Woke curricula and Covid lockdowns inspired frustrated parents to push for education reform.
Woke curricula and Covid lockdowns inspired frustrated parents to push for education reform.
T he news got lost in the tsunami of coverage over the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, but Arizona governor Doug Ducey is about to sign a new law that will allow every one of the state’s 1.1 million students to take advantage of an education scholarship to attend a school of their choice — public, private, religious, or charter.
School-choice advocates call the legislation the “new gold standard” for student freedom, one that will be a model for states across the country to emulate.
The Center Square, a website focused on state policy issues, reports that all of Arizona’s school-age children will be eligible for the Empowerment Scholarship Account. An ESA is a decade-old, state-funded account that allowed some parents to spend up to $6,400 a year on anything a student needs.
Up to now, ESAs have been limited to disabled students, those in badly failing schools, and kids on Native-American reservations. This coming year, legislative analysts believe that 25,000 students — double the current number — will use the expanded program and have access to up to $6,400 a year. I predict the program will then grow dramatically after parents learn about other families successfully using it to pay for everything from tuition for a private school to tutoring to homeschooling materials.
“And they said it couldn’t be done! The most expansive school choice program in the nation has passed the legislature and is on its way to the Governor’s desk,” Arizona house majority leader Ben Toma tweeted last Friday. The expanded ESA bill passed the state house 31 to 26 and the state senate by 16 to 10. Sadly, the vote was along party lines, as previous Democratic support for school choice has melted away.
GOP representative Jake Hoffman said the impetus for its passage was the “woke agenda” of many public schools as well as the fact that, during the pandemic, many parents learned that their kids were receiving a very low-quality education in the public schools. “Public sentiment against public schools has boiled over,” Hoffman told me. “With the state having a $5 billion budget surplus, parents are demanding real reforms.”
The ESA program provides that $6,400 in student funding will follow the student, just as it already does each time a student leaves one public school for another public school. State and local taxpayers already spend more than $11,000 per pupil in public schools, and every public school will get some of the savings from students who use an ESA to leave the system — even though they are no longer serving that student. A 2021 report found that school-choice programs nationwide saved taxpayers an average of $7,500 per student that participated.
Kudos to Governor Ducey and Arizona legislators for giving parents the power to go around the Education Blob and take control of their children’s education.
“This win is the biggest school choice victory in U.S. history,” Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, told the news website Center Square. “Education funding is meant for educating children, not for protecting a particular institution. School choice is the only way to truly secure parental rights in education.”
A coalition of pro–public-school groups said the move came from a “corrupt Arizona legislative majority” that will be “making Arizona once again the laboratory for predatory national privatizers.” They vowed to repeat their 2018 success in blocking implementation of a previous school-choice effort. In a referendum, voters rejected the concept. But Toma countered, “We’ve learned from that election and have designed this measure to have broader support that will make a true difference in the choices parents have.”
This isn’t the first time that Governor Ducey has decided to take on the teachers’ unions. In January, he announced he was completely frustrated by Arizona teachers’ unions that were pushing for the shutdown of in-person learning in public schools. Study after study has shown that depriving kids of in-person learning has many negative consequences, including an increase in depression and suicide attempts, and steep declines in scores on achievement tests.
Ducey chose to announce that he would allow eligible families to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere if their public school closed. Any school that closed for even a single day because of Covid would see attending families earning less than $66,000 annually become eligible for $7,000 in child care, school-coordinated transportation, online tutoring, and school tuition. It’s no shock to reveal that the number of schools trying to close their doors plummeted.
I was born in Arizona, and I can say I’ve never been prouder of my native state than now. Kudos to Governor Ducey and Arizona legislators for giving parents the power to finally outflank the immovable Education Blob and take control of their children’s education.