Hail the (ed) work-around.

Will it be $20 billion? Or $2 billion? Or $250 million?

That’s what parents are wondering after the Trump Administration put forward a widely varying array of price tags for its plan to fund school vouchers. The lobbyists, of course, are already pressing Congress and Education Secretary Betsy Devos to see if they can push through the largest appropriation possible.

But the extra zeroes don’t actually matter much. Even $250 million, enough for 25,000 children, will make an outsize difference. That’s because when it comes to innovation, a little does a lot. Especially when the producers (private, independent or charter schools) are already in place—schumpeterian “Ubers” just waiting for customers so they can disrupt, and improve, the petrified sector of K–12 education.

Parochial schools stand ready to accept school vouchers, and deserve them. But there are plenty of lesser-known academic Ubers primed to scale. Consider four such disruptors.

• The first disruptor is Classical Conversations. This home-school curriculum charges less than $1,500 a year for high school. Classical Conversations was founded by Leigh Bortins in 1997 with 11 students and the aim of restoring Western civilization, memorization, recitation and strong science and math to lesson plans. You won’t hear this too often on National Public Radio, but Classical Conversation’s curriculum now has more than 100,000 “seats,” i.e., registered students, and an academic performance most public schools only dream of. The curriculum is Christian but can be adapted to serve those seeking secular classical education.

• A second non-washington wonder is the BASIS schools project. Founded by economists Michael and Olga Block, BASIS started as a charter campus and then expanded to charter and private schools in Arizona, Washington, D.C., Texas, New York, California and, recently, Virginia. Unlike most other schools BASIS can boast that its pupils score as well as Singaporeans or Koreans in math and science, or Europeans in the humanities. The Blocks see the best future to be in private schools: “Education is too important to be left to charity alone,” Olga Block says. BASIS has close to 30 campuses but would have 1,000, absent regulators and if, as Block puts it, “Americans had an inkling of the type of truly excellent education they’re missing.” • A third plant that has sprouted without federal cash or friendship is a school system set up in North Carolina by entrepreneur Robert Luddy. Luddy runs his own natural experiment with charter, Catholic and private schools, all in his home state. There are far more applicants for the Luddy schools than there are seats. Greater demand from parents with Devos vouchers would permit these Luddy schools to expand. (Readers should know that Luddy is a fellow trustee at the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, where we fund another work-around: high school debate.)

• Then there are the Great Hearts Academies in

Arizona and Texas. These charter schools have waiting lists that run longer than their enrollment. They might be coaxed into increasing supply by expanding into the private-school business if families had the option to use vouchers or scholarships.

What all these educational disruptors have in common is that they are ready to scale. But their market is chained by its obligation to pay for public schools via property taxes. Parents have to pay twice if they want to send their children to independent schools. The scholarship money would make the investment in private school economically feasible, especially when more private options are available.

The main obstacle to large-scale voucher programs is funding. A source could be the repatriated profits of firms that are currently parking some $2.4 trillion overseas. Such a plan is advocated by Richard Hough III, one of the founders of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, a voucher-style charity that sends poor children to private or parochial schools. Under the Hough plan the federal government would forgive any tax owed by corporations repatriating cash on the condition that they allocate 10% of those profits, $2.4 billion, to a national endowment for grammar school scholarships. The amount would cover private, parochial and other scholarships for the families of a million children.

There is a cautionary note to be sounded here: That endowment could be subject to capture by the federal government, just as, say, the National Endowment for the Humanities has been. Even gradual support for smaller projects may be subject to federal meddling. “‘With the shekels come the shackles,” Robert Bortins, CEO of Classical Conversations, likes to say. And besides, in order to scale, these reforming schools need publicity as much as they need funding for candidates. The first impulse of Devos’ predecessors when they espied a project like the Luddy schools was to squash it.

Dollars matter. But it’s important not to forget what a difference having Betsy “Let the Money Follow the Child” Devos at Education represents. Washington’s disapproval has always been the biggest obstacle to true education reform, even at the local level. Anything else, we can work around.