What Are We Actually Buying for Kids?
The provider is not the outcome, and the bundle is not sacred. The important question is: what do kids actually get?
This memo is for: district leaders, funders, policy people, school operators, parent advocates, and anyone spending money because they believe it will help kids learn.
Use it in: budget meetings, grant reviews, school-design conversations, tax-credit fights, and any room where adults defend the system before naming what kids are supposed to get.
If you only have a minute: My LinkedIn feed has started putting two education conversations next to each other. In one, people talk openly about education as a set of sectors, services, investments, and purchases. In the other, American education people keep fighting over which provider deserves protection. The purchasing frame forces a better question: what learning outcomes are we actually trying to buy for kids?
I have started following more people who work in international education and private schools, which means my LinkedIn feed has gotten strange in a useful way. One minute, American education people are having the same provider fight we have been having for twenty years: districts, charters, private schools, homeschooling, microschools, public money, private actors, who counts, who is dangerous, who deserves protection.
Then I scroll again and see ministries, school groups, and investors talking openly about the education economy. Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education shows up in that stream a decent amount. The language is about investment, growth, services, and the industries sitting underneath schooling.
The investment pitch does not do much for me. Plenty of people have figured out how to make money around education without making education better for kids. But the contrast did make me stop. In one conversation, education is a bundle of purchases. In the other, we keep pretending the real question is which provider deserves moral protection.
That is where my mind went. Not to investment, but to purchasing.
The Bundle Lets Adults Hide
Most education debates start with the provider.
District school. Charter school. Private school. Homeschool. Microschool. Magnet program. Vendor. Nonprofit. Tutoring provider.
Then we fight about the provider. Is it public? Is it private? Is it equitable? Is it regulated? Is it democratic? Is it part of the system or outside the system?
Some of those questions matter. But they also let adults skip the harder one: What are we trying to buy for kids?
A school is not one thing. It is a bundle. It includes adults, curriculum, transportation, food, space, peers, time, safety, relationships, support, and accountability. Some pieces are strong. Some are weak. Some are expensive because they matter. Some are cheap because adults have decided they are secondary, even when kids experience them as central.
The word “school” hides all of that. So does the word “system.”
Every Purchase Carries a Theory of Learning
A parent is not only choosing a school. They are trying to buy some mix of safety, challenge, belonging, convenience, adult attention, opportunity, and hope.
A homeschool parent is not just rejecting the system. They are assembling curriculum, time, community, flexibility, and a learning rhythm they believe will work better for their kid.
A microschool founder is not just launching a cute small school. They are buying or building space, staffing, curriculum, trust, insurance, and enough family demand to make the thing survive.
A district is not just operating schools. It is purchasing learning conditions at scale. Some it builds in-house. Some it buys. Some it regulates. Some it ignores until families with more money buy around the system.
That is where the frame starts to expose things. Once you ask what learning outcomes we are purchasing, food stops looking like a side issue. Transportation stops looking like logistics. Buildings stop looking like fixed assets. Curriculum stops looking like procurement.
They all become part of the purchase. Not because everything matters equally. It does not. Because kids do not experience the system in categories that match adult budgets.
We Pretend Some Costs Are Not Instructional
There is a quiet rule in a lot of education conversations: push as much money as possible toward teachers, curriculum, and direct school operations. Hold everything else as low as you reasonably can.
That instinct makes sense. Nobody wants bloated overhead. Nobody wants money leaking into adult systems that do not touch kids. But the rule can get stupid fast.
If transportation determines whether a child can access a better school, transportation is buying a learning outcome. If food determines whether a child is awake, calm, and ready to learn at 10:30 in the morning, food is buying a learning outcome. If a building is unsafe, chaotic, poorly located, or hostile to the kind of learning adults say they want, the building is buying or blocking a learning outcome.
This is where some of our old arguments start to look thin. We say we care about outcomes. Then we protect the inherited bundle. We say we care about equity. Then we let families with money assemble better learning conditions around the bundle while telling everyone else to be grateful for the assigned version.
We say we care about innovation. Then we treat anything not delivered through the familiar provider as suspect before we ask whether it helps kids learn.
That is the bullshit.
Districts Should Be Better Purchasers
This is one reason I keep coming back to districts as platforms.
Not because districts should disappear. The opposite.
A serious district should be one of the best purchasers in the education system. It should know what it must provide directly, what it should coordinate, what it should buy from others, what it should refuse to buy, and what standards every provider has to meet.
That is public stewardship. Not owning every service. Not pretending the district payroll is the same thing as the public good.
The public obligation is access, quality, transparency, rights, stewardship, and accountability. Sometimes that means direct provision. Sometimes it means partnership. Sometimes it means letting families use dollars in more flexible ways under clear public rules. Sometimes it means saying no to a provider selling magic.
The point is not to worship markets. The point is also not to worship the existing bundle. The purchasing frame makes both sides show their work.
The Tax Credit Is a Purchasing Question
This is also why the federal scholarship tax credit keeps pulling at my attention.
A lot of people want to debate it as a school-choice fight. That is not wrong. It is part of the fight. But it is not the only useful question.
A better question is: what can this money buy for kids, under what rules, and with what accountability?
Tutoring, transportation, career-connected learning, mental health support, better food, and small learning environments are all possible purchases. That does not mean everything should count. It means the design question matters.
Who gets access? Who decides? What qualifies? What happens when the provider fails?
Those are better questions than the bumper-sticker version of the debate.
Use This
In your next budget or grant conversation, ask: What learning condition are we purchasing for kids, and how would we know if they actually got it?
When someone defends a school, program, provider, or funding stream, ask: Are we protecting the provider, the bundle, or the outcome?
Before saying a service should be in-house or out-of-house, name the public obligation first: access, quality, rights, transparency, stewardship, and accountability.
I am not trying to turn education into a shopping cart. I am trying to make adults say what they believe their spending actually buys for kids.
Once you separate the provider, the purchase, the kid, and the outcome, some of our cleanest arguments start to look a lot less clean.
That is usually where the useful work starts.