Definition and mechanics
Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are described by Corey DeAngelis as a mechanism of school choice in which education funding is directed to an account operated by the family rather than issued as a voucher payable to a private school. In the account-based arrangement, the money can still be used to pay private school tuition and fees, which DeAngelis says makes it in that respect much the same as a voucher. The difference he identifies is scope: an ESA can also be used for non-private-school forms of education, including special needs therapies for special needs students, online learning, homeschool expenses, microschools, and expenses for unschooling or pandemic pods. He characterizes the mechanism as more flexible and more customizable than a voucher Students, Not Systems (2022).
DeAngelis addresses the objection that families might spend the money on things that are not education. He states that regulations require the expenditures to be government-approved education expenditures, that the money cannot be used to buy groceries or a big-screen television, and that a family doing so could be caught for fraud and would be in serious legal trouble Students, Not Systems (2022).
The funding question ESAs answer
The ESA discussion arises from the program’s general account of how school choice money works. DeAngelis says a child’s education dollars currently go to a residentially assigned government-run school regardless of how well it meets the family’s needs, and that under a school choice mechanism the same funding follows the child to wherever the family chooses to allocate it. The residentially assigned school remains an option, in which case nothing changes. Where the family chooses otherwise, the program is typically built at a fraction of what would have been spent in the traditional public school system — he gives 80 percent as an example, and sometimes less, such as half — so that public schools and taxpayers each keep some of the money and the family gains a choice Students, Not Systems (2022).
He frames the underlying principle as funding students instead of institutions. In his formulation, the money does not belong to any particular institution — not to private schools, charter schools or government schools — but to the families, and school choice programs flip the power dynamic so that funding goes to people as it does in other programs Students, Not Systems (2022).
Vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and ESAs compared
DeAngelis places ESAs alongside two other funding routes. The voucher route delivers the money to a private school to pay tuition and fees. The ESA route delivers the same money to a family-operated account with the broader permitted uses described above. A third, privately funded route is the tax-credit scholarship: a donor contributes to a scholarship-granting organization, families obtain those private dollars from the organization and take them to a private school or use them for homeschooling expenses, and the donors receive a tax benefit. DeAngelis says these programs tend to be less regulated because private funds are less likely to be regulated by the government than — and the excerpt breaks off there Students, Not Systems (2022).
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, the 2022-08-05 conversation with Corey DeAngelis, treats Education Savings Accounts; the excerpts show no development or change in treatment across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not name any state’s ESA statute, any enacted program, any eligibility rule, any funding amount, or any date of enactment. They do not identify a court case, a constitutional provision, or an administrative agency bearing on ESAs, and they do not report participation figures or outcomes. The tax-credit scholarship comparison ends mid-sentence, and nothing after the break is available.