Public schools across the nation are reaping what the “experts” have sown—a collapse of quality and confidence in districts’ academic offerings and a fall in student enrollment. Now, those experts want to blame school choice for their current plight, and this month the Washington Post joined the fray in an inaccurate broadside against Arizona’s groundbreaking education reform.
In a major national story spotlighting the closure of schools in the Roosevelt Elementary School District in Phoenix, the Post warned, “Public schools are closing as Arizona’s school voucher program soars.” In short, we’re told, Arizona has hollowed out enrollment and resources for its public school system in favor of unregulated and unaccountable alternatives like the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program—derisively labeled as “vouchers.”
As the Post’s author, Laura Meckler, observes, “Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability.” There’s just one problem—these complaints are overwhelmingly false.
“Eat up state funding?” Arizona taxpayers spend nearly twice as much per student on public schools as on ESA families (over $15,000 per public school student versus about $7,500 for typical ESA kids).
“Benefit families who can afford private school on their own?” Arizona taxpayers spend 10 to 20 times as much money on public school students coming from families making over $150,000 than on ESA families of similar means who were already attending private school or homeschool before the universal expansion.
“Disrupt communities?” More than 10 times as many families in the Roosevelt district that the Post featured have opted out of the district’s schools to attend neighboring public schools, compared to how many are utilizing an ESA. According to the Arizona Department of Education, more than 8,000 (over half) of the students who reside within the Roosevelt elementary district have abandoned the district to enroll in a different public charter or district school, versus just 800 who’ve chosen an ESA.
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Meckler notes various other tired talking points from critics: “Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.”
Yet as even the Arizona Republic, (no friend of school choice) has acknowledged, districts themselves actively send away difficult to educate students to private schools: “Some districts say the best way for them to educate students with the highest needs, like autism and emotional disorders, is to turn them away — at least for a while. More and more public school districts are paying private schools to provide individualized education that they likely could not supply or afford on their own.”
What’s more, contrary to this narrative that private schools shut their doors on the most vulnerable, Arizona’s ESA program actually serves a higher percentage of students with disabilities than the public school system (18% versus 14%).
Finally, Meckler adds, in her own words, “The expansive voucher program also has strained the state budget, with costs projected to top $1 billion this year, far more than originally projected.” Yet this, too, is inaccurate—the state of Arizona enjoyed a multi-billion dollar budget surplus following the expansion, even after fully accounting for the costs of the program, and even as state lawmakers poured hundreds of millions of dollars more in new discretionary funds for public schools than went into the ESA program.
While union activists may prefer scapegoating and slandering ESAs rather than engaging in any meaningful self-reflection (such as looking at their Covid-era policies of literally locking out students), the current enrollment challenges facing public schools are largely self-inflicted.
There is no doubt that demographic changes are narrowing the pool of students across the nation, but the acute exodus of kids from dysfunctional school districts as covered by the Washington Post and others is not rooted in a lack of available bodies or some nefarious privatization plot. Rather, it is the harvest that comes from local district schools chronically failing the students in their communities, year after year.
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