Education choice tax credits from the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) are no longer a hypothetical. They’re here. And with them comes a pivotal moment for American public education. These tax credits, alongside the rapid expansion of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), are accelerating us toward an environment that looks increasingly like a publicly funded education marketplace of public and private providers for core and ancillary services.

Markets – including publicly subsidized ones – rarely shape themselves into engines of equity without intentional design. These new choice mechanisms will either exacerbate inequity or make big strides toward resolving it. The difference will lie entirely in the rules we set now.

The Marketplace Is Coming. We Must Think Far Ahead.

Many wealthier families have always assembled their child’s education from a menu of public and private providers, both within and beyond the school day. Extracurriculars, summer programs, tutoring, test prep, supports for mental health & wellbeing that support their child’s educational outcomes. Homeschooling families across the economic spectrum curate their education approach too. School districts have embraced these opportunities as well – like dual enrollment and early college programs that enable students to attend college courses during the school day; or shared technical centers, vocational programs, and apprenticeship programs that allow students to spend partial days with specialized providers. To some extent, special education functions this way, with IEP-driven “bundles” for related services.

But with ESAs and now tax credits, the floodgates are opened.

Today, these are managed options – often available to those most over- or under-served by the standard education system. Tomorrow, they could be curated education programs – bundles of services designed around a learner’s (and their family’s) needs, priorities, interests, and schedule. It’s the logical endpoint of a growing marketplace, with growing resources, and a movement toward unbundling education.

First, to state it clearly – after decades of research, we largely know what matters in education: good teachers, quality content to teach, and the right conditions to teach it (enough time, support, etc.). And like many, I worry that this structural shift may take our collective eye off the ball – adding choice for choice’s sake and not for quality’s sake.

But, I’m a pragmatic optimist. So on the upside, what could a high quality, accessible education marketplace look like? Think:

• Real personalized learning pathways, pulling from myriad providers and content sources to support each student’s learning journey and interests.
• Workforce-aligned programs coordinated across multiple vendors aligned with community priorities.
• Flexible schedules that combine academic, social-emotional, and extracurricular learning.
• AI-supported recommendation engines that help families assemble a package of providers.
• An intentionally coherent school day and year that aligns with parents’ work schedules.
• Infrastructure supports like transportation providers that make this all pragmatically possible for families.

Early sketches and examples of this vision already exist in several state ESA programs, online programs with course choices, dual enrollment options, and microschool options, among others.

The question is if (and when) this shifts to the predominant market structure, not just an alternative for those under- or over-served by the current system. If we accept that this is a plausible future (and the policy trends strongly suggest it is), then the urgent question becomes: What must we build today to ensure such a system expands opportunity rather than cements inequity?

A Few Risks, Challenges, and Concerns to Consider Before Moving Forward

If we allow the marketplace to evolve without guidance or guardrails, several risks emerge:

• Affluent navigators dominate the system, gaining access to high-quality curated bundles while low-income families and students with special needs lose access to what works today.
• The system becomes overly complex and burdensome for parents, who face unmanageable fragmentation that they don’t have time or resources to navigate. (Think summer coverage planning today, where parents patch together paid and unpaid services in a frantic frenzy.)
• Provider quality becomes opaque, with no meaningful accountability beyond marketing claims.
• Funding flows become unpredictable, threatening the sustainability of both public schools and high-quality nonprofit providers, while public transparency dissipates.
• Inefficient spending balloons, as dollars chase activities rather than outcomes and unqualified market entrants seek to make money above impact.

We Need to Start Building Tomorrow’s Infrastructure Today

To avoid these pitfalls, we need to ask ourselves what an effective future looks like, and backwards map from the long-term vision to today’s structures of governance, funding, and accountability.

Ideally, this is done in connection to, and not separate from, understanding where a given state is on its academic success trajectory and how system changes can be leveraged toward needs.

This includes:

Governance that protects equity, responsibility, and coherence.

We will need:

• Neutral entities or platforms that help families navigate options.
• Transparent data systems that follow students across experiences.
• Rules and mechanisms to prevent predatory or low-quality providers from entering the system.

Funding models that prioritize efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.

We will need:

• Clear definitions of what counts as a “public good” within a fragmented ecosystem and should be supported by public funds.
• Alignment across spending rules and allowable use of public funds.
• Guardrails to prevent inequitable upcharges and hidden fees.
• Transparency into the overall cost of our full system, acknowledging the inherent costs of choice.
• Cost models for discrete services that reflect real costs for programs and services like tutoring, transportation, enrichment, and mental health. (Without this, we risk repeating the market failure of market-based rather than cost-based child care.)

Accountability that measures value, not just compliance.

This means:

• Providing clear and consistent rules based on sound and transparent rationale for what student needs market-based programs must serve, including special education needs.
• Acknowledging the importance and unique role of public school districts in meeting state constitutional requirements.
• Shifting from “What did we spend money on?” to “What value did the investment generate for students?”
• Investing in data systems that enable transparency to families and taxpayers alike.

Families Must Have a Voice in Shaping This Future

A marketplace without meaningful family voice is not a choice system – it’s a vendor system.

Families must play a role in:

• Co-designing curated pathways
• Defining what quality looks like
• Identifying which services meet their needs and which gaps persist
• Participating in governance structures that oversee the ecosystem

Without intentional design, the system risks being shaped by providers and policymakers for families, rather than with them. And that sounds a whole lot like what we have today.

Districts Can Lead, If They Get Smart About Strategy

I don’t hide the fact that I believe districts will remain the backbone infrastructure of a choice system, at least for the near-to-medium term future. We must take a long, hard look at how we uplift them (or don’t) to play this invaluable role. But that’s not an excuse for stagnation.

Public systems must reorient their business models and culture. Otherwise, they risk being undercut by private vendors – not because the private vendors are better, but because public systems didn’t adapt quickly enough.

States like West Virginia, Utah, and Florida are tiptoeing into this future. West Virginia’s “Hope Scholarship”, Utah’s “Utah Fits All Scholarship”, and Florida’s “Family Empowerment Scholarship” programs have explicit provisions enabling district schools and public entities to receive ESA funds. Districts there and elsewhere are becoming service providers, offering tutoring, high-demand courses, enrichment, and learning experiences à la carte to families using ESAs. They show us that traditional districts and charters are no longer just schools – they can be sellers in the future education marketplace.

This is an opportunity, not a threat, only if systems understand:

• What services families actually want
• Which services they can sustainably provide
• How to price those services
• How to measure whether the services create real value

Public education institutions can compete (dare I say thrive?) in a choice-driven marketplace.

They have assets that private vendors do not: expertise, scale, community trust, and often superior data.

But to participate successfully, districts and existing charters must:

• Understand what programmatic assets they have to offer grounded in actual demand, not assumptions
• Rethink accounting and build financial models to clarify what is sustainable
• Train or hire staff who understand market systems, including pricing, product marketing, and market-based communications.
• Create data systems that provide real-time information needed to compete and sustain.

This is not merely a policy shift. It’s a mindset shift and a capacity shift.

We Stand at a Fork in the Road

The expansion of tax credits and ESAs is transforming the education landscape faster than most policymakers anticipated, and more broadly than previous choice efforts. We can either:

A) Let the marketplace evolve organically, risking inequity, opacity, and fragmentation.

or

B) Deliberately design a marketplace that expands opportunity, protects children and families, promotes high-quality providers, and uses public dollars wisely.

If we want the latter, we must start planning for the long-term now: intentionally design the governance, funding, accountability, and family engagement structures we need today.

The education marketplace is arriving.

The question is whether we shape it, or it shapes us.