program, and they have another kid who goes to the public school down the street. They may all change the next year because this one’s on a traveling lacrosse team. This one’s wanting to do this extracurricular so they can get into college. This one’s dual enrolled. It’s much more rare to have all of your kids are doing exactly the same thing. What is more common now is people are shifting year to year because there’s a lot more good options, and the barrier of change is really, really low.

It used to be when my parents were homeschooling, the barrier of, “Hey, we’re going to jump into this alternative model where there’s not many curriculum choices, and we’re just going to go for it.” It was a lifestyle commitment of, “Hey, we’ve got to jump into the deep end.” The pool analogy is one I use when I talk with people about these ESAs and school choice options in various states. The old school pioneer was, “Hey, you jump into the deep end, and it’s really hard to switch back.” You’re going in. You’re going in, usually for multiple years at a time because you’re in, and you learn how to swim, and you’re being mentored by these folks, and you’re just in there swimming.

Everyone looks into the deep end and goes, “That looks a little crazy.” Then there’s a lot of parents who go, “That looks really cool. I like what they’re doing, but I have no idea how to swim.” Now we have a lot of options that I would call our shallow end options, whether they’re ESAs, micro schools, hybrid schools. My kids currently go to a hybrid homeschool where two days a week they’re in class, and their friends are there. They set the curriculum, and then we do homeschooling the rest of the time, but we register as homeschoolers in the state of Pennsylvania. It’s a much more approachable way. Other folks are doing three days a week. Other folks are doing, “Hey, we’re doing five days on, five days off.”

You have so much flexibility, and sometimes you have the viewpoint of, I would call the old-school pioneers who are swimming in the deep end with eight kids and their 12-passenger van. Yes, I now have a 12-passenger van. My wife is now making bread at home, and she goes, “Am I becoming the stereotype homeschool mom?” I was like, “You kind of are.” That’s just where we are right now. Sometimes that old-school pioneer mindset looks at the folks with the arm floaties in the shallow end, and they go, “Wait, it’s way too– you need to suffer like we suffered. You need to make a full lifetime commitment to this.”

[00:33:24] Gretchen: Absolutely, yes. You know what? The mindset of a homeschool parent has changed because when I was homeschooling, you could have put everything that was available in my living room because there wasn’t a lot of curricula. Now, I’ve just come back from two of the largest conferences in the US, and there are thousands of options. In some ways, I was fortunate because I didn’t have to choose among so many options. When you’re a curriculum junkie, that can become an issue in and of itself.

[00:34:02] Ethan: That’s how Demme Learning Math-U-See started back in the early days of homeschooling. You couldn’t go to the publisher and buy the instruction manual. Even the curriculum that was written for private Christian schools did not sell to parents because they saw homeschooling as a threat to the private Christian education system. It was just an unwritten policy of, “No, we don’t sell books to parents.” Parents had to essentially write their own curriculum. Math-U-See started to be sold when you couldn’t go and buy some of the other curriculum that were out there, even the ones that were being used by the private Christian schools, because they didn’t want that competition of homeschooling taking away from those private Christian schools, which they viewed as a better system.

There’s still folks out there that are like, “Hey, you shouldn’t go to public school, and you shouldn’t homeschool. You need a good Christian school that you go to.” Now, the folks are, “Hey, you can just go to the public school that you’re in. If you don’t like it, figure out how to make it better.” Other folks are, “You can only homeschool. That’s the only best way to do it.” I go, I don’t think the government or a state organization should tell you how to raise your kids. I think you’re the expert on your own kids and use whatever tools are available in your state and figure it out. You’re going to do way better job figuring it out the best you can than any of them will.

[00:35:25] Gretchen: I think that’s really true. Ethan, you had talked about a restructured ecosystem. How is the parent’s mindset going to change here as they have the opportunity to watch their children’s education unfold and drive that dream, if you will?

[00:35:43] Ethan: Yes, I think you’re seeing now, and we saw this, I would say, everyone saw it very big during COVID. COVID, it was a forced home education experiment and forced distance learning with your local public school of, “Hey, we’re going to do kindergarten classes on Zoom.” Doesn’t work great, let me tell you. What happened was, hey, the parents were forced to be at home, the kids were forced to be at home. For a first time, I think a lot of parents actually started to see what their kids were learning or not learning with the curriculum and the methodologies at their school. Some liked it and some didn’t.

You quickly saw parents start to naturally create a whole bunch of different options. Parents who were like, “Hey, we’re doing cyber through my school district, but I hate it because it’s not being run well, and the teachers don’t know how to use Zoom. Everything’s not working. I’m just going to buy a curriculum and start doing it myself.” Or they’re like, “Hey, let’s just get five parents together and we’ll call it a pod.” They create these learning pods. If you’re an OG homeschool, you’re like, “It’s just a co-op. That’s just Thursday co-op at our house, or I’ll go to Julie’s house and drop off.”

[00:36:52] Gretchen: I’m reminded of a conversation I had last fall with a mom in 2020 who couldn’t find a pod in South Carolina. She decided she was going to create something, and she decided because of the rules of COVID, her entire school program would occur outdoors. She has created something unique and pretty phenomenal. They’ve got 200 kids in their foundational campus, but now they have campuses in five states and over 25 locations. It’s pretty remarkable. All of those academics occur outside. I think a traditional academic mindset would say, “No, you can’t do that. You can’t educate people outside full-time. You can’t make that happen.” Of course, that would be right up your kid’s alley.

[00:37:46] Ethan: Currently, what I’m deep in the weeds learning more about is because I look at where they’re at is where they need to be right now. We’ll probably do this model for at least one more year. My wife and I have started to kick around. What would be the ideal environment as we see them move into middle school and then high school? I’m like, “Let’s just go straight full-force school. Let’s just go outside all the time.” Our family is already outside all the time. We are outside every day. You’ve heard of 1,000 hours outside. When I first heard about that, I was like, “That’s a great summer program. I bet I could do that in three months.”

Then I realized you have all year to get 1,000 hours. That’s pretty easy, but we’re on the far end of the outdoor spectrum. Even that I’m looking at and going, I see the benefit with connection with the kids, with our family, with outdoors. I look at how can we do this even more? We’ve done plenty of homeschooling outside on the trampoline, on the playground. You go to a park, you do your books, and you go get muddy and play in the water and go fishing. That’s a much more, I would say, natural way to learn. That’s what I’m currently looking at and reading a lot of books on, is how do I just go full outdoors all the time? Stay tuned for that. We’ll see what happens.

[00:39:07] Gretchen: I was going to say, I’ve got a really good podcast for you. What I was going to ask you is, I know that there are parents who are risk-adverse. Address with me some of the concerns parents might have about using public funds to educate their children about accessing ESAs, and how would they feel more comfortable in doing that?

[00:39:36] Ethan: In every state, there is a traditional, I call it independent homeschooling versus affiliated. Even some of the funds are directly from your local taxes, your state taxes, or sometimes their tax credits, or it’s money that’s going into a fund funded by private entities that’s a nonprofit, and those are distributed. There’s multiple ways for those funds to go out and support parents. It’s not all sort of a direct ESA program. I use the word sort of you’re an independent homeschooler or you’re an affiliated homeschooler.

If you’re affiliated with some group, sometimes it’s a church group that actually subsidizes people to homeschool in their church. That also happens, but that church is now tax exempt, so people are donating to that program and they get a tax write-off. This is where you argue semantics of, that’s perfectly fine for the government to fund it that way, but if they write you the check, then it’s bad. That’s an ideological question. If people have an ideological problem with taking any government money, then don’t do it. It’s a pretty simple way to do that. If you don’t like the fact that your state’s doing it, vote against the people who put in place that bill.

We have a representative democracy that allows us to do that because I’m not an expert on every state as well. I know Pennsylvania really well. I know Alaska pretty well. I know a few states that I’ve spent some time in. The big one is, I look at it as, there’s a lot of parents who are looking at the pioneer homeschool model, those deependers, if you will, in the pool who are looking and saying, I would love to do that, but I’m not sure it’s the perfect fit yet. I don’t want to jump in and find out that I can’t swim really well or that, “Hey, my kids hate water or hate not being able to touch the bottom.”

A lot of times, the ESA programs allow people to try before you buy. What you see is, I view it as an on-ramp to parents formally taking full control over their kid’s education and owning it. They may start off with more tentative, more risk and say, “Hey, if I don’t like it, I can always go back to where I was.” I usually see the trend as, once parents start down that path of taking ownership, they take ownership and they own it. Even if they put their kid back in a traditional private school or a public school, the level of engagement in that classroom with the school board, with the teacher is way higher once you’ve had your kid at home.

I view it as, and the more you have the parents engaged in all of those spheres, the better the outcome for those kids is. I view it as, the more the parents are engaged in that education, whether it’s in a public school, private school, or homeschool, the better off it’s going to be for the kid because I fundamentally trust parents to be able to make those decisions. ESAs, to me, are just a way to help people try out a few things that they may be nervous about trying if they had to do it all on their own.

[00:42:40] Gretchen: It was interesting to spend last week and the week before in Texas and Florida to get to talk to parents who are taking advantage of those and to meet parents from Arkansas who were taking advantage of the programs. No two families that I spoke with, and boy did I talk to a bunch of them, were doing it the same way. I think that gives families– and then when the funding follows the child, it gives families an enormous amount of flexibility to be able to do for their children what is best for them, which I think is very interesting.

[00:43:27] Ethan: Functionally, we’re decentralizing the whole education system from, “Hey, there’s a single building and there’s a single source of funding,” to we’re decentralizing it to the family unit to be able to make those decisions. We’re also breaking the barrier that says you have to make a certain income level or reach this economic status in order to have options. Then everyone else is just stuck in their assigned zip code. We’re breaking that barrier as well. Now we have a lot more parents able to make the choices that other people have been able to make for hundreds of years.

It’s that access to the customization regardless of your income and economic status. It’s really about who chooses both what you do with your kids and then who chooses how the money is spent. It’s either a bureaucrat or it’s a parent. The more we trust the parents, the better outcome. I think what you said is the best way to describe it is, it’s not a homogeneous system. Every family is different, every child is different, and each child and every family is different. Sometimes you’re different every four hours. I’ve got kids that I go back and forth.

[00:44:43] Gretchen: Only my children, Ethan, only my children, not yours.

[00:44:47] Ethan: Sometimes my kids are little angels and they do their homework, homeschooling at the table just fine. Other times you go, “Man, it’d be really nice if they were on that bus right now.” Then I wouldn’t have to deal with them. They could come home and I could deal with the fallout there. That’s the piece when you look at the reasons. Even if you look at, Pew Research has done some research on why people homeschool. Some people have in mind, “Hey, it’s people homeschool for religious reasons.” It is across the gamut. That’s probably one of the mid-tier reasons.

It’s usually, I want a different environment than what my local public school offers, or I’m concerned about safety, or I’m looking for customization for my children’s special needs, or I’m concerned with bullying. It’s a panoply of reasons why parents are choosing to homeschool. The ESAs now give you both a lot more options to choose from and different ways to try it out. It’s really just distributing that power down to the lowest level of folks who are the best equipped, in my opinion, to make those decisions, which is the parents.

[00:45:55] Gretchen: Ethan, some of the questions that we were asked by parents, I wanted to ask you one of these questions. It says, “By having and using an ESA, does this place us under the state’s control with a homeschool requirement?” The answer to that is yes and no, because it depends on how your ESA is administered, the state you live in. Understanding the ESA. Do you think for parents who are interested in this, but they haven’t stuck their toes in the pool, so to speak, they need to go research if there is that kind of ability in their state, how is it administrated and what are their obligations? Would you say that is a good piece of advice for those parents?

[00:46:53] Ethan: The best thing is to learn what’s the eligibility for the funding and then what strings are attached to it. Anyone who says, “Oh, there’s no strings attached to public money, has never been in the public.” I’m a recovering politician. I’m no longer an active elected official as of December. I spent 12 years in local politics. There’s strings attached to every grant, every state program, every tax credit program, and they’re all different. You have places like Arizona where the state homeschool associations lobbied against the bill and then made it so if you’re a traditional homeschooler, you can’t get the ESA funds unless you re-enroll in public school for a period of time.

Then you can only get ESA as a homeschooler if you go back to public school. Whether or not that requirement makes any sense, I’ll leave that up to the people in Arizona to argue with their legislature about. Then Texas is coming online this year, very different program that says, “Here’s a way to do it.” Their state organization was part of drafting that. This is where we get into the public policy side. Some folks view it as we’d rather be at the table when we’re writing the law that’s going to impact us versus we’re just against it, but then you don’t have any voice into how it’s written.

[00:48:12] Gretchen: True. True.

[00:48:15] Ethan: This is the age old, do you fight for, do you compromise, or it’s hot or cold and it’s bad or evil? We’re going to get comments that says, “We’re the worst people.” You have these core special interests. You have teachers unions and some ideologically politically minded folks who are saying, “Hey, you either have to fully fund public school and that’s your only option. You should fund no public school. There should be no public funding of education at all,” which is, I would say, the far ideologically driven position on the other side, which there are some folks in the homeschool world who say that out loud and some folks who don’t say it out loud, but also believe it.

I would say there’s folks I’m friends with who are in that camp and I would call them the honest brokers of their stated mission is for everyone to homeschool and for there to be no public funding of education. Full stop. It should purely be private schools and private homeschooling and those should be your only two options. Then you have the folks I would call the messy middle of the 80% that goes, “I don’t think we’re going to upend and change the entire educational system overnight. We can make small tweaks here and there.” Some states do it well. Some states don’t do it well.

We’re a laboratory of democracy and we can figure out what’s best in each state and learn from it. We can learn from each other and politics is messy. If you look at Alaska as our earlier case study, over a period of almost 100 years, it’s about 90 years now, they’ve slowly been making incremental changes to that legislation. You’ve had a group of people that have been working at different times advocating for and against those changes, and that’s what you get.

California is constantly tweaking theirs, and they’ve got powerful teachers unions that are opposed to their cyber charter schools as well, but they also have a lot of parents who really benefit from those programs and advocate for them. You have these constituent groups who are all advocating for their individual thing. The big one is to definitely check on what are the rules in your state? Then I would say, go one step further. How have they changed recently, and what are the proposals to change them going forward? You’ll at least go into it if, hey, it might change next year, or, hey, we put this in place 10 years ago and haven’t changed it, I’m pretty confident it’s going to stay this way.

[00:50:47] Gretchen: Ethan, when you and I met a couple of weeks ago, you were talking about a more– Actually, the question that I pulled from your notes was a more human-scale educational ecosystem. I think I’d like you to spend just a few minutes talking about what is the parental mindset that is successful in using this, whether there’s an ESA available to you in your state or just looking at the possibility of doing a more traditional homeschool experience. What’s the mindset you need to bring to the table to be successful?

[00:51:27] Ethan: I’d say that there’s a couple mindsets that I think you really need to have. The first one is recognizing two things which can seem to be contradictory, but I don’t believe them to be. One is you are the expert on your own kid. Two, you don’t know everything. You have to go into it being willing to learn with your kids. I would look at my upbringing and my past and my role in education with Demme Learning and say, “I know what I’m doing with home education.” I’m teaching my kids with Math-U-See at home, and I’m like, “I’ve used this. They have access to go to their grandpa’s house, which they’re at there right now. He can help them with homework.” I’ll still get to a point, and I’m like, “I have no idea how to help my son learn this math. I don’t know how to help him.”

[00:52:16] Gretchen: Ethan, there’s a lot of moms in the audience who are going to hear you say that and go, “Oh, thank goodness.”

[00:52:23] Ethan: There’s times when I’m like, “Wait a second. You watched the video. Your grandpa was over here last week helping you. We were working on triple-digit multiplication with regrouping.” They’d have it for a week, and then the brain’s glitched, and then it’s completely gone. Then you have to come up with a different way to teach it. I’ve used all the examples in the books. My dad’s come over and helped teach it. We’re drilling it, and my kid’s still having a meltdown because they forgot everything. You come up with a different way to do it.

You have to be humble and willing to learn with your student and know that, hey, even the best programs with full access to the resources sometimes get stuck on gamma lesson 25 when we’re doing regrouping, and it’s a pain in the butt. It spends four weeks working on that one lesson. That’s sometimes what you have to do. Recognize, A, you’re the expert, and B, you don’t know everything, and be willing to learn and adapt and work with your student because every single kid’s different, and most of them are different 10 times a day.

[00:53:26] Gretchen: Yes, absolutely.

[00:53:28] Ethan: If you have those mindsets, you’re going to do really well. Then the third mindset is don’t take yourself so seriously. There’s a lot of parents who really try to get it. Perfect. It’s like sometimes, I would say, perfect is the enemy of good. Most of the time, your kids are going to do fine. You can try to figure out what’s the exact best math program to use. Most likely, most of them are going to do pretty good.

I shouldn’t say that ours is always the best. You know what? If you’re using one and it’s working, don’t look over the fence. “Oh, well, my cousins who’s homeschooling, they’re using this one. It’s the best now.” If what you’re doing is working, don’t change it. You can improve it slightly, but don’t go and just do these wholesale changes for no reason. Be willing to be flexible. Sometimes if it’s not working, just stop using it. Be willing to pull the plug on some things and go, hey, that didn’t work, great, we’ll just stop doing it.

[00:54:29] Gretchen: I might have been that German who said, “I bought the program, you will do the program because I spent the money.” It was also beneficial to be able to walk away and go, “This just really isn’t working out the way we’d planned.” Despite the fact you made the investment of money, sometimes it’s better to just take a step back, re-evaluate, and start over somewhere else.

[00:54:56] Ethan: Yes, and maybe your next kid’s going to work great with that product, or you sell it on Facebook marketplace like everyone else.

[00:55:03] Gretchen: Absolutely. Well, Ethan, we’re almost at the top of the hour. What would be the closing words you would have for the families who have joined us today?

[00:55:12] Ethan: Yes. I would say, look at your state, look at yourself, look at your kids, and look at what your options are. I think there’s an art. People argue whether it’s public versus private. It’s really who’s the expert on your kid and who decides how your kid is educated. If education savings accounts are available in your state, they’re a great tool that help you become, hey, I can now take my expertise and I can decide much more. I have now the agency to be able to fully decide and exercise those parental rights and say, “Hey, here’s how I can take what I know to be truthful about my child and find exactly what they need, because I’m the expert, dang it.”

To me, ESAs are an outgrowth of this constant evolution that we’ve seen in American education, both to allow homeschooling, but also now to allow these pieces. Homeschooling, traditional, it’s about 3.8% to 4% of parents will choose that option. The other systems, but the fastest growing number is folks who are in this, call it the messy middle of cyber charter schools, education savings accounts, distance education programs. That’s where parents are recognizing that, “Oh, I now have a little bit of support to allow me to do what I really want to do.”

It’s a shift towards really trusting parents, really trusting families, expanding access to more than just the wealthy, and distributing that opportunity much more broadly than we’ve ever seen before. It’s not about replacing or choosing, having someone else tell you, this are the education options you can and can’t have, whether it’s an ideological group or another ideological group, because you’ve got multiple out there. It’s about recentering education around families and children, while also making sure we have lots of high-quality education options that are affordable and accessible to everybody.

[00:57:09] Gretchen: You said something that was really important, and in closing, I want to come back around to it. You said you are the expert on your child. I often say this to parents, and they look at me like, “What do you mean?” You’re the one who wakes them up in the morning. You’re the one who puts them to bed at night. You’re the one who knows what they need when they’re in the middle of a meltdown. That translates to also being able to know what they need in an academic experience.

[00:57:42] Ethan: If you’re on the fence, you should always just trust yourself as the parent and do what you think is best. If it doesn’t work, change it up and do something different.

[00:57:53] Gretchen: Ethan, I want to thank you. This has been an extraordinarily busy week for you. I want to thank you for taking the time to have this conversation with me because I think it gives parents the opportunity to think differently about what can sometimes be a volatile topic. You have reframed it in a way that parents can think of the control that it offers them to be able to guide their children’s education successfully. I think that’s a powerful tool.

[00:58:21] Ethan: Thank you for having me, Gretchen. Maybe we’ll talk about outdoor education next time. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do.

[00:58:26] Gretchen: Yes, let’s do that. That would be really fun. I think that that would be amazing. All right, Ethan, thank you so much. I want to thank our audience for bearing with us today with the minor technical difficulties that we had in the very beginning. I’m so glad that we were able to resolve those. I want to thank you for trusting us to come into your living rooms. We don’t take that trust lightly. We appreciate the opportunity for being able to allow you all to think deeply about these kinds of things. Take care, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon.