Here’s the Republicans’ ESA pitch: “We just want to give poor children the same opportunity to attend private schools as rich kids have.” Here’s their real goal: “We want to give rich kids as much taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition as we can.” According to a well researched article in the AZ Republic, they’re doing a great job of meeting their real goal.
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts—aka Education Savings Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids—are a transfer of state funds into accounts for individual students which parents can spend on pretty much any educational expense, so long as the child isn’t enrolled in a district or charter school. The way the law is written right now, only some students qualify for ESAs. A bill in front of the legislature would make all 1.1 million of Arizona’s public school children eligible.
The AZ Republic article reveals that money from Empowerment Scholarship Accounts goes disproportionately to students from high achieving school districts.
This year, more than 75 percent of the money pulled out of public schools for the Empowerment Scholarship Account program came from districts with an “A” or “B” rating, the analysis showed. By contrast, only 4 percent of the money came from school districts rated “D” or lower.
The top rated districts, those with the highest scores on the state standardized tests, tend to serve students from higher income families, while the lowest rated districts are almost always in low income areas. When 75 percent of the money goes to students from those top rated districts and only 4 percent goes to the lowest rated, it’s pretty clear who’s taking advantage of the funds.
Here’s another jaw-dropping bit of information the article pulls from the data. For students from those “A” and “B” districts, the average amount of the ESA for each student is $15,3000. For the “D” and “F” districts, the average amount is $6,700. Individual kids from the top rated districts are pulling in more than twice as much as kids from the lowest rated districts.
For that to make sense, you have to understand how the ESAs are awarded. Every ESA student gets 90 percent of the state funds that would have gone to that student’s district. However, all kids don’t bring in the same amount of money. Students with diagnosed learning disabilities get more money for their educations, since it costs more to educate and take care of them. The more serious the disability, the more money the state pays — as much as $25,000 per student, sometimes even more.
That means a large number of the students leaving the top rated districts are claiming significant learning disabilities, while most students from the lower rated districts are leaving with more-or-less what the average student receives. There are a number of possible explanations for the difference, but whatever the reason, it points out who’s taking the greatest advantage of the taxpayer funds.
The current bill to open ESAs to everyone is hanging by a thread in the legislature. With 17 Republicans and 13 Democrats in the state senate, it only takes two Republican defections to stop the bill. Republicans who genuinely believe their party’s pitch that the main purpose of the ESAs is to make private schools accessible to poor kids should have a hard time voting for the bill based on the information in the article. For the rest of the Republicans who knew from the start this is just another way to give more taxpayer money to the rich and speed the dismantling of our public education system—It’s a twofer!—the information in the article will make their Aye votes that much stronger.
For anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject, the Republic article is chock full of information I haven’t discussed here. At the end of the article is a searchable database of every school district and charter school, which includes the number of students getting ESAs, the average award, the percentage of students on free/reduced lunch and the state letter grade.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2017.
Why do you always bifurcate the American population into “rich” and “poor,” David? What about the middle class? It may be rapidly disappearing, but at this point it still exists and constitutes so large a portion of the electorate that it can only be ignored at grave peril to elected officials and policy proposals that disregard the new realities this class is being forced to face.
From what I’ve seen of your commentary — and I follow it pretty closely — you have never made any attempt to discuss the realities the middle class deals with in academic standards, pricing, and financing for higher ed. That is one of the largest factors influencing what K-12 education policies the middle class will support. In a context where the best universities in this country turn away 9 out of 10 applicants and require that middle class students pay $60K per year for their college educations, wouldn’t it be fair to say that the middle class has been given a very large incentive to support any policies that will enable their students to meet tough admissions standards in desirable universities and reduce the degree to which their children have to load themselves up with tens or hundreds of thousands of undismissable student loan debt to get through college? Do you doubt that these factors are influencing the degree to which portions of the electorate is now willing to support measures like ESAs?
The Democratic party, which likes its friends on Wall Street and in the financial industry, has been in the habit of ignoring what’s going on with student debt — which some characterize as another bubble building like the bubble in the housing market that brought about 2008 — and getting rid of candidates like Sanders who try to address the problems honestly. Perhaps they should stop. Perhaps the fact that they continue to do this and continue to believe that the middle class faces no economic threats is part of the reason they lost the 2016 presidential election and Trump- & DeVos-style education policy now seem to rule the day.
Here’s hoping the Democratic party wakes up before 2020. If they continue to pretend that policy interventions and alterations of the education pricing and finance scene are only needed for those with family incomes below the poverty line, they will lose again, and then we may never be able to reverse the current plutocratic trajectory.
Maybe the affluent have a higher value for education and will not allow their children to be imprisoned in the failed liberal indoctrination centers.
David,
What hypocrisy by the liberal media. As Superintendent, I attempted to directly inform families of D and F rated schools of their opportunity to get a public education through ESA scholarships.
The screams were unbelievable. Brahm Resnick said that I had “crossed a bright red line” – what a hypocrite. You would think that I had engaged in mortal sin. So, keep them uninformed and then use their lack of information as an indictment of a scholarship program for the most needy, the most under-served, the most vulnerable.
That is from page 1 of the liberal, progressive movement. Accusations, accusations. Whether they are true or not accuse everybody else of what you are doing. You can fool half the people all the time.
Come on David. Let’s not make education just ANOTHER partisan issue. It’s too important.
Americans for school choice.
David is a political propagandist, not an educator and not an education policy analyst, so he won’t be responding to comments that raise questions about his talking points. Once his blog is posted on the Tucson Weekly website and is then available to be linked on the Facebook posts of the politicians in his network, providing them with “reporting” to back up their policy preferences from what looks (to the uninformed) like a valid news source, his work is done.
If he did respond to jhuppent@hotmail.com‘s post, he might note that the obstacles to academic achievement that often hinder students in D and F schools will not, in most cases, be solved by enabling them to transfer to other schools. For example, if their parents have to work so much at low wage jobs to pay the rent and utilities that they have a hard time providing after school presence and homework help, that’s not a problem most private schools, which tend to serve students whose life situations are very different, can solve for them. It is a problem that would have a better chance of being solved by raising the minimum wage or by the installation of high quality after school programs in schools serving low-income populations, but those sorts of policy changes and service provisions are not favored in states like Arizona.
And then again, if you’re dealing with a district like TUSD, treating problems in D or F schools might involve providing effective OVERSIGHT to ensure that the available desegregation and Title 1 funds are actually applied in ways that benefit minority and low-income students. You can’t solve the problems of students in D or F schools by allowing the administrators in their schools to underperform and mismanage available funding supplements, and then applaud them for handing 3 and 1/2 million in desegregation funds back to taxpayers. When you’ve failed to require competent management in the schools serving poor families, it doesn’t help to hand them ESAs and suggest they exit the public district system that has been allowed by state regulatory agencies to underperform and fail them and their children.
The population ESAs may actually help (as shown by the data on who is actually using them) is the middle class. They are dealing with their own set of problems and are pursuing their own set of damage-control policies that put band-aids on the bad effects of the underlying problems but do nothing to eliminate the causes of the problems. David refuses to report on these problems because discussion of them doesn’t serve his political network, but that doesn’t make them any less real. What are these problems? Pricing of higher ed. Methods for determining “need” on FAFSA forms. For-profit student loan industry and its entanglement with the government that should be defending citizens from these abuses.
The opportunists may have made it impossible for TUSD to be allowed to continue. The very life has been sucked from it.
“The Democratic party, which likes its friends on Wall Street and in the financial industry” haha. Looked at Trump’s cabinet lately?
Da Coach:
The post you quote from ended with “then we may never be able to reverse the current plutocratic trajectory.” People who want to end the “current plutocratic trajectory” are not generally fans of Trump’s cabinet. Who doesn’t like Trump’s cabinet, Wall Street, the financial industry, or the mainline Democratic party agenda? A Sanders supporter who feels like we are where we are now because Super-delegates, primaries in which Independents could not vote, etc., gave a compromised, unpopular candidate the Democratic party nomination.
Three Sonorans is, (as usual) doing a better job than David Safier.
Excerpts from a TSON re-post of an article from The Intercept:
“Katie Porter, a University of California-Irvine professor and public interest lawyer who authored one of the first academic studies of foreclosure fraud, and who helped thousands of California homeowners as a monitor of the national foreclosure fraud settlement, announced yesterday that she will run for Congress in Californias 45th Congressional district […] Porter told The Intercept that the system hasnt changed, not just in foreclosures but in many aspects of the lives of the middle class. ‘Families are feeling squeezed,’ she said. ‘Theyre concerned about stagnant wages, about the high cost of housing. Theyre concerned about college tuition and student loan debt, and saving for retirement.’ Porter says that fixing the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be among her top priorities.”
But to David Safier, the folks Porter correctly identifies as burdened and in need of protection and relief are “the rich,” “the affluent,” because their incomes put them above the federal definition of poverty? (Safier doesn’t mention this here, but according to one of our local education policy experts, a previous study of Arizona’s ESA’s indicated that “over 58% of families [using ESAs] have income over $57,000.” These would be the folks using ESAs who David Safier refers to as “rich kids”? If this data is actually correct, what kind of alternative universe is he living in, where any American family trying to raise and educate kids on more than $57K per year is “rich”? Maybe someone should send him a spreadsheet with a budget breakdown for a family of that income level. How much can you sock away in the college fund every year when you’re covering day-to-day expenses on a (pre-tax?) income at that level?)
To what degree are federal definitions of “poverty” marking out a vulnerable class encompassing millions of Americans who generally can’t afford to hire lawyers and lobbyists to defend their interests: the middle bracket above the poverty line and below the level of TRUE affluence, that the banks can indenture and exploit? It’s an interesting question asked by some who are in the habit of engaging in critical thinking and economic analysis — not just recycling stale, financial-industry-influenced, Safier-style party-line talking points.
Thanks again, Morales, for providing blog posts worth the time it takes to read them. Full post available here:
http://threesonorans.com/2017/04/04/an-enemy-of-the-wall-street-foreclosure-machine-is-running-to-unseat-a-gop-lawmaker-in-california/
Vouchers give parents the opportunity to get their kids out of TUSD and the morons running it.
It appears that Three Sonorans has taken the re-post of the Porter article down. Fortunately, it’s still available on The Intercept’s website:
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/04/an-enemy-of-the-wall-street-foreclosure-machine-is-running-to-unseat-a-gop-lawmaker-in-california/