Our traditional school system — built around fixed buildings, set schedules and standardized staffing structures — was designed for control and scale, not for flexibility or innovation. 

But those priorities no longer match the aspirations of many American families.

The pandemic accelerated long-standing cracks in our education system. Parents dissatisfied with district offerings turned to learning pods, hybrid schools, virtual providers and microschools. This surge of bottom-up innovation has created a more dynamic, diverse education landscape — one that can be more responsive to student needs and family preferences. For many families, education is no longer a singular institutional experience but a personalized mix of resources, tools and providers.

Yet how we finance, regulate and analyze public education remains designed for a world where “school” means a single provider delivering all services within a building-based framework. Public funding typically flows to districts, not students. State education agencies track school-level outcomes, not student-level journeys. The disconnect between what families want and what schools provide is at the core of many problems in education today.

To support new ways of learning, we need a more flexible, modern approach to education. That means creating space for new providers to enter the market and serve students in different ways.

Foundational to this is rethinking how we fund education. Rather than allocating dollars exclusively to school systems, we need funding models that follow students to the learning experiences they actually use. Education savings accounts (ESAs) and other programs that allow flexible education funding enable families to customize their child’s education across multiple providers without sacrificing public accountability.

In addition, we must invest in new tools and systems that allow a diverse array of providers to serve students. This includes platforms to manage enrollment and payments, tools to help parents judge what works, and legal frameworks that ensure equity without imposing one-size-fits-all approaches. 

Finally, we must rethink the role of the state. The state’s job is not to operate a single model of schooling but to help a wide range of education models succeed. That means ensuring access and equity, while setting guardrails. It does not mean defining what all learning should look like or limiting families to one-size-fits-all options.

This is not just theory. At least two states – Arizona and Florida – have created flexible and expansive school choice programs. An analysis of the private school markets in these two states suggests that the number of private schools has expanded over the last decade, while in states with no private school choice, such as California or New York, the numbers have decreased.

But looking at the number of schools alone doesn’t tell the whole story. A deeper dive into the Arizona ESA program reveals that while most families are using their ESA funds for tuition at private schools, the definition of a school has been expanded to include community colleges, online schools in other states, microschools and homeschool co-ops. 

The supply side of K-12 education, at least in Arizona, has grown in two separate ways.

Thousands of Arizona families now use ESA funds to create hybrid learning experiences. Their children attend a mix of schools and they access tutors, therapies and extracurriculars. These students don’t fit neatly into traditional categories. They aren’t fully homeschooled — but they’re not in conventional school, either. The education system is evolving, and families are leading the way.

Further, in Arizona there was an increase in the number of vendors in all of those categories between the first year that the program was opened to all families in the state and the second year. It would appear that as parents look to redefine how their children are educated, suppliers show up to serve them. 

Universal ESA programs understand that learning doesn’t just happen in classrooms. With the right safeguards — like transparency and parental approval — public funds can support learning anywhere it happens. But, these efforts are fragile and require coordinated systems that serve families with minimal barriers. 

If we want choice to work for everyone, especially disadvantaged families, we must ensure that infrastructure exists to make high-quality options accessible, navigable and sustainable.

Education reformers have spent decades pushing for choice. That work remains vital. But it is no longer enough. If we want families — especially those with fewer resources — to truly benefit, we must build the systems that make navigating those choices easy, affordable and effective.

Susan Pendergrass is director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute in St. Louis, Missouri, and a fellow at EdChoice, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to advance educational freedom and choice for all students.