For months, we have documented the pattern of errors, distortions, and outright fabrications that characterize the coverage of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program by Channel 12’s political reporter Craig Harris. Each new episode—the fabricated 20% fraud claim, the defiance in the face of correction by the Arizona Department of Education itself, the constant shifting of goalposts as each of his claims is debunked—seemed like it might result in Channel 12 taking appropriate corrective action.
But they never did.
Last week, at the Arizona Legislature’s final stretch of its 2026 session, the mask came off entirely.
While lawmakers debated a series of consequential ESA-related bills and resolutions on Thursday and Friday—including a constitutional amendment to protect military family scholarships—Harris was captured on camera doing something that no journalist who takes the job title seriously can explain away: coordinating, via text message, with members of Save Our Schools Arizona, the anti-school-choice advocacy group that is a principal sponsor of the Protect Education Now ballot initiative, about where they should position themselves inside the Capitol building for maximum political impact.
Text message conversation between Channel 12’s Craig Harris and anti-school choice activists.
Let that sink in. A reporter on the education beat, covering legislation in real time, was not observing the advocacy groups in the building. He was directing them.
The text exchange was visible on the screen of a Save Our Schools activist—readable thanks to a conspicuously large font and no privacy screen—and was flagged by our Heritage Foundation colleague Corey DeAngelis, who shared images of the messages on social media after receiving them from a local activist. Harris subsequently confirmed on X that the images of the group chat, named “ESA DDD Confidential 12News,” were real.
After Harris told the activist that he was in the state senate chamber as that is “where [the] bill will first get introduced,” Save Our Schools board member Kathy Boltz asked Harris for advice regarding where their team of activists should place themselves in the capitol building. “Should we be in the senate? Hmm,” she asked. Within a minute, Harris answered in the affirmative.
This is not ambiguous. This is not a misunderstanding. This is a journalist using his knowledge of the Arizona Legislature’s political process to provide tactical advice to an advocacy group that has a direct political stake in the legislation he is supposed to be covering neutrally.
Harris was no longer covering the news. He was helping to manufacture it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The same captured text conversation revealed Harris mocking a local school choice supporter, asking whether the individual “stars in porn.”
This derision was not just a lapse in professionalism. This was contempt—contempt for the families, advocates, and ordinary citizens who show up at the Capitol to make the case for educational freedom, expressed in a private conversation with advocates on the other side of the issue.
Text message conversation between Channel 12’s Craig Harris and anti-school choice activists.
Multiple Arizona politicos were quick to call out the behavior publicly. State Senator Jake Hoffman called for Channel 12 to fire Harris and called on the station to “open an investigation into every story he was involved in and retract any instance of undisclosed coordination.” Hoffman observed that this coordination with activists is “precisely the kind of unethical behavior that has caused the majority of Americans to deeply distrust the media.”
Arizona Republic columnist and former State Senator Paul Boyer called it “a really bad look” for Channel 12 to have their reporter, “who is also reporting on these same groups” to be discovered “coordinating with them at the legislature to defeat the same type of legislation he’s myopically focused on.” Similarly, J.P. Twist, executive director of Citizens for Free Enterprise, called out Harris for “literally strategizing with a partisan union to undermine parents’ rights.”
The parent company of Channel 12 publishes a “Principles of Ethical Journalism” statement committing its journalists to the values of truth, independence, public interest, fair play, and integrity. It’s hard to see how coordinating with one group of political activists and crudely mocking the other side comports with those standards.
Sadly, Harris’s breach of journalistic ethics does not end there.
Later that night, in a hearing on legislation to protect military family scholarships, Harris took to social media to characterize two of the three supporting witnesses who testified as people “making money off ESAs,” implying their support was financially motivated rather than principled.
One of those witnesses was Kevin Biesty, spokesperson for the Arizona Christian Education Coalition. As Biesty detailed on X, he reached out to Harris privately and asked him to correct or remove the post. Harris declined. As Biesty observed, the logic Harris applied to him — that representing clients who are affected by ESA policy makes one a financially conflicted advocate — is never applied to the other side. The staff and lobbyists of Save Our Schools Arizona and the teachers unions, who are paid to oppose the ESA program, are never characterized by Harris as people “making money off” the issue.
Harris also claimed that no military family spoke at the hearing. That too was false. Biesty had personally presented a written statement from a military mother who could not remain for the late-night session, and referenced letters from other military families — all of this while Harris was in the room. At no point did Harris ask Biesty for that mother’s contact information or seek to include her perspective in his coverage. He was, however, apparently attentive enough to the gallery to communicate with his Save Our Schools contact — the same ESA mother and SOS board member who, Biesty observed, is never identified as such in Harris’s stories — while sitting at the press desk on the floor.
Indeed, when ESA students and their families share their stories, Harris is quick to dismiss them. Recently, a young ESA student with disabilities named Jordan Visser shared on video about the ways the Protect Education Now initiative would harm students like himself. Harris went on social media to dispute his account, claiming that the initiative would not affect students with special needs—effectively accusing a student with disabilities of lying about the impact of a ballot measure on his own situation.
He was wrong. As the student’s mother, Kathy Visser, and others documented, the text of the initiative itself bore out what the student had said—the ESA funds that the family had saved to continue providing him with services would be seized by the state if the Save Our Schools ballot initiative were adopted.
The irony of Harris’s posture—aggressively checking the credibility of a disabled student while coordinating inside the Capitol with the very advocacy group sponsoring the initiative in question—encapsulates the problem. It is not that Harris is a journalist who occasionally makes mistakes. It is that the mistakes run in one direction, consistently, and that when corrected, he doubles down rather than acknowledging any error. And it is now documented, on camera, that he was coordinating tactics with one side of the debate he was purportedly covering.
Arizona families with children in the ESA program deserve better than a reporter who coordinates with the opposition at the very hearings he is assigned to cover. Arizona viewers deserve better than a news organization that has allowed this pattern to continue unchecked. And the thousands of children—including those with disabilities—who rely on these scholarships deserve a press corps willing to represent their stories honestly.
Channel 12 has not issued a correction or a retraction of the false fraud statistics. It has not yet acknowledged Harris’s coordination with activists or the mockery of a school choice supporter.
Channel 12’s parent company should answer a simple question: Is the behavior documented at the Capitol last week consistent with its Principles of Ethical Journalism? If not, what will it do about it?
Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow and Matthew Ladner is aSenior Advisor for education policy implementation 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 school choice program allows participants to use funds to pay for college, per a reminder from the state’s top elected education official.
Tom Horne, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, promoted this usage of Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program funds in an interview with The Center Square last week.
Horne said this option was more than just a benefit to families. The superintendent made the case that higher education directly correlated to strengthening Arizona’s economy.
“We want kids to go to college,” said Horne. “The percentage of college-educated students in a state has something to do with the success of its economy.”
This is not a new allowance. Arizona law has allowed this use of school choice funds since universalization occurred in 2022 under the former governor, Doug Ducey. Arizona was the first state to open school choice to all students.
Over 102,800 students have enrolled in the ESA program for the 2025-2026 school year, as of last week.
Horne is touting the benefits of the ESA program amid attacks from various special interests.
The Arizona Department of Education (AZED) is under pressure from a major media outlet, 12News, and anti-school choice organizations over misspending rates within the program.
12News reported that 20 percent of ESA expenditures were improper purchases. AZED reported the misspending rate amounted to less than two percent.
12News argued both figures can be true depending on the context, but Horne argued that was not the case. He said the actual amount of fraudulent purchases out of all misspending was 0.3 percent.
“The people who’ve made these criticisms fundamentally did not understand. To start with, [12News] said there was 20 percent fraud,” said Horne in a KTAR interview last month. “The 20 percent figure was the percentage of purchases under $2,000 to see if they were okay or not. But only 20 percent of that 20 percent were improper. That’s four percent. And the other thing to know is, they’re not all fraud. A lot of times it’s innocent mistakes.”
While Horne continues to defend and promote the merits of the ESA program in its present form, both supporters and detractors of the program argue changes need to be made.
Horne’s primary election challenger, Treasurer Kimberly Yee, announced last month that reforms were needed to reduce improper spending, starting with a switch in the reimbursement vendor.
Regardless of the outcome of this election, either Horne or Yee may face new challenges from school choice opponents.
The benefit to pay for higher education through the school choice program, and universalization as a whole, may be limited later this year pending the outcome of a ballot initiative seeking to place an income cap on eligibility.
Under the initiative, only families earning less than $150,000 a year would qualify to enter the ESA program. That income ceiling would be adjusted annually.
Under that income cap, approximately 15 percent of current ESA students would be removed from the program.
The initiative would also further restrict the list of allowable purchases. All tutors, schools, and service providers would be required to fall under State Board of Education oversight, and pay a fee and register annually with AZED to receive ESA funds.
It would also eliminate the current ability for families to rollover funds. All unspent funds would be recouped and returned to the state. That would, effectively, end ESA students’ ability to set aside funds over the years to pay toward college.
The Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona are behind the ballot initiative, “Protect Education Act,” filed last month (this version superseded a previous version, the “Protect Education, Accountability Now Act”).
The initiative requires nearly 256,000 signatures to make the ballot.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee is advocating for reforming the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program to reduce improper spending.
The treasurer’s office manages the contract with the vendor operating the portal through which ESA holders submit reimbursement payments.
Yee shared that she directed her office to seek out vendors proposing to innovate better means of facilitating the expanding ESA program. The treasurer’s office will publish a formal request for information to secure a platform better suited to support the current scope of the program.
Over 100,000 families participate in the ESA Program.
“If there is a financial platform, or are updates to the current platform, that can provide families ESA program funds efficiently and identify any misspending or misuse, then Arizona taxpayers deserve to use that system,” said Yee.
Today I announced that the ESA marketplace platforms must be improved to protect taxpayer dollars. Arizona taxpayers deserve to have a platform that efficiently provides families with ESA funds while identifying misspending or misuse.
— Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee (@AZTreasurerYee) March 19, 2026
Yee announced her RFI plan following a public dispute between Arizona Department of Education (ADE) Superintendent Tom Horne and the media over fraud, abuse, and waste within the ESA Program.
Horne maintains the program has low levels of those problems, but 12News argues they’re much higher.
12News claimed based on a risk-based audit that 20 percent of purchases under $2,000 within the ESA Program were fraudulent. Horne disputed that total as a “ridiculous” misunderstanding of data.
“Only 20 percent of that 20 percent were improper — that’s only four percent,” said Horne in an interview with KTAR News. “The other thing to know is, [those improper expenditures are] not all fraud. A lot of times it’s innocent mistakes, a paper that needs to be submitted, things that people think are okay but don’t fall into our standards. The amount of actual egregious purchases or fraud is 0.3 percent.”
It's "ridiculous" to say that 20% of ESA purchases under $2,000 were fraudulent, according to Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction. @BroomheadShowpic.twitter.com/4WT3gGXUIJ
The 0.3 percent figure came from a randomized study by a Stanford PhD, per Horne, which reviewed 3,000 random ESA orders between July 2025 and February 2026.
12News relied on public records to estimate in a report published last month that misspending “could” amount to 20 percent of all purchases in the ESA Program. According to their report, at least 18,000 of the 102,000 ESA Program participants had one or more unallowable purchases over the course of one year, which amounted to nearly 84,000 unallowable purchases.
Horne has demanded that 12News issue a retraction of their reporting perpetuating the 20 percent claim.
“A ridiculous figure of 20 percent fraud has been circulating concerning ESA purchases which resulted from a total misinterpretation of data provided to Channel 12. The 20 percent figure represented program participants that ADE had selected for risk-based auditing,” said Horne in a press release last week. “Continued use of the 20% fraud allegation is an outrageous misrepresentation to the public that must stop.”
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
Arizona’s legacy media is at it once again—going after our state’s highly popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, which now sits at over 100,000 enrollments.
Last month, activist reporter Craig Harris, from 12 News, pushed his latest “investigation” claiming that the ESA program had fraud totaling 20 percent. Certainly, if such a level of fraud is accurate, it deserves a full investigation. But it didn’t take long before the truth—and the real data—revealed itself.
According to the Arizona Department of Education (ADE), Harris’s 20 percent fraud claim originated from a risk-based audit, which was not only limited in scope, but also targeted higher-risk participants and accounts. But it did not account for the entire ESA program. Instead, the ADE referred to a study by a Stanford PhD that showed a more accurate assessment of fraud at 0.3 percent. That’s quite a gap between the 12 News report and reality. Perhaps Harris is getting math lessons from his buddies in the teachers’ unions who, as we know, have never exactly been good at counting.
As Harris continued to push his vendetta against school choice on social media this past weekend, he was completely ratioed for his debunked ESA fraud claims. And the best part? He was also unmasked as a partisan liberal with Red for Ed conflicts of interest and a history of publishing defamatory stories that are still being litigated…
