Education boon—or boondoggle?

DEPENDING ON WHOM YOU ASK, Arizona is either the gold standard for school choice or a gold mine for petty swindlers.

In 2022, state lawmakers expanded a limited education savings account (ESA) program to include all students, regardless of income. It gives families the same dollar amount for each child, and parents use a debit card to access funds for any approved educational expense, including private school tuition, microschools, tutors, and homeschooling supplies.

Well … at least most parents do. Others have used the money to buy golf clubs and similar items not normally associated with education. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and the teachers unions who support her point to those items as evidence of fraud and misused tax funds. Hobbs has tried repeatedly to shut down or limit the program. But parents love it.

It was Hobbs’ predecessor who signed the ESA expansion into law. Months later, in 2022, teachers unions tried to put a repeal measure on the ballot. But they couldn’t get enough signatures. That’s left ­opponents staging periodic protests instead.

Waving placards denouncing ESAs at press conferences this year, they angrily insisted Hobbs cap the dollar amount the state uses for the universal plan. But Republicans still hold a majority in both the Arizona House and Senate, giving Hobbs few allies for making changes.

School choice isn’t new in Arizona. The state has one of the nation’s most robust charter programs as well as open enrollment across public school district lines. Both began in 1994. The state added tax-credit scholarships in 1997. It also became the first in the nation to pass an ESA program, although it included only a small number of students at first.

Arizona now has more school choice options than any other state, according to Matthew Ladner, senior adviser on educational policy at the Heritage Foundation. More than 450,000 Arizona children—about 40 percent of all students—attended a school other than their zoned public campus last year.

Ladner credits those options with strengthening education for all K-12 students in the state. According to research compiled by the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project between 2008 and 2019, Arizona students in grades three to eight experienced the fastest rate of improvement in the nation on standardized test scores.

“And this is in a state with a majority minority student population. That’s remarkable,” Ladner says. Historically, Arizona’s high school graduation rates have fallen near the bottom of nationwide rankings. But the past decade has seen improvements in all ethnic groups, with the biggest gains among Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American students.

Michael Petrilli, president of the pro-school-choice Fordham Institute, favors ESAs but hesitates to fully endorse Arizona’s system: “It’s sort of a free-­for-all, anything-goes program. It’s expensive.” He prefers charter schools as well as universal programs like Oklahoma’s, where poorer families get more funds than wealthy ones.

Arizona’s lack of a standardized testing requirement for ESA students also bothers Petrilli: “If there’s public money involved, then there needs to be some way to measure results. … With all their faults, standardized tests are the best tools we’ve got.”

And what about those golf clubs? Petrilli says Arizona—like other states that allow ESA funds for various educational expenses—needs to be vigilant about what qualifies as a legitimate expense. But Ladner says most of the expenses questioned by critics turned out to be for true needs. For example, a paddle board purchase might not look legit—until it turns out it’s being used as balance therapy for a child with cerebral palsy.

Private school options

• Education Savings Accounts (ESAs)
• School Vouchers
• Tax-Credit Education Savings Accounts
• Tax-Credit Scholarships
• Individual Tax Credits and Deductions

Other school options

• Charter Schools
• Magnet Schools
• Inter/Intra-District Public School Choice
• Homeschooling
• Hybrid Homeschooling
• Online Learning
• Microschooling
• Town Tuitioning
• Personalized Learning
• Learning Pods

The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with vouchers provided by the Milwaukee Parental School Choice program. Since then, school choice options have mushroomed. Education Savings Accounts are popular now, but new models, including microschooling, are gaining ground.