Hail The(ED) Work-Around

That’s what parents are wondering after the Trump Administration put forward a widely varying array of price tags for its plan to fund school vouchers.

- Amity Shlaes

WILL IT BE $20 billion? Or $2 billion? Or $250 million?

The lobbyists, of course, are already pressing Congress and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to see if they can push through the largest appropriation possible.

But the extra zeroes don’t actually matter much. Even $250 million, enough for 25,000 children, will make an outsize difference. That’s because when it comes to innovation, a little does a lot. Especially when the producers (private, independent or charter schools) are already in place—Schumpeterian “Ubers” just waiting for customers so they can disrupt, and improve, the petrified sector of K–12 education.

Parochial schools stand ready to accept school vouchers, and deserve them. But there are plenty of lesser-known academic Ubers primed to scale. Consider four such disruptors.

-The First Disruptor is Classical Conversations. This home-school curriculum charges less than $1,500 a year for high school. Classical Conversations was founded by Leigh Bortins in 1997 with 11 students and the aim of restoring Western civilization, memorization, recitation and strong science and math to lesson plans. You won’t hear this too often on National Public Radio, but Classical Conversation’s curriculum now has more than 100,000 “seats,” i.e., registered students, and an academic performance most public schools only dream of. The curriculum is Christian but can be adapted to serve those seeking secular classical education.