The truth is that Arizona’s K–12 choice program saves taxpayers money.
The truth is that Arizona’s K–12 choice program saves taxpayers money.
T he infinite monkey theorem holds that if you keep a group of chimpanzees in a room full of typewriters long enough, they will eventually pound out a copy of King Lear. Likewise school-choice opponents, after decades of predicting school-choice doomsday scenarios that have never materialized, have found a gross school-choice distortion that some people are ready to believe: that Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Program is supposedly “bankrupting” the state budget.
The false claim originated from a memo from Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, and the press has been eagerly parroting it. The truth, however, is that Arizona’s K–12 choice program saves taxpayers money while giving families the opportunity to select schooling that matches their needs and values.
Arizona lawmakers have been expanding K–12 options through charter schools, district open enrollment, and private-choice programs since 1994. Arizona lawmakers created the nation’s first account-based choice program in 2011: the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program. The Empowerment Scholarship Program gives participating students 90 percent of their state funding, which is deposited into accounts managed by families under state supervision.
The accounts have numerous educational uses, such as private-school tuition, individual public-school courses, online programs, special-education therapies, college tuition, and tutoring. Arizona lawmakers made all the state’s K–12 students eligible to participate in 2022. Last year, about 77,000 of Arizona’s 1.2 million participated.
The Arizona Department of Education put out a press release after the publication of the Hobbs memo noting that Arizona’s K–12 budget (which includes ESA) had a multimillion-dollar surplus. Budgetary surpluses do not cause budget deficits.
Like all state budgets, many factors influence Arizona’s budget, including trends in tax revenue, federal funding, and expenditures across scores of programs. The ESA program expenditure represented less than 1 percent of the state’s revenue.
The Mesa Unified School District, for example, spent $15,526 per pupil last school year — over $850 million to educate just under 55,000 students. The ESA program, however, educated over 71,000 students for less than $700 million. The ESA program therefore represents a bargain for Arizona taxpayers, with the average Mesa Unified student costing taxpayers more than $5,000 more per pupil than the average ESA student.
During the 2020–21 school year, 50,000 students unenrolled from Arizona school districts. The state provides Arizona schools with funding on a per-pupil basis, so state funding followed children from the schools they departed. Charter-school, private-school, and homeschooling enrollment increased during this year, and an unknown number of students dropped out of school entirely.
Taxpayers bear a substantially smaller burden per pupil for a student enrolling in either an Arizona charter school or the ESA program. Further, it is entirely appropriate for K–12 funding to follow children, as those educating the student require the funding.
Arizona school districts not only improved their performance but also led the way on choice. A 2017 study of Phoenix-area districts found that district open-enrollment transfers outnumbered charter-school students nearly two to one. Charter-school students likewise greatly outnumbered private-choice students. As with everything else, the funding followed the student to the school they attend.
Nearly 5,000 nonresident students attend Scottsdale Unified Schools, and approximately half of the enrollment of the Madison Elementary School District attends through open enrollment. The school boards of both districts have school-board majorities endorsed by the district employee union. “Draining” district budgets through Arizona’s largest choice program (open enrollment, which dwarfs the ESA program) is fine — so long as the unions get their cut of the funding through dues.
Arizona choice opponents have predicted doom for the public-education system consistently since 1994. Arizona students, however, demonstrated significant improvement on all six exams of the Nation’s Report Card (fourth- and eighth-grade math, reading, and science). Only Arizona students achieved this during the period in which all six exams were available.
Moreover, when scholars from Stanford linked state testing data from across the country, they revealed that Arizona students learned at a faster pace than students in any other state — both overall, and for low-income students when compared with their peers.
If the chimpanzees ever do type a copy of King Lear, it will include the line, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” What we ought to say about Arizona’s ESA program is that it empowers teachers to create their own schools and families to select from among them while saving taxpayers money.
Special interests feel threatened by the success of this innovative approach, but taxpayers, teachers, and parents should feel hopeful and encouraged.