By Matthew Holloway |
Citing a report from the Arizona Legislative Budget Committee, the Goldwater Institute debunked the narrative that Arizona’s universal education savings account (ESA) program has harmed students and blown up the states’ budget.
In a lengthy and detailed report from Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute Matt Beienburg, it is made plain that the universal ESA program has been a net-positive development for Arizona’s students, families, and taxpayers.
In a post to X, Beienburg summarized the report writing, “Since universal expansion, AZ enjoyed a $2B budget surplus one year, & an overall K-12 formula savings compared to its enacted budget the second, all as 75,000 ESA students are now being served at lower taxpayer cost $ than their peers in the state’s public school system.”
In a subsequent comment, he added, “Arizonans deserve better than willful or sloppy misrepresentations by @propublica, @joedanareports, @laurieroberts & @arizona_sos attacking the ESA program while ignoring record public school costs (including recently uncovered misspending on wine tastings & political candidate bootcamps)[.]”
The depth of Beienburg’s breakdown of the committee’s analysis can be summarized into a few key points.
He writes, “While union-aligned journalists and advocacy organizations have painted Arizona’s ESA program as excessively costly to taxpayers and responsible for triggering a budgetary shortfall, the two years of the universal ESA program’s history—and a new report from Arizona’s nonpartisan state budget analysts—suggest otherwise.”
The committee analysts explained, “With the above forecast adjustments, we estimate the total combined district/charter/ESA enrollment will generate savings of $(352,200) in FY 2024 relative to the enacted budget.”
Beienburg points out that the budget deficit of 23’-24’ only arose after Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed the original budget passed by Republican majorities in the House and Senate. That budget would have left the state with over a billion dollars in reserve funds even after fully funding the ESA program.
“Hobbs instead signed a budget that increased state spending by an additional $2 billion to the highest level of all time and exhausted the state’s surplus financial cushion, leaving it unable to absorb lower than projected revenue collections.”
Beienburg also mentions that the bevy of claims from critics of the ESA program “have relied on ideologically motivated, often factually dishonest misrepresentations of the program and its finances,” and “are simply false and represent either basic numerical illiteracy or willful misrepresentation of fact.”
Finally, the report from Goldwater assesses the fifth claim that critics of the ESA make which is that the program “siphons too much money to ‘wealthy’ or ‘high-income’ families,” by supporting families who are either pursuing home schooling or private education. And it is in this last segment of the report, the ultimate, purely ideological and class-warfare driven motivation for all of the “misrepresentations of the program and its finances” emerges.
The glaring inconsistency in the view of ESA critics that the “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts” benefit the wealthy is utterly undone by even a cursory examination of the families utilizing the program. As the Goldwater Institute, the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute, and multiple conservative outlets have repeatedly verified, families of ESA children cover the full breadth of the socio-economic strata from crushingly impoverished to blindingly wealthy, from the broken down trailer parks of South Phoenix to the most lavish homes of Paradise Valley.
Beienburg notes, “By simply proclaiming a national ‘consensus’ in support of their own views—and ignoring an entire half of the nation seeking something better—advocacy organizations like Brookings suggest the education status quo should be preserved because…that’s how it’s always been.”
He concludes, “Yet this same status quo failed families during COVID-19, locked children out of classrooms, has doubled inflation-adjusted K-12 costs over recent decades, and has failed to meaningfully improve student outcomes for generations. The proliferation of education savings accounts—like other school choice innovations such as charter schools—on the other hand, offers families and lawmakers the opportunity to expand the range of educational choices available to students and ensure that each child can pursue an education of excellence, not simply political convenience.”
Matthew Holloway is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.
