Glen Gaugh’s two boys have taught him a lot, including just how different two brothers can be. 

Take Elisha, his 12-year-old. The four walls of a traditional classroom weren’t for him. “He was just bored,” Glen says. “He was more interested in rushing through his work so he could read a book.”  

The Gaughs pulled Elisha out of the district school. After nearly a year of homeschooling, Glen reports that Elisha is doing extremely well — and not just with school. Elisha is part of the local 4-H Club, and his beekeeping project received an award at a recent exhibit. 

As for Jesse, age 8, Glen says, “He thrives on learning from someone and doing that among his peers. It’s like every kid in his class is his best friend.”

“His learning style is just different,” says Glen, making an observation expressed by many parents. 

A proposal passed by state lawmakers may help families like the Gaughs who wish to customize their child’s learning according to his or her needs. It would do this by making education savings accounts available to more children in the state.  

Here’s how it would work. The state would deposit a portion of a child’s share of state education funds into a private spending account that the child’s parents could then use to buy education products and services for their children. Tennessee already allows these account-style learning options for children with diagnosed with certain special needs.  

Families in Arizona, Mississippi, Florida and North Carolina also have access to these opportunities. Parents can find personal tutors or education therapists for their child, pay for online classes, buy textbooks, pay private school tuition and even save unused money from year to year — in any combination.

Account holders have reported high levels of satisfaction with these options. In Mississippi and Arizona, more than 90 percent of participants report some level of satisfaction with their child’s account. 

In a strange turn of events, the state’s wild experience with standardized testing over the past few years has convinced lawmakers that they need more of it. But studies have found regulations such as these drive successful education providers away from participating in K-12 options because they require them to change their instructional practices — even when their students were demonstrably excelling without state intervention.

The proposal also asks taxpayers to keep spending resources on empty seats in district schools if students leave to use an account. Tennesseans should not have to pay twice for students using education savings accounts. Lawmakers in other states, such as Arizona, move a portion of a child’s spending to an account, creating a savings to the state in some cases. In fact, Arizona children with special needs who use an account save the state $1,400 per student. So far, the steady enrollment in the savings accounts in other states has resulted in a fraction of a percent of state students choosing an account — which does not strain state resources.

Glen just hopes he and other families like his can have more options when it comes to preparing their children for a bright future. “Hopefully in Tennessee we can get to the point where we support policies that support education freedom,” he says. “There should be as many unique educational opportunities as there are students.”  

Most parents — even those with only one child — would agree.