by Matt Beienburg
January 22, 2019
You’ve heard that “a
lie repeated enough times becomes the truth.” So what about setting a whole
playlist of falsehoods on loop? Unfortunately, as the media have discovered in
their coverage of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, this
approach is even more ruthlessly effective than replaying one fabrication alone.
In the spirit of National School Choice Week, let’s
take a look at one particularly false and tiresome refrain: the claim ESAs are
a hotbed of fraud and abuse.
For those unfamiliar
with the program, ESAs take a portion of what the state would have spent
covering the costs of a student’s education in a public school and allow
parents to instead use those monies for tutoring, educational therapies,
private school tuition, curriculum materials, and other teaching tools.
ESAs offer this opportunity for about two-thirds the cost of the roughly $9,500 per student per year that Arizona taxpayers spend on each public district school pupil once you factor in all the property, sales, and income taxes that go into supporting them. (For special needs students, public school funding and ESA awards both exceed $20,000 a year.)
Yet in coverage ranging
from The
Arizona Republic on the eve of the election to continued
local TV spots in recent weeks, journalists have been trumpeting the
message that ESAs are funneling hundreds of thousands of education dollars to
the pockets of opportunistic hucksters out buying designer perfumes rather than
curriculum materials for their kids.
And representing the peak of this coverage, the nationally respected journal Education Week extended this storyline’s circulation across the country with a stunningly deceptive report that stated: “according to a recent audit by the state’s attorney general…Arizona parents fraudulently spent $700,000 in fiscal 2018 on banned items and services” via the ESA program.
As a national, rather
than local, onlooker, EdWeek can certainlybe forgiven for mistakenly attributing
the report, which actually came from Arizona’s Auditor General, to the Arizona Attorney
General. What is harder to overlook, however, are two extraordinary misrepresentations
in EdWeek’s narrative, which are
emblematic of the broader reporting on the story.
First, the claim that
ESA parents “fraudulently spent $700,000” is simply false. For something to
count as fraud, there has to be deceit.
But unlike the Auditor General—who was careful to note that the misspending
arises from a host of circumstances—EdWeek
took the liberty of attributing the entire balance to fraudulent activity.
Under this assumption, Arizona’s
criminal masterminds include, for example, one ESA grandparent whose account
was closed for $15,000 of “fraudulent” infractions such as…(drumroll)…buying
educational games and supplies for her special needs grandson that weren’t explicitly
required by his at-home curriculum and thus not approved under the program. (For
a little perspective, next time you or a loved one is at wits’ end trying to
decipher which healthcare services are or are not covered by your
insurance—like when a hospital is “in-network”, but a certain doctor there
isn’t—perhaps you can appreciate the idea that parents might struggle to
navigate the dozens of pages governing ESA program rules and thus make
purchases that aren’t “covered.”)
But what about the
cases of actual fraud, you ask?
Well, in one case, an ESA
parent learned she had earned herself a spot among the highlighted culprits featured
in the Auditor General report for having had her card stolen and used to purchase cosmetics and clothes. Fraud? Most
definitely. A sign of a failed program? Not so much. (And fortunately, this
mom’s ESA funds were later returned to her account by the bank.)
But what about the other cases of fraud?
Well, this takes us to
misrepresentation #2. Conspicuously absent in the coverage by all three of EdWeek, The
Arizona Republic, and the recent TV
segments, is any discussion of the fact that the reported misspending
totaled about 1 percent of the
roughly $60 million
flowing to parents through the ESA program in the 2017-18 school year (meaning
that whatever fraction is actually even related to fraud is smaller).
But naturally, “99
Percent of ESA Funds Used as Intended” would be a less exciting headline.
And for a little extra
context, let’s pick another government-administered program that involves a
debit card: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as
food stamps. Hailed by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
not only as a pillar of the social safety net, but as an “effective
and efficient” one, SNAP chalked up $592.7
million of fraud and misspending in 2016. Coincidentally, that
translates to just shy of 1 percent of the program’s spending.
Of course, the takeaway
isn’t that we should stomach the more than half a billion dollars of misuse
taking place within SNAP. To the contrary, we should aggressively safeguard
taxpayer money. Yet ironically, as Dr. Matthew Ladner of the Arizona Chamber
Foundation has pointed
out, the very legislation
that would have expanded ESA eligibility to all Arizona families last year
would also have strengthened the accountability and transparency of the
program—requiring, for example, the state to contract with a financial
management firm to run the program, and mandating that the Department of
Education post information on all program expenditures online for maximum
transparency. But thanks to the efforts of the Arizona group “Save Our Schools”
(SOS) and other opponents of parental choice, that measure—including
the very ESA reforms that would have helped stem misspending and clarify
program guidelines for parents—was defeated.
So what’s the takeaway from
all this? That instead of drive-by soundbites and half-truths, the public
deserves an accurate portrayal of the ESA program. Indeed, the problem isn’t
that ESAs fall short in the face of evidence—it’s that those who abhor the idea
that parents should ultimately be able to choose the best educational avenues
for their children are dominating the airwaves. (I’ve written elsewhere,
for example, on the media’s egregiously inaccurate reporting on the program,
including manipulating data to bogusly claim that ESAs disproportionately
benefit wealthy families.)
Sure, it may be too
much to ask for favorable coverage of
choice programs like ESAs, but at this point, I’d be thrilled with some that’s at
least fair.
Matt
Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater
Institute.
