Giving Ventures Podcast: Episode 101 – Building on Policy Victories for School Choice

This transcript has been AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity. Some inaccuracies may remain.

Peter Lipsett: So back in August of 2024, an email hit my inbox from the American Federation for Children announcing a new Director of Implementation at AFC. And this was a role that was meant to ensure the gains being made in launching educational savings accounts or ESAs as they’re known and other school choice wins actually stay in the win column. I remember immediately writing back to my friend Tommy Schultz who runs AFC. I was just so enthusiastic because this new role really spoke to a felt need I had but couldn’t articulate because this isn’t really my area. But, you know, I’ve mentioned on the podcast before that my family has had its own struggles with school choice implementation and found it’s really hard. My wife and some others started a micro school in our small little Virginia town only to hit roadblock after roadblock: location, getting insurance, having to deal with the fire marshal and going in front of zoning boards. And that’s all before recruiting kids and actually doing any teaching.

Fortunately, they did get off the ground, but it wasn’t easy. And if we had had our other guest on there, maybe it would have been. So all of that is preamble to why I’m so excited to have this discussion today on not just the school choice fight and where it stands, but what are we going to do to make sure that the legislative victories that we’ve had actually stand the test of time, that families actually take us up on what is now on offer in so many states?

And for this conversation, I’m happy to have two organizations represented and two key individuals from there. As I mentioned, Tommy Schultz from the American Federation for Children. Tommy is the CEO there. AFC has been a leader in school choice for many, many years, has spent millions of dollars in states across the country at every level, C3 level, C4 level, election PAC level, to make sure that people understand the value of school choice and that we get across the finish line in these places. Also joining me is Ryan Delk, the founder and CEO of Primer, which is a unique organization on the supply side of school choice. So Primer helps identify educational entrepreneurs and offers them the tools to start micro schools in their area. And it’s not just that I think it’s cool. Primer actually won the 2024 Yass Prize, which is probably the most prestigious prize in the educational choice space, gives a million dollars towards programs that excel in sustainable transformational outstanding and permissionless education. Ryan, Tommy, so glad you’re here. So, Tommy, why don’t you kick us off, ground us in where we are here, start of 2026, in the school choice fight writ large.

Tommy Schultz: Thanks for having us.

Ryan Delk: Thanks for having us.

Tommy Schultz: Look, last year was the greatest expansion of school choice in American history. Between Texas and 15 other states, basically that created an additional $1.85 billion in annual revenue for basically nearly 150,000 new students that are probably going to be coming on board with those programs. And all told, that’s basically going to mean about 1.5 million kids this upcoming school year are going to be accessing the school of their choice thanks to some state-funded scholarships.

And why that’s incredible, that $1.5 million number is that in 2020, it was about 550,000 kids accessing a private school choice program. So really in the last five years coming out of COVID, we’ve tripled the number of kids accessing school choice programs, attending amazing schools. New entrepreneurs are coming into the fold, building schools like Ryan, who you’ll hear from in a bit. And all told, that means about $10.5 billion is getting utilized with state funding for kids to go to these amazing schools.

The other additional piece to last year’s amazing historic year of expansion was a new federal opportunity. So in 2027, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, a new federal tax credit comes online where people can contribute voluntarily to 501(c)(3) charities and they can get a dollar for dollar tax credit, a dollar for dollar reduction up to $1,700. And so that’s going to free up billions and billions of dollars for families, even in blue states. We already have one blue state, Colorado, that has said they will come on board. Dozens of other states are starting to jump into the fray saying they want to opt in, they want to get access to this tax credit locally. So we’re just at this whole new phase of the movement where we’ve been fighting political and legislative battles for probably 30 years. You know, after Milton Friedman in the 1950s puts his essay together, the school choice movement gets going in earnest in the early 1990s. And now to your point in the preamble, it’s about implementation.

You know, you basically have 32 states that have a school choice program, 17 of them where every single kid is eligible, essentially eight of them where kids in every state are eligible and fully funded. So now it’s about making sure that kids get access to those seats. Annually, we are now going to be deploying about a million and a half dollars at least to marketing and enrolling families into these programs. Last year’s results showed that we got about 150,000 new kids into programs all across the country. It’s the most exciting time in the school choice movement. There’s higher leverage than ever before on philanthropy in K-12 education writ large. So we’re excited to keep talking about the day. I’m excited to hear more from Ryan about what he’s doing on the ground.

Peter Lipsett: So how many wins should we expect in 2026? I mean, 2025 was a big deal. We’ve probably got a lot of the low-hanging fruit. Not that Texas…

Ryan Delk: You’re going to let him call a shot? Wow.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, exactly. I am, I am. Not that Texas was low-hanging fruit. I know how hard you all worked out there, but do we expect to pick up some more ESAs or other big programs this year?

Tommy Schultz: Sure, I think in terms of massive going from zero to 100 types of expansions, not necessarily the case, but I think there’s going to be a handful of states, probably half a dozen, that massively improve their programs. They increase it by 20% or something like that. But also it’s an election year, so legislatively that’s usually your lowest kind of volume, lowest metabolic rate for how many pieces of legislation actually get passed. Lawmakers want to get onto the campaign trail quickly, so they’ll have a quick legislative session.

So we will be probably investing through our super PAC operation into about a couple hundred state legislative races, mostly defending lawmakers who made those huge expansions in the last few years. We do have a dozen or so incumbents that we want to challenge, usually hostile school choice Republicans that are still a couple of them remaining in a few states. And then there’s a few governor’s races where you have places like Iowa, Oklahoma, Arizona, where you have the opportunity to see a potential hostile school choice governor continue on or get into office. And we hate to jeopardize the gains that we made in those states over the last few years. So really this year, it’s an election year. So big things afoot on that front. And legislatively, we’re trying to both cement the victories and then set the table for the upcoming legislative sessions where we really hope to go get major expansions in a few other states.

Peter Lipsett: So that’s all super helpful. So let’s shift now more pointedly into the implementation side of things and bring Ryan to this. So you’ve probably heard of the concept of a pre-mortem before. Listeners probably have this idea of you’re going to launch some big initiative, but before you do, you sit around and have this kind of navel gazing session of if it all went wrong, what went wrong? Now, obviously we’re well down the road on a lot of school choice stuff, but this implementation piece in a lot of states still is pretty early phase. I wanted the two of you to kind of pre-mortem this a little bit. If we fail on the implementation, and maybe you want to define, Ryan, I’ll let you kind of define what implementation means. If we fail on this, what are the places that are going to cause us to fail? Ryan, why don’t you kick us off on that?

Ryan Delk: The thing that we are obsessed with, and that I think is existential for this, is not just onramping more supply, which is oftentimes the language that people talk about of opening new schools, but it’s about opening new schools that are both quality, so you’re delivering real academic outcomes, and also they’re accessible to everyday American families. In my opinion, that is the existential challenge over the next five to 10 years for the school choice movement is can we open thousands of new low cost or completely free private schools that deliver quality educational outcomes for everyday families? And I think if we don’t do that, you risk what’s frankly already happening in some states where you have families that get these scholarships. They’re super excited and then they can’t find a quality option that fits their budget. A $7,000, $8,000, $9,000 ESA for a $40,000 a year private school does not suddenly make that private school accessible to a working class family. And there’s tens of thousands of scholarships across the US, maybe hundreds of thousands now that go back that are unused because the families can’t find quality supply. And so that is what we are hell-bent on solving. We’ve made tremendous progress this year, not just through Primer, but we want to solve it for the whole movement. We are specifically sort of maniacally focused around this affordable, high quality new supply and how do we bring as much of that online as possible.

Peter Lipsett: So the supply piece, tell me what else. What are the other things that would cause implementation to just fall apart?

Tommy Schultz: Yeah, I think to Ryan’s point, even some just stats on the state level school choice programs you have in the places where we’ve really ramped up to having all kids eligible, all kids funded in places like Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, et cetera. You’re basically starting to see the trend after a couple of years into the implementation of these new programs that basically 90% of kids that are attending a private school are going to that private school with state funding. And so to Ryan’s point, like you’re both, the supply thing becomes an issue. New schools need to get built. Formerly shuttered ones need to reopen. The current schools need to expand their capacity because really families are looking for options. And now these are sort of the problems we’ve been hoping to have for the school choice movement for 30 years is how do we fill up all of the seats? How do we make the quality ones grow and expand? Whereas before, especially in the early, you know, early 2000s when a lot of these school choice programs were hyper-targeted to the lowest income or the highest special needs kids and you had a real limit to the number of students that could even attend that via the law, you really started to see, well, you’re not making a dent in the marketplace. But now we have now fully brought the school choice movement into a whole new sector, really exit velocity in some sense to where now we need to open up new schools. And that’s exciting because great entrepreneurs like Ryan can jump into the fold and say, I now have a business model to rapidly expand high quality schools in people’s communities. But also I would say to go on about where I feel like other flaws are going to happen. There’s a small handful of programs that probably lack a few transparency items that we’d like to see improved there. Some of this is because, you know, in the first year of starting a new program or expanding a program, lawmakers have their ideas on what they would like to do for their own personal preferences and things like that. But ideally, you’re showing high quality academic results and therefore that requires opting into sort of nationally normed reference testing that a state can evaluate how a student’s doing.

There’s also some other financial guardrails, other just very basic minor common sense accountability metrics that you need to see in every program. And the vast majority of them have this, I think, but long-term when we’re talking about if this is educating, you know, upwards of 10% of kids in the country nationwide for the long-term, I think as we’re already seeing from massive studies that have been done by David Figlio in places like Florida, new studies that have come out from the data of the great Arkansas School Choice program alone that the kids are doing phenomenally better in these private school choice programs, and they are making the public schools better. It’s kind of the most definitive piece of research out here that school choice really does lift up all boats. For us, the more data that you have to show that, the more that you can actually really make the case and defend these programs into the future. So I think in terms of both, like we need more supply, and I’d love to see more transparency and data in each of these programs, and that’s what we’re always fighting for.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, it’s got to be tough, because…

Ryan Delk: One thing to build on what Tommy just said, there’s an element too as these programs get refined where I think obviously there’s considerations that every rule, the agencies that administer these programs that they have to think about for their own operations and their timelines that work for them. But something that we are very passionate about and Tommy and I spend a lot of time talking about is how do you ensure that the way, the cadence of the program and the way the program actually functions and the sort of physics of the program itself works for the families who need it most. And these are often the families that are the busiest, that are working multiple jobs, single parents, they have lots of other stress in their life. And so, you know, they don’t have a bunch of time to pre-research, you know, some very complicated process or hit some super tight enrollment window. And so I think the beauty of modern technology is that you can do a lot of these things much more quickly. And so some of the really long lead times that a lot of agencies needed or that the rule makers needed, I think we can start to compress those. And so what we spend a lot of time on and what we hope to see is more and more of these programs that are, as they mature, they’re more accessible to the families that need them most in terms of application deadlines, when the applications close, when new students can enroll. Because the reality is that a lot of these families that are stuck in schools, that they need alternatives, they don’t operate on the same timeline as maybe what you would consider a traditional private school family that’s thinking nine, 10, 12 months ahead for where their kid’s going to go to school next year. And so as we think about the failure states or the pre-mortem, that’s what we spend a lot of time educating legislators on, is just making sure that they’re thinking about not the existing private school families solely, but these new families that they want to bring into the fold and sort of give opportunity that are stuck in these schools and what timelines will work for them.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, you mentioned like the $40,000 a year private school. And as I think of kind of the PR risks of some of this and goes to the supply question, a state passes a law. The only private schools are these 30, 40, $50,000. I mean, sure, there’s some more affordable options, but the instant supply is already too expensive. So you have to bring these new things on. And I imagine there’s a bit of maybe Tommy, you guys are working on this, helping people say, hey, the schools aren’t automatically there instantly and what you see isn’t going to be what you get in two years. Is that right? That’s got to be a tough perception. I think of AI, right? People who don’t use it frequently are like, well, it hallucinates all the time. But no, a lot’s changed. But once something gets stuck in the consciousness, it stays there.

Tommy Schultz: Yeah, I think a couple of things that demystify there, according to the latest federal data, the NCES actually tracks private school tuition rates. There’s really only less than 20% of private schools that charge more than $15,000 in tuition. 75% of them have tuition rates below listed $10,000. And that’s the headline tuition rate. When you actually talk to school leaders all across the country, the average of what you’ll see in terms of financial aid is anywhere from like 30 to 40% of kids at a private school are going there with some form of financial aid, whether that’s an outside scholarship entity in a state or a national scholarship or school-based fundraising, right? Because for anybody that has a kid in a private school, you know your school’s at the end of the year, they’re hosting galas, they’re trying to raise money to support kids that have financial needs. So what’s really interesting now though is the unit economics of private schooling are getting so much better because in a place like Florida or Iowa where you might be getting $8,000 in state funding for your kid there, your school then becomes financially much more stable and viable for the long term because then they have stable planning versus going, ah, it’ll be lumpy this year due to a financial crisis and, you know, voluntary contributions go down or you have kids that are not even paying a single dime in tuition and they’re maybe being supported by some sort of endowment model. Are we going to draw down three, four or 5% from the endowment?

All of these things for financial stability for the schools gets much better. So my view is in the long run, this will help keep kind of tuition costs flat or the cost to educate a little more predictable for schools as they’re doing their planning. And I think too, for your point about school growth and like what is happening now is just a snapshot in time, but what’s going to happen in the future. What we’ve seen in Florida, and this is actually somewhat dated because all these new programs that have come online in the last few years happened so rapidly with their growth that it’ll be really interesting to see what happens in the next three years, let’s say. But in the last 10 years, Florida’s doubled the number of rural private schools that they’ve had. They now have like 60 private schools operating in rural counties that didn’t exist in 2015 or so. So it’s going to be really interesting to see this kind of renaissance of these smaller schools that either happen in churches or YMCAs, of interesting models that Ryan’s putting together. Plus, what are the existing private schools going to do to expand their capacity? So you’re right, Peter, that means there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of things we have to clarify for people because their maybe headline perception is that a private school is really tony and wealthy and it’s $40,000 a year. Well, again, if only maybe 20% of kids are actually paying that rate where the rest of them are on either some sort of financial aid mechanism coupled with the fact that gosh, a lot of new low cost amazing schools are about to open really for the first time in American history. Again, it’s been my view that it’s the golden age of American education here in the future because of this really fundraising, financing revolution that we’ve had with our K-12 policies at the state level.

Peter Lipsett: All right, well, let’s talk about some of those schools that are going to be opening and they’re going to be opening under the Primer banner. So Ryan, tell us the Primer model and the role of the Primer foundation in that, because Primer is a for-profit school piece, but then you have the foundation as well. Talk to us about that whole interplay, where you are, what the model is.

Ryan Delk: Yeah, so Primer is really quite simple. We help great teachers launch schools in their communities. Our schools are free for any family making under $75,000 a year household income nationwide. So every single Primer is completely free for families in that category. All of our schools in Texas that we opened this year will be completely free. And we hope to move to 100% free model across the board in the next couple of years. And so affordability and accessibility is key.

Peter Lipsett: And let me jump in real quick. It’s free because of the ESAs, right? Because there is funding coming in from the state on that.

Ryan Delk: Exactly. Exactly, and so to your speed piece, like when you were asking the questions about the onramp, Tommy and many great folks worked on this Texas legislation this past year. Primer, we will have four or five campuses with a dozen-ish micro schools live in Texas for year one in San Antonio that will be completely free to Texas families. And that’s not a two-year ramp or a three-year ramp. That’s a year one to start the program. Those will be live. And so, you know, with the right regulatory environment and, you know, with, I think, experienced operators, you can ramp really quickly. And I think that’s what we have to do to show the success of these programs, because we’ll be able to come in year two of the program and say, hey, look at all these families that were able to, you know, access a school that works for their family, deliver great academic outcomes, and do it for zero dollars out of pocket. They didn’t pay a penny out of pocket to attend these schools. So our model is really all about the teacher and we partner with teachers that know these communities really well. So every Primer leader that launches a school is someone who knows that community, who loves that community, who’s taught in that community. So we don’t import teachers from other states or other cities and have them go, you know kind of figure it out. And then we use technology in a really thoughtful way to help deliver really great academic outcomes for a much lower cost to educate. And so as an example, if a student needs remedial academic support, we have virtual instruction, virtual teachers that can work with a small cohort of kids that need that remedial support. And they can work with those kids across the Primer network. And so if there’s fifth graders that are two grade levels behind in reading or two grade levels ahead, they can be slotted into a virtual cohort where they get that support, the small group support that they need, but we don’t have to staff that on the individual campus. And so we’re really quite maniacal about how do you optimize for the best possible academic outcomes while still maintaining this accessibility. Florida, South Florida was our first ever market that we opened many years ago. And then we expanded to Alabama this past year. And then we’re going to be opening in San Antonio and Texas in 2026, sorry, this upcoming school year.

Peter Lipsett: And are you in Arizona as well or not yet? Okay.

Ryan Delk: Yes, in Arizona as well, yep.

Peter Lipsett: Back in October, I sat down with Erica Donalds. You probably know her. She’s got a whole network of more classical schools in Florida. And so there’s that classical piece. Is there a pedagogy around these Primer schools in that same way?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, we haven’t split out into like the more niche pedagogies yet. So right now every Primer is 100% consistent across the network. It’s really a foundational model around math, reading, writing. We want your kids to have a really great academic foundation and then we give them time in the afternoon to go deep on things they’re excited about. We call them pursuits, but that’s where kids are learning science and social studies and getting exposed to history. And so we haven’t launched any Primers that are like classical Primers or even like language immersion Primers or arts Primers, but we’ve thought about how that will look in the future. And so certainly the goal in the future is to serve families that want those kinds of pedagogies. But right now, every Primer is the same, and it’s a much more traditional pedagogy.

Peter Lipsett: So let’s take my case, for example, let’s say Primer, we knew about Primer, you were in Virginia, we actually had ESAs, which of course we don’t. Tommy, get to work on that. If we had had you as a resource when we were starting this micro school several years ago, how does Primer help the educator not just build a school, but clear the roadblocks, the fire marshal, the finding a location, all of those types of things?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, I would say the insight that we had was that the optimal people to start these small schools are educators. That’s who you want starting the schools. However, it’s often extremely hard for those educators to go through the process required to start the school. And so you have this adverse selection problem where the people that are capable of actually going through all the lobbying and legal and regulatory work are not actually the people you necessarily want starting schools. And so our goal is to empower these great educators, take all that off their plate, let them focus on what they love, which is teaching students, interacting with families, investing in kids’ lives, investing in their community, and that we handle all the regulatory, real estate, state-level compliance, local compliance, insurance, making sure that they are guaranteed specific financial outcomes so they don’t have to be stressed about putting their life savings on the line. I talked to a teacher who personally guaranteed a multi-million dollar commercial loan for her micro school. And it wasn’t going well and it was essentially going to be financial ruin for her and her family if she didn’t figure this out. And so those are the kind of things that we don’t want to see happen and we want to take all that on for these educators. So as an educator you can roughly conceptualize it as, Primer takes on all the financial risk, we make sure that you’re taken care of financially with competitive salary benefits, and then we take care of all the regulatory and operations components to get the school live.

Peter Lipsett: Tommy, like we started the show off, you have this director of implementation now. Is that person engaging in some of these types of really small but really important kind of fire marshal type issues and helping to figure out a better way kind of nationally to streamline those? Because I got to believe those are big hindrances everywhere.

Tommy Schultz: Yeah. They absolutely will be at the frontier of like the expansions of all these programs. So in an older era when you maybe had a state that did a huge expansion and it was something like 5,000 kids are going to go to a private school and they can only go to an existing private school under these new frameworks of the laws we’re passing where every kid becomes eligible and new schools can get started. You’re going to start to see a lot of these issues. So Ryan and other people that are doing this great work on the ground give us a lot of this feedback and we try to see where is there something we can do that can be done at the state policy level to fix this? Oftentimes there is, oftentimes there isn’t. And so state by state, we’re doing this evaluation to see where can we have the most leverage and try to remove these roadblocks for private schools to get started and operate without massive headaches. But look, at the end of the day too, the unions and our opponents to expanding school choice, they’re filled with lawyers and lots of them in every state. And they’re very good at probably preempting some of this and thinking through, okay, we’re not going to win at the state legislature, we know that we’re just getting destroyed at the ballot box or the governor and the state legislature is in the Capitol, they’re just going to stop us. So how do we go down to the micro local code issue and try to gunk things up there? So at the end of the day, we’re hoping that we can do this at the state level, because again, that just helps keep everything clean and predictable for a lot of private schools. In the same way that we approach these school choice laws, we don’t go school board by school board trying to fight this out across 13,000 school districts, the state capitals who control huge chunks of the education funding or all of the education funding in certain regards, why not change the law there so it’s permanent and predictable for families? So that’s our approach is like, we want to get the feedback from our implementation team. They talk to hundreds of schools all the time, thousands of families. We get this sort of really interesting feedback that we can then try to see how do we translate into that actual state law moving in the next legislative session.

Peter Lipsett: And what are some of the other organizations out there working on this supply problem? Are there other groups like Primer or the classical schools, Optima that Erica Donalds is building, who else is doing the supply piece? Because I got to imagine we need a lot of these flowers to bloom to cover the waterfront.

Tommy Schultz: We need a lot more. There’s a few funds that are out there that are helping to either give grants to schools to get going. You have folks like the Drexel Fund. They’ve been in the business for a while of providing capital to get a new school started. And honestly, this is going to be, I think, a really exciting marketplace to see new ventures coming out there, new funds that get started to say, we’re going to see, we want to see 500 new Catholic schools in a year or something. Whereas Catholic schools have largely since 1960, if you look at the average, they might be closing about 70 or 80 schools per year just because of the challenging financial model that Catholic schools have had. And so what if we are reversing that trend and suddenly, as I said at the front end, if people see now that K-12 is an investable philanthropic opportunity, you can start to see if they’re looking at the state funding unit economics for the schools, they’re looking at the fact that there’s available commercial real estate or empty kind of underutilized spaces. You can really see a flourishing market of supply get going. And so I think more to come, the charter sector had a lot of analogies like this. They went from practically nothing in the early 1990s to where now they have federal funding streams to help new charter schools get started. You have major things like the Charter School Growth Fund that I think have hundreds of millions of dollars that they are using as capital or providing loans and access for funds for new charter schools to get going. Now private schools have that opportunity. And so I’ll let Ryan speak to any other of his partners in the space that he’s working with.

Ryan Delk: Yeah, I’ve actually been shocked at how quickly folks have gotten excited about this kind of new wave. I was talking to some of the early charter trailblazers, and they said it would take, it was years from the time of the initial kind of legislative shift to when the key players got excited. And I think the writing is kind of on the wall where you see how these sort of state level programs pass, how quickly you can ramp up micro schools and some of these other new, you know, the ability to open a school in six months and get that school to full enrollment in 12 months was like a completely unthinkable proposition even like two or three years ago. And so, yeah, we’ve been blown away by the people that have reached out to Primer and wanted to get involved with what we’re doing. But we’re also, I mean, we sort of try to be, you know, as much as we can, we want a rising tide to raise all boats. And so we’ve, the legislation that we passed in Florida and we’re working on legislation in other states, we’ve tried to sort of clear the way for especially like the independent folks that want to start like the small school for their community, like how do we make it easier for them to do that? And there’s a lot of folks like Drexel and others that are funding those types of folks that want to start these schools. And I think, you know, we need 10X or 100X in terms of volume of that kind of activity happening.

Peter Lipsett: So we talked about the supply piece, but the other important part of implementation, other than just the political risk and making sure that programs don’t disappear, is actually getting parents to buy in, right? To have them understand the nuances of the program, that this free money actually is, to a certain extent, free money. Who’s working on that? How are you all working on that in your respective areas?

Tommy Schultz: I’ll let Ryan go first if he wants to talk about kind of his school’s experience and I can take a macro view on our end.

Ryan Delk: I would say the most important point I would make here is that this is a very under discussed and under invested in part of this whole ecosystem. We actually have literally full time Primer employees whose entire job it is, is to basically be like a concierge for the various scholarship programs that our parents tap into because there’s questions, it’s totally new, the FAQs aren’t super clear, the timelines aren’t clear, they’re confused, can’t get the information they need. And so this thing we’re trying to make sure that we actually pulled a bunch of data on like here’s the average number of questions per family that we get by scholarship program, by ESA provider, by state. Here’s the timeline of those questions. I think it’s easy to think about sort of hey, we’re going to pass this, we’re going to get the funding secure, we’re going to figure out the economic side of it. And then I think often you know there’s kind of not enough effort put into hey, this single mom in this community is going to need to apply for this, how is her user experience going to look? And so we end up spending a lot of time on that and we’re happy to do it. But I do think there’s probably some opportunities for dedicated organizations. I think Tommy has worked with or partnered with to try to get more parent-side support out. So we obviously do it for Primer families, but I think there’s kind of some ecosystem-wide work that needs to be done.

Tommy Schultz: Yeah, and Peter, it comes to the state laws themselves is where like educating lawmakers about these kind of parent level impacts is important because, you know, state legislature, I won’t name the state, maybe says like, you know, February, March, they passed this massive expansion for all students, every kid’s eligible, every kid’s going to get the funding and you maybe only have three or four months to build the actual systems and architecture to deploy something like that. You can see where it’s like, hey, give it a little bit of lead time, let all the appropriate technology vendors or staffers get ready to go to deploy this at scale. These are some of the considerations you have to think through. And two, we run a big part of our piece of our implementation business that we operate is about marketing and enrolling, the enrollment periods to families. So yes, the government sometimes is doing that. Maybe they’ll spend a few hundred thousand, a couple million dollars to let families know they’re eligible. But that’s trickier because the government is usually overextended and maybe they aren’t the best marketing gurus that are out there. So we try to use all of what we’ve learned for the past 15 or so years, all of the kind of advertising campaigns we’ve seen what works and gets, what gets families actually excited about programs. And I think it’s why you’ve seen in just this week as an example, Tennessee opens their new enrollment period for the new program that just expanded. 20,000 students would be eligible to get this. First 48 hours, 50,000 kids have already applied. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets up to 75,000. Iowa or Idaho, South Carolina, they opened their enrollment periods, 10,000 people are applying for that within the first 24 hours. You’re seeing booming demand. It’s partly because we’re doing a lot of intensive marketing. Even the media itself, when they’re talking about how every single kid is eligible for this new program, there’s a limited number of seats. That actually does a pretty good load share marketing for us because in the olden days, 15, 20 years ago when some of these programs were started, it’s like…

Peter Lipsett: Yeah.

Tommy Schultz: Here are the 15 different eligibility categories. If you live in this type of zip code with this type of a school, your income is below this weird federal poverty threshold. It’s confusing and people are like, I’m probably not eligible even if they were. Whereas now the uniformity of so many of these choice programs that says every kid is eligible, you should apply, this is real money. And to Ryan’s point, there are some complications in FAQs because it’s not always easy to navigate a government system. But at the end of the day, these are always, I think the cycle rate of improvement year over year because other legislators are seeing what’s happening. I think in the laws, we’re just going to start to clean that up more and more to make it easier for families and schools.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah. And one group, of course, to throw out there is Love Your School, which is in Arizona and doing some of this work to help people figure out the right school. I think they’ve expanded to West Virginia. I think they’ve won the Yass Prize as well. So this is a dynamic area. And you’re right, there’s lots, lots more to do to help parents understand all this. All right. Well, let’s close on the role of the philanthropist, the giver out there. And Tommy, you’ve talked about some of the funds that are out there, but what can people who have means or even just have a few dollars to rub together and want to give it, what can they do to help launch these efforts? Tommy, maybe you want to also speak to the School Choice Scholarship credit that’s coming up and the importance of that. What can philanthropists do to help not just win more battles, we know we need to win more battles, but actually get the implementation piece right?

Tommy Schultz: Look, it’s time to build with all of the funding that is available across these 32 states. And in 2027, once this federal tax credit comes online, we need more schools built across the country. And whether it’s great entrepreneurs like Ryan or other kind of nonprofit models that are out there that are trying to structure current schools or expand their current school offerings, we need more capital flowing into private education in America and onto homeschooling dynamics. Right. There’s, I mean, I think we’ve tripled the number of kids in homeschool environments since 2020. And they’re also in certain states getting access to state funding as well now for scholarships. So it can be a real boom for America’s civilization, in my opinion, if more philanthropists finally go, we’re going to invest big in education and not into kind of important but smaller bets. Like this is a core function, right? Building a great school in a community. At the end of the day, I think probably a few areas that beyond like marketing and enrollment and letting families know that they have these options, but also I think there’s going to be interesting new real estate models. I’m curious to see how a REIT model might take over maybe a former mall. I’ve been hearing about these ideas in certain states and we’ve put in some pilot funding to these that think of all the malls that were flourishing in suburbia in the 1990s and early 2000s that many of them have shuttered. You could really create some really interesting classroom spaces there. Ryan, I know already looking at all these creative ideas to get into these underutilized spaces or brand new spaces. And a lot of places you’re just running out of real estate, especially in places where a lot of red states, a lot of families have moved to Miami or to Dallas, new office buildings going up because there actually is demand. With this federal program that’s coming online where scholarship groups can now raise money at a significant clip with essentially free money with the 100% tax credit, scholarship groups are going to need funding to help scale this up. Many scholarship groups, operate maybe with one to $5 million in budget. Maybe they had three or four staff. If they are now sitting there with the prospect of going, gosh, we could triple or quadruple our revenues if we could get enough tax credit contributors to give to us. That’s going to require still staffing and overhead to kind of manage that influx. I think philanthropists, family foundations should absolutely look at funding scholarship groups that are going to be either getting started or well-established ones nationally that can actually help a lot of kids because at the end of the day, if this federal tax credit is not raising billions of dollars annually long-term, it’s probably at risk from a hostile administration or a hostile Congress in the future. So we want to show that it’s successful. We want this working in blue states where with our business model and with just the teachers unions power, they’re never going to be able to let us get a piece of state school choice legislation done in California. Now this federal opportunity creates that. And now California can have a robust school choice marketplace 10 years down the line. Right. So that’s how I would think about this from a philanthropist perspective.

Peter Lipsett: Ryan?

Ryan Delk: I would, the only thing I would add to that, I’d echo everything Tommy said, but the only thing I’d add to that is I think historically, as philanthropists have thought about capital allocation, especially in K-12 education, it has almost always been a multi-year, if not in perpetuity, commitment, specifically on the supply side. So if you’re funding a new school, it’s definitely a multi-year commitment and maybe you’re just expected to kind of continue funding that school forever. And the prospect, and I think what’s changed, and the prospect of these programs that Tommy and everyone has worked so hard on, is these schools, our schools become self-sustaining between a year and two years in, depending on the market. And so you start to unlock a world where there’s just tremendous leverage per dollar from a philanthropic perspective on getting these new schools started. And so for very low, single digit thousands of dollars per student, you can get a new school started and get it to self-sustaining in perpetuity. And so there’s no ongoing capital commitment. That school is now off to the races, and it can continue to operate within the structure of these programs and then potentially even recycle some of that capital to go open a new school. And so the paradigm here has changed. And I think there’s been a lot of wonderful people who have deployed a lot of capital into K-12 over the last 30, 40 years. And some of them may have gotten burnt, feeling like, I sunk a lot of capital into this school and it just didn’t exist five years in or whatever may have happened. And I just think that this new kind of world has unlocked a different opportunity with just tremendous leverage. And so as folks are thinking about deploying capital in K-12, I think the game has changed. And I think it’s a pretty tremendous opportunity.

Peter Lipsett: Well, I like all that. I think you’re right. It’s a tremendous opportunity. And Tommy, as you said, it’s time to build. And that’s what this whole implementation battle’s all about, is building, kind of physically. I mean, building crowds and just building a better education system for America. So Tommy, thanks for everything you at AFC are doing. Ryan, keep growing Primer. It’s really an exciting project. And hopefully you will have many more states to attack soon. Thanks, gentlemen.

Tommy Schultz: Thanks for having us.

Ryan Delk: Thanks, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: Well, as you heard, this issue is personal for me because we’ve been through the challenges of implementation. And frankly, it’s going to be personal for a lot more people out there as we continue to rack up these wins on ESAs, as we continue to expand school choice and allow more opportunities. We need supply. We need parents to understand. And we need the political pressures coming from the other side to get fended off. All of those are really critical pieces. I love what American Federation for Children is doing. It’s such a critical organization in this fight, has been for years. And above all, they’re a partner. They’re a partner to so many organizations. You know, donors love to see groups working together. AFC is always working together with other people. And Primer is an excellent case study of what is now possible and then the types of groups we’re going to need to be able to fill this supply gap. And Primer’s doing a terrific job tapping into those educational entrepreneurs that we know are out there and helping them to not hit the roadblocks that we hit, but really get out there, teach kids and make not just successful schools, not just successful students, but make a success of this entire ESA experiment. Well, if you’d like to learn more about Primer, more about AFC, go in the show notes. Their websites are there. You can learn more. I encourage you to do so. I named a couple other organizations in there as well. We’ll try to link to all those. But of course you can always just reach out. We’re happy to have a conversation about school choice, about whatever your big issue is. We at DonorsTrust are here to help donors to have an impact with their giving. It’s not just to give simpler, though we do that, not just give in a tax advantage way, though we do that too. But we really want you to live out your values and have the impact towards the organizations and the causes that you care about. So reach out. TellMeMore@DonorsTrust.org is the email or visit DonorsTrust.org. Poke around there, you can reach us through the website as well. We would love to talk to you, whether we’re already working with you or maybe we could work with you. Well, that’s it for today. As always, thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.