By Matt Beienburg |

The legacy media seem to be on a mission: tear down Arizona’s groundbreaking school choice program with false accusations and inaccurate reporting. 

Fortunately, facts don’t lie, even if the media does.  

The Arizona Capitol Times declared this week in astonishing terms, “Education department under fire for approving $124M in improper ESA [education savings account] purchases.” 

Such astronomical levels of fraud would seem to threaten the very foundations of the historic school choice revolution that has swept the nation. There was just one problem, the headline was completely false. 

Not only were the supposed dollar amounts exaggerated up to 100 times greater than the amounts of improper spending actually reported by the department, but these purchases weren’t even approved in the first place.  

Here’s the story the media won’t tell: Arizona’s 2022 adoption of a fully universal ESA program has been a nation-leading success, allowing parents across the state to give their children an education best suited to their needs.  

To its credit, the Times quickly retracted its original headline and issued a formal correction admitting “an inaccurate dollar amount” in its first draft and eliminating the suggestion that the purchases were “approved.”  Unfortunately, such journalistic ethics appear not to be shared by the Times’ more ideological media counterparts in Arizona, particularly those of the teachers’ union-aligned 12News team, who have resolutely declined to correct or retract their false reporting.  

12News’ Craig Harris, for instance, has repeatedly and falsely declared that the state has “approved” ESA purchases for iPhones, televisions, and other non-educational items over the past year.  

But all those purchases haven’t been approved, as the State Board of Education’s ESA Handbook—ratified by members appointed by both former Gov. Doug Ducey and Gov. Katie Hobbs—makes clear.  The document expressly states that while families’ ESA purchases under $2,000 are promptly reimbursed by the state, these items “are not deemed ‘approved’ by the Department, until they are audited OR the timeframe to audit the orders has passed [2 fiscal years].”  Just like their tax returns filed with the IRS, these families’ ESA purchases are processed up front and subject to enforcement afterwards.  

Yet, 12News either knowingly misrepresented the status of these orders or else incompetently failed to perform basic due diligence to learn how the program operates.  

By 12News’ anti-ESA logic, the IRS should apparently also withhold refunds to taxpayers until their tax returns have been audited potentially years later, rather than promptly when the returns are filed. 

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that 12News’ anti-school choice reporters have been exposed in such light. In 2018, Harris (then with the Arizona Republic) falsely reported that Arizona charter schools produced worse student graduation rates and worse outcomes on the state A-F letter grade system than district schools. Both claims turned out to have been fabricated results stemming from a faulty, agenda-driven data analysis by Harris’ team.   

In 2024, 12News’ Joe Dana likewise doubled down on false claims that ESAs cost state taxpayers more than the public school system per student by conveniently ignoring major sources of public school funding. The state’s Classroom Site Fund, for example, allocates over $1,000 for every public school student in the state and gives not a penny to ESA families.   

Undeterred by journalistic standards, Dana’s 12News team also went further, deceptively extracting a fragment of a statement given by the state’s budget director (given in response to a completely different question) to suggest the ESA program had created unprecedented strain on the state budget.  

The Heritage Foundation’s Matt Ladner and Jason Bedrick have already exposed a litany of deceptive claims flowing from outlets like 12News, while more prestigious national news organizations like The Washington Post have seen their recent anti-ESA narratives similarly debunked. Yet none of these outlets have expressed any contrition for their deceptive coverage.  

Indeed, in perhaps the richest of ironies, Harris’ 12News team recently attacked ESAs for “hurting” high-performing schools like Arizona charter network BASIS by competing with it for students. Never mind that Harris previously attacked BASIS for its alleged poor stewardship of taxpayer funds.  Now that it is clear he and the media were on the wrong side of that school choice debate as well, they have simply shifted to a new enemy in their war on parents.   

Looking at the whole of Arizona’s education landscape, there is no question that those who seek to defraud the state—whether via the traditional public school system or its competitors—should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.  But if there is a scandal in our education system, it is the dishonest reporting by journalists who are more disturbed by parental empowerment than by the tens of billions of dollars squandered year after year in chronically poor performing public schools. 

Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.