Despite Arizona facing a surge in crime and a lack of affordable housing in recent years, Gov. Katie Hobbs has, for the third year in a row, produced a budget focused on attacking the ability of families to access school choice.
Her recently released budget plan seeks to tear down Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program (ESA), the most successful school choice program in the country, even as it fails to account for more than $800 million in statutorily required spending on the state’s Medicaid program.
This is fiscal mismanagement at its worst.
Indeed, while her office was botching its basic budgeting responsibilities, the governor decided to recycle the same failed policy platform as the past two years — waging war on families rather than solving the state’s most pressing issues.
Hobbs wants to punish parents for using vouchers
Her campaign against ESAs, which now serve more than 80,000 Arizona children across the economic spectrum, is absurd.
She even decried in her recent State of the State address that parents getting to choose the best possible education for their children is tantamount to “scamming Arizonans.”
As such, Hobbs now wants to economically penalize thousands of ESA families for seeking to educate their children outside of union-controlled settings.
As she declared in her address, “Our children deserve the best public education. Public education is the key to opportunity, security and freedom.”
Governor opposes ESAs, despite parents’ concerns
But why is it that these children deserve only the best that public education can provide, rather than the best that any education — public or private — could provide to a child?
Despite having benefited from a private school education herself, Hobbs has been remarkably consistent in opposing educational opportunities for others — opposing even the original ESA program that exclusively served vulnerable special education students.
A supermajority of her colleagues in the Arizona House voted in favor of providing educational opportunity to special education students in 2011 — yet the governor has unflinchingly opposed such opportunities for families regardless of their needs.
So, it is perhaps unsurprising that her latest proposal — a rehash of her attempt to repeal the entire program for all children — would continue to try blocking families from benefiting from the ESA program, while at the same time spending even more money to force Arizonans to subsidize the public school system at a much higher cost to taxpayers.
Unfortunately, this follows a pattern for Hobbs
Unfortunately, Hobbs’ decision to place the interests of government-operated entities over the needs of the families they’re intended to serve mirrors her policies across state government.
For example, even as homeless encampments such as “The Zone” in Phoenix degenerated into public health hazards, the governor vetoed legislation cracking down on their growth.
Voters had to take matters into their own hands and pass Proposition 312 last November to ensure local governments enforce basic public health and safety laws rather than look the other way, leaving families and small business owners to pay the price.
At the same time, despite at least some minimal face-saving efforts to endorse border security coming in Hobbs’ latest budget proposal, Arizonans might be forgiven for wondering how such gestures fit with her past vetoes of border enforcement legislation, which she labeled as “anti-immigrant.”
Hobbs’ budget shows her priorities are out of touch
Much like her attacks on families choosing to use ESAs, the governor has also decided to make it much harder for new home construction in Maricopa County, despite Arizona families facing a massive shortage of affordable housing.
For example, she recently directed the Arizona Department of Water Resources to impose new rules designed to stop development in the fastest growing parts of Arizona, even in areas without projected groundwater shortages.
Her actions necessitated the Goldwater Institute, where I work, to file a lawsuit against this overreach of executive power, much like the institute is suing government officials trying to micromanage how parents educate their children.\
In determining yet again to attack school choice in her (unbalanced) budget, while exacerbating the housing and crime problems plaguing our state, Hobbs has sent a clear message as to where her priorities lie:
Progressive politics trump the concerns of Arizona’s families.
This op-ed was originally published at AZ Central.
Matt Beienburg is director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute.
