by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Oct 18, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Ever since Arizona passed universal school choice, the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program has been the target of the Red for Ed teachers’ union, Democrat lawmakers and their corporate media allies. They demand transparency and accountability for alleged abuse of ESA dollars—all while scandal after scandal continues to pop up in our state’s K-12 public schools.
We saw it at the beginning of the year when the Isaac Elementary School District (IESD) was placed under a state receivership after it was determined that it had a budget shortfall of over $12 million! And this wasn’t a surprise. The Auditor General had been sounding the alarm on IESD’s mismanagement of funds for five years!
But where was the corporate media? Where was the digging? Where was the series of articles and threads on X exposing the corruption?
We got none of it. Instead, we have certain Red For Ed reporters, like Craig Harris, attacking Arizona’s popular ESA program with liberal talking points about unspent funds and alleged waste and abuse.
But if the failures of IESD weren’t enough, now we have the sordid financial tale of Tolleson Union High School District, a story so scandalous that it should make every taxpayer’s blood boil…
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by AZ Free Enterprise Club | Mar 28, 2025 | Opinion
By the Arizona Free Enterprise Club |
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs and the Radical Left have made it clear that they want to dismantle school choice in our state. Despite getting trounced in November’s election where teachers’ unions and other anti-school choice groups made it a referendum on educational freedom, Hobbs has doubled down on her same tired and out-of-touch efforts since the start of this year.
Once again, it hasn’t worked. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program continues to grow—with enrollment now over 87,000 students. So, Hobbs and her buddies in the teachers’ unions have resorted to employing one of their favorite tricks: relying on activist reporters in the corporate media to give their anti-school choice messaging an extra boost.
In early March, a coordinated attack was launched against Primavera, an online charter school serving thousands of K-12 students across the state. It began with a story from Craig Harris, a Red4ED activist that calls himself a reporter, who claimed that Primavera received a ‘D’ letter grade from the Arizona Department of Education for the past three years. According to the report, the school failed to meet the minimum academic requirements for a traditional charter school. Harris’ column then went on to complain about the owner of Primavera and how much money he has made while operating the school.
After the story was published, the Arizona Charter School Board convened a hearing to review the allegations against Primavera. In a span of just a few hours, the board imposed the most severe punishment at their disposal, revoking the schools’ charter and setting them up for eventual closure. In effect, Primavera was given the charter school death penalty after one meeting.
On the surface, this might make sense. After all, if a school is failing its students, it deserves proper accountability. But as so often happens with today’s corporate media, an important fact was omitted from this manufactured takedown…
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by Dr. Thomas Patterson | Jan 6, 2025 | Opinion
By Dr. Thomas Patterson |
What accounts for the differences in academic achievement between inner-city poverty area schools and high-income public schools? We‘ve all heard of the dreadful schools in cities like Chicago and Baltimore with no children in the entire school able to achieve even baseline levels of competence in math or verbal skills and many other schools with a third at most achieving at grade level.
Many would assume funding is the major determinant, but the facts don’t back that up. American public schools have traditionally been funded by local property taxes, which provide a clear advantage to the wealthy. But that was then. Today, education funding is complex, with federal funding for special programs, equalization formulas, and other inputs making it difficult for even experts to determine the bottom line.
A recent study from the Urban Institute confirmed other research showing that “when considering federal, state and local funding,” all states but three “allocate more per student funding to poor kids than to non-poor kids.” Moreover, researchers from Harvard and Stanford found that each extra $1,000 per pupil spending is associated with an annual gain in achievement of 1/10 of one percent of a standard deviation. In other words, more spending and more learning are essentially unrelated.
If more spending did produce more achievement, we would be morally obligated to provide it. As it is, we must look for other reasons to explain the achievement gap, examining how well the allocated funds are used. Education researcher Jay Greene observes that “wasteful schools tend to hire more non-instructional staff while raising the pay and benefits for all staff regardless of their contribution to student outcomes.”
Effective schools, whenever possible, prioritize the learning interests of students, eschewing the fads and misconceptions that plague the public school establishment. When a Stanford education professor helpfully developed an “equity-based” curriculum proposal, gullible California educators issued guidance against students taking algebra courses before high school.
After decades of the promotion of “context-based” reading instruction, it became obvious that the old-fashioned phonics instruction produced better readers. The Columbia University center that pushed context-based instruction was finally closed in 2023.
The devastating COVID closures demanded by the teachers’ unions disproportionately affected low-income public school students. The closures lasted longer and caused more learning loss for poor students than for those in private schools and more upscale districts.
The different, more “lenient” treatment afforded to low-income kids is evident also in the cellphone bans proliferating in the schools. Educators are suddenly realizing, after 20 years or so, that daily staring at a small screen bearing social media messages is not healthy for the developing brain.
According to advisories from the Surgeon General, UNESCO, and others, adolescent cell phone usage impairs academic achievement by distracting students’ attention from classroom instruction. Chronic cell phone overuse is also isolating and interferes with normal social development. Widespread cell phone use is associated with higher rates of teenage depression and suicide.
Eight states and many school districts have imposed cell phone bans, and others, including Arizona, are considering legislation. But there are objections. Parents feel the need to “keep in touch” with their children. Phones are also needed to locate friends in the lunchroom (yes, really). More seriously, parents worry about not having contact in a school shooting, even though the chances of any student encountering even one during their entire school life is vanishingly small.
The bigger problem is that legislative cell phone bans are typically so loose and riddled with exceptions that they are practically useless. California, with great fanfare from Governor Gavin Newsom, passed a bill that only required schools to “adopt a policy limiting or prohibiting smart phones by July 2026.” Any school with even an insignificant modification in cell phone usage would be legally in compliance, and enforcement would be a snap. Helicopter parents would still be in business. Florida’s ban is limited to classroom time only.
Private schools and high-end public schools pushed ahead with their own rules, which typically are more comprehensive and tightly written. Strict, uniform restrictions are easier for both teachers and students to understand. Meanwhile, poor students once again are saddled with misdirected compassion and low expectations.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
by Staff Reporter | Dec 1, 2024 | Education, News
By Staff Reporter |
The National Education Association (NEA), a teachers’ union and the nation’s largest labor union, has continued its promotion of gender transitions for children.
NEA posted the guide by Advocates for Youth on Transgender Day of Remembrance last week. The guide was published last year.
The guide claims that humans are “assigned” their sex at birth based on reproductive traits (genitalia, chromosomes, and hormones), and that while everyone has a gender identity, only some align with their reproductive traits. The guide claims that children inherently know their gender identity as young as 18 months to three years.
Parents, per the guide, shouldn’t be the sole decision-makers about their children. Those parents that rely on information conflicting with or opposing transgender ideology are relying on “misinformation and falsehoods.” Instead, parents should accept information which affirms transgender, non-binary, and gender-expansive youth (TNGE).
“Parents have everything they need to begin the journey of supporting their TNGE children,” said the guide. “When making decisions for their children, many parents search for information and resources to support their efforts, but some of what is readily available is misinformation and falsehoods. Parents who are interested in seeking out additional help to support their TNGE children are encouraged to do so.”
As for the role of educators, the guide says that they should “proactively teach the entire school community about gender identity, gender expansiveness, and celebrate LGBTQ history and culture.”
The guide also says that schools should affirm students in their gender identity by using their chosen name and preferred pronouns, regardless of their legal name; ensure students have unencumbered access to their preferred gender-specific facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms; and ensure students may participate in their preferred gender-specific extracurricular activities and athletics.
Per the guide, those who oppose transgender ideology, especially in children, qualify as “extremists” who put out disinformation.
The guide puts out a number of other contested claims, such as: puberty blockers are lifesaving, not harmful; LGBTQ ideologies contribute to healthy diversity; transgenderism isn’t a mental illness;
The NEA affiliate in Arizona — the Arizona Education Association (AEA) — has over 22,000 school employees as members (in addition to teachers, their members include librarians, custodians, cafeteria workers, and counselors).
Like the NEA, AEA has actively worked to foster transgenderism and advance other LGBTQ+ ideologies in minors.
AEA successfully advocated for the repeal of the 28-year-old “no promo homo” law prohibiting the discussion of homosexuality during HIV/AIDS instruction in schools. The law prohibited discussion that “promotes a homosexual lifestyle,” “portrays homosexuality as a positive alternative lifestyle,” and “suggests that some methods of sex are safe methods of homosexual sex.”
AEA also fought against legislative efforts to require the use of bathrooms based on biological sex, and prohibiting access based on gender identity.
The union also supported gender transitions for children as young as preschoolers, promoting a parent in 2017 who transitioned his four-year-old son into his “daughter.”
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by Matthew Holloway | Nov 14, 2024 | Education, News
By Matthew Holloway |
A post-election letter obtained by AZ Free News from Arizona Education Association (AEA) President Marisol Garcia to union members, saw the labor leader address AEA members as if reacting to a great catastrophe. Rather than remarking on a largely peaceful and uncommonly decisive national election that provided an unambiguous mandate to the incoming government, she spoke of families and students being “directly in danger,” and that “no one is coming to save us.”
In the text of the letter, Garcia speaks in disturbingly combative terms, suggesting that there are individuals, either teachers or students, they will need to “protect,” because they “are being targeted.”
She also told Arizona educators, “We are going to be the union thugs that we were meant to be…” and added instructions that they “Drink some water, get some rest, get off social media and surround yourself with joy and get ready. Because, it’s on y’all.”
AZ Free News independently confirmed the letter was sent to Arizona educators and the language is consistent with Garcia’s post to X on November 6th when she wrote, “Join your union—Unbreakable Solidarity, and “OK take a deep breath, find some space the rest, and know the way through this is through it TOGETHER. Elections are one tactic. Organizing for solidarity and power is another. ✊🏾”
In the full letter Garcia wrote:
AEA,
First, how proud we must be for all the efforts that everyone put into this year’s election work. We all have to be proud of the new leaders that we saw step up. The goals that brave locals made and worked hard to reach, many of which they broke, too much shock to themselves. Ballots continue to be counted in every county and so many of our focus races are yet to be called—so as usual the work continues.
In that vein, our labor work, our power building work must continue as planned, with more clarity on the importance of unbreakable solidarity. The talk, the words, now more than ever become the walk and the work.
I won’t sugar coat this, many of us, our families and our students are directly in danger. You might recall, last year I reminded the delegates that no one is coming to save us — we have to save ourselves. The mechanism to which we can save ourselves is through good old fashion local organizing work.
Building our smaller circles into bigger circles. Embracing the things we have in common to find solution for the things that threaten all of us. Small group meetings, engaging in difficult conversations and above all listening. Our union knows how to do this, we have the ability to not just work through this, but lead through this, together.
On a personal note, as a product of ancestors who survived hundreds of years of institutional impacts, including genocides, starvation, and military attacks. I’m still here. My great great grandmothers did not give up. They fought back and organized collectively to survive, sharing food, housing, powerful stories and safety. This resilience was passed to their next generations and will continue with my son.
We will not comply in advance, we will not shirk, we will not forget the fights we have survived nor will we not prepare to protect those who are being targeted.
We are going to be the union thugs we were meant to be… we will fight, because together we are always stronger and whether we like it or not, it is our destiny to be in the fight.
Drink some water, get some rest, get off social media, and surround yourself with joy and get ready.
Because, it’s on y’all.
Unbreakable solidarity.
Marisol Garcia, President.
Arizona Education Association
Turning Point Action Field Representative and VP of Greater PHX Republican Women, Alyssa Goncales shared an image of the letter in a post to X, writing, “The AZ teachers union is an obvious branch of the Democratic Party. @MarisolGarciaAZ doesn’t care about the rights of all teachers and students. She’s just spreading fear and pushing the lefts agenda. It speaks volumes to what public school is trying to do to our children. Great push for AZ parents to homeschool.”
Notably in the union’s recommendations for the 2024 ballot, all of the recommended candidates in partisan races were Democrats.
Matthew Holloway is a senior reporter for AZ Free News. Follow him on X for his latest stories, or email tips to Matthew@azfreenews.com.
