ESA vendors eager to get off the sideline

The wait continues. We are now entering the fifth month of a District Court injunction against Educational Savings Accounts, a decision that has been enormously disruptive to the 6,000 families who have signed up to take advantage of this landmark program.

Last fall, hundreds of parents started pulling their kids from public schools and enrolling them in private schools. Since ESAs were nullified in January, however, they have had to pay this tuition out-of-pocket.

But there has also been another party disrupted by this injunction. Private vendors offering education services are now left in limbo, unable to plan when, where, or even if their services will be needed.

My company is a case in point. We were approved by the state treasurer’s office in January as an ESA vendor, excited to expand our operations into Nevada. Within a week of this approval, however, Carson City District Judge James Wilson issued his injunction and we have been stuck in a holding pattern ever since. Even though a Las Vegas judge last week upheld the constitutionality of the program, everything remains on hold until the state Supreme Court weighs in.

Our company was prepared to offer supplemental literacy classes to ESA students this summer. Our plan was to provide 40 hours of instruction from June 6 to July 1. We specialize in teaching middle- and high-school students from Title I schools (those with high rates of students on free and reduced-price lunches). Our rigorous curriculum, unique methodology, and 1:6 teacher-to-student ratios routinely raise our students’ reading scores 20 percent to 25 percent, sometimes in as little as 20 hours.

We were especially looking forward to teaching kids from Title I schools in Las Vegas and Reno who wanted to take advantage of ESAs to transfer to better schools. Having been stuck in failing schools for so long, however, most are unprepared for the reading and writing demands at private schools. That’s where we come in, offering a kind of “intellectual tune-up” over the summer to prepare them for this workload.

No longer.

With a Nevada Supreme Court decision now pending, kiss summer school goodbye. This represents a loss of income for our business, but more importantly it represents a valuable loss of time for these students. We can do a lot in 40 hours, but that opportunity is now gone.

Furthermore, depending on demand, we are prepared to hire part-time and full-time instructors. If 900 students sign up for our program we’ll hire 10 Nevadans, with annual salaries starting at $60,000. These are 10 of those coveted “good-paying jobs” that politicians always promise but can’t deliver because they don’t make the hiring decisions. I do, and with more demand I’ll hire more people.

In 1983 a famous study published by the National Commission on Excellence in Education was called “A Nation at Risk.” It found that nearly 40 percent of American 17-year-olds could not successfully “draw inferences from written material,” only one-fifth could write a persuasive essay, and only one-third could solve a math problem requiring several steps.

This study was generally regarded as the inspiration behind the modern education reform movement, of which ESAs are a direct result. They are the fruit of 33 years of effort and confirm a very simple fact: Public education cannot reform itself. In fact, no large government institution is capable of reforming itself because its own needs quickly overcome the needs of its customers (parents and students).

Only choice and competition can improve outcomes and give parents an alternative to traditional top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches. Our company is one of these alternatives, and quite frankly we’re tired of sitting on the bench while the usual suspects file lawsuits denying us the opportunity to take the field. Our message to Nevada: Put us in coach, we’re ready to play.

Nate Braden is President &CEO of America and the World, Inc., an education services company based in Denver