Coming to a private school near you, and the home-school down the block: taxpayer-funded ESA money for children whose parents never considered sending their kids to a district or charter school.
Courtesy of a bill Ducey signed a few days ago, the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids, will soon be available to every child in Arizona. The restrictions on who can apply for an ESA are gone. Rich or poor, in districts and schools with “A” to “F” grades, with or without learning disabilities, every child qualifies. True, a last minute deal to lure in a few reluctant Republican legislators added limits to the number of ESAs which can be given out, topping out at 30,000 by the 2022-23 school year, but the Goldwater Institute had its fingers crossed when it made the deal. The limits will be gone as soon as G.I. and Ducey can figure out a way to get rid of them.
But even without the limits, there’s a catch. To get an ESA, a child has to attend a district or charter school for at least 100 days the year before, which means students already in private schools or being home-schooled can’t apply for the vouchers. But that catch has an escape clause. Children entering kindergarten can get the voucher money without ever setting foot in a district or charter school.
So why wouldn’t parents who plan to have their kindergarteners attend a private school apply for an ESA, which, once they get it, will continue year after year until their children finish high school (or, if there’s money left over, until it’s all used up paying for college)?
And why wouldn’t parents who home-school their children start the ESA ball rolling when their tykes hit four or five, and keep the money rolling in until their children finish high school (or, if there’s money left over, until it’s all used up paying for college)?
After all, those parents will get a $4,000-a-year voucher at the low end and as much as $20,000, or even more, for children with educational disabilities. Free money! It’s all upside, no downside. They’d be fools not to take advantage.
At the beginning of the next school year, no doubt, lots of kindergarteners whose parents never considered sending them to district or charter schools will have ESAs. The year after that, those children will be in first grade, vouchers intact, while a new group of kindergarteners qualify for another batch of ESAs. Keep that process going every year for the next 13 years, and every grade, K through 12, will be filled with those ESA recipients. By then, it’s possible that nearly every private school and home-schooled student will be dipping into state funds to help pay for their educations.
So how much new money might that cost the state — not for students who transfer from district or charter schools, but for students who would have been in private schools or home-schooled anyway? My very rough estimate is that it could run between $150 million and $300 million a year by the time next year’s kindergarteners are seniors.
Here’s how I arrive at those numbers. Right now, about 70,000 Arizona children attend private school or are home schooled. It’s probably more than that, but let’s use that figure. Some of those students are already getting voucher money either through ESAs—more than 3,000 students—or through Student Tuition Organizations—nobody knows how many STO-assisted students are out there, but the number is in the tens of thousands. That leaves between 40,000 and 50,000 students who are attending private school or being home-schooled with no financial assistance from the state.
If most of those parents receiving no financial assistance decide to take advantage of the ESAs—and why shouldn’t they, it’s easy money—that could run up to 35,000 students. Each student would get anywhere from $4,200 at the low end to $20,000+ at the high end, so let’s use a conservative figure and say the average ESA is $8,000. That would total $280 million a year in taxpayer money for students who never would have attended a district or charter school. Even if my rough estimate is twice as high as it should be, the total would come to $140 million.
We spend too little on education in Arizona. That’s a given. Ducey pats himself on the back for backing Prop 123 which adds $325 million a year. But his latest attack on public education could drain between $150-$300 million of that into private schools. And that’s not counting the students who transfer from district and charter schools. That’s just for students who never would have attended a district or charter school.
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2017.
What if we have just moved to AZ? Would our children qualify, even though they never attended AZ public schools?
Another way of looking at it is that with the education money spent differently it will improve the economy based on spendable income for all that were paying tuition. This will bring increased sales tax revenues and higher wages.
It isn’t all negative. Wisconsin was really surprised what it did for their public schools. It allowed them to get rid of the undesirable teachers, reduced class sizes and improved test results.
New To Az, I have never seen Wisconsin’s name among the states distinguished by spending the least in the country on public education, so I would not think their experience would be comparable with ours. Also, I would be interested in citations about the benefits for the public schools there–citations by organizations that have to do with education, not budgets. Thanks.
Ever heard of Scott Walker?
As for citations on the “benefits for public schools” of voucher policy, vouchers are policy lifeboats. Lifeboats aren’t meant to benefit the sinking ship. They’re meant to get people off of it. Yes, the Republican party is responsible, in part, for the state of public school systems in red states. But the Democratic party does not help matters when they engage in reality denial about the fact that, in terms of its ability to educate students effectively in a humane environment, the public system, or, more accurately, portions of it, is indeed sinking. And they don’t help matters with a working class constituency that should form part of their natural base when they blame the victims, i.e. the people using the lifeboats.
In a context where the cost of college tuition is so high, every education $$$ supplement available will be needed by families that don’t form the top bracket of earners. How’s the Democratic party doing with keeping the cost of tuition in Arizona’s public universities down? Can’t say I’ve heard much “messaging” on that topic in recent days, at the same time that the media is reporting that the U of A successfully completed its first billion dollar capital campaign a few years ahead of schedule.
In recent days, there’s been plenty of denigration and mockery of people using the damage-control policy lifeboats the Republican Party has offered, which the Democrats call “welfare for the wealthy.” Perhaps the Democratic Party should postpone their denigration of the working families trying to patch together a way to educate their children in this sad state until they have successfully offered an alternate way for these people to get to their destination. And part of that would include being honest about the fact that districts like TUSD need not just increased funding, but REFORM. The Democratic Party in Southern Arizona has had a remarkably hard time facing that reality.
Sorry to disappoint, but denying that there’s no real need for these people to get off the sinking ship doesn’t cut it any more. A lot of people see through TUSD’s lipstick-on-a-pig expensive PR campaigns to mask the ugly reality of what conditions ACTUALLY are in the district’s schools.
Lets be straight here. Public schools are falling behind in red states because they don’t fund them fully. Period. You can point to national statistics that show privet elementary schools charge on average about the same as what we spend on public schools in red states but those figures are very misleading. Many, if not most are religious schools that subsidize half the bill. Public schools are what in the private world would be called ‘Day Schools’. They tend to spend 15,000$-30,000$ per student while we spend here in AZ 7,2500-7,500$ per student. I’d say it’s pretty clear you can’t get a 15,000$ education result for 7,500$. So when you say our schools are failing, yeah, it’s obvious why. . .https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/201…
Nope, I don’t buy it. I bought it four years ago, when I fell hook line and sinker for TUSD’s propaganda about how all their problems were the result of the mean Republicans and their draconian funding cuts. And then I watched TUSD for closely for four years while one of my children was enrolled in it. Yes, the funding is insufficient, but in the humble opinion of someone who has watched the Board meetings and taken an interest in policy implementation and funding allocations on a few of the school sites, the district has also been poorly administered and the funding available to it has not uniformly and competently been applied for the benefit of students. Until the district is effectively reformed — if at this point it CAN be reformed, which many who have had extended contact with it have good reason to doubt — (again, my humble, but experience-based OPINION) students do need to get out of it. And they shouldn’t be penalized financially for recognizing a sinking ship for what it is. Nor should they be disparaged by a political party that is supposed to effectively DEFEND, not disparage and insult, the working class.