Hint: It’s not about improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged children

I was reminded by someone today that back in the 1970s, Arizona public schools were 19th in the nation for funding. Now, they rank 49th. This didn’t occur in a vacuum, nor was it by accident. Rather, it has been, and is, a concerted effort to wrest power from the people by defunding the common good and destroying our sense of community. 

One of the most effective routes to this end is to privatize public education and Arizona has been the pace car. From being the first state to allow charter schools in 1994, to leading the effort to offer dollar-for-dollar tax credits to fund private school scholarships in 1997, Arizona has leaned into the school privatization effort. Although the path hasn’t always been a straight line, (an initial voucher attempt was ruled unconstitutional and the first try at universal expansion was successfully killed by a Save Our Schools AZ ballot initiative), AZ GOP lawmakers finally succeeded in passing universal vouchers in 2022.

Of course, those lawmakers didn’t do it on their own. The American Federation for Children (Betsy DeVos), Americans for Prosperity (Koch Brothers), American Legislative Exchange Council (national conservative bill mill), and the Goldwater Institute were all behind the voucher expansion here in Arizona and elsewhere. According to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting (AZCIR), Arizona’s Goldwater Institute has said, “It won’t stop until parents in every state in the nation are empowered to decide what education path truly meets their children’s needs”. 

What, I would ask, about the rest of our needs? These programs, despite proponent’s claims, have not saved taxpayers money. Rather, they’ve diverted and diluted the funding available to our district schools, where 80% of our students are educated. In an analysis of state education spending, Columbia University researchers found from 2008 to 2019, “Arizona was one of the few states where public school spending declined even as enrollment increased. Per-pupil public school spending dropped by 5.7% during that period, according to the analysis, while spending on voucher and tax-credit programs climbed by 270%”. According to the Arizona Department of Education, the total annual ESA awards for students enrolled in Quarter 3 of this year is $735 million this year. And to those who claim that there is a direct cost reduction to public schools when students take a voucher, that is only true if the student was attending a public school when they took the voucher. In FY 2023, only 21% of those taking vouchers were in public schools at the time indicating families are likely using vouchers to subsidize expenses they had formerly covered. As of March 2024, AZ DOE claimed the number has risen to 61.5%. Regardless, when a public school student leaves to take a voucher, there are always fixed costs that the public school can’t reduce when one or a handful of students leave (bus routes, number of teachers required, utility consumption, etc.”). In the meantime, tightened funding hampers our public school leaders in ensuring facilities are well-maintained, and that transportation, technology, and other needs are addressed.

These programs also offer us no real accountability. Private schools aren’t required to participate in state or national testing, nor to publicly report the efficacy of their educational efforts with indicators such as grades and graduation rates. This might have been okay when parents self-funded their children’s private education, but it is not when taxpayers foot the bill. We have a right to know how those tax dollars are spent and whether or not we are getting an adequate return on our investment. Instead, the GOP-led Legislature has resisted any attempts to introduce more accountability into the voucher program. 

Of course, this is all by design. If schools (whether it be private schools, homeschools, micro-schools, or religious schools) accepting vouchers aren’t required to report on academic progress, they can’t be compared to public schools. This allows voucher proponents to make claims that can’t be supported with data. And, the more funding that is cut from our public schools, the harder it is for them to succeed. As Maria Polletta from the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting writes, “The harder you make it for public schools to succeed, the easier it is to sell the alternatives. And, plenty of well-financed conservative groups are working to do just that”. This leaves us to ask ourselves what’s in it for them.

I’d argue that the desire to maintain and grow their power and wealth is driving privatization proponents. We already have proof that vouchers work better for well-resourced students than lower-income ones. This dynamic, (according to Professor Derek Black who specialized in the intersection of constitutional law and public education), “will continue to exacerbate segregation and create a fragmented educational landscape”. Black goes on to say, “The people who propose these types of things, in my mind, are either highly ignorant of or highly dismissive of a 200-year commitment to public education with the understanding that democracy itself rests upon it.” Or maybe, just maybe, they know exactly what they are doing…