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.
Channel 12 continued its clumsy crusade against school choice this week with a breathless report about fraudsters abusing Empowerment Scholarship Accounts to buy diamond rings and necklaces, flights and hotel stays, and even lingerie.
It paints a picture of a program rife with abuse. But is it?
The Arizona Department of Education gave Channel 12 the records for more than 1.2 million ESA requests. Yet when askedrepeatedly what percentage of those requests were fraudulent, Channel 12’s reporter refused to comment.
Why? Because the truth undermines the anti-ESA narrative.
The salacious report is intended to persuade policymakers who support ESAs to impose regulations that would undermine the ESA program. It goes without saying that anyone engaged in fraud should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and the Arizona Department of Education is appropriately cracking down on fraudsters. But before policymakers rush to amend the ESA program, they should know the context that Channel 12 left out.
ESA Misspending Is a Tiny Fraction of Total ESA Spending
The ESA program currently serves about 90,000 students at a projected cost of $882 million this year and $939 million next year, or about 6.7% of the $14 billion spent on Arizona’s district schools. Families can use ESAs to purchase a wide variety of educational expenses to customize their child’s education.
The typical ESA student receives about $7,500 per year, compared with more than $15,300 per pupil at Arizona’s district schools. Students with special needs—who account for more than 19% of ESA students, compared with 14% of district school students—can receive more funding, although the accounts are still worth 90% of what the state spends on similarly situated students at public schools. According to the Common Sense Institute, “a disproportionate share of middle-income households use an ESA.”
On Tuesday, the Arizona Department of Education revealed that their internal audit had turned up $622,000 in ESA funds that are “possible fraud or misuse.”
That’s less than one-tenth of 1% of total ESA spending.
Ignoring Mountains, Covering Molehills
Meanwhile, there are 30 school districts that the Arizona Auditor General currently deems to be non-compliant with state reporting requirements or that have internal control deficiencies. The total spending in those districts is more than $1.4 billion, more than the total spending of the ESA program. Yet aside from its coverage of the disastrous overspending in the Isaac Elementary School District, Channel 12 has barely covered it at all.
For that matter, Channel 12 has ignored the $7.8 billion that Arizona school districts are holding in cash reserves. That’s about $7,000 per pupil. The reserves have grown $2 billion in two years, yet Channel 12 doesn’t evince even the slightest curiosity about why.
Nor is anyone at Channel 12 interested in the $12 billion worth of unused and underutilized buildings that districts are sitting on, often just to prevent private or charter schools from buying them.
Channel 12 found space in the aforementioned ESA exposé to mention that a judge recently ruled that the state supposedly “isn’t properly funding capital needs for its public schools,” but the station had no space to mention that school districts are sitting on $20 billion in cash reserves and underutilized buildings.
Indeed, Channel 12 has barely covered any of these facts even as they pump out multiple anti-ESA stories each week, despite the fact that the ESA program is dwarfed by the spending at non-compliant districts, district school cash reserves, and underutilized buildings.
School-choice opponents and their media allies are hyper-focused on ESA misspending because they want to pressure lawmakers to undermine the program via regulation.
The Arizona Department of Education adopted its risk-based auditing strategy—automatically approving ESA spending requests below $2,000, then auditing accounts on the back end—because Superintendent Tom Horne’s previous “review every penny” approach was causing massive backlogs and delays in approving expense requests and reimbursements.
There were nearly 11,000 transactions in quarter 3 of this year alone. It’s impossible for the department’s staff to review each transaction in a timely manner, but parents trying to teach their kids can’t wait months just to buy a textbook or pay their child’s tutor or school.
To Horne’s credit, he listened to parents and made some incremental improvements that make it easier for parents to use the program. Now a tiny percentage of ESA holders are taking advantage of the looser rules, but they will be forced to pay the money back and could face prosecution.
The Arizona Department of Education has suspended 400 accounts due to improper spending —just 0.4% of the total accounts—and has referred some to the Attorney General for further investigation and prosecution.
Punishing fraudsters is necessary. Every government program is subject to some amount of fraud and abuse, and it’s incumbent upon public officials to implement rules that keep fraud as close to zero as possible. But it is not in the public interest to undermine a program’s effectiveness, especially when that program is helping kids get access to a better education and a brighter future.
School-choice opponents are using misspending as a pretext. If that was their real concern, they’d be raising alarms about all the waste, fraud, and abuse in the district school system. They’re not really concerned with stopping the 0.4% of ESA holders committing fraud, they just don’t want the program to work for 99+% of families just trying to do right by their kids.
Supporters of education freedom and opportunity should ignore the manufactured outrage and work to ensure that the ESA program works well for the families it serves.
Jason Bedrick is a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
Have you heard the charge that Arizona families are using Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) for babysitting? Or that ESA families are sitting on millions of dollars that they’re using for expensive, overseas vacations? Or that the ESAs only benefit wealthy families who live in high-performing school districts?
These claims range from “lacking key context” to “lacking any evidence whatsoever.” The main source of these and other horror stories that school-choice opponents tell is reliably left-leaning Arizona media outlets such as Channel 12 and the Arizona Republic.
It’s no surprise. Reporters at these outlets, such as Craig Harris, have a history of inaccurate agenda-driven “reporting” on Arizona’s school choice policies. Recent articles and “news” segments from these and other outlets are in keeping with this history.
Award-Winning Errors
In 2018, the Republic released a series criticizing Arizona’s charter schools. The series won the paper a Polk Award. The only problem is that it was riddled with errors.
For example, the Republic claimed that Arizona’s traditional district schools outperformed the state’s charter schools as measured by the state’s A-F school grading system and graduation rates. Both these claims were demonstrably false, but the Republic never ran a correction.
Matthew Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute detailed at length the numerous errors the Republic made to reach those incorrect conclusions, describing the story as “astonishingly deceptive.” For example, they counted one charter school as having a graduation rate of 0% when the school only offered instruction through 9th grade. Two more schools that supposedly had 0% graduation rates had closed years earlier. Another charter school with a low graduation rate was an alternative school that operated under the Yuma County Juvenile Justice Center—hardly an apples-to-apples comparison for typical district schools.
In 2019, the Republic released an above-the-fold, front-page story claiming that 100 of Arizona’s then 544 charter schools were in imminent danger of closure. The report said it was a “near certainty” that at least 50 would close “in the near future.” You’d think such a sensational claim would warrant a healthy dose of skepticism, but the Republic was more than happy to breathlessly repeat the claims nearly unchallenged.
Six years later, 580 charters operate in the state, defying predictions of a mass extinction. In fact, on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s charter school students scored over two grade levels higher than district students on 8th grade mathematics and by almost two grade levels on 8th grade reading. The state’s charter school students also scored higher than any other statewide average on both subjects.
You won’t see those facts reported by Arizona’s legacy media.
Journalism’s Credibility Crisis
For careful journalists concerned with their personal credibility and the declining credibility of their profession with the American public, these embarrassing errors might have sparked some self-reflection upon their sources and practices. For the Republic, it was merely a warmup for more of the same.
Author Amanda Ripley, interviewed for a book she wrote on deep problems of journalism, noted the “strange and insular world of journalism prizes,” which encourage simplistic “us versus them” stories. “This adversarial model that we’ve got going in education, journalism, and politics no longer serves us. There’s a good guy and a bad guy and everything’s super clear, it just breaks down. And we keep awarding prizes in that model. But 99 percent of stories are not that clear-cut,” Ripley noted.
In other words, as if journalism did not have enough problems amid a pronounced decline in public confidence, journalism awards—like the Polk Award given to the Republic team for their inaccurate and ideological anti-charter school series—encourage advocacy-style journalism.
There Is No Evidence Families Used ESAs for Babysitting
Channel 12’s recent anti-choice crusade involves a series of clumsy attacks on Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program.
One myth Channel 12 has been attempting to spread is the notion that participants in the ESA program are using their accounts to pay for “babysitting.” In fairness, this claim is based upon a since-corrected misstatement by a representative of the Arizona Treasurer’s Office. The ESA program, however, has a list of allowable uses for accounts, and babysitting is not now—nor has it ever been—an allowable use.
Despite the correction by the Treasurer’s Office, some in the media are still spreading the claim. Asked about this on KTAR days after the correction, reporter Craig Harris of Channel 12 (who authored or co-authored the erroneous Republic articles described above) artfully claimed that the Arizona Department of Education’s use of risk-based auditing on low-dollar purchases means that we really don’t know whether parents are using ESA accounts for babysitting or not.
We can likewise state that we really don’t know whether any random person has cheated on his or her federal income taxes. After all, the IRS does not audit every single income tax return—instead they use a technique known as “risk-based auditing” to detect and deter fraud. This is the same technique that Arizona law established to ensure accountability in the ESA program, as recommended by the Arizona Auditor General, and it is used by numerous government agencies.
Journalists have no evidence that anyone has ever used the ESA program for babysitting. But if it happened and they were caught, just like the hypothetical tax cheat, the hypothetical ESA offender would face fines or even jail time. The combination of risk-based auditing and consequences for fraud is why the United States has one of the highest tax compliance rates in the world.
ESA Parents Are Not Really “Subsidizing Vacations”
Channel 12 is likewise playing fast-and-loose with the facts when they claim that Arizona parents are “using education tax dollars to subsidize their vacations.” That phrasing gives the impression that ESA funds are being used for flights, food, or hotel stays—none of which are allowable expenses under the ESA statute.
The reality is that families are using ESA funds to buy tickets to museums, zoos, aquariums, and other educational venues that are—appropriately—allowable expenses under the ESA statute, and which public schools regularly purchase as well.
ESAs Expand Educational Opportunity
Stories from the same outlets also claim the ESA is “hurting high-performing public districts.” Even setting aside that such statements treat children as mere funding units for district schools, reporters’ use of the term “high-performing” is out of step with what most parents think it should mean.
The article notes that the “top five school districts losing students who left for [ESAs] are: Mesa, Deer Valley, Chandler, Peoria and Scottsdale,” and that all these districts received an “A” letter grade from the state except for Mesa, which received a “B.”
But are Arizona’s school letter grades a reliable indicator of quality? Absolutely not.
In the 2023-24 academic year, Arizona awarded 677 schools “A” grades, while only four schools “F” grades—yet only a third of Arizona students passed the state math exam.
By contrast, GreatSchools is a much harsher grader than state bureaucrats. In Maricopa County, the state awarded 325 “A” grades and only two “F” grades, while GreatSchools gave 49 “A” ratings and 111 “F” ratings. For obvious reasons, parents trust GreatSchools more than they trust state bureaucrats.
In the five districts that parents are fleeing most for ESAs, the percentage of students scoring “proficient” or higher on the state math test ranges from 30% in Mesa to 58% in Chandler. Fewer than half of students scored proficient in Deer Valley and Peoria as well.
Reporters who are hostile to parental choice in education might call that “high performing,” but most parents don’t.
Arizona families deserve accurate reporting on education policy, not sensationalized narratives built on flimsy foundations. Arizona media’s pattern of misrepresenting school choice programs—from the error-ridden charter school series to unfounded attacks on ESAs—undermines the public’s understanding of legitimate educational options.
While parents increasingly turn to alternatives like ESAs and charter schools that demonstrably outperform traditional districts, journalists have a responsibility to report these developments fairly, not perpetuate myths that serve no one except those invested in maintaining the status quo. Arizona’s children benefit when families have genuine choice in education, and they deserve journalism that illuminates rather than obscures the facts about their options.
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.
Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne criticized recent remarks made by Governor Katie Hobbs’ spokesman, Christian Slater, who labeled the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) staff as “wasteful bureaucracy.”
Horne called the comments a reckless insult to dedicated state employees who are understaffed, under pressure, and focused on serving the parents seeking the best education for their children.
“The governor’s spokesman has demeaned state employees by calling ESA professionals a ‘wasteful bureaucracy.’ Defining people as waste is a terrible insult,” said Superintendent Horne. “No matter what her (Governor Hobbs) personal opposition, the ESA program exists to give parents’ choice when local schools don’t meet their children’s needs, and people are needed to serve those parents. That is not wasteful; it is essential.”
ESA Director John Ward, in a recent legislative testimony, highlighted the program’s significant growth and challenges.
In the 2025 fiscal year, the ESA program distributed $869 million, surpassing the $769 million allocated for all federal education programs in Arizona.
Despite managing a larger budget, the ESA program has only 40 employees, compared to the 300 staff members handling federal programs at the Arizona Department of Education.
Since its start in 2011, the ESA program has grown from $100 million and 11,000 accounts to now, nearly $1 billion and over 90,000 accounts today, with no additional staff to support the increased workload.
“We are always in survival mode,” Ward told lawmakers. “Our main responsibility is to get students who want to be in the program into the program, to review their purchases, and provide customer service. That is our core mission, and that is what we are focused on.”
Horne also noted that in 2025, the Department of Education requested 12 additional staff members to manage the growing program’s demands. The House supported this request in its budget, but Governor Hobbs refused to consider it.
“To deny these resources while allowing her spokesman to insult state employees serving parents is beyond the pale,” Horne said.
Ethan Faverino is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Although the causes are attributed to various factors by different sources, largely dependent on political leanings, one irrefutable fact emerged on Monday. During Governor Katie Hobbs’ tenure, Arizona has plunged from a ranking of 4th place in the nation in job growth, to 47th.
On Monday, Russ Wiles, writing for the Arizona Republic noted, “AZ no longer ranks near the top for job creation,” and asked rhetorically, “What went wrong?”
Citing figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Republic reported that Arizona now ranks in 47th place among the fifty states, just ahead of Massachusetts, West Virginia, and Iowa. The report cited a net loss of 1,900 jobs year-to-date in 2025.
In 2020, at the height of the first Trump Administration and under former Gov. Doug Ducey’s tenure, Arizona ranked third in the nation for economic momentum.
THIS JUST IN: The Phoenix metropolitan area ranked #1 in the nation for new jobs created last year. With 66,500 nonfarm jobs added (3.2% growth), #Arizona’s booming economy continues to grow at one of the fastest rates in the U.S.! #AZMeansBiz#AZAwesomehttps://t.co/pr093PEesc
— Arizona Commerce Authority (@azcommerce) July 3, 2019
In 2019, the Phoenix Metro area even beat out the largest cities in California, Texas, and Florida to take the #1 slot for job growth.
More recently, in a March 2024 statement, Hobbs touted that Arizona ranked 4th in job growth, and tripled the national average in workforce growth. In the pronouncement, which has aged quite poorly, the governor even dubbed herself “Governor Katie Jobbs,” and credited the “81,800 jobs created,” to “investments in housing, healthcare, infrastructure, childcare, and education.”
Meanwhile, a Goldwater Institute op-ed in January, predicting an acrimonious budget battle that materialized over the next five months, pointed out Hobbs’ askew priorities. While the beleaguered Democrat focused on defeating Arizona’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Account program (ESA) and presided over a surge in crime, her failure to account for $800 million in statutorily required Medicaid spending and an affordable housing crisis represented “fiscal mismanagement at its worst.”
AZCentral’s Russ Wiles, in working to answer “What went wrong?” addressed one factor in the decline as “slowing migration, with fewer people moving here from other states,” which dovetails with the affordable housing issue and the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) rule cracking down on new developments.
Lee McPheters, director of the Economic Outlook Center for Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business, noted to the outlet, “With domestic migration trending down and international migration dropping off a cliff in 2025, the impetus for population growth has diminished and undoubtedly plays a role here.”
In May, Goldwater launched a legal battle against the Hobbs administration over the ADWR’s controversial new rule imposing the requirement of a 100-year “unmet demand” groundwater supply rule across wide swaths of the state, essentially choking out new housing development.
In addition, as Wiles notes, construction employment has been further weakened by rising material costs, with overall job growth stunted by tariff uncertainty and high interest rates.
Large scale layoffs, such as Nikola Corp.’s 855 jobs lost to its February bankruptcy and Joann Fabrics’ layoffs of 374 employees in January, also factored in heavily. While not directly attributable to Hobbs’ actions, the losses drew a spotlight to a lack of decisive action from Hobbs to attract new employers to Arizona in the short term.
Another factor, unmarked by AZCentral however, has been the $1.6 billion deficit under Hobbs which forced budget cuts, including Department of Economic Security layoffs that directly contributed to the 1,900 net job loss. As Common Sense Institute of Arizona (CSIAZ) explained in June, rather than being caused by Arizona’s flat tax, the shortfall was caused by a massive increase in spending under Hobbs.
“If spending had followed historical trends, Arizona would have had a $4.3 billion surplus rather than a $1.6 billion cash shortfall last year,” CSIAZ wrote.
Hobbs’ vetoes could present the most egregious contribution she’s made. By vetoing 178 total bills in 2025, 73 in 2024, and 143 in 2023, totaling 424 to date, or approximately a third of all bills sent to her desk, Hobbs has prevented the implementation of a comprehensive policy for economic growth from either her administration or Republican leaders in the state legislature from materializing.
Ultimately, Hobbs’ unwillingness to work productively with Republican lawmakers and her active obstruction of legislation to reduce tax burdens, ease regulation, and stimulate job growth may have proven to be as prominent in Arizona economics as it has been in politics. And as prominent Democratic President Harry Truman famously said, “The buck stops here.”
