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.
One Republican is competing against two Democrats for two seats in the highly competitive Arizona House of Representatives race in Legislative District 9.
Bradley (Brad) Bettencourt is facing off against Democratic incumbent Lorena Austin and Democratic newcomer Jacob Martinez. Bettencourt fell right in the middle of the pack for voter turnout in the primary election. Austin received about 11,200 votes, Martinez received about 9,300 votes, and Bettencourt received about 10,400 votes.
Bettencourt believes his banking career and budgeting prowess — which he says are evidenced by his role in fixing over $1.5 million in budget errors at his Dobson Ranch community — can bring the Arizona budget off life support and onto the path of recovery.
“I’m running because the numbers have to add up: for our state budget and for the families who live here,” said Bettencourt in a recent news release. “I stepped up when my own community of 5,000 homes discovered more than a million and a half dollars in budget errors and helped get the finances back on track. Arizona families are dealing with rising prices while paychecks struggle to keep up. They deserve a representative who will bring practical solutions, not games or extremes.”
Along with the budget, Bettencourt has his eye on strengthening approaches to the biggest issues facing the state today: water security, housing affordability, educational outcomes and choice, legal immigration, and border security.
Bettencourt generally advises more aggressive government action on Colorado River negotiations, cuts to bureaucratic red tape that impact housing, border security, legal immigration pathways, first responder funding, increased penalties on certain crimes like fentanyl distribution, regular infrastructure improvements, and tax cuts to incentivize family growth.
As for the other priorities, Bettencourt proposed government actions that support the individual freedom to act, like protecting educational choice and increasing educational outcomes through competitive teacher pay and expansions of career preparation pathways for students, and opposing new restrictions or burdens on lawful gun ownership.
Bettencourt is an Arizona native that resided in other states and traveled through Latin America before returning to the Valley. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Arizona State University, and has previously resided in southern Arizona, where he worked for a bank in Yuma and Nogales.
So far, Bettencourt has been outraised by his Democratic opponents.
His campaign has raised more than $64,000, out of which $29,000 has come from himself.
The other top single donors to his campaign are the Freedom Club PAC, which gave $2,500; Michelle Masters, who gave $2,000; Gary Golka, who gave $1,000; the NFIB Arizona PAC, which gave $1,000; Veronica Law, who gave $1,000; and Don Tapia, who gave $1,000.
Austin has raised more than $104,000. Her top 10 donors are:
AFSCME People, $11,000
Elizabeth Simons, $5,500
Western States Regional Council of Carpenters Legislative Improvement Committee, $5,500
The Next 50 PAC, $5,500
Ross Boucher, $5,400
Jane Fonda Climate PAC, $5,000
Peter Francis, $3,000
Climate Cabinet PAC, $2,500
Int’l Ass’n of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers Local 359 PAC, or SMART PAC, $2,500
Arizona Education Association Fund for Public Education, formerly AZ PAC, $2,000
Martinez has also raised a similar amount at more than $100,000. His top 10 donors are very similar to Austin’s top 10:
AFSCME People, $11,000
Western States Regional Council of Carpenters Legislative Improvement Committee, $5,500
Joseph Rich, $5,500
The Next 50 PAC, $5,500
Jane Fonda Climate PAC, $5,000
Ross Boucher, $3,500
Int’l Ass’n of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers Local 359 PAC, or SMART PAC, $2,500
Climate Cabinet PAC, $2,500
Ironworkers Local 75 PAC, $2,000
United Food & Commercial Workers Local 99 PAC, $2,000
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Teachers’ union activists were once again dealt a serious blow after the Arizona Supreme Court issued an order effectively removing an initiative from the ballot that aimed to undo the state’s universal school choice program.
Nearly four years ago to date, a similar initiative was removed from the ballot for failing to have the required number of signatures. Katie Hobbs, secretary of the state at the time and now the governor, held out on invalidating the ballot initiative.
The court’s order to recalculate the signature totals using the trial court’s formula, issued on Tuesday, is projected to have brought Proposition 212, the Protect Education Act, below the required signature total following a legal challenge filed by the Goldwater Institute in Clark v. Fontes.
Protect Education Accountability Now, the political action committee (PAC) behind the Protect Education Act, confirmed that the Arizona Supreme Court order meant their initiative would not qualify for the ballot.
The PAC blamed “big money in partnership with Republican lawmakers and the anti-public education lobby” for the initiative’s demise.
A spokesperson for the PAC stated that the initiative should have been included on the ballot regardless of the invalid signatures.
“This does not reflect what Arizona voters want. It does not reflect the overwhelming support of educators, parents and public school advocates across the state who volunteered their time and demanded a voice in reforming a program that abused taxpayer money and pulled funding from their neighborhood public schools,” said the spokesperson. “Instead, the hard-earned resources educators raised to fund this were buried under a mountain of big money, political power, and a system that consistently sides with special interests.”
— Protect Education Ballot Initiative (@ProtectEdAct) August 18, 2026
Activists submitted around 420,000 signatures to qualify for the ballot. Pending a review incited by the Goldwater Institute’s court challenge, the number of valid signatures will fall to a projected total of approximately 245,000. The initiative needed approximately 256,000 to qualify for the ballot.
Nearly 70,000 signatures were invalidated due to their discovery as duplicates or having been collected by legally ineligible circulators, like felons. The court also upheld the trial court ruling which invalidated entire sheets of signatures due to the petition circulator providing an address at which they weren’t living.
The ballot measure would have rolled back the universality of the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program by imposing an income cap.
The union-backed Protect Education Act appears to have fallen short of the valid signatures needed to make the November ballot.
In this special Keep Arizona Free Update with @Darla4freedom:
➡️ The campaign submitted roughly between 416,000-421,000 signatures, but after trial… pic.twitter.com/l7886cgtT9
The court also agreed with a lower court ruling that the ballot language drafted by Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was false and misleading because it used the term “voucher” to describe the ESA program. Vouchers must be spent immediately and only at certain approved schools, whereas ESA program funds may be rolled over and applied to various schooling types and educational resources.
The PAC behind this second failed initiative to end universal school choice raised more than $7.5 million and spent more than $7.2 million.
More than $6.5 million, or 87%, came from the National Education Association. $810,000, or nearly 11%, came from the Arizona Education Association.
Other major donors included $50,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers Active Ballot Club, the PAC of a D.C.-based union; and $50,000 from Arizonans for Quality Education, a corporation or LLC based in Phoenix.
The latter entity was formerly known as Friends of ASBA, with ASBA standing for the Arizona School Boards Association, and was registered as a domestic nonprofit corporation, according to Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) records.
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The Protect Education Act is projected to fall more than 10,000 valid signatures short of the number required to qualify for Arizona’s November ballot after a court challenge removed thousands of petition signatures and county recorders completed their validity reviews.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) announced Monday that applying the trial court’s rulings and county signature-validity rates leaves the initiative with approximately 245,000 valid signatures. Arizona law required the campaign to produce 255,949 valid signatures.
The calculation follows an expedited ruling Thursday from Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David McDowell in Clark v. Fontes, the lawsuit challenging the petitions submitted by Protect Education, Accountability Now, the political committee behind the initiative.
At the time of McDowell’s ruling, the final outcome remained unresolved because Maricopa and Apache counties had not yet completed their reviews. The Arizona Capitol Timesreported that the Secretary of State’s initial review had reduced the campaign’s submitted total to 389,376 signatures before the court considered challenges to individual circulators, petition sheets, and duplicate signatures.
🚨 BREAKING: “PROTECT EDUCATION ACT” FALLS SHORT
Based on the trial court’s ruling in Clark (@ClarkRimsza) v Fontes and county signature validity rates, the union-backed anti-ESA initiative does not have enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
McDowell’s ruling left 348,269 signatures presumptively valid before application of the counties’ random-sample validity rates. The court also addressed 24,369 duplicate signatures and challenges involving more than 110 petition circulators.
“The court agrees that it is conceivable that a double count could occur, but the court cannot make a decision based upon a hypothetical double counting of duplicate signatures,” McDowell wrote.
The initiative’s supporters submitted 421,451 signatures on July 2. Save Our Schools Arizona and the Arizona Education Association were among the organizations backing the campaign.
The Goldwater Institute filed its challenge July 20, alleging that tens of thousands of the submitted signatures should be rejected because of duplicate entries, defects in circulator registrations, and petitions collected by people who were legally ineligible to circulate them.
The amended complaint raised more than 73,300 objections. Those included allegations involving unregistered paid circulators, signatures collected before circulator registration, inaccurate addresses or contact information, identification problems, and circulators whose felony convictions or other legal circumstances allegedly made them ineligible.
McDowell ultimately invalidated signatures collected by several circulators. Four circulators were disqualified because of criminal histories. The judge also invalidated several thousand signatures collected by circulator Tyrone Crispell after finding his denial that he misrepresented the initiative to prospective signers was not credible.
AFEC said Monday that nearly 70,000 signatures were disqualified through the challenge, including duplicates and signatures gathered by legally ineligible circulators.
“This is a major victory for Arizona parents, students, and the integrity of our elections,” AFEC President Scot Mussi said. “This anti-school choice initiative and its union backers spent more than $7 million dollars trying to dismantle school choice in our state, but they still could not collect enough lawful, valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.”
Campaign-finance figures compiled by Transparency USA from Arizona disclosure records show the Protect Education, Accountability Now committee had reported more than $7.5 million in total expenditures through July 30. The National Education Association accounted for approximately $6.57 million in cash and in-kind contributions, while the Arizona Education Association contributed another $810,000.
The Protect Education Act, designated Proposition 212 during the ballot-review process, would make several changes to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The measure would generally limit eligibility to families earning $150,000 or less, with exceptions including students with disabilities, certain military families, and students assigned to poorly performing public schools.
The proposal would also establish additional requirements for participating private schools and tutors, restrict certain ESA expenditures, and generally require unused annual ESA funds to be returned to the state.
The signature dispute is separate from litigation over how Proposition 212 would be described to voters. Last week, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Julie Ann Mata ordered Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to rewrite portions of the proposition’s descriptive title and “yes” and “no” statements after finding that the existing language omitted significant provisions of the measure. Judge Daniel Martin separately ordered revisions to the Arizona Legislative Council’s publicity-pamphlet analysis.
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ordered Arizona election officials Tuesday to rewrite the descriptive title and “yes” and “no” statements for Proposition 212. The judge found that the current version omits substantial changes to enforcement and government oversight and misleadingly describes Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program as a “school voucher program.”
Judge Julie Ann Mata enjoined Secretary of State Adrian Fontes from using the current language on the official ballot or in the publicity pamphlet. She also issued a writ directing Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes to revise the language in accordance with state law and her ruling.
The court left the exact wording to Fontes and Mayes under their statutory drafting and approval authority. Mata declined to order the state to adopt replacement language proposed by the plaintiffs and denied their request for attorneys’ fees and costs.
Daryl Groves and the Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) filed the case against Mayes and Fontes on July 28. Protect Education, Accountability Now, the political committee sponsoring Proposition 212, participated as a friend of the court in support of the challenged language. The defendants argued that the wording fairly summarized the measure and complied with A.R.S. § 19-125(D).
AFEC called the order a “major victory for Arizona school choice” and said, “Arizona voters deserve the truth.”
BREAKING NEWS: MAJOR VICTORY FOR ARIZONA SCHOOL CHOICE
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club has won at the trial court in our lawsuit challenging the misleading ballot language drafted for Proposition 212: the union-backed initiative targeting Arizona’s ESA program.
Mata wrote that the court’s review addressed the accuracy of the ballot language and left the policy merits of Proposition 212 to voters.
The version posted by the Secretary of State before the ruling states that Proposition 212 would limit ESA eligibility to families earning $150,000 or less per year, with specified exceptions; prohibit spending on noneducational and luxury items; impose qualifications on tutors; require accreditation or testing for participating schools; and generally return unspent annual ESA allocations to the state.
The full initiative also gives the sponsoring committee or its designee standing to initiate or intervene in litigation to enforce or defend the measure. Mata found that authority to be a substantial change that the ballot title or description must disclose. She found that the existing phrase “other rules and restrictions” failed to adequately inform voters about it.
Mata also found that the “yes” statement omitted a substantial change to two existing statutory limits on government control or supervision of nonpublic schools and homeschools. Proposition 212 would amend those provisions to permit control or supervision provided elsewhere in the ESA chapter for schools and homeschools receiving ESA funds. The court did not rule on the constitutionality of that proposed change.
The judge separately found the phrase “school voucher program” misleading. She cited Arizona decisions that invalidated two voucher programs and later upheld the ESA program under a different legal structure. Mata wrote that using the phrase could lead voters to treat the legally distinct programs as equivalent.
The court rejected one of AFEC’s arguments. The group argued that describing the $150,000 income limit as “adjusted for inflation” could mislead voters because the initiative caps the annual adjustment at the lower of 2% or the change in the gross domestic product price deflator. Mata found the existing wording provided appropriate information and held that omitting the precise formula was not misleading.
In a separate decision, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin also ordered changes Tuesday to a separate piece of voter information concerning Proposition 212. The judge directed the Arizona Legislative Council to revise its analysis for the publicity pamphlet by Aug. 21.
Martin found the Council’s statement that the initiative committee would have “the power to sue the families and private schools that participate in the program for any violations of the proposition” sufficiently partisan to violate state law. He ordered the Council to strike or revise the language by Aug. 21. The Council’s adopted three-page analysis is governed by a separate law requiring an impartial explanation for the publicity pamphlet.
Mata’s case concerned the shorter ballot title and “yes” and “no” statements prepared by the Secretary of State and approved by the Attorney General.
Proposition 212’s ballot qualification remains the subject of separate litigation over petition circulators and signatures. That case, Clark v. Fontes, is a Goldwater Institute and AFEC-backed challenge to the initiative’s petition circulators and signatures. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge David McDowell is expected to rule on the matter by the end of the week. The amended complaint seeks to prevent the initiative from appearing on the November ballot.
