By Jason Bedrick |

Craig Harris of Channel 12 is out with another story cunningly designed to make Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program look like a runaway subsidy for private schools. Regular readers will recognize the pattern: take real numbers, arrange them to imply a conclusion the numbers don’t support, and omit every fact that would undercut that conclusion.

We’ve documented this pattern before. For example, Harris’s fabricated 20% fraud claim that the Arizona Department of Education directly refuted, or the misread auditor general sample Harris falsely presented as a program-wide “34% misspending,” despite the auditor general specifically saying it was not a random sample and hence “not intended to be projected to the entire population.”

Most damning, Harris was caught coordinating by text message with anti-school choice activists at the Capitol — advising them where to position themselves for “maximum political impact” on the very legislation he was supposedly covering neutrally.

Channel 12 has never corrected the record on any of it.

Harris’s latest piece continues the tradition. Among numerous falsehoods in the piece, three stand out.

1. Big Numbers With No Denominator

Harris tells readers that $719 million in ESA funds flowed to “just” 190 private schools since 2022, and that Gilbert Christian Schools alone received $34 million – letting the insinuation behind the word “just” do a lot of work.

What Harris doesn’t tell readers is what any of that means in context.

Arizona’s public school system — district and charter combined — spends roughly $14,673 per pupil, a record high, according to the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee. The ESA program, by contrast, reports that three-quarters of scholarships fall between $7,000 and $9,000 a year — roughly half what a district or charter school spends on the same child.

Total annualized ESA spending as of the most recent quarterly report is about $1.1 billion — against total Arizona K-12 public school spending of roughly $15.9 billion. ESAs represent about 7% of what Arizona spends educating children, despite educating 9% of Arizona’s K–12 students. That’s not the runaway spending Harris implies.

The Gilbert Christian figure is even more telling once you run it against the alternative. Gilbert Christian’s enrollment grew from roughly 1,377 students in 2022 to 2,300 in 2026. Had those same students attended a district school instead, at Arizona’s average per-pupil cost, taxpayers would have spent well over $100 million educating them over that period — versus the $34 million ESAs actually paid out.

Harris presents the $34 million as an alarming number. He never mentions the number it’s replacing. Again: the context that undercuts his narrative is conspicuously absent.

2. Omitting ESA Data on Special-Needs Students

For his next two attacks on the ESA program, Craig Harris quotes Tulane economist Douglas Harris (no relation) of Tulane University. For those unfamiliar with the latter’s work, Douglas Harris is the Craig Harris of school-choice research.

For example, in a brazen attempt to smear school-choice philanthropist Betsy DeVos during her confirmation hearings for U.S. Secretary of Education, Douglas Harris wrote an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that that charter-school sector in Detroit (which DeVos supported) was a “disaster.” As proof, he relied on a study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). The only problem was that the study showed that Detroit’s charter schools consistently outperformed Detroit’s traditional public schools, and CREDO called Detroit’s charter school sector a “model to other communities.”

In the latest Channel 12 salvo against ESAs, Douglas Harris is cited claiming that school choice programs nationwide serve students who “typically have fewer needs” than public school students.

Arizona’s own data say the opposite.

The most recent Arizona Department of Education (ADE) quarterly report shows 21% of ESA students have a disability, compared to 15% in Arizona’s district schools. That’s not a program skimming the easiest kids to serve. It’s a program serving a higher share of students with disabilities than the district school system.

Of course, those data don’t appear in the Channel 12 story. That would undercut Harris’s crooked narrative.

3. Omitting ESA Data on Sector Switchers

Douglas Harris also claims choice programs nationally serve students who were “already attending” private schools before receiving public support. That’s not true nationwide, and it certainly isn’t true in Arizona today.

ADE’s most recent quarterly report shows 58.6% of new ESA students newly enrolling this year came directly from a public school the year before — up from 57.3% last year and 47.6% the year before. Moreover, these figures undercount the number of switchers because they don’t factor in students moving from out of state or students who would have attended a public school in the absence of an ESA program.

Those figures are harder to calculate, but at the very least, an objective reporter would give readers ADE’s published data on this very question.

But yet again, Craig Harris chose to omit any data that would undermine his anti-ESA narrative.

A Pattern of Omissions and Distortions

None of these are subtle errors a careful reporter might miss once. They are the same style of omissions and distortions that have become the hallmark of Craig Harris’s career—anti-school choice advocacy wearing a press badge.

Arizona families deserve real reporting that provides the context necessary to understand what the numbers actually mean. Until Channel 12 starts doing that, Arizonans should get their news elsewhere.

Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.