Only a few states require private schools to be accredited. Iowa is one of them.
2023 is beginning with a school choice bang, as legislators in both Iowa and Utah introduced education bills this month that would enable all K-12 students to access a portion of state-allocated education funding to use for a variety of educational expenses, including private school tuition, tutoring, curriculum and supplies and educational therapies.
The Iowa education savings account (ESA) bill passed both legislative chambers and was signed into law earlier this week by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. When fully implemented, Iowa’s ESA program will provide all K-12 students in the state with approximately $7,600 per year if they choose to exit an assigned district school.
Utah’s bill is similar to the Iowa bill and would provide about $8,000 per year in scholarship funds to all Utah K-12 students. That bill passed the Utah House of Representatives and is now up for debate in the state Senate.
Both of these bills are victories for families who will now have far greater ability to opt out of a government-run school for private options. Indeed, bills such as these grant middle- and lower-income families access to school choice that more affluent families have long enjoyed. High-income families have always been able to exit a mandatory school assignment, while nationally most other families remain trapped by their zip code.
School choice policies, particularly robust ones such as those enacted last year in Arizona and West Virginia, equalize access to more and better education options.
The good news is that families in some states now have the opportunity to consider other educational options that may be a better fit for their child. The bad news is that the supply of these options remains low. In Iowa, in particular, those options are likely to remain scarce for the foreseeable future.
Only a few states require private schools to be accredited according to standards set by the state department of education. Iowa is one of them. These regulations preceded any school choice programs involving taxpayer funding, long constraining the entire private education sector in Iowa.
State accreditation requirements limit the supply of new and innovative learning models, such as microschools, while favoring incumbents. They also prevent certain types of schools, such as those I spotlight in my Unschooled book, from operating at all—regardless of any school choice policies—because those self-directed schools largely reject standardized testing and top-down curriculum frameworks.
For example, a group of entrepreneurial educators had been trying valiantly to launch a Sudbury-style school in central Iowa, modeled after the famed Sudbury Valley School that opened in Massachusetts in 1968 and that has inspired the growth of dozens of Sudbury-model schools across the U.S. and around the world. Sudbury Valley continues to flourish today, more than a half-century after its founding, and its alumni have thrived.
In July 2021, after many months of trying to launch their Sunrise Sudbury School in the Des Moines area, the Iowa founders announced that the state’s private school regulations would not allow them to open. “We have a heartbreaking update,” they posted on their school’s Facebook page. “Over the past few months we have been in correspondence with the Iowa DoE and the BoEE. We have determined that opening a Sudbury model school in Iowa is not feasible based on our discussions. While this is obviously not the outcome we had desired for the school, we are glad to have some closure.”
State private school accreditation requirements, like those in Iowa, block access to certain educational models and discourage innovation and experimentation—regardless of any school choice policies. These requirements protect conventional educational models while crowding out competition, and reward established incumbents who toe the line.
Iowa may have forged ahead this week in expanding access to education options for families, but that access is likely to remain restricted and those options will be limited until policymakers remove private school accreditation requirements. Education entrepreneurs in Iowa should have the same freedom that they do in most other states to introduce new and different schooling models, and families should have the freedom to choose the learning model that works best for them.
