Want your child’s private school tuition subsidized by the state? Want your child’s home schooling subsidized by the state, with the added bonus of a heap of money left over to help pay for college? You can do that right now by signing up for one of those Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids, but only if your child fits into a few specific categories. If HB 2482 passes, in a few years anyone can do it.
Private school vouchers give parents money from state funds to help them pay private school tuition. Empowerment Scholarship Accounts take the idea a step further. ESAs give parents a pot of money each year to spend on their children’s educations. If they want to use the ESA money to pay private school tuition, fine. If they want to home school their kids and use some of the money to pay for educational supplies, tutoring, testing, therapy or anything else the state OKs as an educational expense, that’s fine too. Any money left over from one year rolls over to the next. Anything left over when the kid is through with K-12 education can be used to pay for college.
When the Goldwater Institute originally wrote the ESA bill and the legislature passed it, only a small portion of Arizona’s children qualified, basically those with an educational disability of some kind. But that was only the beginning. The ESA elephant slipped its trunk under the educational tent flap with the idea of eventually crowding its whole self in and including every child in Arizona as a potential “Vouchers on Steroids” recipient. Legislators openly said as much when the bill first passed, so I’m not guessing as to their intent.
Now HB 2482 is trying to make the “ESAs for everyone” idea a reality. Over a few years, the bill would add more and more students into the mix until every child from kindergarten through 12th grade qualifies. There’s only one hitch for the parent to get the money. The newly qualified children have to spend some time in public schools. How much time? In my reading of the added language, that’s not clear. Previously, a child had to spend 100 days in a public school—district or charter—to qualify. The school year is about 180 days, so that’s a little over a semester. Under the new wording, it includes “any child who attends a public school.” That may mean that a child only has to enroll in a public school and attend a few days of class to earn an ESA for their rest of their K-12 career.
Whether the requirement is a few days or 100 days in a public school, should the bill pass, there will be a time a few years from now when every home school or private school student in Arizona will be given taxpayer money to pay for their educations. If the child is a kindergartener, that’s a thirteen years long government stipend. The only possible exceptions will be children of parents who are so rich that spending ten or twenty thousand dollars per year to send a child to school isn’t worth worrying about.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 3, 2016.
That is awesome news Mr Safier. Thank you for staying on top of it and pushing it through. We parents could not be happier. We will find a better education for our children once we have control of the spending. It might even save the state some costs. I guess number one would be those high cost pension plans.
Appalling. 49th in The nation in the funding of PUBLIC education , and Biggs and Ducey whining about no more money available. The State’s job is funding PUBLIC education. For everyone. But somehow we have plenty of money to subsidize unaccountable private education. I guess we can repeal money laundering laws since the lawless Arizona legislature endorses money laundering. You can have your private choice but State taxpayers should not be subsidizing private choices. Maybe the State can subsidize private reproduction choices? Oh you don’t want that? Why not? The last time private choices were subsidized it was called ALT FUELS. How did that work out? Just another page in the Goldwater/Koch Brothers playbook. This same private money laundering scheme is on judicial hold in Nevada, brought to you by the same cast of characters.
The massive expansion of the # of students exiting the public system this bill seems to be designed to bring about is not feasible: there is not sufficient capacity in the charter / private system to accommodate it and representatives of the state department of education already admit that the infrastructure to oversee existing charters and home schooling plans is insufficient. Without a massive increase in infrastructure which the conservative concoctors of this bill are unlikely to fund, the educational results of such an experiment will be very poor.
It remains the case that if “defenders of public education” had taken care to put as much effort into advocating for improved functioning of the public school system in Arizona as they like to put into denigrating charters and vouchers, they would have an easier time combatting this bill and others like it. When somewhere near 50,000 students in Southern Arizona are attending a school district that has been allowed to descend into a state of dysfunction that has made its name synonymous with low quality service delivery and irresponsibility, it’s harder to make the case that students should be confined to the public system. There’s not enough capacity in the other public districts to receive all the students who would benefit from open enrolling in another system, and not every parent has the means to provide transport to other districts.
Moral of the story? Those who hope to combat the current misguided legislative agenda on education should recognize that speaking honestly about the compelling need to reform TUSD has to be a large and visible component of any “anti-privatization” agenda.
Our outdated Prussian school system is a gigantic waste of money. It’s primarily a very expensive baby-sitting service that indoctrinates the masses into unquestioning subservience to authority. If it weren’t for the dogged work of great teachers, it wouldn’t serve any useful purpose.
bslap,,, If you are talking about the public schools systems…. you really don’t know that the public school systems in AZ and throughout the nation functioned much much better prior to charters and the attack on the systems? Do your research. I read often… ‘Remember when we were young and we got a good education in public schools?’ You have bought the Koch playbook on education. Read “Wrapped in the Flag” and “Dark Money”. Hopefully you will be sick to your stomach. This is what is happening throughout our country.
No.
In Gov Ducey’s State of the State speech he said, “a great economy requires great public schools”. Reflecting that, state commitment to public education he has defunded our JTED program, changed the education funding formula from 100th day population to “current year funding”, in the words of Lorenzo Romero, the Gov’s budget director, “to save the State money” and now he wants to further deplete public school funding to pay for vouchers for all.
Does “Liar, liar, pants on fire” seem to fit?
My child was awarded an ESA due to the local school being graded a D school. We used the funds to catch up in subjects where education had been lacking and to become college ready. We never would have been able to fund these classes without ESA. To those saying ESA takes away from public schools I strongly disagree. ESA allows students stuck in a failing public school to leave and get a real education elsewhere. ESA empowered my child to graduate high school with the required abilities to be accepted into a university and excell. The D grade public school did not have the classes or academic rigor needed to prepare for college. Educating the child should be the most important point, not who can get school funding. I personally feel it is very wrong to keep giving public tax funds to failing public schools when ESA allows students a chance at a better education. I am sure countless others feel the same.