by Matt Beienburg
February 22, 2019
Restoring
eligibility to families that already
belonged to the disadvantaged populations served by Arizona’s Empowerment
Scholarship Account (ESA) program is not an expansion—certainly not as
opponents of the ESA program mean to convey the word. Suggesting otherwise,
while perhaps satisfying and politically expedient, is cynical and misleading.
In
the wake of discredited national media narratives over Jussie Smollett and the
students of Covington Catholic School in the last month alone (the former now
facing felony charges for filing a false police report, and the latter now
pursuing legal charges against the Washington
Post over its coverage), I would plead with our state’s local news outlets
to distinguish themselves by holding to a higher level of journalistic
integrity—beginning with their coverage of Arizona’s ESAs and the ongoing
legislative debates surrounding the program—particularly SB 1395.
Senator
Sylvia Allen sponsored SB 1395 to address administrative challenges in the ESA program,
as echoed by the wave of ESA families who testified at the Senate Finance
Committee hearing about their struggles to navigate and comply with the
program’s rules, many of which have been changed on them from one year to the
next by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) with little, if any, notification.
But
while Sen. Allen explicitly separated SB 1395’s reforms from a concurrently
filed expansion bill (SB 1396) to allow the proposals to be treated
individually, Arizona’s newspaper outlets have been almost dizzying in their
embrace of the talking points of Save Our Schools (SOS) Arizona and Democratic
lawmakers opposed to the ESA program. As the logic goes, Arizona voters
rejected Prop. 305 (which would have expanded ESA program eligibility to all students
statewide), so anything that can be tied to “expansion” in even the mildest
terms threatens to violate the voters’ will.
Headline
Exhibit
A: “Senate Panel OKs new school voucher bill, despite recent
rejection by Arizona voters.” Headline Exhibit
B: “New Efforts to Expand
Arizona Education Voucher Program Advance at Legislature.” Nevermind that the
bill’s purpose and primary impact would be to improve the operation of the
program—there’s a whiff of expansion, and that must be highlighted above all
else.
The
Arizona Mirror then touted
this week that the fiscal impact estimates of SB 1395 “concluded what
was obvious to everyone but the GOP backers of the bill: It expands enrollment
and will thus cost the state more money.” (Before pointing out the Mirror’s
decision to shrug off the context of the bill’s provisions, I wonder whether the
Mirror and others would also characterize the roughly 1,000 additional students
joining the program each year as an “expansion” being snuck past voters against
their will?)
So
for those whose only conduit to the bill’s Senate hearing was through the
filter of correspondents, I’d like to make very clear what this alleged
usurpation of the voters’ will actually entails:
Underlying
the charge against SB 1395 is the claim that the bill allows kids to use an ESA
if they reside near a D or F rated school, rather than actually attending one,
as required by law now.
But
what has been mentioned in precisely zero
of the news stories on this issue is that these students had already been eligible for an ESA and
had only lost that eligibility due to inconsistent language in the program’s
statute. Their eligibility is being restored,
not expanded.
Before
the current frenzy, most readers probably never stopped to wonder whether the D
or F rating that qualifies a student for an ESA refers to the student’s
neighborhood public school they’d be assigned to based on their zip
code, or whether it means whichever school the student ends up attending, even
if it might be miles further away from their home.
Well,
right now, the answer depends on and actually changes based on what grade the student is in. For a kindergartener,
the relevant rating is based only on where they live, and the rating applies only to the nearest school. But for a second-grader it’s
based on the where they attend,
and the rating can apply to either a school or school district.
Maybe that seems convoluted, and that’s exactly the problem. SB 1395 is
intended to eliminate the disparity in the language.
So
let me address the charge that—regardless of the merit or intent of the reform—this
still constitutes expansion: As I stated in my testimony at the bill’s
Committee hearing, yes, a student could become eligible under SB 1395, but that
student would have already originally been
eligible as a kindergartener and lost the
eligibility just because they had tried attending a public school further from
their neighborhood, rather than immediately turning to an ESA or languishing in
the D or F rated public school down the street.
So,
no, it is not a new student who was never eligible. If that family had wanted
to put the student into an ESA in kindergarten, they could have done so. But because
they tried making it work in public school and sent their child to a campus
someplace further away and then realized that approach still wasn’t working for
them, they’d be out of luck and discover that they’d been shut out from the ESA
program, even though they continue to reside in the exact same place, near the
exact same failing school as before.
So
yes, it is true, that for the sliver of families who live near a D or F rated school
(less than about 10 percent of students) AND who moved to that neighborhood after their kids were kindergarteners
(surely the vast minority of that 10 percent) AND who had moved away from a higher-performing neighborhood
where they wouldn’t have qualified as a kindergartener in the first place, AND
who then enrolled in a public school outside their new neighborhood school, AND
then decided they wanted to get an ESA after spending at least 1 year in that
public school…yes, they would constitute a new population who was never
previously eligible for an ESA. But this tortured hypothetical is not grounds
for labeling SB 1395 as an expansion bill.
Again,
this is not about expansion or bringing in a new class of students who qualify;
this is about eliminating confusion, frustration, and needless complexity in
the program.
As
I recently wrote elsewhere,
there are indeed ESA expansion bills that have been introduced this session,
and those are appropriate grounds for a spirited debate over the future of the
program. But to claim that supporters of SB 1395 are somehow “disingenuous”
because the facts on the ground don’t fit into the headlines of the day is
beneath the journalistic decorum Arizonans deserve.
Matt Beienburg
is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.
