School choice is popular throughout Arizona across all party lines, according to a poll released by the Yes Every Kid Foundation (YEKF) earlier this month.
The poll reported that both parents and non-parents across all political parties support the Education Savings Account (ESA) Program. 78 percent of parents and 62 percent of non-parents support ESAs. 48 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of independents, and 78 percent of Republicans expressed support for school choice. Only 38 percent of Democrats opposed the ESA Program.
A new poll found that school choice and Education Savings Accounts (ESA), in particular, are broadly popular in Arizona.
— yes. every kid. foundation (@yes_everykid_f) August 21, 2023
The poll also asked its respondents for their view of Gov. Katie Hobbs. 38 percent expressed an unfavorable view of the governor, with 34 percent expressing a favorable view and 20 percent expressing no opinion on the matter. The percentage of those who expressed an unfavorable view of the governor increased by 14 percent after pollsters told the respondents that Hobbs wanted to eliminate the ESA Program.
WPA Intelligence conducted the poll for YEKF.
YEKF is a Virgina-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit associated with its 501(c)(4) nonprofit counterpart, Yes Every Kid. Their director of policy operations, Whitney Marsh, has an extensive leadership background in Arizona.
Marsh was formerly the deputy chief of staff for former Arizona Department of Education (ADE) Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, from December 2019 to last April; executive director for the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, vice president of education policy and budget for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and then director of strategic initiatives under the Arizona Board of Regents under former Gov. Doug Ducey; state policy director of K-12 funding for Foundation for Excellence in Education; and senior budget analyst for former Gov. Jan Brewer.
Several YEKF executives hail from the Koch Network: Director Andrew Clark; COO Erica Jedynak, also formerly the state director for Americans for Prosperity; Vice President of Strategy Matt Frendewey, also formerly a senior advisor to both former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education.
In response to the poll, Arizona State Board of Education member and school choice proponent Jenny Clark criticized Hobbs’ opposition to the ESA Program.
“ESA approval in Arizona is popular across party lines,” said Clark. “Maybe Governor Hobbs will get a clue! Families want choices!”
Hey Arizona – check this out! If you’re a parent, policy leader, elected official, and everything in between, take note. ESA approval in Arizona is popular across party lines.
Hobbs retracted a $50 million grant issued by her predecessor, Ducey, for the ESA Program in May. The funding was slated for day-long ESA Program kindergarten. Hobbs said the grant represented unequal treatment of ESA versus non-ESA students, since the state only funds half-day kindergarten for public school students.
Today, we held the Ducey Administration accountable for illegally handing out a $50 million ESA grant. Instead, we're going to put that money to good use.
In my administration, we are committed to ESA accountability, protecting taxpayer dollars, and truly investing in public…
— Governor Katie Hobbs (@GovernorHobbs) May 25, 2023
Last month, Hobbs’ office issued a memo declaring that the ESA Program would bankrupt the state. ADE Superintendent Tom Horne countered with an independent analysis debunking Hobbs’ prediction.
Hobbs’ initial budget asked for a rollback of the universalized ESA Program. However, the governor ultimately compromised in the final form of the budget.
We have a constitutional responsibility to fund our public schools. If we continue down the current path, we will not be able to fulfill that responsibility. That's why my budget called for a rollback of the ESA program to ensure Arizona has a sustainable https://t.co/JnVBGtxuvl…
Another week brings another school choice battle between Arizona’s Governor and Superintendent of Public Instruction.
On Monday, the state’s schools chief, Tom Horne, issued a statement to continue to push back against Governor Katie Hobbs political assaults over the historic Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, calling her recent attacks “unfounded.”
The release touted an “independent analysis by education analyst, Dr. Matthew Ladner, of how much the ESA program will cost, showing the dire predictions made by Governor Hobbs and other opponents of the program are incorrect.”
@katiehobbs memo on AZESA conflates the interests of the spending lobby with those of taxpayers (taxpayers pay all the taxes and they are all green) and ignores $218,000,000 in tax credits in making fiscal estimates https://t.co/jc15ayJWkF
Last month, Governor Hobbs’ Office issued a memo, highlighting that the ESA program “would cost the state over $943 million, with over 53% of all new K-12 education spending going towards only 8% of Arizona students.” Hobbs stated, “The universal school voucher program is unsustainable. Unaccountable school vouchers do not save taxpayer money, and they do not provide a better education for Arizona students. We must bring transparency and accountability to this program to ensure school vouchers don’t bankrupt our state. I’m committed to reforming universal vouchers to protect taxpayer money and give all Arizona students the education they deserve.”
Horne has been extremely proactive in responding to all of Hobbs’ attacks on the ESA program, and the fight over the veracity of the Governor’s memo has been no exception. Horne wrote that the author of the analysis, Dr. Ladner, “has studied the issue thoroughly and without political bias. His analysis should be read to reassure taxpayers the ESA program saves tax dollars and is sustainable.”
The Republican schools chief concurred with Dr. Ladner “that the costs of the ESA program will never be $943 million.” However, he pointed out that “even if it were, that would be only about one percent of the fiscal 2022 state budget of $80.5 billion.”
He then took two routes to defend his argument that the cost of the state’s ESA program would not reach the controversial $943 million mark. First, Horne reasoned that “taxpayers pay both state and local taxes. Combined they contribute about $13,000 per student for every student in public school. If a student leaves a public school for a private school, and obtains a payment from ESA of $7200, that is a savings of about $6000 per student to the taxpayers.”
Second, Horne argued that “if the student was never in a public school but was already in a private school when the ESA program was adopted, there is still a benefit to the state for the following reasons: many students in private schools are beneficiaries of the tax credit available for contributors to the student’s tuition. If they choose to take the $7200 from the ESA program, they have to give up that tax credit. This increases revenues to the state, because the tax liability that previously was erased by the tax credit now has to be paid to the state.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Have you heard the outrageous story of what happened recently in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital? Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.), elected in 2022, had campaigned on school choice for tens of thousands of children, mostly minorities, who are forced to attend failing public schools in places like Philadelphia.
“It’s what I believe,” Shapiro, then state attorney general, assured voters as he ran for governor. Last month on a national Fox News broadcast, Shapiro was unequivocal in his support for school choice because “every child of God” deserves “a quality education.”
But there’s a force far more powerful in politics than Shapiro’s convictions, such as they are. And that force is the teachers unions. They put on a full-court press to stop the roughly 10,000 vouchers for the poorest kids in Pennsylvania’s worst school districts even though the state budget bill gave billions more for the public schools. It didn’t matter that this voucher program comprised less than 0.5% of state spending. The union brass commanded Democrats to vote no on even a single penny going to schools that work.
In the end, Shapiro did a full flip-flop. He vetoed his own promise. He might as well have declared that black lives don’t matter.
Shapiro has presidential ambitions — so he figures he needs the teachers unions behind him. But if he can’t face down Randi Weingarten, how is he ever going to stand up to bullies like China’s President Xi Jinping or Russia’s President Vladimir Putin?
This story isn’t just about Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. In North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency in the Tar Heel State because the legislature wanted to fund vouchers for kids to go to the best schools possible. Egads!
In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs wants to defund a school choice program that is already serving tens of thousands of kids, most of whom are Hispanic, with proven results of better performance and higher test scores. Why would she kill a program that is working? The teachers unions want the money and the kids under their control.
In New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, charter schools are flourishing. They are alternatives to public schools but are still regulated by the state. They are oversubscribed because parents want to choose the best school for their kids. Now, the Democrats want to put a cap on the charter schools because the teachers unions want to warehouse the kids in public schools where a majority of the kids can’t read or do math at grade-level proficiency. In other words, many of the public schools are worse than mediocre. And it’s not for lack of money. New York spends more than $20,000 per child in public schools.
Did I mention that in nearly every one of these cases across the country, the Democrats blocking private and Catholic school options went to private schools themselves? Or they send their kids to private schools. But poor black kids aren’t allowed that same opportunity? These are hypocrites with a capital H.
There’s a cruel historic irony here. Sixty years ago this summer, Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood before the doors of schools to prevent black children from attending the schools with white children. He was trying to preserve the stain of segregation.
Today, Democrats are employing the same tactic to keep minority kids from attending excellent schools. Why? They say that school choice will hurt public schools or cause more segregation.
Wrong on both counts. Monopolies are always bad for consumers and competition improves service. Education choice requires public schools to compete. Would you get good and friendly service if there were only one restaurant in town?
Instead of draining public schools of money, studies show that per-pupil funding rises when some kids take advantage of vouchers to attend alternative schools. Charter and Catholic schools tend to be, in most cases, more racially diverse than inner-city public schools.
I’m a parent of five boys, so I know that each of my kids has different skills, interests, behavior issues and attention spans. To warehouse them all in the same schoolroom is madness. Schools should be tailored toward the kids and serve their interests — not those of the $1 trillion a year public-school-industrial complex.
More importantly, as an economist, my biggest worry about America’s future is what happens when kids are graduating without being able to read their diplomas and with no useful skills. There are hundreds of schools around the country where not a single child can pass a basic math or reading test.
That’s an economic, civil rights and national security tragedy. Shame on Democratic leaders, and some Republicans, too, for putting their own political ambitions ahead of our nation’s children.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”
Americans’ support for school choice is on the rise.
A recent poll from Real Clear Opinion Research showed that school choice has the support of 71% of the 1,000 registered voters who participated in that survey. This number was a seven-point increase from an April 2020 poll.
— Christine Accurso (@ArizonaCatholic) July 12, 2023
In this June 27-30 poll, support for school choice came from 80% of Republican voters, 66% of Democrat voters, and 69% of Independent voters. Though the Republican and Democrat support was up from April 2020, the 9% increase in favor from Independents was the most among the political parties.
NEW POLL: 71% of Americans support school choice.
April 2020: 64% —> June 2023: 71%
7 percentage point jump in support since April 2020.
IT'S HAPPENING.
— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 11, 2023
The question presented to voters on the survey was as follows: “School choices gives parents the right to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school which best serves their needs. Generally speaking, would you say you support or oppose the concept of school choice?”
The CEO of American Federation for Children, Tommy Schultz, lauded the news about the growing support for school choice around the country, saying, “School choice support is here to stay, and politicians who ignore this reality do so at their own peril. Parents are the new interest group in town, and legislators would be wise to keep responding to their needs. The days of the old one-size-fits-all model are numbered, welcome news for the countless students who need something different to learn and thrive. AFC is thrilled to continue standing behind parents as they gain more options for their children’s education.”
Arizona has been at the front lines of the surge in school choice support. Last year, the Republican-led Legislature passed a historic expansion of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program, allowing any child in K-12 to apply. According to a June 30 update from the Executive Director of the ESA Program, Christine Accurso, 62,005 Arizona students have now been enrolled.
That same update also showed that the program, under the direction of Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, had largely caught up with the backlog and influx of reimbursements to ESA account holders. As of June 30, the ESA Program only had 1,195 Reimbursement Orders in the queue – down from 24,409 on February 8.
When asked about the increasing support for school choice in Arizona and around the nation, Superintendent Horne told AZ Free News, “We have a lot of excellent public schools in Arizona. But no matter how good a public school is, it may not be able to meet the needs of all students. Rich parents have always had the ability to choose the best school to meet the needs of each of their children and people at all economic levels should have the same ability. In addition, competition improves public schools. The United States has been prosperous, and the Soviet Union was poor, because we had competition which drives people to do their best, while they were a government monopoly. As they used to say in Poland, ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’ The same applies in education. Competition causes everyone to do better.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
America is losing faith in its system of free public education. Test scores are down. Violence in schools is up. There’s a growing perception that things are out of control.
What’s odd about it all is how no one, seemingly, is interested in exploring why. State legislators don’t want to do it. Local school boards have other things on their minds. And the press is too busy covering real problems, like Donald Trump’s refusal to return classified documents to the National Archives, to spend any time exploring the reason kids are still being allowed to graduate from public schools without anything close to the mastery they need to get ahead in life.
Occam’s razor, named for its progenitor, 14th-century English philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, suggests the simplest answer is most likely the correct one. This would mean, one can infer, that the plight of our children is the fault of the teachers and administrators who run the schools.
Before continuing it is important to reflect on how teachers, especially, are like Members of Congress. Most voters believe, and have for decades, that while Congress as an institution is corrupt, moribund, and beholden to special interests, their representative is a fine, upstanding individual who is not part of the problem. That is also, the evidence suggests, how parents feel generally about the teachers whose responsibility it is to educate their children.
They too, it is reasonable to suggest, may fall victim to bureaucrats who, in telling them what to teach and how to teach it, end up perverting the process of education until our children’s minds are filled with mush.
Then again, perhaps not. It has been reported – but not as widely as it deserved – that some weeks back the Colorado Education Association, which claims to be the voice of 39,000 public educators in the Centennial State, adopted a resolution condemning capitalism. To wit:
The CEA believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources. Capitalism is in opposition to fully addressing systemic racism (the school-to-prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), education inequality, and income inequality.
It is as alarming as it is illuminating. If most teachers in Colorado or indeed throughout the nation believe this, it becomes quite clear why the education system is failing our children. Those who teach are unable, unwilling, or unprepared to make our children see the world they are being prepared to enter as responsible adults.
Helpfully, and thanks of all things to the unnecessary pandemic-era lockdown of the nation’s schools undertaken at the apparent insistence of teachers’ unions and professional associations, parents have had enough.
There is no way to replace the learning and socialization lost to school closure. Leaders in some states like North Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, and Arkansas are heeding the cries for help coming from parents by expanding education savings accounts and reforming the system so that education dollars follow the students rather than fund the systems.
To do this, they are showing great courage. They have taken on “Big Education” and in many places are defeating it by giving parents a role in deciding which school their child will attend.
As a practical matter, that means more and more children will be able to attend schools where Marxist doctrine is not presented as scientific fact, where a greater emphasis is placed on the “Three R’s” than the various ways to avoid pregnancy, and no one is going to be fighting over who gets to use what locker-room to shower and change after an athletic event.
Restructuring public education using free market principles like the supremacy of individual choice will break up the “Big Education” monopoly that is wrecking our children’s futures. Finally, after many years, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Peter Roff is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation. A former UPI senior political writer and U.S. News and World Report columnist, he is a senior fellow at several public policy organizations including the Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network. Contact him at RoffColumns@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and TruthSocial @TheRoffDraft.
