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“Freedom to Learn”: A New Approach to Education Accountability

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Matt Frendewey on Reducing Federal Bureaucracy, Freeing Families, & Funding Innovative Options

On Freedom to Learn this week, Matt Frendewey and I talked about policies that move power closer to students, including block grants, microschools, and universal Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Matt explains what is driving the shift away from a lackluster K-12 system “reform” model to an exciting movement focused on freedom and choice for every student. And we address the K-12 system’s relentless push for more funding and what true accountability to families entails.

Matt is vice president of strategy at yes. every kid, an organization that seeks ⁠⁠t⁠⁠o create educational opportunities free of arbitrary constraints. He previously served as a senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and in key roles at the American Federation for Children, ExcelinEd, and the Michigan Attorney General’s office.

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Below is an abridged and edited transcript of our conversation. Watch or listen to our full conversation to learn more about what it means to truly free families.

Make sure to follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Ricochet, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday.

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Could you pull back the curtain on some of your behind the scenes work and share what you’re working on now?

Matt Frendewey: What motivates me these days and what really excites me is we’ve really moved from this movement that was really focused on trying to reform the system, just to make it a little bit better, to this point in time now where we’re trying to free families. We’re trying to create a movement of freedom. And to me, that’s an important shift in terms of how we approach our work, but it’s also an exciting shift because we see what families are doing out there that is completely different than what you may have imagined education could look like as much as five, 10 years ago.

So when you’re talking about shifting from reforming to expanding freedom or focusing on freedom, what does that mean for the public school system that people have been trying to reform for all these many decades?

Matt Frendewey: It means that the system as it’s designed, it’s going to do what it’s intended to do. And I didn’t make up that line. It’s from this author, Donella Meadows, a professor from MIT. And she did this whole work on systems and how big systems change or why they don’t change. And she discovered that most systems are designed to do what they’re intended to do.

Our system was built to provide a mediocre education to as many people as possible. And that was the intent, and that’s what it’s done.

And for at least the last 30 years, we’ve tried really hard to make it a better system for all students. And we’ve seen reform after reform come up short. And we’ve seen frustrated parents, even frustrated educators. And to me, it’s because the system’s not intended to provide individual experiences and excellent individual experiences to students. And so all the reforms in the world will never get us to a system that’s going to deliver on that. The only thing we can do to try and provide every student with an excellent education and individualized experience is think about how to transform into a model that really treats them as the customer.

And to me, that’s more than just school choice. It’s about creating a model where families are truly empowered to be in control, where we trust them, where we don’t just say we trust them, but we truly trust them. And then what does that mean? That means probably elevating our risk tolerance as public policy professionals, recognizing that parents can make decisions that we may not be comfortable with or we may not make as parents or teachers, and stepping back and saying our role is no longer to try and control the outcomes of families, but to give families as many options as available and step back.

We frequently hear, ‘If only we had more funding. If only we spent more at the federal level on Title I, then the low-income kids’ outcomes would improve. If only we spent more on tutoring, then we could catch up on the learning loss caused by school closures during the COVID era.’ So how do you help people understand that it’s not a matter of funding, it’s a matter of design?

Matt Frendewey: Well, I think two things. you just call a straw man out, right? I asked Randi Weingarten this in a radio interview where we debated topics almost 10 years ago. She was going after the funding issue, school choice defunds public education. ‘We need all the resources in public schools.’ And I said, ‘Randi how much? How much? How much money do you need? Because you keep saying you need more funding, but how much?’ And she couldn’t answer. She tried to pivot. And that to be proved that this is just a talking point. And it’s not to say that it doesn’t cost money to fund education. Families who pay out of pocket know that it costs money. The point is that there’s no dollar figure that will ever satisfy the opponents of education freedom.

In terms of how to think differently about the funding argument is just go look at what’s happening around this country. Go look at some of the low cost education models that have sprouted up that have been permissionless. They didn’t wait for the government to come along and bless them. A family just got together, you know, started to collaborate and built what we call now micro schools or pods. And they’re oftentimes at low cost. And oftentimes they’re serving lower income families and they’re all over the country. Vela Education Fund helps provide some seed funding to more around 4,000 of these now.around the country, or nearly 4,000. And they’re all different sizes and shapes and forms. And none of them were sitting around waiting for the government to come bless them or waiting for the government to come fund them. They went and figured it out themselves. And they’re serving thousands upon thousands of children all over this country. To me, that shows that the, you know, the entrepreneurism that really built this country, it can exist in education if we just step back and stop trying to control it.

When we talk about education policy, unfortunately, the federal government comes up a lot, even though it has such a small role financially in what happens with K-12. It has nothing to do with these pods and microschools. What do you think that the federal government’s appropriate role should be?

Matt Frendewey: That’s a loaded question. I think it should be as minimal as possible. I recognize that there’s some civil rights protections that are necessary to families that are enshrined in law. Other than that, and this isn’t just me speaking, this is from research we’ve done speaking both directly to families and focus groups, as well as polling, families don’t want a federal involvement in K-12 education.

And in every capacity, we know that when the federal government’s involved, you lose autonomy, you lose control. There’s no reason a family should have to pick up the phone and call a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. if they’re upset with something happening in their local school. And so the more we can get the federal government out of that, the better.

I think that’s why I’m excited that Secretary McMahon really casts a bold vision about trying to return as much power to the states. That starts with eliminating any type of top-down mandates, trying to block grant funds, and saying, ‘look, states know best.’ That’s what was intended. That’s what federalism is all about. Trust states to manage their local schools. And then from there, really trust families. Give families as much autonomy and freedom as possible. And so my preference would be the most minimalist role possible if there were a role at all for the federal government.

I can’t point to an example of really, other than maybe some extreme civil rights examples of where the federal government’s really gotten involved and made things better, but I can point to a whole lot of examples and a whole lot of frustration from parents and teachers where the federal government has made life more difficult.

So as far as solutions, implementing returning education to the states, I heard you throw out the term block grants. Could you explain what you mean when you say block grants?

Matt Frendewey: Let’s take Title I funding. That’s the largest K-12 block of funds. To simplify it, you have a low-income kid. They trigger a stat that goes up to their local education authority that triggers a stat that goes up to the state education authority, that gets reported up to the feds. You would think then dollars come right down to the state, to the locals and to that school. That’s not how it works. Instead what happens is a really complicated formula that I like to joke that only three people know how it works and all three are lobbyists now. And it creates a formula that ends up funding the states and the states get the ability to kind of address how the funding reaches the local education authority and the local education authority gets to determine how that funds distributed to the schools. And what has been demonstrated time and time again, this is not just recent… going back to the Obama administration and the Bush administration, there are report after report that the funds do not reach the kids. Like the low income kids who trigger Title I who are, I would argue, entitled to it, because that’s what the law was intended to support, don’t get the funds. A US News and World Report article from, I think, 2015 now, maybe 2014, covered this in Virginia, and showed that wealthier districts in Virginia figured out how to kind of manipulate the formula to get more funding, where lower income districts didn’t.

Let me go back to my whole point: The federal government is not designed to administer these funds well.

And so what I’d rather do is, to use Virginia, for example, what is the number of the dollar figure for all Virginia for Title I, block grant those funds to Governor Youngkin, and make him responsible for distributing them. Because if the citizens are upset, if they don’t feel like they’re getting the resources, they can actually take political retribution out on Governor Youngkin. Or Governor Newsom or Governor Whitmer, fill in the blank in the state. They can actually hold them responsible as opposed to a nameless bureaucrat who says, ‘oh, it’s part of a formula.’ So that is a very simplified explanation of how block grants could be used to better fund states as opposed to the Title I formula that currently exists.

A reminder to listeners that Title I has been around since 1965, 15 years before the creation of the U.S. Department of Education. I’ve heard you talk about this before that shifting the power from the federal to the state, to the local level, it shifts the accountability mechanism closer to the students, closer to voters, closer to parents.

Matt Frendewey: We’ve talked to parents about accountability. We’ve asked them, ‘What is accountability? What does accountability mean to you? How do you hold your kid accountable? What does accountability look like?’ And time and again, parents will say accountability is typically a consequence, positive or negative, of an agreed upon outcome that was expected that between their kid perhaps or an employee at work.

We have accountability everywhere. Only in education do we have accountability where it’s not accountable to the family. Accountability is this test largely that is administered around the country through states. And we treat that we call that in education accountability. We did that largely because there was no option for families to hold their schools accountable. They weren’t able to fire them, if you will, or hire them. It was you went to your public school, and so we’re going to outsource your accountability to this state test. And then this state test will somehow exert some sort of consequence on the schools.

In the 30 years that we’ve been doing this, it hasn’t worked, right? Schools haven’t gotten tremendously better. If anything, according to NAEP, they’re doing worse and continuing, and at best, flatlined. Accountability to me is the genesis and really the backbone behind education freedom. It’s the ability for a family to say, ‘I’m not happy with you, traditional public school, or even a private school, or a microschool, whoever it is. You’re fired. You don’t get my kid next year. I’m going somewhere else.’ That’s accountability.

And that’s accountability that I think we’ve never had in education before and we’re starting to have now. And to me that creates healthier outcomes, right? It causes a school, regardless of the sector to be like, ‘hey, I want to serve you better. I want to meet your needs. I want to understand what you want.’ When we talk to families who switch between public school to any other model, a lot of them describe like being pushed out of their public school. Basically that they weren’t happy and they raised the concerns to the public school on multiple different occasions, whether it was academics or bullying or cultural issues, and that the school largely ignored them or downplayed their concerns or essentially just didn’t address them. And in almost every situation, the parent ended up, if you will, firing that public school and going to a new school. And that new school creates a level of accountability. They’ve held somebody else accountable, executed a consequence, and hired somebody to meet their needs.

That to me creates way better outcomes than what we’ve oftentimes tried to call accountability, which is a test. And I think that’s, if we’re really honest with ourselves as education policy folks, that’s what I think causes families to be most frustrated about state testing is they’ll take a test, their kid will take a test. It’ll disrupt their whole learning. They won’t get the results back to like August. Usually, it’s usually like a day or two before they start the next school year.

And it’s because the test was never designed for them. It was never actually designed to give the family accountability. It was never actually designed to give the family the ability to hold the system accountable. Instead, it was really designed for some faraway bureaucrat to try and measure how well a school might or might not be doing. And for good reason, families have been frustrated because they’ve been told this is your form of accountability, but they actually get no consequence out of it.

You’ve worked for organizations that engage in a very intentional and a focused way at the state level to make sure that state legislators understand what good education policy looks like, what bringing power closer to the people closest to the students looks like. Can you give examples of states doing the right thing in these policies that we’re talking about?

Matt Frendewey: There are like 13 states passed new education freedom laws last year or this year. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be celebrating Texas, but implementation is always where these laws come into play.

Let’s use Arizona as an example. It was the state that passed the first ESA program, originally just for special needs families and then families who lived on reservations and expanded to military families, et cetera. And now it’s fully universal. It unfortunately was not the first universal — West Virginia like to remind them —but they’re doing a really good job, I think, of recognizing that we need to trust families and allow families to be free.

And what I mean by that is originally they were trying to approve every expense a family made. And they realized really quickly they couldn’t do this. There’s so many families trying to exercise new education freedom that the state finally said anything under $2,000 we’re going to approve. And then we’re going to do, you know, risk-based auditing, which is essentially how the rest of the world works. But to me, it reinforces the notion that we need to trust families, let them do what they believe is right for their kid. And then weed out the bad actors.

There’s always gonna be some bad actors. I like to remind folks, if you really want to focus on bad actors in education, there’s a billion dollar public school system down the road from you somewhere. I guarantee they’re leeching funds and they budget for X number of extra monitors every time they buy monitors because somehow 30% of them disappear or are broken. If you’re really concerned about public education funds being misspent, I promise you there’s a public school district down the road that would love your help weeding out that fraud.

In Arizona, it’s less than 1% of families have either have been identified as spending fraud, but they get scrutinized way more. There’s been a holy war against the program lately from the mainstream media there trying to identify one or two expenses here or there. The overall majority, like 99% of families are using their funds appropriately to educate their kids, to buy things that give them the tools and knowledge and skills to learn, core academics, as well as experience education in a way more dynamic way than the traditional four walls and a chalkboard.

Florida is another great state. 400,000 plus students now involved in the Florida education freedom movement. It’s tremendous. I think Florida is exciting, but I can’t stop there. Arkansas, Iowa. Like I said, I’m excited to see where Texas goes. Louisiana now. West Virginia obviously is fully universal. We have a lot of excitement out there.

And what’s really cool, if you ask my opinion, is that all those programs I just mentioned, they’re all different. Like each one of those has their own unique twist, their own unique flavor, their own unique state design. And that to me is a good thing that shows that public policy, done at the state level is better because it allows states to really design what they think is best for their citizens.

To me, part of the beauty of this universal movement that we’ve kind of evolved into post-COVID is that it is an accepted notion that everyone largely supports this now. Look at the polling: Republican, Democrat, Independents are all well over 55, 60% in support of education freedom. Give this to as many folks as possible, then let families decide who’s going to opt in.

If you’re the opposition, you for good reason are probably are fearful that everyone’s going to opt in tomorrow. To me, that probably speaks to how poorly the product might be that you’re trying to defend. But what really happens is, as you know, families opt in on their terms, right? They decide, ‘hey, this isn’t working for me anymore, or I’m really excited for something new, or maybe I want a blended experience. I want my kid to still go to the traditional public school for a little bit, and I’m excited to see if I can blend that with some alternative options or vice versa.’

And to me, that’s the kind of future of education where sectors can’t kind of hold a kid hostage and kids can kind of pick and choose what is best for them.

Could you talk a little bit more about what that looks like? I know you guys talk about the early adopters. So what are the early adopters doing and exploring and are excited about with this?

Matt Frendewey: So I think like high school is ripe for disruption, right? It was glamorized and it still glamorizes this really cool, fun experience for kids and this coming of age and, whether you watch the movie that might come out this summer or several years ago, it’s always this kind of exciting moment in kids’ lives. For a lot of kids though, now. It’s like racked with like stress and anxiety and trying to cram in all the AP classes and the volunteer work and trying to make sure that you prepare. You don’t miss anything. So you prepare yourself perfectly to get your perfect college application ready. And it’s just, to me, it’s like this awful amount of stress we’re putting on kids when we’re trying to really help them grow into adults. And we wonder why there’s such burnout and frustration with children these days.

What I think is exciting is you’re starting to see this unbundling of education. In Arizona, for example, there are several districts that are publishing rate sheets of how you could buy one course with your ESA. And they’re starting to go like, maybe your microschool doesn’t teach a topic, maybe AP math or something, or maybe it’s a language, you can come buy it from us for this amount. You can use your ESA to come over here and purchase from it. Florida is starting to do it and we see it in Utah as well.

To me, that’s an exciting opportunity for families to start and say, how can I curate this experience for my kid to really let them like flourish, like explore who they are, what they’re interested in? And then, you know, maybe it’s a microschool for few hours, maybe it’s a public school for a few more hours, and maybe it’s even a private school or a charter school for one or two days. And then maybe it’s an internship or other things that are more conventionally blended into education for kids later in their schooling career. I think that’s exciting.

I feel like we’re reaching this boiling point where families and even maybe high school students themselves are going to be like, ‘Enough. This is broken. We need to do something different.’ And so I’m really excited to see what that looks like.

Is there an education freedom myth or another topic that we’ve been tossing around today that really bugs you and that you’d like to dispel?

Matt Frendewey: I’ll tackle it two I’ll go back to accountability. Mike McShane wrote in his 2021 The Accountability Myth paper that accountability is a contested term. I think it’s really coming into fruition now where families are recognizing that they don’t really get the accountability they were promised. They don’t get it through the school board. They don’t get it through the traditional public school or through a state standardized test. And they get it through exercising choice. They get it through exercising some sort of decision or where they want to send their kid. So I’m excited to see how that hopefully like reframes what accountability means to families. And I think it gives us an opportunity as policy experts to be honest with families that like, look, this test that you want your kid to take, most families want to know how their kid’s doing, most teachers are administering tests regularly to assess their students’ progress. Those are important metrics to help you as a parent understand how your child’s doing, but true accountability is your ability to make sure that you can pick and choose the education environment for your child.

I think the other myth would be that education freedom and microschooling are these sort of like flash in the pan things that were just coming out of COVID. School choice is taking off because of COVID. All these microschools and education entrepreneurs are popping up. And I would say it may have poured fuel on the educational freedom fire, but it’s certainly not a flash in the pan. Education entrepreneurs are just springing up left and right. If you don’t know of a microschool right now, I can almost promise any of your listeners that within 10 miles or less of you, there’s a micro school. Like they’re all over the place. They’re a little hidden at times. I think that’s a little bit of their charm too, that there’s these like really beautiful little microschools all over the country. And so I think the idea that these are just a flash in the pan is false.

This movement that started as a kind of a rescue movement to rescue the least among us has shifted into this freedom movement to give every student in this country the opportunity to go to the school or the learning environment that best suits them.

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Listen to our full Freedom to Learn conversation on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. If you have suggestions for future guests or topics, please send them to podcast@dfipolicy.org.

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