The AZ Republic recently published at least six articles and columns about Arizona’s Tuition Tax Credit program, and there may be more coming. Reporter Alia Beard Rau deserves credit for being at the forefront of the Republic’s work on the issue. For anyone who wants to dig deeper into the issue, I link to the Republic pieces at the end of the post.
Tuition tax credits are sometimes referred to, accurately, as backdoor vouchers. An Arizona taxpayer “contributes” money to one of the state’s private School Tuition Organizations which give out private school scholarships, then the taxpayer gets 100 percent of the “contribution” back in the form of a credit on income taxes. “Contribute” $1,000, pay $1,000 less in state taxes. The result is, the taxpayer foots the bill. It’s a private school voucher program by another name. Like the more recent Education Savings Accounts, aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids, tuition tax credits are carefully crafted to get around the state constitution’s prohibition against using state funds for religious education. If, unlike me, you like private school vouchers, you probably like the programs. If you think the tax credits are a good idea because they help poor kids go to private schools, well, they help rich kids go to private schools too. These programs continue to grow, with the goal, stated by many Republican legislators, of offering vouchers to every student in the state.
The longest and most comprehensive piece in the Republic is Arizona private-school families cash in on state’s tax-credit program, which includes a great interactive map that shows every Arizona private school that receives the tax credit money and how much they get. The others focus on specific issues.
I could go on almost endlessly about tuition tax credits as I have in the past, mainly on Blog for Arizona when the topic was first spotlighted in 2009. I won’t, especially since the Republic has done a good job exploring the topic. Instead, I’ll focus on a few issues I think are especially interesting.
Enrollment in Arizona’s private schools dropped since the Tuition Tax Credit program began in 1997 according to Alia Beard Rau.
Arizona’s private-school enrollment in 2012, the most recent year available, was nearly 2,000 students lower than it had been since before the tax-credit program was started. Public and charter schools in Arizona during that same period have grown by more than 400,000 children.
Put that enrollment drop next to the $140 million spent on Tuition Tax Credit scholarships for this year alone. That means, even with the state injecting a $140 million carrot to lure parents, private schools are less attractive today than they were 18 years ago, which is especially true if you factor in the population growth which added 400,000 students to public schools during the same 18 year period. Voucher advocates tell us how superior private schools are, how every parent should have a chance to send children there, and yet parents are choosing them less often. This is a national trend, by the way. Private school enrollment is down more than 10 percent over recent years. Catholic schools, for instance, are hurting for enrollment all over the country. Many of them are shutting down. It’s fair to say that vouchers are an attempt to prop up many private schools falling on hard times.
How many scholarships do STOs give out each year? Rau says the number is 57,000. What’s the total Arizona private school enrollment? Around 62,000. We can learn a few things from those two numbers. First, a hell of a lot of private school students are having their tuitions subsidized by the state, though probably not as many as the number makes it look like, because . . . Second, that 57,000 number is deceptive, since that’s the total number of scholarships given out. There’s no way to find out how many students double, triple or quadruple dip into the voucher pool by getting money from a number of STOs. Third, when advocates for the program tell you the average scholarship is about $2,500, take that with a grain of salt. If, as is likely, many students are getting more than one voucher, the actual amount a given student receives is likely significantly higher.
Finally, there’s Arizona Senator Steve Yarbrough, one of the major proponents of the tuition tax credit program and, not coincidentally, the executive director of the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization. Republic columnist Laurie Roberts estimates how much Yarbrough brings in from ACSTO. He gets $145,000 in salary and other compensation directly from his STO. He co-owns HY Processing that takes care of some of the way money comes into and flows out of the STO. ACSTO pays HY about $500,000 for its services. He collects $52,000 in rent since he owns the building. And that’s only a partial accounting of the bucks Yarbrough makes from his pet legislative project. Ka-ching!
Here’s a list of Republic articles, columns and editorials on Tuition Tax Credits.
Arizona private-school families cash in on state’s tax-credit program
$100,000 salary for Arizona scholarship program advocate
Sen. Steve Yarbrough makes out like a …legislator … on tax-credit tuition program
Arizona boarding school takes advantage of school tax credit program
Brophy uses tax credits to make tuition more affordable
Sugar daddies at top of tuition tax credit reforms
This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2015.
The AZ Republic recently published at least six articles and columns…even though they have been upheld as Constitutional?
This looks like an attack on the right. Could it be for the attack on Planned Parenthood?
Political types seem to be out to destroy the American reality.
No wonder Trump is leading in the polls. I for one am sick and tired of this scorched earth selfish behavior.
Steve Yarbrough is such a crook. We use one of the other companies to send funds to our church’s pre school. And we brought up this jerk to the school board and told them they ought not promote this outfit.
A quote from one of the articles you link: “’They are literally shifting public money from public schools to private schools,’ said Dana Wolfe Naimark, president and CEO of the advocacy group Children’s Action Alliance.
No. They are not “literally shifting public money from public schools to private schools.” They are literally reducing the cost burden on public schools by removing students from the public system that the public system would otherwise have had the expense of educating. The public school doesn’t have the expense of educating that child, so it doesn’t receive the tax money that the state provides to pay for the cost of that. Another institution does the work and supplies the facilities associated with educating that child. They receive the money (or in most cases, SOME of the money) that would have gone to the public school. If tens of thousands of children are getting better educations as a result, what’s the problem with this policy?
We need to revise our public policy to better regulate and oversee the private sector and to dis-allow “schools” that are demonstrably not serving children’s best interests. But if we eliminate tax credits now, across the board, as you seem to advocate, we will put many worthwhile non-profit institutions implementing progressive educational practices out of business together with the bad actors in the “private” sector. In a context in which anyone who is honest must admit that some of our “public” schools and districts find themselves unable to meet children’s needs, it will not serve ANYONE’s best interests — or the “common good” — for us to wipe out responsible alternative institutions.
You know Some Public Funds, I was thinking exactly the same thing. Private and charter schools have allowed the public schools to eliminate old inefficient campuses, sell them, reduce staffing or reduce class size and lessen the burden on taxpayers. $1,000 does not educate a child and the parents must still be paying the lion’s share of this.
This column seems to be agenda driven rather than fact based.
And yet I haven’t even scratched the surface of what is wrong with the public school system. Leave these folks alone.
Sonoran winds there are other organizations in Tucson you can donate to. I saw one on Craycroft by 22nd St…. Change to them.
This is good news. Anytime less money is given to the government schools to waste, the taxpayers are ahead.
Wow, Dave. As the comments illustrate, you can’t confuse the ideologues with facts.
Seems wrong that legislators can personally profit from their votes.
Wow, Pima Mujer — you’re right. People who are ideologically committed to reinstating the district school system’s monopoly on the use of all public funds applied to education cannot be confused or diverted from their agenda by the FACT that districts like TUSD have very serious, long standing problems that compromise their ability to function well and meet students’ needs and the FACT that many beneficial nonprofit educational institutions that do an excellent job implementing progressive educational principles like those articulated by the likes of John Dewey would be put out of business if all tax credits were abolished across the board immediately, without any effort to distinguish between institutions using them appropriately (in financial aid programs meeting demonstrated need) versus institutions abusing and mis-distributing funds through rogue STO’s.
To the mutual dismay of idealigues on both the left and the right, it turns out that getting public policy right involves attention to detail and close study of the realities “on the ground” in the institutions serving our children, not blind commitment to ideological programs that find themselves having to ignore FACTS if they are going to retain their commitment to beliefs that don’t actually serve the common good.
At the same time I agree to more openness and research into data that compare schools, I dislike doing more high stakes time consuming testing. Public school districts are transparent but some places the tax money is going are not. Even so the data we are getting does not show better results from charter schools. They continue to show the socio-economic impact on learning. Charter schools that use public monies are tax supported schools. They take money away from neighborhood schools. Our emotions are guiding so much of what we believe as facts. Lets leave our emotions and anger at the door and come to the table with open minds and open hearts.
I read the Republic stats, and they are very deceiving. They counted only state aid to the public schools, did not count the property tax funneled into the schools nor the federal aid, which approaches $10K not the less than $5K they said. Aldo missing from the equation is this $10K not being spent on those who are using the tax credits, and if you look at the Catholic schools most of the aid is going to low income Laitno schools, and there are more requests for space in them than is curretly available, with a number of new schools opening.
Yup, low income Latino schools like Salpointe, Brophy and Xavier. Of course the same bunch that screams bloody murder about Obama destroying the Constitution have no problem destroying it themselves as long as you throw enough straw parties in between the Constitution and the beneficiaries. Such as vouchers in Arizona, ESAs being the bull cookies name for them, or buying politicians with “independent expenditures”, in the name of First Amendment “freedoms”.
Martha –
1. If you dislike students having to spend more time doing high stakes testing (a reasonable sentiment many teachers, parents, and students share) then you might want to think twice about granting (as you tacitly do) that schools should be judged by so-called “data” on outcomes. The belief that testing outcomes are a good measure of the “quality” of a school is one of the primary things driving the inappropriate levels of testing to which public school students are subjected these days.
2. Not all public districts are as transparent as they should be. Some “public” districts manage to resist or deflect calls for transparency quite successfully.
3. When you’re talking about educational validity or similarity of methods employed, “charter schools” is not a meaningful category. What, for example, does Hermosa Montessori have in common with Basis? Next to nothing. (And, for that matter, when you’re talking about the quality of students’ experiences, level of operational functionality, ability to generate supplementary funding, and / or the administration’s degree of responsiveness to parent concerns, “public schools” or “neighborhood schools” is not a very meaningful category either. Locally, when you consider districts’ performance in these areas, what do Tanque Verde and TUSD have in common? Not much. What do Flowing Wells and TUSD have in common? Again, not much.
4. When you’re talking about the money that “being taken away from neighborhood schools” because of either tax credits or charters, you are talking about money following students whose parents do not want them enrolled in the “neighborhood schools” you refer to. If those students’ needs were being met in those schools, it seems unlikely that parents would be withdrawing them. One fundamental area of contention between those who support tax credits and charters and those who do not is whether tax dollars we all pay to support our education system “belong” in some sense to the mainline district public school system exclusively, or whether money NOT spent in district schools can be applied elsewhere. There are currently many abuses relating to how tax credits are applied and there are definitely some irresponsible charters. The policy and enforcement relating to these two areas needs to be cleaned up. But eliminating tax credits and charters entirely would eliminate much good that is happening in the lives of students who benefit from these programs.
As for the Catholic-bashing comments in another one of the posts above, I can tell you that there are many Catholic supporters of Obama and that the Jesuits (who run Brophy) are an order deeply committed to social justice. I had the pleasure of talking with several Brophy grads recently who were involved in social-justice oriented liberal policy initiatives and Hispanic activism in Phoenix. One of them spoke of his education at Brophy as what had inspired his policy work and he spoke with deep gratitude of the Brophy mentors who continued to support and encourage him. He also mentioned that his family would not have been able to afford tuition without significant financial aid. Brophy’s financial aid programs are funded, in part, by tax credits.
I don’t know all of the details of how tax credits are used at Salpointe, but I do know that the school has a commitment to offering need based financial aid and that the community seems to be both ethnically and socio-economically diverse, with more free academic support and tutoring services readily available to students than you would find in the “college prep” public high schools with which I’m familiar locally.
As I said above, “getting public policy right involves attention to detail and close study of the realities ‘on the ground’ in the institutions serving our children, not blind commitment to ideological programs.” Getting public policy right also requires eliminating the use of categories that are too broad to address meaningful differences in the quality of programs being offered to our children.
The point is I went to one of the aforementioned Catholic high schools. My family struggled to pay the tuition while also paying and supporting public schools through the property taxes. There were far more rich kids than poor Latinos, as it is now. Now they have managed to get public tax subsidies, yes that is what they are. As Diane Ravitch said, you are entitled to your education choices but you are not entitled to have tax payers pay for your private choices. Can I get tax credits for private security if I don’t like the cops? Can I get tax credits for Rural metro, if I don’t like the fire department? Can I get tax credits for my gym because I don’t like the Parks Department? These vouchers are obscene no matter how you spin it, and they are wrong, bad public policy.
The point is I went to one of the aforementioned Catholic high schools. My family struggled to pay the tuition while also paying and supporting public schools through the property taxes. There were far more rich kids than poor Latinos, as it is now. Now they have managed to get public tax subsidies, yes that is what they are. As Diane Ravitch said, you are entitled to your education choices but you are not entitled to have tax payers pay for your private choices. Can I get tax credits for private security if I don’t like the cops? Can I get tax credits for Rural metro, if I don’t like the fire department? Can I get tax credits for my gym because I don’t like the Parks Department? These vouchers are obscene no matter how you spin it, and they are wrong, bad public policy.
Frances, I’m a beneficiary of an excellent K-12 education in a blue state. I would love to see all the states in this country with public education systems like the one I experienced growing up, and I’m often a fan of Diane Ravitch’s writings as well. However, I don’t think the quote you mention applies in circumstances where there are significant, seemingly un-remediable failures in our largest local school district. When conditions in the public schools are as bad as they now are in TUSD, choosing to remove your children is not a private choice — it is a public choice, forced by failures in the public system. When the state has failed as miserably in its duty as a guarantor of academically sound, humane public education as the state of Arizona has failed in its relationship to TUSD, it owes families some help with the burden of funding an alternative.
One of the commenters in these streams signs off as “Supporting Public Education Means Supporting Local Reform,” and, having observed TUSD closely for three years now, I agree with that sentiment. People on the left who would like to support catch-all “Save Public Schooling!” campaigns need to honestly name and help find some remedy for the egregious problems in the governance and administration of TUSD. It’s not valid to engage in advocacy only on the general, theoretical level, without doing anything concrete about the local, particular failures of an institution within the broader network they support. Perhaps, as a supporter of high quality public education, you are one of the people doing something locally to support the reform of TUSD, I don’t know. If so, more power to you. Until reformers get the job done, though, a lot of people are going to need to exit, together with some portion of the tax dollars that would have supported their children’s enrollment in the public system. They should not be asked to “sit tight” in schools that are not meeting their children’s needs, nor should they be asked to foot the entire bill for the alternative, as your parents did.