The Best Case for School Choice Is Pacing, Not Politics

Most of the argument over school choice happens at the wrong altitude. People argue about vouchers, public dollars, and whether Education Savings Accounts quietly privatize education. Almost nobody argues about the thing that actually matters to a kid staring down a math worksheet: whether he's allowed to move at the pace he actually learns at, instead of the pace the lesson plan demands.

That's the case worth making. The real value in ESAs, at least for homeschool families, isn't political. It's that ESA funds finally let parents buy the one thing a single curriculum bundle can't budge on: how fast or slow their child moves through a concept. A kid who needs six weeks on fractions instead of two isn't behind. He's just moving at a speed the curriculum doesn't allow for. ESAs are one of the first funding mechanisms that let a family fix that, dollar by dollar, subject by subject.

The school choice debate is almost entirely institutional: public versus private, oversight versus autonomy, whether vouchers count as privatization. That fight has moved fast. Eighteen states now run active ESA programs, and more than thirty have some form of ESA or private school choice on the books. But almost none of that debate asks what it looks like when it's working: a kid actually getting taught at the pace they need.

For homeschoolers specifically, the answer is rarely "switch to private school." It's closer to "build something that fits." Curriculum. Therapies. Tutors. A family with a fifth grader who's advanced in reading but a full year behind in math doesn't want one blended program that averages out to "on grade level." They want the ability to pay for exactly what that child needs, in each subject, at their own speed.

The scale here isn't small anymore. Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account now serves 97,679 students as of this July. Texas's new education savings account program enrolled nearly 96,000 students for the 2026-27 school year in its first real expansion. Florida operates the largest ESA ecosystem in the country, covering more than 500,000 students across its programs. Tennessee's universal ESA, open to any student regardless of income, is already serving 20,000 families.

None of that growth is happening in a vacuum. Homeschooling itself grew by 4.9% in the 2024-25 school year, nearly three times the pre-pandemic pace, and 36% of states that report homeschool numbers hit their highest enrollment ever, higher than the pandemic peak. Roughly 3.4 million kids, about 6% of school-age children in the U.S. are now homeschooled. ESA money and homeschool growth are climbing together because they're solving the same problem from two directions: one gives families the flexibility, the other gives them the funding to act on it.

Here's the misconception that comes up most: that ESA money is for buying "school in a box," and a tutor is what you add later if the curriculum isn't working. That gets the order backwards. For a lot of homeschool families, the tutor is integral to the instructional method. A parent teaching four kids across four grade levels can't also be an expert in fifth-grade fractions and eleventh-grade rhetoric on the same Tuesday afternoon.

Treating live 1-on-1 instruction as the default for the subjects that need real expertise, and using ESA funds to pay for it directly, isn't a workaround. It's arguably a more honest use of the money than assuming one parent-purchased curriculum can flex to fit every kid in the house.

This isn't just a hunch. In a now-classic 1984 study, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that students who received 1-on-1 tutoring performed about two standard deviations better than students in a conventional classroom, roughly the gap between an average student and one in the 98th percentile. Bloom called it the "2 sigma problem" because no one could explain how to deliver that kind of gain at scale.

More recent research on mastery learning, where students only move to new material once they've actually shown they understand the current material, backs up the underlying mechanism: a pooled effect size of 0.59 across mastery learning studies, a moderate-to-large improvement in academic performance. The common thread in both is pacing, not curriculum brand or platform. Kids do better when the pace of instruction matches the pace of their actual understanding. ESAs are, functionally, one of the first policy tools that let an ordinary family pay for that directly instead of hoping their curriculum happens to fit.

If you're a homeschool parent trying to figure out whether this applies to you, here's where to start.

Check your state's specific ESA rules this week, not next semester. Look for tutoring specifically on your program's approved-vendor list, not just curriculum publishers. Several state ESA programs already treat live tutoring as an eligible expense category, separate from textbooks or online courses.

Pick one subject to test the pacing idea on, not your whole schedule. If your child is stuck on a specific skill, long division, essay structure, whatever it is, that's the subject to try 1-on-1, paced instruction on first, not a full curriculum overhaul.

Track how long a concept actually takes once someone is teaching to mastery instead of to a calendar. Most parents are surprised in both directions: some concepts click faster than the curriculum assumed, others take twice as long, and neither is a problem once you can see it clearly.

Not every subject needs a dedicated tutor, and ESA funds aren't unlimited. A reasonable threshold: if you've spent three or four weeks re-explaining the same concept and you're both getting frustrated, that's not a discipline problem. It's a sign the explanation needs to come from someone else, in a different way, at a different pace. That's a normal, smart use of ESA money, not a sign homeschooling isn't working.

This is exactly the gap Cosmo was built to sit in. Cosmo is a WASC-accredited provider and an approved direct-pay tutoring option for 15 Education Savings Account programs, which means for a lot of homeschool families, live 1-on-1 math and ELA tutoring isn't an out-of-pocket extra. It's something ESA funds can cover directly.

Every class is live and taught by a real teacher matched to where your child actually is, not where a curriculum assumes they should be. If you're not sure whether your state's ESA covers a service like this, or whether your child would benefit from paced, 1-on-1 instruction in a specific subject, a single free trial class is usually enough to find out. Book a free class today →