Penn Hill Group Vice President Lindsay Fryer was quoted in a December 30 Education Week article, “Tricky Balance in Shifting From ESSA Blueprint to K-12 Reality.” Fryer commented on President-elect Trump’s opportunities for expanding school choice:

“Plenty of opportunities for expanding school choice are already written into the law, said Lindsay Fryer, who worked as an education aide to Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, when Congress was writing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).”

Fryer noted that:

“States can reserve up to 3 percent of their Title I dollars and channel it to purposes such as public school choice, distance learning, personalized learning, tutoring and Advanced Placement course-taking. Already, under ESSA, choice can be utilized in a broader sense than where we hear the rhetoric now, said Fryer, who is now a vice president at Penn Hill Group, a government relations firm in Washington.”

Fryer stated that ESSA offers States a chance to shift their thinking:

“States have, for so long, been in compliance mode, the bureaucratic back-and-forth of, ‘Can I do science tests this way?’ Fryer said. Now is the opportunity for States to figure out what they want to do, she said. States will learn a lot from each other as these plans move forward.”