By Matthew Ladner & Jason Bedrick |

Emerson famously noted that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Opponents of Arizona’s school choice program seem determined to field legions of such monsters.

Exhibit A: the reporting of Craig Harris. Harris has over the years repeatedly filed anti-school choice stories which were riddled with errors. His latest salvo against Arizona’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program is no exception.

In 2018 and 2019, Harris published articles in the Arizona Republic claiming charter schools underperformed district schools and faced mass closures, but both stories relied on flawed research—including counting schools that only went through 9th grade or had already closed as having 0% graduation rates and relying on “research” by anti-charter school activists that misunderstood basic accounting concepts.

More than six years later, the predicted mass closures have never materialized, and National Assessment of Educational Progress data actually showed Arizona charter students outscoring district peers by roughly two grade levels.

But Harris, unlike the students, doesn’t seem to have learned his lesson. These days he has fixated his efforts against Arizona’s ESA program—and the results are just as edifying.

With an ESA, parents can purchase a wide variety of educational goods and services using 90% of the state money that their child would have received at their local district school. The parent-managed accounts have state oversight to keep transactions focused on allowable education expenses. The program is wildly popular with Arizona families, with over 100,000 students participating.

However, the ESA program is not so popular with special interest groups tied to school districts and their allies in the press.

Now at Channel 12, Harris has produced misleading stories about Arizona’s ESA program, including claims that parents use accounts for “babysitting“—based on a since-corrected error by the Treasurer’s Office—and that families are “subsidizing vacations,” when in reality they’re purchasing tickets to museums, zoos, and aquariums, which are allowable educational expenses also used by public schools. The program uses risk-based auditing to detect fraud, the same widely accepted method used by the IRS and recommended by Arizona’s Auditor General.

In his latest salvo against ESAs, Harris has produced a so-called “analysis” claiming that 20% of ESA purchases constituted a misuse of funds—a huge jump from the less than 1% rate of misuse previously detected by the Arizona Auditor General.

Misuse of funds in publicly funded programs is a serious problem which the Arizona Department of Education has taken great pains to minimize in the ESA program. Harris, however, is once again playing games and tricks with the data.

First, Harris’s claim of that 20% misuse is based upon an examination only of a small portion of total ESA purchases—384,478 of the 1.8 million total ESA transactions since December 2024, or about 20% of the total. This smaller group of purchases had been selected by the Arizona Department of Education for additional scrutiny via risk-based auditing, so it’s not a random sample that one could use to extrapolate about rates of misuse in the ESA program generally.

In other words, among the 20% of ESA purchases flagged for additional scrutiny, 20% were found to be misspending. But 20% of 20% amounts to only 4% of total purchases. Harris’s claim that 20% of ESA purchases were misspending is a gross exaggeration.

In fact, even the supposed 4% misuse rate itself is an exaggeration, as it is 4% of total transactions, not 4% of total spending. The most recent data from the Arizona Department of Education show than half of ESA funds are spent on private school tuition, so the rate of misspending is likely less than 2% of total spending—a rate of improper payments that is well below a variety of programs found in programs which ESA opponents support, such as Medicaid (7.4%), food stamps (9.3%), and unemployment insurance (14.4%).

Tears for Fears’s hit song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” includes the line, “One headline—why believe it?” If the headline is followed by a Craig Harris byline, be very careful before you believe it as you are not getting the whole story—maybe even a false story.

Matthew Ladner is a Senior Advisor for education policy implementation and Jason Bedrick is a Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.