Michael Horn explains why his book is titled Disrupting Class rather than Disrupting Schools. U.S. public schools seemed free because families couldn't opt out or compare alternatives. Education Savings Accounts change this by giving families a transferable dollar allotment to spend on any educational service, forcing schools to compete on value.
My first book was called Disrupting Class. And a big reason for that was we didn't see that it was possible to disrupt schools in the United States because there was no non consumption or even over serving of students because public school felt free. But that could be changing and that's because of the growth of education Savings Accounts or ESAs where families essentially get an allotment of dollars in, yes, a savings account that they can spend on a variety of educational products or services. If you don't spend it all in a given year, that's fine, you roll it over to the next year because it's in a savings account, you can spend it for the future. But now with these families have an incentive to consider the relative value of different educational goods and services and make trade offs. And that means for a family that stays in the traditional neighborhood school but is feeling like they're overserved by the bundle of services they this is going to start feeling like an expensive choice. Why? Because they'll be sacrificing receiving several thousands of dollars in their ESA that they could have allocated to different educational options to create the right mix of services for their child. In other words, traditional public schools might not feel free for much longer.
