A new round of videos confirms that the spread of misinformation is extensive on both campaigns.
The entire Arizona school choice coalition opposes both measures because they would curtail the ESA program, which enables the families of more than 102,000 Arizona students to choose the learning environments that work best for them.
The initiatives would greatly disrupt their education by imposing new restrictions on how families can spend their funds, layering on bureaucratic red tape, and—in the case of the union-backed measure—kicking tens of thousands of children out of the program entirely.
In the latest clips, signature gatherers working for Protect Education Now, a joint project of Save Our Schools Arizona and the Arizona Education Association, and Fortify AZ, backed by the American Federation for Children, misrepresent the basics of the initiative and the ESA program itself.
Surprisingly, the talking points used by the supposedly pro-school choice campaign frequently mirror those used by ESA opponents.
Both Campaigns Grossly Exaggerate Misspending
In video after video, signature gatherers working for both initiatives wildly exaggerate the prevalence of fraud in the ESA program and hype the supposed purchase of “luxury” items such as jewelry, lingerie, trips to Disneyland, and other tabloid-ready spending that are forbidden under the ESA regulations.
One signature gatherer wearing a badge for Petition Partners, the group hired by the American Federation for Children-backed campaign, claimed that the ESA funds were used for jet skis and vacation rentals.
Another signature gatherer wearing a Petition Partners badge claimed there was $10.3 million in misspending in 2025. She failed to note that that accounts for barely 1% of total ESA spending, and that the vast majority of unallowed expenses were innocent mistakes, such as backpacks, lunch boxes, and water bottles.
Although there is room for improvement, Arizona’s ESA program is among the most accountable of any Arizona government program.
The Arizona Department of Education has confirmed that only 0.3% of ESA spending has been flagged as fraudulent or egregious—and nearly all of that occurred in the ClassWallet Marketplace channel that the American Federation for Children-backed initiative would preserve, while eliminating the debit card and reimbursement options that have almost no fraud at all.
Both Campaigns Spread Misinformation
Some gatherers from both campaigns have gone further still, telling voters verifiably false information in order to induce them to sign their petitions.
One Petition Partners signature gatherer told a voter that ESA parents were not required to submit receipts and that they could “buy a puppy” with their ESA and “say it’s for science class.” In fact, parents are required to provide receipts and other documentation. Moreover, the Arizona Department of Education confirmed that no ESA funds have been spent on puppies.
Another Petition Partners signature gatherer told a voter that parents were using ESA funds on cruises and home remodeling, while yet another claimed they were buying “cars and houses” with ESA funds. The Arizona Department of Education confirmed that no ESA funds have been spent on cruises, cars, houses, or home remodeling.
In some cases, the signature gatherers misrepresent the ballot initiatives to make them appear to be providing more education options for students.
In one video, a signature gatherer wearing a badge for FieldWorks, the group hired by the union-backed campaign, falsely tells voters that signing the petition would “help low-income students go to college.” The ballot initiative does no such thing.
In another video, a signature gatherer wearing a Petition Partners badge claims that the ballot initiative was “for everybody to be able to qualify for the [ESA] program.”
When the voter pushed back, noting that all students already qualify now, he replied (incoherently), “Because there’s something that’s against it already, so we [are] trying to get it on the ballot to be voted on instead of it just being changed.”
Ballot initiative workers have even spoken falsely to voters about the nature of their employment. In one video, a signature gatherer wearing a FieldWorks badge falsely tells a voter that he works for the Secretary of State’s office.
FieldWorks, the Arizona Education Association, and Save Our Schools Arizona did not respond to a request for comment.
It is unsurprising, if dishonest, when a teachers’ union and an avowedly anti-choice group resort to these tropes. It is genuinely appalling when a campaign backed by a self-described school choice organization spreads misinformation about a popular school choice program.
The American Federation for Children did not respond to a request for comment.
Previous videos have shown workers from the two campaigns colluding to gather signatures. In a new video, a signature gatherer with a FieldWorks badge that identifies her as a “team leader” introduces a voter to her fiancé, whom she claims is working for the “other education petition,” seemingly referring to the American Federation for Children-backed campaign.
The FieldWorks worker claims to be the “top signature gatherer in the state.” Her fiancé does not appear to be wearing a badge identifying the campaign for which he works, but he is holding a clipboard for the Fortify AZ petition.
When asked for comment, the owner of Petition Partners, Drew Chavez, deferred to their spokesperson David Liebowitz, who runs a self-described “public relations, political and crisis communication firm.”
The spokesperson declined to answer questions about the involvement of the American Federation for Children in crafting the messaging provided to the Petition Partners signature gatherers, instead providing the following statement: “Petition Partners has hands down the most thorough training program in the industry. Each of the more than 800 circulators hired for this effort has spent hours training on how to comply with state law and the facts of the measure itself.” The Petition Partners spokesperson said that they “have had reports of people pretending to be [Petition Partners] team members in an effort to discredit our work.” When asked to confirm or deny the employment of individuals who appeared in the videos, the Petition Partners spokesperson declined to answer.
Jack Reany, an ESA parent from Tucson, says that he has spoken with more than a dozen signature gatherers. He expressed shock at how little they tend to know about the ballot initiatives they’re asking people to sign.
“The public is being dangerously misled,” says Reany. “The fraud-and-accountability narrative is a smokescreen obscuring a deeply consequential piece of legislation: one that would strip legal protections from private schools, remove children from educational environments where they are thriving, and raid savings set aside by disabled students for their future.”
Arizona law is clear. Under A.R.S. § 19-116, knowingly misrepresenting an initiative’s subject matter to induce a signature is a Class 1 misdemeanor.
The videos keep accumulating. Whether Arizona’s anti-ESA attorney general acts on them is another question.
In the meantime, the advice from Arizona’s school choice advocates remains unchanged: If a gatherer approaches you with either petition, decline to sign.
Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
This week’s erroneous attack on Arizona’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) is another example of how biased reporting is misleading lawmakers and the public.
When the Arizona Auditor General last week released its Single Audit Report on the state for fiscal year 2024, Craig Harris of Channel 12 News had another fairy tale ready for viewers and readers. The ESA program, he claimed, is “plagued by weak controls, questionable spending, and internal management failures.”
No mention was made of the Arizona Department of Education’s recent finding that only 2% of ESA funds were spent on unallowed items (mostly innocent errors like backpacks and lunch boxes), and only 0.3% of ESA funds were spent fraudulently.
A new Arizona Auditor General report finds the the percentage of misspending in the state's Empowerment Scholarship program was a stunning 34 percent, based on a sample of transactions from July 23-October 25.
The report also is highly critical of @RealTomHorne management….
Both halves of that claim are false. And the falsehoods are not minor.
Start with “random.” The Auditor General’s report describes the relevant sample in unambiguous language: “we judgmentally selected 63 expenditure transactions for review occurring between July 2023 and October 2025 totaling $251,446.” [Emphasis added.]
A footnote on the same page adds, for the benefit of any reader who might be tempted to make the mistake that Harris did: “We selected our audit sample(s) to provide sufficient evidence to support our findings, conclusions, and recommendations. Unless otherwise noted, the results of our testing using these samples were not intended to be projected to the entire population.” [Emphasis added.]
Judgmental sampling and random sampling are not synonyms. They are distinct methodologies with distinct inferential properties. A random sample can be projected to a population; that is its entire purpose. A judgmental sample cannot, which is why auditors use it to probe suspected weaknesses rather than measure their prevalence.
In this case, the auditor general was testing the robustness of the Arizona Department of Education’s review process, not trying to determine the prevalence of misspending in the ESA program.
More responsible journalists, such as Garrett Archer of ABC 15, made sure to clarify that the auditor general’s findings were not generalizable to the entire program.
Note: This is not a program transaction error rate. The Auditor General's focus was on the review process itself.
— The AZ – abc15 – Data Guru (@Garrett_Archer) May 12, 2026
In other words, Harris completely misrepresented the auditor general’s methods and findings. That is sloppy at best, dishonest at worst.
Not only is the “34% misspending” figure not generalizable, it’s also not all misspending.
The 34.4% figure comes from dividing $86,599 in flagged transactions by the $251,446 sample. But Table 2 of Finding 2024-04 breaks those flagged transactions into five categories, and only two of them — “unallowable expense” ($2,155) and “overpayment” ($9,977) — involve money the program should not have disbursed.
The other three — missing documentation ($42,760), missing accreditation ($14,175), and “indicators of possible misuse” ($17,531) — are paperwork and compliance gaps. A tutor’s accreditation certificate that wasn’t uploaded is not the same thing as a misspent dollar. The actual confirmed misspending share within the sample (combining 0.9% unallowable expenses plus 4% overpayments) is about 4.9%, not 34%. Moreover, as the report concedes, even the 4.9% figure cannot be projected to the entire program.
In short, Harris conflates paperwork issues with misspending and treats a non-generalizable sample as generalizable, even though the auditor general warned readers not to do exactly that. Then Harris’s manufactured anti-ESA talking points are repeated ad nauseum by politicians and political activists.
Harris built an entire investigative series on a Department of Education internal review that supposedly reported a 20% misuse rate — except the internal review, like the auditors’ sample, was not designed to be projected. Harris projected it anyway.
When the same Department then produced a separate analysis suggesting misuse was minimal, Harris turned around and faulted that study for over-generalizing from its sample. For Harris, non-generalizable findings become generalizable when they damage ESA. Generalizable findings become non-generalizable when they don’t.
The convenient feature of this method is that the error always points the same direction. A reporter who genuinely struggled with the statistics of audit sampling would make mistakes in both directions over time. Harris’s don’t. They cluster.
And they remain uncorrected. Harris’s original 20% claim has never been retracted. The “random sample” language and the 34% framing are now circulating through campaign statements, legislative press releases, and social media posts, citing Harris’s distorted reading of the Auditor General report.
One cannot help but notice that Harris’s manufactured anti-ESA talking points come at a moment when anti-ESA groups are gathering signatures for two ballot initiatives to curb and regulate the ESA program. One also cannot help but wonder whether the downstream political effect is more than incidental to the reporting.
The Auditor General’s findings on ESA are real and worth engaging on their own terms. The program’s risk-based audit methodology is likely better than any other program in the state, but it could still be improved. The auditor has some substantive criticisms, and ADE will have to answer them.
Arizonans deserve honest reporting on those findings, not statistical fictions dressed up as “journalism.”
Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow and Corey DeAngelis is a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
Arizona’s trailblazing Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program enables the families of more than 102,000 students to choose the learning environments that work best for their children.
All Arizona K-12 students are eligible for an education savings account, which lets families direct their children’s education funding toward private schools, tutoring, curricula, therapies, and other educational expenses that fit their children’s unique needs.
Families love it. Three-quarters of parents of school-aged children in Arizona support it.
Yet, although the ESA program is very popular and highly accountable, special-interest groups pushing two separate ballot initiatives are seeking to curtail and regulate it. Advocates working on both campaigns have been caught on camera giving false information to voters whom they are soliciting to sign their petitions.
The initiative aims to regulate the Empowerment Scholarship Account program in several ways, including restricting eligibility to families earning under $150,000 annually—less than the median income of an Arizona firefighter married to a registered nurse—which could kick tens of thousands of children out of the program.
Although students with special needs would still be eligible, they would have to spend 45 days in a public school before getting access to the ESA.
As the Goldwater Institute detailed, the initiative would impose a host of unnecessary and harmful regulations on private schools and homeschoolers. It would also severely restrict what families can buy with their ESA funds, and it would confiscate any unspent funds remaining in a family’s ESA at the end of the year, punishing families who have spent wisely and saved. Those funds would be redirected to district schools that did not educate the ESA students.
The second campaign, Fortify AZ, is more surprising. It is backed by the American Federation for Children, a pro-school choice group.
Their initiative mostly mirrors the union-backed anti-ESA initiative, including a modified version of a provision that the Goldwater Institute has warned “[t]hreatens to block parents from buying basic school supplies and grind the ESA program to a halt with mindless bureaucratic red tape.” However, it would retain the ESA program’s universal eligibility and would not confiscate yet-to-be-used ESA funds.
Nevertheless, the American Federation for Children initiative is worse in other ways, as it would impose regulations and restrictions that the union-based initiative does not.
For example, it would require all ESA students to take a standardized test—something no school choice law in Arizona has required in three decades—and would eliminate two of the four ways that families can spend their ESA funds, leaving only direct pay and “Marketplace,” which is an online platform managed by ClassWallet.
The last provision is particularly puzzling, as the American Federation for Children claims its initiative is intended to “strengthen fiscal accountability and prevent fraud,” which it would supposedly accomplish through “an online marketplace payment system.” According to the Arizona Department of Education, only 0.3% of ESA funds have been spent on fraudulent or egregious purchases, and nearly all the fraud was in Marketplace.
Meanwhile, the two payment methods that the American Federation for Children would inexplicably eliminate—debit cards and reimbursements—have almost no fraud. It makes zero sense to eliminate the more accountable payment options in the name of “accountability.”
The American Federation for Children ballot initiative goes against the wishes of nearly every ESA family, 90% of whom say they support having ESA debit cards.
Arizona School Choice Advocates Oppose Both Initiatives
“The entire Arizona school choice coalition opposes both anti-ESA initiatives,” explains Jenny Clark, the founder and executive director of Love Your School, a local school choice group.
“These initiatives have the potential to disrupt the education of tens of thousands of students,” warned Clark. “They would make it harder for families to use their ESAs, impose unnecessary regulations of private schools and homeschoolers, and even throw children out of the program and potentially out of the schools that serve them.”
Dan Kuiper, the executive director of the Arizona Christian Education Coalition, agrees. “These initiatives were crafted and funded by out-of-state special interest groups without any input from Arizona families or education providers.”
Kuiper worries that if either initiative were to pass, it “would force education providers who serve even one ESA family, including those who serve children with disabilities and special needs, to become part of the government bureaucracy that has already failed many of these families, causing them to seek the alternatives that the ESA offers their children.”
National school choice organizations are also weighing in. EdChoice, the nation’s premier school choice organization, also opposes both ballot initiatives because they would impose “new restrictions” that “would do little to improve accountability while directly reducing the flexibility that families value most.”
Caught on Camera: Initiative Backers Misleading Voters
Under Arizona law, citizens can bypass the Legislature by collecting enough signatures to place a measure directly before voters. Once enough valid signatures are gathered, the initiative goes on the ballot, and a simple majority decides the law.
The ballot initiative process depends entirely on voters understanding what they’re signing. That process is undermined when activists give false or misleading information to voters.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what signature gatherers working for both initiatives are doing.
In one video taken by an ESA parent, a signature gatherer working on behalf of the American Federation for Children initiative made it appear as though the ballot initiative was creating a new school choice program rather than curtailing an existing one. She claimed erroneously that the ballot initiative was “to help out with the cost of charter schools, private schools, tutoring, for the kids.”
Not only do charter schools not charge tuition, but full-time charter school students are not eligible for ESAs.
Worse, the American Federation for Children signature gatherer appeared to encourage Arizona voters to also sign the other, union-backed anti-school choice petition, claiming that it is “the same thing,” albeit with an income cap. “This is just to help get it onto the ballot,” she explained, “either or, whichever one you sign.”
When the ESA parent challenged the signature gatherer, noting that the ESA program already exists, she had no response.
This was no isolated incident.
In another video, a signature gatherer working for the American Federation for Children erroneously stated that their initiative was “to keep the ESA scholarship for families.” Of course, no initiative is needed for that.
Even more troubling, the American Federation for Children signature gatherer misrepresented the initiative, falsely portraying it as “not restrict[ing] ESA funds.”
As in the other video, the American Federation for Children signature gatherer told the voter that she could “sign both” anti-ESA petitions.
In a third video, a pair of signature gatherers representing each of the two initiatives falsely claimed that their ballot initiatives expanded school choice.
When asked what the ballot initiative would do, one signature gatherer misrepresented that it was “to support the children so that they get the funding … to receive the funding and expand the Empowerment Scholarship program.” The second gatherer also fraudulently asserted it was “to expand the [ESA] program.”
When the voter asked the first signature gatherer how the initiative would expand the ESA program, she replied, “By adding more funds.” That is false. The ESA program is already fully funded via the state funding formula. Neither initiative adds additional funding.
The series of false statements by the signature gatherers working for both anti-ESA initiatives could lead to legal trouble.
Arizona Revised Statutes § 19-116 states: “A person who is a circulator of an initiative or referendum petition and who induces any other person in the circulator’s presence to sign the initiative or referendum petition by knowingly misrepresenting the general subject matter of the measure is guilty of a class 1 misdemeanor.”
Likewise, Arizona Revised Statutes § 19-119.01 states that “any fraudulent means, method, trick, device or artifice to obtain signatures on a petition” constitutes “petition signature fraud.”
Whether Arizona’s anti-school choice attorney general actually prosecutes the fraud is an open question. But one thing is certain: Both anti-ESA ballot initiatives would hurt the children who currently benefit from the ESA.
“Neither of these initiatives deserves to reach the ballot,” said Clark. “If you’re approached to sign either one, the right answer is simple: Decline to sign.”
Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
It is said that a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. But when the truth finally catches up, it tends to arrive with receipts.
In recent weeks, anti-school-choice activists have accused Arizona’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program of having a ludicrously high rate of misspending. That narrative, repeated endlessly despite being repeatedly debunked, has now collided with an inconvenient reality: the Arizona Department of Education’s own data tell a starkly different story, one that exposes the “unaccountable ESA” myth for what it always was: a misleading talking point masquerading as journalism.
On Thursday, the Arizona Department of Education published the results of a random audit of the ESA program, finding very low rates of misspending relative to other publicly funded programs and even less fraud. Less than 2% of ESA funds were spent on unallowed items, and 0.3% of the funds were spent on items considered “egregious” or fraudulent. The department is in the process of recouping those funds.
The department’s audit has punctured the gross distortions of Phoenix-based journalist Craig Harris of Channel 12, who had misrepresented the ESA program as being rife with fraud. The department called Harris’s claims “ridiculous,” “reckless,” and “a total misinterpretation of data provided by [the department] to Channel 12.”
Harris had claimed that 20% of ESA purchases represented misuse of funds based upon an examination of only a small portion of total ESA purchases—384,478 of the 1.8 million total ESA transactions since December 2024, approximately 20% of the total.
But it was not a random sample. The Arizona Department of Education had selected these purchases under a risk-based audit for additional scrutiny, so it was not a random sample that one could use to extrapolate rates of misuse in the ESA program. Instead, the risk-based pool was far more likely to contain misuse than the average purchase.
In other words, among the 20% of ESA purchases flagged for additional scrutiny, the department found 20% to be misspending. Harris, however, extrapolated the risk-based results on to the entireuniverse of ESA purchases. This represented a blatant distortion because the remaining purchases outside of the risk-based sample were far less likely to involve misspending.
Think of it this way: imagine that a reporter read a study showing that 20% of Americans were obese and that 20% of obese Americans had diabetes, then he ran a story claiming that 20% of all Americans had diabetes. Such a claim would be a complete distortion of the data, a conclusion that is entirely unsupported by the facts.
Harris was warned both publicly and privately that his “analysis” was deeply misleading. Nevertheless, he continued to repeat his “20% misuse” claim on television and social media.
The Arizona Department of Education decided to set the record straight by auditing a random sample of thousands of Arizona ESA purchases. The audit’s conclusion: “About 2% of purchases are unallowable expenses and only 0.3% represent fraud or egregious purchases.”
In short, Harris’s “analysis” on misspending was off by a factor of 10, and his accusations of fraud were off by nearly a factor of 100.
And although Harris made it seem like one in five ESA parents were buying diamond rings, the reality is that egregious purchases represented a vanishingly small percentage of ESA spending. Most of the unallowed items appear to have been innocent mistakes.
The Arizona Department of Education explained the difference between unallowable purchases and egregious purchases/fraud in a press release:
The submission of a purchase that is deemed unallowable does not constitute fraud. Most are innocent mistakes, such as an error in a form that must be resubmitted, or educational items that are not on the allowable list but that the user could have in good faith believed were permitted. Some examples would be backpacks, lunch boxes and water bottles.
A ridiculous figure of 20% fraud has been circulating concerning ESA purchases which resulted from a total misinterpretation of data that we provided to Channel 12.
Cracking down on misspending is important, but so is keeping things in perspective. The rate of improper payments for the Arizona ESA program, at 1.9%, stands far below a variety of programs which ESA opponents support, such as Medicaid (7.4%), food stamps (9.3%), and unemployment insurance (14.4%). Moreover, the Arizona Department of Education actively recovers misspending, and refers serious cases for criminal prosecution to punish criminal activity and to deter fraud.
Indeed, the only reason we know about the miniscule level of unallowed purchases in the ESA program is because it is so transparent—far more transparent than district schools, which do not report transaction-level data to state officials, let alone the public. Given the rash of recentscandals in Arizona’sdistrictschoolsystem, one can only imagine what we would find if given access to information about every purchase that district schools have made, as we have for the ESA program.
In the interests of transparency and accountability, state lawmakers should require the district schools provide the same level of information about purchases as ESA families.
Harris has not yet retracted his false reporting. Instead, he has doubled down on his errors, erroneously claiming that the department’s audit was “largely skewed” and based on “a miniscule sample.” This claim is particularly ironic given that Harris erroneously treated a risk-based sample—which is inherently skewed—as though it was representative of the entire population. A random sample, by contrast, is representative of the whole.
Facts are stubborn things. So too, apparently, are anti-school-choice activists who can’t let go of the false narrative they pushed in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Matthew Ladner is a Senior Advisor for education policy implementation and Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
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 more 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.
