There’s no way Republicans can take away the initiative process using the initiative process. Voters won’t go for that. And they can’t push through school vouchers that way either; people always vote against vouchers. So this year, Republicans have used their legislative majority to thumb their noses at voters, taking away something they like and pushing through more of something they don’t.
We’ve been there before. In 2013 Republicans tried to make it more difficult for voter-proposed initiatives to make it on the ballot. But after passing an anti-initiative law, they repealed it a year later because a move was afoot to let the people decide if they liked what the legislators had done. Republicans hurried to get rid of the law to save themselves from an embarrassing defeat, and to let them reenact anti-initiative legislation later piece by piece, which is what they’ve done this year.
Private school vouchers have never been on the ballot in Arizona. The Republican-controlled legislature voted in School Tuition Organizations in 1997. In 2011 it did the same for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Then year by year it passed new bills to expand the two voucher systems.
Why didn’t Republicans let voters have their say on STOs or ESAs? Because they know, voucher ballot measures have never passed anywhere—at least not for the past 30 years, which is as far back as I can find information.
Here’s a list of statewide votes on vouchers, courtesy of Ballotpedia.
• 1990: Oregon Tuition Tax Credits. Defeated 68%-32%.
• 1993: California School Vouchers. Defeated 70%-30%.
• 1996: Washington State School Vouchers. Defeated 64%-36%.
• 1998: Colorado Tuition Tax Credits. Defeated 60%-40%.
• 2000: California School Vouchers. Defeated 71%-29%.
• 2007: Utah School Vouchers. Defeated 63%-38%.
When even conservative Utah votes down its voucher initiative by a 25 percent margin, that says something. It’s been ten years, and no one’s tried it since.
Here’s what Arizonans think of vouchers. In 2016, an Arizona Republic/Morrison/Cronkite News poll asked the question, “Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents who choose a private school to attend at public expense?” The poll results look a lot like the state results above: 63 percent opposed vouchers, 28 percent supported them and 9 percent weren’t sure. That’s a 35 point spread. Even among Republicans, 55 percent of them said no to vouchers. A 2014 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll showed similar results nationally: 63-37 percent against vouchers.
The numbers might move a bit if the questions on the two polls were phrased in a more voucher-friendly way, but not by enough to change the overall result.
Only the 8 percent of Arizona’s children who attend private schools or are home-schooled can take advantage of vouchers. It’s awful hard to convince people raising the other 92 percent that their tax dollars should be used to pay for vouchers, no matter how hard the school privatizers try.
It’ll be interesting to see if two major votes against the will of the people, on initiatives and vouchers, will make Arizonans more reluctant to vote for Republicans in 2018.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2017.
The Republicans want all the power so they try to pass any bills to take away the rights of the people and communities. It’s called DICTATORSHIP
Updated 48 hours ago.
https://edsource.org/2017/majority-of-californians-polled-favor-school-vouchers/580456
I wonder just how much of what you believe just simply isn’t true?
“The numbers might move a bit if the questions on the two polls were phrased in a more voucher-friendly way, but not by enough to change the overall result.”
Pure assertion. The questions in the polls you cite were asked in extremely biased, prejudicial ways, and there is absolutely no evidence to back up your claim that if the questions had been phrased differently, the results would not have been different.
What if the question were posed this way:
“Do all children with similar needs deserve to have exactly the same amount of tax funded support for their educations, or should it be legal for the state to discriminate economically against parents who are responsible enough to take the time and trouble to remove their children from malfunctioning / low performing neighborhood schools and to transport them at their own expense to schools that are able to meet their children’s academic needs i.e. that enable their children to perform at the academic level that matches their ability level?”
Ever consider that the willingness of the electorate to support vouchers may vary in inverse relation to the functionality of the public school system in a given state, i.e. where there are low functioning public schools, there will be high support for vouchers; where there are high functioning public schools, there will be low support for vouchers?
Coming from a blue state that had high functioning public schools, my initial stance was anti-voucher. After several years of observing what is going on in TUSD’s schools and on its Board and with its administration, I changed my position. Now I do support vouchers. But if you refuse to be honest about the fact that the ship is sinking, David, which you have consistently done for the four years that I have taken the trouble to read your misleading and deeply depressing “commentary,” I guess you think you should get a “pass” on having to acknowledge that lifeboats are necessary to save as many lives / educations as possible from a school system that has descended to this now-probably-irreversible level of dysfunction.
You may hold the opinion that more children’s futures should be sacrificed to the false God of WHAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS SHOULD BE, BUT IN ARIZONA ARE NOT AND NEVER WILL BE. Many of us — more every day as the dysfunction of TUSD becomes ever more conspicuous to the broader community — disagree with you.
Statewide vouchers will HELP the public schools identify their problems, and deal with them. More tax dollars going to them only means much more of the same.
allen s, you should have kept reading:
PPICs 13th annual K-12 survey would appear at odds with California voters strong past opposition to vouchers. Twice before, in 1993 and 2000, voters rejected voucher initiatives, with 70 percent voting against them each time. However, in 1998, two years before the last vote and the last time that PPIC polled Californians on the issue, 58 percent of adults favored vouchers while 36 percent opposed them.
That means that answering a poll is different than actually VOTING for something.
Nice try.
NOT A RANCHO SNOB, you should have kept reading:
“That tells you that a single question on the concept of vouchers does not tell the whole story, said State Board of Education President Michael Kirst, who wrote analyses for both voucher initiatives. ‘Support eroded for vouchers the more that voters learned about the details and the implications,’ he said. He said to accurately measure public opinion, there should be several questions, such as: ‘Would you support a voucher program if it funded students already in private school? Would you support it if it only went to low-income children? Or paid for only a portion of the tuition?”
So in other words, contra Safier, the way the question is framed does matter. Support changes significantly as the wording changes and the details of the proposal that goes to the electorate change.
Also of interest in the same article: “African Americans, who elsewhere in the poll express the least satisfaction with public schools, are the most supportive, with 73 percent favoring vouchers, followed by Latinos, with 69 percent favoring vouchers, Asians with 56 percent and whites with 51 percent.”
That would seem to suggest that the comment above which stated that support for vouchers is related to how well the public schools are meeting the needs of their constituents is correct. Minority populations that have traditionally been under-served in public schools support vouchers at higher rates than whites and Asians do. Schools serving high-SES neighborhoods that have majority white / Asian populations generally have higher functioning public schools.
People don’t generally leave a neighborhood school that is convenient and comes with free transportation for trivial reasons. If they want to leave, let them leave, and let them apply the money that the state saves when they exit that school in a school that better meets their child’s needs.
Rancho Snob, depending on who is drafting the polling question, the issue is framed to give the desired outcome. Mine was not an attempted nice try. It serviced the target.
Wow, the majority is willing to abuse the minority. What a prescient observation.
Let’s review the history. District education education is not public education. 99% of the public is excluded from district schools.
Bricks and teachers aren’t public. Children are the public. Arizona is the only state with a public education system with every school in the state open ro the public.
In almost every other state, it is a crime to allow the public to attend a district school or to allow them to get their public education at a Christiam school.
Here you are defending a bigoted, racist institution to the bitter end.
Let’s not be too certain about what voters will never go for. We thought they would never go for Trump, either. You will never go wrong underestimating the intelligence of an American voter.
This is another perfect example of Republicans using Public Money paying the cost and Private Gain reaping the rewards. I’ve been practicing my Sieg Heil! and Straight arm salute for whats to come.
If that were true they would be building ovens instead of walls. Don’t look now but France has tired of the atrocities of open border politicians. This could be the end of the old political parties. The first ones to frame the issues that appeal to thinking voters will control the majority by vote.
There should be two simple questions. The Republican majority is always adding more and more “transparency” requirements to school district bond and override elections. The voters should have a chance at a transparent question, without money laundering “empowering” wording nonsense. “Should the State of Arizona provide taxpayer money to subsidize private religious schools?” Period. The next question should be,”Do you support a dedicated tax increase to pay for these subsidies?” Yes or No. Of course they do not have the courage nor their corporate backers the confidence this would ever pass, thus a bamboozled Supreme Court bought the money laundering nonsense. The writer could add Michigan to the list, as the DeVos bunch put a constitutional amendment on the ballot to repeal the prohibition on public money for religious schools. It also lost bigly.
Should all children receive an equal amount of tax funded support for their educations, or should some receive tens of thousands of dollars of support while others receive none?
When a private institution relieves the state of the burden of educating a child at the state’s expense, should the state pay for the provision of those services? When private entities provide citizens other services the state usually provides, they are paid to do so.
Why would a tax increase be needed, Frances? You apply your per pupil funding in one institution or another. It’s a zero sum game.
The fact is that without vouchers equalizing the per-pupil funding and remedying a situation in which there has been unfair economic discrimination against educational institutions providing excellent services to constituents and thereby contributing more to the common good than many public educational institutions do, what we have going on is the state creating an economic incentive for parents to enroll their children in schools that produce a less educated citizenry. If the government creates incentives, it should be incentivizing behaviors that produce better outcomes, not worse ones, cf. Cass Sunstein on policy “nudges.”