Arizona Offers Blueprint for Parental Empowerment

The reverberations are echoing across Arizona, and across the whole nation – the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office announced last week that teachers unions’ last-ditch effort to overturn the state’s landmark universal school choice reform has failed. Now, America can look to Arizona’s first-in-the-nation model of a groundbreaking, statewide expansion of school choice to any family that wants it.

Special interests fell well short of the requisite 118,823 valid signatures needed to challenge the expansion of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program to every student in the state. While the Secretary of State’s Office has yet to release a final signature count, the Goldwater Institute and the Center for Arizona Policy Action revealed that they only submitted 88,866 signatures, despite their false claims last month that they had turned in over 141,000.

Entrenched government interests felt threatened by parental empowerment, and they tried to maintain the status quo by fighting school choice with falsehoods and half-truths. But Arizonans didn’t fall for it. Instead, parents rallied to urge their fellow citizens to decline to sign the anti-parental rights group’s petition. And in so doing, they showed the rest of the nation that parents’ demands for school choice can prevail over the union spin machine.

Read the rest of the op-ed at the Arizona Capitol Times. 

Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as Director of the Institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.