Are Education Savings Accounts Actually Vouchers?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer to follow.

An Education Savings Account (ESA) may turn up in your state as an Education Freedom Account some kind of Scholarship or some other shiny name. And school choice advocates really, really don't want you to call it a voucher. Why not? Well...

Distinguishing between vouchers and ESAs matters because word choice can introduce misrepresentation of and opposition to a parent empowerment program that would otherwise be well-received.

In other words, there is very little support in this country for vouchers, especially when you call them "vouchers." People appear to understand that a voucher program takes taxpayer dollars away from your public school and hands it instead to some private (probably religious) school. 

Voucher fans do a lot of language testing, determining that lots of folks think that ESAs are vouchers, and Colyn Ritter at EdChoice (formerly the Milton Friedman Foundation) sees that as a problem.

While many of us in the education policy sphere can very succinctly explain the difference between a voucher and an ESA, there is plenty of evidence to show that this distinction is not as easily grasped by various media outlets or skeptics of educational choice programs.

I'm not sure the voucher crowd can explain the distinction all that succinctly. But even if they can, I'm not sure the distinction matters all that much. A classic school voucher allows your student's share of taxpayer dollars for school to go to a private school instead of the public school. An ESA allows your student's share of taxpayer dollars for school to go to a private school or education supplies or a whole list of other allegedly education-related expenses instead of the public school. The truly wonky may also try to describe different pathways that those taxpayer dollars travel. 

It comes down to this-- an ESA is a type of voucher that provides greater flexibility in how the taxpayer dollars can be spent than does a classic voucher. But both are vouchers-- instruments that give a family control of a certain number of taxpayer education dollars. The money follows the student, who could be said to be carrying a backpack full of cash. For the average human, the only distinction is what the family may spend the taxpayer dollars on, and that's simply a difference of degree, not of type. 

It is a bit ironic that voucher fans are concerned about imprecise language here, as an ESA does not really resemble a savings account, isn't an actual scholarship, and doesn't confer any special freedom. 

But charges that voucher opponents are trying to muddy the water or confuse the public are just silly. The public has made the connection mostly on their own, in part with the help of school choice fans who have described vouchers and ESAs with the same language. And if voucher opponents like me had that kind of power, I would have done far more to the public perception of vouchers than just confuse the different varieties. 

We call ESAs vouchers because they are vouchers--instruments for directing taxpayer dollars away from public schools and toward private vendors. If that causes branding problems for supporters, well... you can tell people that a pig is a watermelon, but when slice it up and serve it, they'll still taste pork.