Here’s another one of those great stories in the Arizona Republic I don’t think we’ll be seeing in the Star. Add it to the Republic’s terrific investigative reporting on corruption and profiteering in charter schools, and southern Arizona is missing out on some important education news. That is a damn shame.
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (aka Education Savings Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids) are a backdoor voucher program which gives debit cards to parents to spend on their children’s educations so long as the children don’t attend a district or charter school. When parents get the money, they’re told it can only be spent on education. “We’ll be watching you, so don’t use the money for other things,” they’re told. But actually, no one is watching.
In fiscal year 2018, $700,000 was misspent by ESA parents according to an audit released by the Department of Education. The items include obviously non-educational purchases like beauty supplies, sports apparel and computer tech support. Very little of that money has been paid back to the state.
It’s the kind of story the “good government” folks at the Goldwater Institute might want to cover. I say that because G.I. recently published a report on fraud in school districts. The report came fast on the heels of the Republic stories about people making millions on charters, so I’m guessing it was written to counter the bad press — G.I. loves charters almost as much as it loves vouchers — by saying, “Hey look, school districts do it too!” However, something tells me, pointing out voucher-related fraud isn’t the kind of deflection G.I. is planning any time soon.
G.I.’s dollar figure makes the fraud in school districts look like a pretty big deal. The Auditor General said it totaled $26 million. That’s a lot of money.
Except that it’s spread out over 20 years, which means it’s not all that much money after all.
Let’s do some math to see how big the school district fraud really is. Divide the $26 million into 20 yearly pieces, and you get $1.3 million a year spread across the entire state. That amounts to something like five-hundredths of one percent — written numerically, that’s 0.0005 — of Arizona’s yearly school budget, or less than a buck-and-a-half per student per year.
Looking at it that way, well, fraud is never good, but a buck-fifty per student isn’t really such a big deal.
Since we’re doing math here, let’s look at how much the misspent ESA money comes to. Estimating about 3,500 hundred ESA students in 2018 — not an exact figure, but a nice, round number that’s reasonably close — it comes to $200 per student. That’s a whole lot more than a buck-fifty.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2018.
Sorry but none of that information makes public schools any better. And they waste $700,000 every hour.
If you were worried about us missing out on education news, why didn’t you report on the enrollment collapse reasons of why parents left TUSD?
Clearly, ESAs – just like vouchers – take money away from public schools. That’s a bad thing if you think public schools are beneficial, as I do. But it’s a good thing if you want to eliminate public schools, as the Republican majority in our legislature wants. And now we learn a lot of ESA money isn’t even being spent on education. Thank you, David Safier, for bringing this to our attention.
Computer tech support is not an educational expense? Sports apparel for extracurriculars is not an educational expense? By whose reckoning? Theres a lot of money in public education budgets that goes to those things. But apparently if you relieve the public school of the expense of educating your child and take, in the form of an ESA, part, but not all, of the funds that would have been used to educate your child in a public school, you will be criticized for spending the funds in the same ways that funds are spent in the institutions from which you removed them. Good to know.
Neither vouchers nor ESAs take money away from public schools. They allow tax dollars parents have paid to be applied in alternative educational settings. Either the child (and the expense of educating them) leaves the public schools and the money stays in state of Arizona bank accounts unused for any educational purpose, or the child leaves and the money that would have paid the expense of their public education goes with them to pay for other educational expenses.
Which of those two policies is better for the child?
When you answer that question, make sure to take into account the REALITY of the functional state of many public schools in a district like TUSD, not the fantasy of what public schools would be in a Panglossian best of all possible worlds.
One might think of asking Southern Arizona Dems to stop trying to confuse the electorate. But it seems more and more like ignorance and the exploitation and perpetuation of it is what they are all about, so on what basis could they be asked to stop being what they are? They dont seem to understand the kind of standards that could be used to leverage more responsible communication.
Vouchers and ESA’s actually save money for public schools as it allows them to rightsize for the monetary allowance afforded them. More kids did not provide better results for students or tax payers. In fact just the opposite was true. The more money received, the more waste was created.