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Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.
Few people take the time to read through the 1,772-page bill called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Department of Defense's annual policy legislation.
It's a "must-pass" bill that outlines spending priorities for the DoD for the following fiscal year. The NDAA often affirms pay raises -- the 2023 raise was 4.6%, military family programming requirements, Tricare health care policy adjustments impacting both active duty and veterans, and more. It's one of the pieces of legislation destined to directly impact millions of American lives, specifically in the service member, veteran and military families communities.
Much of the coverage of the bill focuses on grassroots advocacy performed by military spouses, veterans and nonprofits or slick well-paid industrial complex lobbyists hoping to score lucrative government contracts for their clients. We read the summary, learn what compromises have been struck, and move on to the next year's budget requests and priorities. What is less understood is how the sausage actually gets made.
As it turns out, it is military spouses and veterans, and the organizations that represent them, who deserve the credit for the at-times incremental improvements to military family…
This is National School Choice Week, and one of the better ideas along those lines comes in a bill introduced on Jan. 24 by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) to give education savings accounts to military families.
The legislation is co-sponsored by Sens. Mike Braun (R-IN) and Tim Scott (R-SC) .
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The U.S. armed forces strive to provide decent education for service members, but as with any large bureaucracy, sometimes parents believe the quality isn’t up to snuff. And sometimes children have special needs or heightened abilities that cannot best be served by a large, institutional program. Banks cites evidence that “roughly a third of military families feel as though the quality of their children’s education is so inadequate that they [the service members] have considered quitting [the armed forces altogether]. This is both a serious national security issue and a moral issue.”
As described by the sponsors, education savings accounts “are parent-driven accounts that allow families to customize their children's educational experiences. ... Eligible uses of account funds include cost of attendance at a private institution, online learning programs, private tutoring, tuition and fees for college…