Unfortunately for Arizona taxpayers, the Grand Canyon State is a petri dish of public school privatization measures and has been for nearly thirty years. Even though voters here rejected universal vouchers through a citizen-driven ballot initiative several years ago, in 2022, then-Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill that opened up vouchers to everyone, even millionaires and billionaires.
Now, public education advocates all over the country look to Arizona as an example of what not to do. Since the voucher system was expanded, the state has been facing massive budget shortfalls. In Maricopa County, a recent lawsuit resulted in public school districts and other government agencies being saddled with even more budget cuts.
The systematic degradation of public school funding began in the 1990s when former Governor Fife Symington and the Republican-led Arizona legislature opened the floodgates for school privatization by way of charter schools. Without conducting any kind of studies or surveys, charter schools began popping up in churches and strip malls across Arizona. Over the years, the privatizers tried to rebrand vouchers as “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs), and they got around that pesky Constitution of ours by saying that since the money goes directly to parents, it does not violate the Establishment Clause.
Today, the taxpayers in Arizona are subsidizing the private education of the children of millionaires and billionaires who can do, well, just about anything with those dollars. Because while public schools and even public charter schools in Arizona have to meet certain academic and fiscal requirements, private schools, microschools, and homeschooling parents have almost no oversight.
Private schools in Arizona can choose any type of curriculum they want. They can tell students the universe is 6,000 years old or that the only suitable role for women is as obedient wives and doting mothers. Private school employees do not have to get background checks or fingerprint clearance cards. Private school administrators do not have to accept children with special needs. Overwhelmingly, Arizona’s parochial schools require students and staff to sign “statements of faith,” which frequently include items like “marriage is between a man and a woman” and “life begins at conception.”
Homeschool parents in Arizona have just as little oversight and accountability. When parents decide to homeschool their children, they must notify the state and their home district of their intentions, and that’s pretty much it. Although they are “required” to teach certain subjects, there are no measures to ensure students are actually being taught. There are no testing requirements and parents do not have to have any experience in education.
Last year, a white supremacist homeschool group in Ohio received national attention. If that group had been in Arizona, taxpayers would be funding them to the tune of about $7,000 per student. Here in Arizona, a large number of vouchers are being used in Colorado City, a polygamist community composed of members of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). I shudder to think what type of curriculum the children are being indoctrinated with up there.
Despite the myth that vouchers are designed to help families in impoverished and underperforming schools, in Arizona these vouchers are going to some of the wealthiest zip codes. With so little oversight, parents can spend their voucher money on expensive Lego sets, private lessons, and other luxury items.
Even if vouchers were designed to give low-income families a “leg up,” think about the privilege required to use them. Families must have reliable transportation and they still have to come up with significant funds because so many private religious schools increased their tuition rates in the wake of Ducey’s universal vouchers. If their child requires special education services? Too bad. If the student, parent, or guardian is a member of the LGBTQ+ community? Tough luck. Just last year, in Queen Creek, Arizona, two gay fathers were discriminated against by the private religious school their daughter attended.
Every freethinking American must pay attention to what’s happening in their own backyards. In Arizona, it will take electing a new state legislature and probably a couple of decades to get back on track. The rest of the country should heed the lessons learned from the Grand Canyon State’s failed private education experiment.