Recent criticisms of the Utah Fits All Scholarship suggest it lacks real accountability and fails to check whether kids are “actually learning anything.” But critics miss a key element that embeds academic accountability throughout the program: parents.

Aside from financial accountability to taxpayers, which lawmakers have strengthened each year through spending caps and outright banning certain expenses, the law intentionally puts parents in charge of academic accountability, or their child’s outcomes. That’s the right thing to do.

Parents using the scholarship personally assess whether their child is progressing in meaningful ways and make real-time education or curricular decisions based on that.

It’s the gold standard of academic accountability in education, because it is both supported in the literature and, crucially, required by law.

Utah law explicitly puts parents in charge of their children’s education and holds them ultimately responsible. It says that a “student’s parent is the primary person responsible for the education of the student, and the state is in a secondary and supportive role to the parent.”

Whether parents choose a traditional public school, charter school, private school, homeschool, or a taxpayer-funded education path through something like the Utah Fits All Scholarship program, they are responsible for determining whether their child is being sufficiently educated.

This is something education leaders and educators ought to celebrate. Rather than praising or (more often) blaming public or private educators for outcomes, parents retain accountability for their child’s learning. If a particular program isn’t working for their student, they are ultimately responsible and ought to be entitled to make a change.

Parents retain this central role, even though education policymakers make statewide policy. Looking at the law again, it says, “parents have the primary responsibility for the education of their children and elect representatives in the Legislature and on state and local school boards to administer the state public education system.”

State or local education policymakers may set certain requirements, but parents evaluate the policies as both consumers of public education and as voters of their elected representatives.

This is not to oversimplify public accountability nor to deny how difficult it can be to implement accountability measures, many of which have been heavily debated for years.

Look no further than the push for standardized testing in public schools, which came largely from innovative, reform-minded advocates, and then softened. Teachers’ unions have long pushed back against high-stakes testing, and parents are equally wary of the overuse of standardized testing to achieve accountability.

Utah provides testing opt-outs for certain assessments, giving parents an option if they feel their child’s progress isn’t well captured in a single test, who are navigating a student’s testing anxiety, or who are interested in protecting student data. Utah also prohibits teachers from being professionally evaluated on end-of-level assessment scores. Many find common ground here because it’s often noted that student achievement and growth are more holistic and complex than a test can reveal. Accountability is not a simple policy objective to achieve, but multiple types of feedback are useful.

More Utah parents using the Utah Fits All scholarship are sharing their stories of success, and the outcomes are significant. They regularly show how the program helped a child overcome a specific learning challenge after struggling with special needs, ADHD, or anxiety. They often highlight how a student discovered a love for learning after schooling experiences that left them with crushed self-confidence.

Importantly, academic accountability isn’t just getting feedback on how a student is doing – whether through a test score, portfolio review, or parent observation – it requires space for consequences too. If a child isn’t learning to read or write, there must be recourse for them, and quickly. Robust education choices through parents make this a reality without complicated incentive structures or statewide mandates administered through clunky though well-meaning bureaucracies.

Of course, just like public schools, some parents don’t do as well as they could at helping their students. If there are accountability measures to prevent this, they should be explored. But the exceptions don’t outweigh the good that comes from parental choice in helping students as individuals find success.

By elevating parents, the Utah Fits All Scholarship enables more accountability, not less, for academic outcomes.