As students across the state continue to find new opportunity through Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, the total number of children served has reached 100,000 and counting.
But now, the same sorts of union activists who called for shuttering schools during the pandemic and who unleashed unprecedented learning loss upon our public school students are now trying to smother the state’s flourishing ESA program. Despite the effort to paint this campaign as “protecting education,” it is nothing more than direct attack on students and families. Among its various politically motivated, economically backwards proposals, it would:
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- Disrupt the education of thousands of children by throwing them out of the ESA program. Nearly 40,000 students all across the income spectrum have switched from public schools to an ESA. Shutting off access to this program based upon arbitrary income levels (that don’t even account for the number of children a family has) does nothing to advance stability or opportunity for our students. It simply puts the thumb back on the scale pushing students toward government operated schools rather than the schools that best meet the needs of each child.
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- Confiscates college savings from students in military families, families who’ve adopted kids out of the foster care system, students coming from Native American reservations, special education families, and more. ESA funds help serve students throughout their educational careers, but this new act would rip away any and all savings that families have worked to build for their children, regardless of family income.
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- By pushing families toward college debt rather than college savings, this latest plan doubles down on the same failed approach that’s cost taxpayers billions picking up the tab for student loan payments after the fact rather than encouraging savings up front.
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- Transfers funding from even the lowest-income ESA families toward higher income students attending public schools, whose per pupil funding amounts are often already double each child’s ESA award.
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- Punishes families who save year to year and forces the wasteful spending habits of government onto families. This act implements a nonsensical 100% annual tax on families who try to economize and save their ESA funds for future years, such as for high school–when tuition & expenses generally increase–or for college. (Even special education families are penalized 100% after the second year).
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- This “use it or lose it” system of funding would force parents to blow all remaining funds in the final weeks of each year, just like a wasteful government bureaucracy, rather than spending them carefully with an eye to the future.
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- Triple taxes ESA families. Even for those who would be able to sacrifice and shoulder the financial costs of keeping their children in a private or home-based program, this new act would result in 3 layers of redundant taxation:
- 1) ESA families already pay income, property, and sales taxes to fund other students in the public school system.
- 2) Every ESA student already forfeits their $1,000 share of funding from the state Classroom Site Fund, which is sent back to the public school system when they switch to an ESA.
- 3) Now these families will be taxed a third time by having any ESA funds they’ve saved taken from them 100%.
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- Pushes families into higher cost, lower performing schools. This act would continue to require Arizona taxpayers to subsidize the cost of schooling for even the wealthiest families who send their children to a public school, while punishing families if they instead choose a lower-cost ESA.
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- Advertises phony “protections” against spending on non-educational items, which are already illegal under the current program. State law and adopted State Board of Education program rules already explicitly prohibit purchases like telephones, televisions, gift cards, jewelry, large appliances, bounce houses, etc.
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- Threatens to block parents from buying basic school supplies and grind the ESA program to a halt with mindless bureaucratic red tape. This act doubles down on the illegal efforts (already being challenged in court by the Goldwater Institute) to restrict families to purchasing only items that are connected to “approved curricula.” Already, such requirements have led to absurd outcomes like blocking parents from buying children’s books like “Brown Bear Brown Bear, What do You See?” and requiring parents to submit written explanations justifying why they are buying pencils for their children.
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- Implement unlimited state control over private education: This act specifically eliminates state statute that requires the government to ensure that a new “law is necessary and does not impose any undue burden on qualified schools.” In fact, this new proposal declares, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as limiting further regulation of the ESA voucher program,” which includes regulation of qualifying private schools throughout the state.
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- Subject private schools to the same state testing regime that has produced proficiency rates less than 40% among Arizona public schools, and/or condition their ability to operate on gatekeeping “accreditor” organizations—the same types of organizations that have led to a failure of higher education by preventing new, higher quality entrants that would help ensure competition and keep tuition costs from rising.
This act will do nothing to improve outcomes for students, families, or the state of Arizona. Rather, it amounts to an ideologically driven assault on the educational opportunity of our students. Arizonans deserve better.
