Tucson’s Green Fields private school is closing. According to an article in the Star, the school’s enrollment has fallen from 246 students in 2001 to as few as 105 in 2015. Green Fields is a K-12 school, so the 2015 enrollment numbers work out to an average of eight students per grade. No school can remain financially viable with so few students.

Understandably, students who were planning to attend this coming school year and their families are mourning the school’s closing. Actually, though, closures like Green Fields’ would be a far more regular occurrence in Arizona, except for one thing. You and I and all the state’s taxpayers are helping the schools stay afloat by chipping in to pay students’ tuition. Not all students, of course, but a substantial number. I’m not just talking about students from low income homes whose parents couldn’t otherwise send their children to private school. High income families are using our money to help pay tuition costs as well.

How much are we chipping in? Last year, nearly $200 million which otherwise would have been in the state’s coffers, money which could have been used to boost our shamefully low education budget, is paying for children to go to private schools.

$200 million a year is a whole lot of money. Far too much for my taste. I don’t like the idea of using taxpayer money to prop up privately funded schools which can’t cut it in the private sector. People on the right like to say, governments shouldn’t be picking winners and losers in the marketplace by giving some of them subsidies, but somehow they’re fine with using $200 million to help private schools survive.

OK, I’ll admit, I don’t like private school vouchers, period, and I especially don’t like them when they run into hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But I want to try and be fair. If that $200 million means a lot more students are attending private schools, that might not be such a bad deal for taxpayers. After all, if those kids weren’t in private schools, we would have to pay for their public educations.

So let’s take a look at the kind of bang we’re getting for our voucher bucks.

Private school tuition tax credits, the state’s first voucher program, began in 1999. Back then, before vouchers, 44,050 students attended Arizona’s private schools, about 5 percent of the student population.

How did private school enrollment look in 2015, the most recent year I can find data for? In 2015, the number had risen to 46,250, which is an addition of 2,200 students over 17 years of taxpayer-funded vouchers — about 130 new students a year. That doesn’t sound like the kind growth you should expect given the investment we’re making.

That 2,200 student growth looks even worse when you realize the state population was increasing rapidly over those years, along with the number of students. During those 17 years, Arizona added 260,000 K-12 students. As a result, private schools slipped as a proportion of the entire student population, from 5 percent in 1999 to 4 percent in 2015.

With all that taxpayer-funded voucher money pouring in, private schools still lost ground.

Here’s a math problem for you. If Arizona had 2,200 more private school students in 2015 than in 1999, and in 2015, we spent $150 million on vouchers. How much were taxpayers pitching in for each new student? You’ll probably need to grab a calculator to figure it out, so let me give you the answer. It comes to $68,200 per new student.

Once again, I’ll try to be fair here. Private schools have been losing ground around the country, more so in states which don’t prop the schools up with taxpayer-funded vouchers, so maybe the vouchers actually added more than 2,200 to the private school student population. Maybe they stopped private school enrollment from sliding into negative numbers. Maybe more schools would have gone the way of Green Fields and shut down.

A Grand Canyon Institute study estimates that in 2016, our voucher programs added about 13,200 students to private schools. Another way of putting that is, without the help of vouchers private schools would have lost 13,200 students. I think the CGI number is too large, but never mind. The institute has some good number crunchers working for it.

If CGI is right, think of what that number means. Without vouchers the schools would have lost 11,000 students instead of gaining 2,200. This gives an indication of how weak the private school sector is and how much it needed its taxpayer-funded lifeline.

Using the GCI numbers, taxpayers were spending $10,700 per added private school student in 2016. That’s far lower than the $68,200 I came up with but that year, the per-student cost at district and charter schools was closer to $7,500. Even using the institute’s generous estimate, it cost taxpayers $3,200 more to send a student to private school than to a public school.

Private schools are in trouble across the country. The advent of charter schools certainly has drawn away potential students. So, possibly, has the general trend toward people being less involved with religion, since at least 70 percent of private school students attend religious-affiliated schools.

The privatization/”education reform” crowd that spends hundreds of millions a year to demonize and dismantle “government schools” are unhappy with private schools’ downward trend, so they’re doing what they can to keep tuition-based schools alive. That’s why Republican-majority legislatures like ours have been pushing vouchers so hard for years, and why Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos spends more time promoting vouchers than supporting school districts and their students. As a result, we taxpayers are footing the bill for the conservatives’ education agenda.

This article appears in Jul 18-24, 2019.

33 replies on “How much is Arizona spending to bail out private schools?”

  1. To be fair why not tell us how much the annual per student cost is in TUSD? Not the printed budget numbers, I want the TOTAL amount including federal grants, personal donations over $5,000 and all corporate donations to TUSD and it’s subsidiaries.

  2. @ Fair Is Fair – is it possible that TUSD doesnt get the sort of corporate donations other districts do because in instances where well-meaning constituents have tried to make connections for them they cannot organize themselves to be accountable and transparent in how they interact with private funders? Do districts like TUSD rely on automatic infusions of public funds and expect that their constituency will not have the time or know-how to track how they allocate those funds?

    Occasionally, it seems professional accountants like Jimmy Lovelace have raised questions about TUSDs financials and auditing:
    https://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/guest/time-for-tusd-to-stop-making-unforced-errors/article_6293e564-8228-587b-aed1-4051d3d35d70.html

    Is the staying power of a political machine intertwined with TUSD is so great that most advocates who get in there and pitch hard for awhile eventually give up?

    As for Green Fields, it was an excellent school in many ways (maybe even as good, in some respects, as the private schools people like David Safier utilize, though certainly nowhere near the quality of Amherst). However, some say that Green Fields, like TUSD, had problems with accountability in how it dealt with funders. While a public district like TUSD can keep limping along with automatic taxpayer infusions no matter how dysfunctional it is, a private institution cannot. If it fails to attract students and investment, it will eventually go out of business, even in a state where tax credits are available.

    P.S. David: you forgot to compare the educational validity of Green Fields practices, like its much-praised interdisciplinary senior project, with the validity of TUSD practices like machine graded AP-testing. You also forgot to factor in 2008 and what it did to both private and public schools. If you ever do start examining the details of specific institutions and their curricular programs and the quality of their funding allocations, rather than tossing out your pre-fab political propaganda, your posts might eventually become worth reading.

  3. Taxpayers should not pay for vouchers, period. Only by creating a go around scheme that flips off the state constitutional prohibition, signed off by look away judges, does this scheme even exist. Anything Cathi Herrod and Betsy DeVos are for, is guaranteed bad for taxpayers. Finchem is so dead wrong, why is he in office? Legislatures are constantly whining about real public school accountability, but these hypocrites look away on voucher accountability.

  4. Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for both. If you don’t support the failing public schools you should be allowed to choose an alternative. Everybody grows from competition.

  5. Some don’t agree with the values David Safier, “Frances Perkins” et al. try to force on the children of their fellow citizens in the schools they misleadingly call “public.” Interestingly, these values too often seem to include a kind of knee-jerk, reactionary hostility to the religions the U.S. Constitution guarantees its citizens the right to practice. If a citizen chooses a religiously affiliated school because it delivers better education than other local options, why should the state not have to pay the cost of that education, which it would have had to pay if an education which produced poorer academic results were delivered in a “public” context? No one is forcing the student or their family to practice that religion. They are choosing to enroll in that school because of the quality of education delivered; they are not being required to enroll.

    We won’t be going back to districts like TUSD being the sole providers of K-12 education to people who live within their district boundaries, thank God. And that is more the result of what millions of people know from their direct experience about what TUSD and districts like it ACTUALLY ARE than it is the result of the actions of the usual scapegoats, including Betsy De Vos. De Vos et al. are just reacting a situation in which districts like TUSD still exist and too many people have to receive “education” (?) in them.

    If there were any justice in the world, advocates for the abolition of vouchers would have to pay for the privilege of trying to foist their policy preferences on “the public” by relinquishing whatever benefits had accrued to them and their families by using the private systems they disparage and undermine. When you look closely at who these people are, you often find that they themselves have never utilized the kinds of schools that their so-called “liberal” policy preferences would lock other people’s children into. Or, they have used “gifted” programs or enclave schools or relatively high functioning magnet schools in the public system, where the quality of services are very different from what you too often find in public district schools in low-SES neighborhoods.

    Turns out there is always plenty of “HYPOCRISY” on both sides of the fence. On the “liberal” side, this particular blog is frequently one of the most flagrant examples of such.

  6. What schools DID Safier use? For K-12 and after?

    Were his kids enrolled in TUSD, Amphi, Sunnyside? Did they attend Pima College, ASU, U of A? Does he track the quality of education delivered in these settings? If not, TW should get an education blogger who actually knows what the HELL he is talking about in celebrating the failure of one alternative to bad and getting worse.

  7. They have to have some outlet where they vent their rage against current policies because they will never control the legislature or the governorship in this state. Year after year, they lose, and they will keep losing.

    Perhaps instead of engaging in this kind of schadenfreude they should take some seminars on how not to back a ludicrously politically inexperienced, utterly ineffective candidate for governor. Or they could figure out how to actually improve the sad institutions they DO control in this region: COT, TUSD, etc. ad nauseam. Then, perhaps Southern Arizona would not continue to be a really poor advertisement for what kind of statewide management the electorate could expect if Dems ever took power in Phoenix.

    But blowing smoke in blogs like this and projecting the false image of a party that knows how to solve problems is easier and more fun than getting real things accomplished in real institutions, or running viable candidates against Ducey, isnt it?

    Sad.

  8. How many of you commentators attend school board meetings in your district or participate in PTA,PTO, or PTT in your local school? Do you try to affect what goes on in your schools at a local level?

  9. What’s really Sad is the Sad sock-puppet Stretch.

    Pathetic Sad, not unhappy Sad.

  10. Caroline Anderson: Your response is pro-forma for your tribe and pretty funny when it is used in certain contexts, like this one, where it does not apply. Cf. the response to TUSD Board Member Leila Counts’ use of the same Southern-Arizona-Dem (SAD) set piece (“Id suggest […] doing something helpful IN THE SCHOOLS”):

    “There are a lot of former TUSD parents who did plenty of “helpful” things “IN THE SCHOOLS!!!” when their children were enrolled in the district, and it was WHAT THEY SAW THERE — in the classrooms, in the P.A. Board meetings, in the Site Council meetings, and ON THE GOVERNING BOARD — that motivated their transfers out.”

    (For the “bad cop” version of another Southern Arizona Dem (SAD) classic response, see “Stretch Sucks,” who checks in regularly to see how Safier’s propaganda goes down with the locals it is meant to bamboozle — and insults anyone who disagrees with Safier. A great little window on the world of local politics: check your brain at the door or get kicked in the teeth when venturing any sort of opinions (or factual observations) that disagree with any element of party propaganda.)

  11. Wow Stretch! I see that you’ve decided to add an unhealthy dosage of anger to your already detrimental long-winded douchebaggery.

    Be careful what you wish for. Going for The Sock-Puppet Troll of the Year award may take its toll on you. I mean, you have proven to be a great contender for that award, but fuck! I wouldn’t want you to suffer from an aneurism or a heart attack while going for the “gold”.

    C’mon man, have some concern about your health. Nobody else will.

  12. Nope, not angry. Just ACCURATE, and taking some degree of satisfaction in occasionally adding some push-back to the bizarre lies circulated in these SAD forums, where we regularly read CRAP like Safiers recent assertion that the massive decline in TUSD enrollment can be attributed to racism. He should try pitching that the moon is made of blue cheese and 2+2=2,462. Makes about as much sense.

    As for Green Fields, Davids celebration of its demise and his regular defense of TUSD are flip sides of the same coin: total contempt for progressive methods in education and total refusal to expand access to same outside of his own rarefied circle. What a great LIBERAL.

    (Hey David – why dont you answer that recurring question about where your kid/s went to school?)

  13. Still continuing on with the sock-puppetry!

    If this horseshit was an Olympic event, you’d be considered an American Hero!

    But, as it is, youz jus a troll.

    Nice try Sad Sock-Puppet Stretch.

  14. No, I think we can all see who the real troll is. That is a poster that has nothing of value to add to the discussion and instead reverts to name calling and foul language in direct violation of the posting rules on the TW.

  15. Name calling and foul language. Like that horseshit that Stretch directs towards Mr. Safier.

    Nice try (Not!) Stretch Sock-Puppetn

  16. Yeah, “Stretch Sucks,” I didn’t respond under “We removed our kids from TUSD.” That was someone else. There are thousands and thousands of dissatisfied former TUSD parents, not just one.

    Back to the topic of David’s post:

    DAVID: when you are pitching public policy that affects other people’s children and their access to good education, you should absolutely clarify how your pitch relates to your own choices. So please stipulate whether your child/ren attended:
    1) a neighborhood public district school in a low-SES neighborhood
    2) a gifted or magnet public district school or a public district school in an affluent neighborhood
    3) a charter school
    4) independent private schools
    5) religiously affiliated private schools for K-12.

    Then clarify whether, if your child/ren attended college and graduate school, the institutions were
    A) land grant public
    B) Ivy League private
    C) some other kind of private.

    I ask the latter question because most families using vouchers in this state cannot afford to spend money on K-12 that will later be needed to pay tuition and expenses in colleges, universities, and professional schools that are currently massively inflated: the rates have gone up more than 300% in the last 30 years, during a period in which real wages for Americans have stagnated.

    DAVID: I will keep asking these question now and then — especially when you post about vouchers — UNTIL YOU ANSWER THEM.

    (When people whose children have attended and benefited from private schools or enclave public schools pitch no-voucher policy, they try to dress their pitch up as some kind of a SOCIAL JUSTICE argument. The practical effect of the message in regions where large blocks of the public school sector are as low functioning as they are in Southern Arizona could be translated thus: “Only the wealthy deserve to have access to good education; in some regions of the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, we cannot AFFORD to provide good education to people who cannot AFFORD to pay for it without re-directing the education tax dollars they have paid into the system.” No voucher advocates neglect to mention that, under the current state-level administration, if the tax dollars of families who have left the public system are not applied in alternative educational settings, they don’t get used for EDUCATION at all. They remain in the state’s coffers or, more likely, get passed out as the current administration’s favorite form of welfare: corporate. Further undermining the validity of the “pitch,” in this particular blog, the same so-called SOCIAL JUSTICE advocate who promotes abolishing vouchers regularly defends a massive malfunctioning school district serving more than 40,000 students which is largely controlled by his political party’s operatives. If he is so keen on locking people into it, perhaps he should do more to CALL IT WHAT IT IS and CLEAN IT UP.

    What is going on here? Whatever it is (probably the Democratic Party’s attempt to have the institutions it largely controls delivering education to the demographic whose growth they expect to use to gain control of the state) it is not what it tries to present itself as: SOCIAL JUSTICE advocacy.)

  17. And “Stretch Sucks” I did not come here to argue with you. I had hoped there was information about reforming public education which has rotted across this country.

    But I did go back and read all the posts. You are the only one using foul language and attacking other posters.

    My apologies to you, “A few more questions for David.” I’m not sure why this person confused you for me. What would be interesting to know is exactly what are they defending?

  18. “Yeah, “Stretch Sucks,” I didn’t respond under “We removed our kids from TUSD.””

    Yeah, sock-puppet Stretch. You’re a liar. And a Bad one at that.

    Nice try.

  19. @ We Removed Our Kids from TUSD:

    No worries. Asserting that multiple commenters are actually one commenter using different posting names is one of the standard issue “moves” of the person who posts under “Stretch Sucks.” What he writes in this thread is not the worst he and his pals are capable of. Check out, for example, the language in the last comment on the thread liked below, the comment entitled “WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES MAJOR DOUCHEBAGS?”:
    https://m.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2019/06/28/the-privatization-movement-is-losing-support-from-democrats-and-the-occasional-billionaire

    In answer to your final question, “We Removed Our Kids from TUSD,”: Yes, it would be quite interesting.

    The last gasps of the “SAVE PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!!” crowd look a lot to me like what has been described recently by a political scientist at Notre Dame: “Either [a dying ideology] enforces conformity to a lie it struggles to defend, or it collapses when the gap between claim and reality finally results in wholesale loss of belief among the populace.”

    That single sentence explains Safier’s bar graphs on TUSD enrollment a lot better than all the verbiage Safier tries, year after year, to paper over the sad reality.

  21. She hit the nail on the head. We found basically the same problem at the college level with our kids, but the problem there was that tenured professors had students teaching the classes. That was not what we were paying for. And too high a price was paid I might add.

    This mentality kind of reminds me of the union trades strikes where they assaulted their replacements which they called scabs. I am afraid this has more to do with education unions than we may know.

    Power and control. It has become a drug for so many. Just look at how somebody racks up the dislikes immediately, against our honest comments. TW is losing credibility with the games they are playing with the next generation of children.

    Have a good weekend.

  22. Poor pathetic little Stretch. Answering questions from and responding to her own posts, acting as if she’s not posting as several different people on this comment thread and so many others. Therapy is most definitely needed for this individual.

    The anger, hate, condescension, harassment, long-winded rambling and hypocrisy found in Stetch’s posts are absolutely incredible. It’s as if she believes that she commands her own world and we’re mere minions in it. Holier and smarter than thou Stretch is! Stretch’s shirts are stuffed solid in her twisted version of reality.

    A reality no rational and/or (not and / or) sane person would want any part of.

  23. No opinion, no coherent argument, no observations of conditions in local schools, just hatred and obscenities in post after post after post. Stretch Sucks continues to give anyone who takes the trouble to read these streams a good, long look at what kind of ADVOCACY and CITIZENSHIP some of our schools and some of our political factions in Southern Arizona produce.

    The only sense in which this is relevant here is that it is actually a big part of why people leave TUSD and use vouchers: to avoid their children being exposed to the kind of verbal behavior illustrated here. Overwhelmed TUSD teachers (or, in too many classrooms, no permanent, certified teacher but a rotating cast of subs) sometimes cannot get a handle on aggressive behavior, just like neither Safier nor the editorial staff of TW can (or wants to?) control the obscene and abusive commentary in these streams.

    But do keep telling us, David, that what you and your friends are all about is SOCIAL JUSTICE and compassion for the poor.

    Looks from some angles like your agenda may actually be about trapping as many people as possible in contexts where their children will be reliably indoctrinated and where they will have no defense against your partys coercive and false ideology…or against other forms of abuse.

  25. Did your kid/s go to public schools in poor neighborhoods, David?

    The answer to that question is relevant to our assessment of the moral quality of your anti-voucher arguments here and elsewhere.

  26. You’re not going to get Safier to answer you. I’m sure that with all of the harassment and condescending remarks that you’ve aimed towards him that he chooses to ignore EVERYTHING you say.

    I can’t say that I blame him. You are quite an annoying pest.

  27. The point is not to get him to answer it. It is to demonstrate repeatedly that he WON’T answer it. Why? Because if he did answer it would blow his “just a humble teacher, man of the people” cover.

    He is a wealthy propagandist who retired here from another state and does not know enough about real conditions in Arizona school systems to make any intelligent policy recommendations about what should be happening in these schools, which under-serve other people’s children.

    If he is irritated by what is written in these streams, he deserves to be.

  28. The comments here don’t go quite far enough in their personal attacks for me to delete them, but they come pretty close. People on both sides of the argument, please keep you comments directed at the points made by other commenters, not at the commenters themselves.

  29. Delete it all, David. I couldn’t care less.

    But I’m happy to see that you’ve read the stream and thereby understood that some of us who have had to educate children in this sad state do not take kindly to your policy propaganda.

    I know several families whose kids’ educations, which had been botched and mangled by Amphi or Basis, were salvaged by Green Fields. If you think salvaging a kid’s damaged confidence and repairing a botched education is something taxpayers in this state cannot afford to do, I think you know what you can do with that opinion.

    People who can pay for good educational services out of pocket need to back policy that EXPANDS ACCESS to GOOD educational services. They should not be throwing a blanket over some of Arizona’s public districts’ shortcomings and insisting that families whose kids’ needs are not being met in those settings stay there because this state cannot AFFORD to do better.

  30. I just read this whole thread and there is one person posting that continually crossed the line of TW guidelines regarding name calling and personal attacks. I encourage you to remove that person.

    I personally looked at his 4:19 am post (at 4:30 the same morning) and he had 32 likes in 11 minutes in the 4 am hour.

    Something is going on here. Please explain how that works.

  31. Let’s take it one step further and apply the Democratic theories to these personal attacks. We need to ban the people that hit the like button on the comment.

  32. How exactly did a tax credit on someone else’s tax return become David Safier’s money? It’s highly dubious that the tax credits mean Mr. Safier’s had to pay more for public school education … especially since without the private schools taxpayers would have to pay for educating the students who go to the private schools anyway (and probably a lot more).

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