Week in Review: School Choice Thrashes Teachers Union Scheme

It’s massive news that’s reverberating across the nation: Arizona families have soundly rejected teachers unions’ last-ditch attempt to overturn a law that would give children the educational opportunity they deserve.

School choice opponents fell well short of the requisite 118,000 signatures needed to challenge the Goldwater Institute’s first-in-the-nation expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) to every student in Arizona, as the Secretary of State’s office confirmed. And America is taking notice. National media outlets ranging from The Wall Street Journal to National Review to Fox News to The Daily Wire to RedState have reported news about the teachers unions’ tremendous failure, originally exposed by the Goldwater Institute earlier this week.

The failure is a clear repudiation of an anti-parent agenda that claims bureaucrats are more equipped than families to make decisions about children’s education. And it shows that parents’ desire for choice in education can prevail over the union machine. As journalist and TV commentator John Stossel wrote in his nationally syndicated column, “School choice is winning in Arizona—and beyond.”

The Goldwater Institute is proud to have passed the gold standard for school choice in Arizona, and it will never stop working nationwide to empower parents around the country to take charge of their children’s education.

Read more at In Defense of Liberty.

Students Are Suffering, But Parents Have the Power

The results are abysmal. Recent nationwide statistics show that over the past two years, reading test scores for 9-year-olds dropped to their lowest point since 1990, and math scores fell for the first time since the federal government began tracking this data in the 1970s. Is it any wonder? Schools have been shuttered, and public education bureaucrats are teaching woke anti-American ideology instead of the ABCs and 123s.

Consider San Francisco: Only 47.2 percent of public school students exiting 8th grade were ready for high school, according to a report that also showed tragic racial disparities. These outcomes “should fuel parents’ desire to know what is being taught in the classroom and how schools are spending precious taxpayer dollars,” Goldwater Institute Director of Communications Mike Brownfield writes in The Orange County Register.

Parents can take advantage of public records laws using the Goldwater Institute’s new OpenMyGovernment.org tool, and they can push for academic transparency, a landmark reform created by the Goldwater Institute that opens the books on radical content in the classroom by requiring public schools to post their learning materials online. “They have the power to find out what is being taught in schools — and they should do it before it’s too late for their children’s education,” Brownfield writes.

Read more at The Orange County Register.

Know Your Arizona Ballot 2022

Here’s where the Goldwater Institute stands on the following measures that will be on the ballot for Arizona voters in 2022.

Prop 128 addresses the problem of out-of-state special interests funding legally questionable ballot measures by giving the Arizona Legislature the latitude to amend ballot initiatives that the courts determine contain unconstitutional or illegal language.

Prop 132 requires a 60 percent affirmative vote for any ballot measure seeking to increase taxes (same as the threshold for legislative tax increases), ensuring a high burden for tax hikes.

Prop 309, The Arizonans for Voter ID Act, requires voter ID for all forms of voting, making the illegal practice of harvesting ballots nearly impossible.

Prop 209 would severely inhibit ALL lenders from collecting on both secured debts and judgments, shifting the burden of these unpaid debts to other borrowers and discouraging businesses from issuing credit.

Prop 211 would force private organizations that speak out on issues to publicly disclose all their donors. It’s a full-frontal assault on free speech that seeks to intimidate citizens from giving to organizations that challenge big government ideologies.

Prop 310 imposes a $200 million sales tax increase on Arizonans to fund fire districts, even though massive state and municipality budget surpluses could easily be used for this purpose instead.

Find out more at In Defense of Liberty.