Education Reads to Start Your Week, April 27

What Are Homeschool Vouchers Buying?, Science of Reading Guilt By Association, Advertising in the Face of an Enrollment Crisis

Author

James Shanahan
April 27, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

What are homeschool vouchers buying?

The first link isn’t much of a read, per se. It’s a news report about entrepreneurs building businesses to deliver services to parents who homeschool their kids in Florida and now have access to as much as $9,000 a year to pay for education related services.

What stands out to me are the types of programs that this report highlights. I’d classify a lot of this as enrichment activities, the arts, and physical education programs. You know, the stuff that gets cut from public schools because of a lack of funding or to make more time for test prep. We hear about these programs providing a “safer, friendlier environment” than public schools and with lots of outdoor time. It’s probably an important signal that parents are pursuing these kinds of services and tells us what they wish to see happening in public schools.

Inside a private room at the gym, you’ll find Sarizzy Art Studio. Art instructor Sarit Baron works with a small group of homeschooled teens.

“I love to be able to offer art lessons and classes and workshops to people with Step Up, who may not otherwise have been able to do these programs,” adds Baron.

Families can find providers like Sarit through the official Step Up portal. But many business owners say the real marketplace is social media.

Facebook groups for homeschool families are filled with ads that promote their businesses— all accepting Step Up funds.

Terri White and Kris Barnett own Wood.Paper.Glass – a physical art studio that holds classes for all ages in the old Wellington mall.

Just last month, they became a provider, and it has been a game-changer.

“Parents are looking for different activities for the kids to do, aside from just your math and science,” says White.

Now, I’ve been pretty critical of voucher programs like Florida’s and Arizona’s because oversight seems to range from minimal to nonexistent. Nobody’s watching how parents spend taxpayer money and there are opportunities for both outright fraud as well as for services that provide very little actual education. This is because the entire idea of where responsibility for educating the next generation falls is being interpreted differently within conservative policy contexts. For many on the right, there is no societal or governmental obligation to ensure kids receive an adequate education, or even to strictly define what adequate would mean. That is now solely the responsibility of parents with the government’s responsibility ending at providing some funds to help them pay for whatever they want.

One component of acknowledging this new reality is to actually try and listen to what parents are saying and try and evaluate how they spend their money. While voucher proponents historically argued that vouchers were a way to assist kids in moving toward higher quality academic programs, they’ve dropped that line of reasoning, preferring to argue on moral grounds that “empowering parents is just the right thing to do” even if it doesn’t lead to higher achievement or test scores. Last summer I explained that academics don’t seem to be the most important part of parents’ use of public funds.

Parents do not equate standardization and testing with rigor and quality. When public schools become focused on standardization and achieving high test scores, parents see this as bad and become more receptive to alternatives. Anti-school conservatives are there, ready to take your kid to Disney to learn fractions from Snow White on the taxpayer’s dime. And, it appears that parents are willing to take on the burden of being the executor and guarantor of their children’s education if it means they escape systems of testing and standards.

I made similar points in the fall after looking at some PBS reporting on Arizona’s voucher scheme.

…so much of what’s changing in education right now depends on how we approach and learn from voucher programs, who uses them, why, and to what end. What’s really interesting here is that, despite lots of discussion between liberals, the left, and among Democrats about how schools aren’t rigorous enough and aren’t accountable enough, whenever we see parents represented in the media, their perspective has little to do with rigor. It really seems like the parents want deeper learning at a slower pace, less standardization, more personalization, more extracurricular hands-on type stuff, and are deeply concerned about safety and behavior. Trying to answer these concerns by doing more phonics and re-implementing test-based accountability will miss the mark with these people. No wonder they’re happy to elect Republicans who will give them money to have the kind of educational experience they want for their kids.

I can also think of some high-profile examples of private schools minimizing their academic focus and maximizing their enrichment time.

…all I want to do is state the obvious: Alpha is not trying to provide the best, most ambitious math or ELA education possible according to conventional understandings of that term. If they were, they’d keep studying ELA/math in the afternoon. Instead, their goal is to minimize the time spent on core academics while maximizing skills.

This is unusual! This is not what most schools are trying to do!

Finally, I’ll once again link Kelsey Piper’s latest article. While I have my problems with it, she makes one point that seems perfectly connected to what I’m writing today.

And I have another solution that will make me even fewer friends. A population that’s much, much easier to study at scale — and that is now large enough for all the statistical significance you’ll need — is homeschoolers. Every day, I see homeschool parents asking “which math and ELA curriculum should I use?” and adoption appears to often go off “what’s recommended in the comments on Facebook.”

There is potential for some very large-scale experiments where parents are encouraged to adopt different curricula (say, by offering different ones to them for free), which could be enormously useful in understanding which are the best of the publicly available programs. I am aware of private-sector efforts to research exactly this question — the academics should hop on board!

One permutation on this idea is to use the financial records from these voucher programs to characterize how parents are spending the money. The funds pay for something. There are records of transactions. What are the vouchers actually buying? How much is directly academic? How much is enrichment? Art? Exercise? Seems like something even an economist could study.

Science of Reading Guilt By Association

A tip of the hat to Peter Greene who shared this article in his links Sunday morning. Rachael Gabriel, co-editor-in-chief of The Reading Teacher, a literacy and reading journal, and literacy professor at the University of Connecticut reminds us where the science of reading comes from.

Unlike previous reading legislation, science of reading policies do not mandate or empower schools to use evidence-based practices. Instead, they focus on using products such as reading programs, assessments, and professional development. Often, these products come from for-profit companies that have lobbied state legislators to require public school classrooms to use their materials. Some products, such as Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) trainings, are written directly into state laws, while others appear on lists of state-approved options to which districts must transition with tight timelines for compliance.

Districts contracting with state-approved curriculum vendors could serve as the blueprint for how states exert more control over the skills, perspectives, ideas, authors, topics, and tools to which students are exposed in more grades and subjects.

This is a bit of guilt by association but I think that it’s a fair point to make in this case. Indeed, I’ve made a similar point, noting that all the worst people love the science of reading. Gabriel, likewise, sees the centralized control introduced by science of reading legislation, as a space where censorship and dumbing down occur.

As one parent with a child at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C., tells The Progressive, “D.C. Public Schools is making concentrated efforts to improve students’ reading levels. But many parents like myself were shocked by a recent change to the English Language Arts curriculum at Deal Middle School.” The change that upset parents, she says, was the decision to remove all novels from the curriculum in favor of a back-to-basics curriculum that mirrors the shifts mandated at the elementary level by science of reading legislation. The curriculum now features text excerpts instead of full books, as well as made-for-test-prep passages.

[emphasis added]

I’ll add two of my own posts here for further reading. First, last fall I said that the gaslighting around phonics needed to stop. The evidence base for whole-class phonics instruction is, it turns out, very limited and we should temper our expectations of what SoR-inspired phonics instruction can accomplish in the long run. Second, at the start of the month I said that literacy is a battleground. I think Gabriel is kind of getting at this idea. We use literacy as a space, a terrain for fighting about other things. It’s never just about more effectively teaching kids to read. We are often in the position of accepting whole packages of reforms, including to things unrelated to basic literacy or literacy at all.

Since it’s never just about adopting a systematic phonics curriculum and explicitly teaching phonics to beginning readers, it’s worth expanding the evaluation of reading programs and policies to include the pet political and ideological projects of the promoters, publishers, and policy makers. They are, in fact, relevant to the work we’re asked to do in classrooms.

Rachel Gabriel also maintains a Substack where she recently wrote about how science of reading mandates are a path for AI control of reading and literacy. Worth a look, I think.

Advertising in the Face of an Enrollment Crisis

The New York Times has a piece about schools, especially charters, using social media and advertising to compete for an increasingly smaller pool of kids.

The number of New Yorkers under the age of 20 fell about 155,000 from 2020 to 2023, according to revised census figures released last year. It rose only a small number, about 224, between 2023 and 2024, according to the most recent figures available.

Cue the race for children.

The pressure to fill classrooms — and the marketing rush — are not entirely new. Many charter and private schools have long seen a need to sell themselves, sometimes printing directories in The New York Post and spending millions of dollars to stuff apartment mailboxes with leaflets during admissions season.

But in more than a dozen interviews, education leaders said that they felt a greater urgency to attract families and were looking for fresh ways to fill their classrooms.

Apropos of the first link today, check out what kinds of thigs these schools are saying in order to look appealing to parents. I’ll add some emphasis just to really hit it home.

At Success Academy, the city’s largest charter network, robust marketing has always been a hallmark. Still, Success has experienced declining enrollment in several of its schools in recent years.

A decade ago, Success had a reputation for rigorous, strict classrooms where students sat at their desks, with hands clasped and eyes tracking the teacher. But recent TikTok and YouTube ads showcase a different experience. The message: Children enjoy far more play time than families may think.

YouTube ads for Zeta Charter Schools, a network that has had schools in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx for nearly a decade, show a girl high-fiving her teacher after solving a math problem and another starting the day with daily affirmations.

At the same time, new schools are trying to introduce themselves. This fall, Strive Charter School will open in the South Bronx for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, a potentially alluring benefit to working parents.

These charters spend tons of money on ads and do market research. They have a sense of what prospective parents want. We see a shift in emphasis to play, happiness, and relieving childcare burdens. Interesting!

Thanks for reading!