Parents want oversight of their children’s education; and they have the right to it. They also have the responsibility of educating their children. It’s not a conservative or liberal value, it’s a parental prerogative. Arizona law affirms this right to ‘direct the education,’ as well as the ‘moral training’ and ‘health care decisions’ of their own children.
But some in power just cannot accept that. A continual battle rages against programs that put parents in the driver’s seat, not bureaucrats.
Center for Arizona Policy (CAP) hosted a webinar last week to discuss the state of educational freedom in Arizona. You can hear the panel discussion here, which may answer some questions swirling around the many false claims in the news media and on social media. I want to highlight just a few main points here.
First, much of the controversy surrounds the popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program that provides about $7,000 to any Arizona student who finds a better educational environment outside the public school system. This money is about half what it costs to educate a student at a public school, as it is taken from just the state portion of the education budget. Federal and local education funds remain with the state, even though the state isn’t educating that student.
However, the contention goes beyond ESAs to other educational freedom programs available to Arizona families to ensure their zip code or financial situation doesn’t limit their options for best educating their children. Today, I focus primarily on the ESA program because that is the main target of attack at the moment.
Matt Beienburg, an expert on the subject at Goldwater Institute, points out that the initial false claim was that ESAs were siphoning money from public schools. That wasn’t true; lawmakers continued to increase public school funding and it has gone up substantially since the inception of the ESA program.
Now, opponents say ESAs are all-out bankrupting the state. They blame ESAs for turning a surplus into a deficit. Matt puts it in perspective, “The ESA program is a sliver, a tiny sliver of the total spending on Arizona education. To blame it and say this is something that’s causing excess costs in Arizona, is to scapegoat the program. The ESA program, as a percentage of the total funding on the public school system is about two percent.”
Matt goes on to remind Arizonans that the first year the ESA program went universal, the state ran a $2 billion surplus,
“So, in the same year that the ESA expansion took off and the majority of kids joined under the universal expansion, Arizona posted a $2 billion surplus. This last year, there was a deficit. That’s true. That was after Governor Hobbs had vetoed a budget for this year that was going to leave an over $1 billion cushion, and instead, the budget that ended up getting signed with her signature on it spent basically down to the dollar.”
Matt counters another common complaint: Many students now receiving ESAs didn’t come out of the public school system, they were already going to private schools or being homeschooled.
“Right. So, taxpayers we’re not paying for them because they weren’t in public school. That family was entirely shouldering that burden beforehand. They’re undeserving, and we shouldn’t be paying for them? That’s essentially what it boils down to. And the question is why not? Because they try to imply that any of these kids who joined the ESA program and weren’t switching from a public school are rich, undeserving, etc., etc. they neglect the fact that 50,000 students dropped out of the public school system during Covid, and a lot of those are probably still the ones who are now moving into things like the ESA program.”
CAP’s Legislative Counsel Bethany Miller addressed the common misconception that fraud and misuse of funds are rampant in the ESA program. Opponents locked on to parents using ESA funds to buy Legos. The news media took it and ran with it, painting such purchases as frivolous and self-serving. Bethany answered,
“Well, the truth about Lego sets is that Legos are never, never misspent funds. Legos are a critical tool for learning for children, for emotional and social development. We all know the benefits of Legos educationally for children. Those Legos have been huge for children who are experiencing autism; for their learning environment, for them to have achievement, to socially connect with other kids. So, you cannot waste money on Legos. And school districts for decades, have spent millions on Legos for their kids, not because they’re wasting taxpayer money, but because Legos and tools like that work.”
CAP’s VP of Policy Greg Scott reminds us of the intense effort to take educational freedom away from Arizona families,
“In the recently concluded legislative session, there were upwards of two dozen anti-educational freedom bills introduced in the Legislature. All of them sought to roll back, strictly limit, interfere with, or even eliminate school choice in Arizona altogether. And that’s not an exaggeration to say eliminate. There was a bill, HB 2562, and its companion, SB 1314, that would terminate the ESA program by 2032. HB 2809 would end the tax credit for contributions to STOs.”
These are just some of the efforts we face if anti-educational freedom lawmakers take control of the state Legislature.
I cannot cover all of the critical information on this page, so I urge you to listen to the panel discussion here.
CAP, the Arizona Christian Education Coalition, Goldwater Institute, and others are working on an educational freedom voter guide this year. That will be available in October, so stay tuned.
The educational freedom voter guide is in addition to CAP’s AZ Voter Guide for the general election, which can be pre-ordered here.
Visit CAP’s Policy Pages here to learn more about educational options and parent’s rights in education and elsewhere.
ICYMI:
- Read here how the National Review sees Arizona’s educational freedom programs and the attacks on them.
- Read here how The Federalist calls out AZ AG Kris Mayes on the unnecessary burdens she is trying to place on ESA families.
- Read here about a group of parents in Scottsdale that are fighting to keep sexually explicit books off school library shelves.