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In 2022, Republicans in Arizona thought they had the niftiest idea ever: School choice for every family in Arizona, giving all parents, especially poor families, the chance to escape the “failing government schools” and use public tax dollars to send their kids to private and charter schools if they wanted! Under the state’s voucher law, taxpayers would foot the bill not only for public schools, but also for private school tuition and other expenses, truly making everyone equal!
Just one tiny problem, as ProPublica explains in a jaw-dropping exposé: It was open to all residents, including rich families who were already paying for their kids to go to pricey private schools, so instead of a lot of low-income folks “escaping” public schools with which they were dissatisfied, the program mostly subsidized people who could already afford private schools. The voucher law had been sold as a money-saver, since presumably it would simply shift tax dollars from bloated public school budgets to leaner, more efficient private schools. Instead,
Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.
No problem, though! To cover the shortfall (exacerbated by other revenue losses), all Arizona needed to do was slash other vital state programs, like cutting $333 million from water infrastructure, surely a luxury a desert state facing the climate crisis can go without. And $54 million was axed from a commitment to improve air conditioning in state prisons, because since when do criminals have a right to not die of heat stroke in their cells?
None of that has dissuaded other red states from wanting to copy Arizona’s “Empowerment Scholarship Account” voucher system, because the whole point of Republican control of state government is to gut public school funding to pay for private, often religious schools, which aren’t required to provide the range of services that public schools must.
The voucher system sure wasn’t sold as a money pit, ProPublica notes, no doubt suppressing the urge to say “of course it wasn’t, just like no other scam is sold that way”:
Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materials at the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”
But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.
So now the state is paying for public schools and for private schools too! And instead of old-style voucher programs that were targeted at low-income families, now it’s anything goes, with money not just for tuition at Catholic schools and prep academies, but also for
recreational programs for their kids like ninja warrior training, trampoline park outings and ski passes, or on toys and home goods that they say they need for homeschooling purposes. (The average ESA award is roughly $7,000.)
And that’s what Republicans want for every state: Limitless public spending on private schools, for freedom. If anything needs to be cut, maybe it should be all that expensive special education money for kids that Donald Trump thinks would be better off dead, because they cost a lot to teach and even then he doesn’t like to think about being in a room with them.
But wait! At least this frenzy of spending is helping the low-income families who want something better for their kids than the cruel leftist indoctrination factories known as government schools, right? Haha, you knew the answer the moment we started asking, because you are wise to our rhetorical tricks:
Most importantly, said Beth Lewis, executive director of the public-school-advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, only a small amount of the new spending on private schools and homeschooling is going toward poor children, which means that already-extreme educational inequality in Arizona is being exacerbated. The state is 49th in the country in per-pupil public school funding, and as a result, year after year, district schools in lower-income areas are plagued by some of the nation’s worst staffing ratios and largest class sizes.
Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on vouchers to help kids who are already going to private school keep going to private school won’t just sink the budget, Lewis said. It’s funding that’s not going to the public schools, keeping them from becoming what they could and should be.
Clearly, something is very wrong in Arizona. Maybe the Legislature should eliminate public schools altogether so parents will have to take their vouchers and use them for a private sector alternative. Fired government teachers could see if they could crowdfund the money to take over the closed schools if they think they were all that hot.
Oh shit, now that’s gonna become GOP policy too.
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