This fall, Arizona voters could hand their ESA program over to the Democrats – The 74

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This article is part of The 74’s coverage of EDlection 2024, which looks at the candidates’ education policies and their potential impact on the American education system after the 2024 election.

Arizona is already considered one of the few swing states that will decide the 2024 presidential election. But closer to home and further down the ballot, elections in the state of Arizona could turn America’s most favorable school choice environment on its head.

The state was a pioneer in some ways, becoming the first state in the country to offer Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) in 2011. A decade later, it was the first state to make the programs – which provide parents with about $7,500 toward their children’s education costs, including private school tuition – available to every family.

But after a wave of copycat laws that have led to ESAs in more than a dozen states in recent years, Arizona voters could set another precedent this fall: They will become the first electorate to hand control of their private school choice system to the state’s Democratic Party, led by Gov. Katie Hobbs. That could pose a serious test of the ESAs’ political sustainability, but also of the power of their critics to block them.

Republicans currently hold a two-seat majority in the Arizona Senate and House of Representatives, allowing Democrats to dream of capturing one or both chambers for the first time in decades. With Hobbs now entering her third year in office, this would be the only period of unified government in Arizona since 1966.

Even two or three seats in each chamber are considered hotly contested, and public polls are rarely conducted during campaigns. Democratic presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were three percentage points ahead in a recent poll, and a nationwide vote on abortion access is likely to increase Democratic turnout on Election Day, but it is impossible to estimate whether such a surge would also affect votes in less important contests.

There is little doubt that local Democrats oppose ESAs. In her first budget proposal, presented last spring, the governor proposed repealing the statewide expansion of the program passed the previous year, which would have made even wealthy families who already enroll their children in private schools eligible for the program. But the idea failed in the legislature.

Earlier this year, Hobbs returned with a package of much more modest reforms aimed at making the system more “accountable.” Among other things, they included requiring private schools that receive ESA funds to collect their teachers’ fingerprints (as traditional public schools do). That requirement, along with one that prohibits ESA families from using their accounts during summer vacation, was included in the fiscal year 2025 budget passed in June. But ESA opponents complained that they would do little to curb the growing choice in private schools.

According to enrollment figures, the number of Arizona students receiving ESAs has increased from 12,000 to 75,000 since universal eligibility.

Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster at Highground Public Affairs Consultants, said a bill to make ESAs more transparent was “overwhelmingly popular.”

“Democrats could pass more accountability measures tomorrow,” Bentz said. “All polls show that voters support requiring schools receiving ESA support to have the same reporting requirements, teacher vetting and school security as public schools.”

Still, he added, the party is unlikely to be able to capture the sector as Hobbs initially intended – at least not without winning significant Democratic majorities in November. More likely, Bentz predicted, the party will win a chamber or perhaps enter into a 50-50 split that would require some form of power-sharing.

“I don’t think they (ESAs) can be completely abolished at this point. The genie is out of the bottle.”

Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association and one of the state’s most influential union leaders, hoped for a more sweeping victory. With a large enough legislative lead, she said, Democrats would have the opportunity to “slowly dismantle” the ESA program. Although she added that state leaders should proceed cautiously given the large number of recipients with special needs, Garcia argued that a better-funded public school system could step into the breach.

“To accommodate these students, it has to be slow,” Garcia told The 74. “But at the same time, public schools should be reaching out to these students to make sure their needs are met.”

Financial debate

For Garcia and many other educators, the biggest drawback of the program is financial.

The Arizona Department of Education estimates that the total cost in the last fiscal year was more than $700 million, about half of the state deficit, which was offset by a series of spending cuts in the recently passed budget.

Opinions vary widely on the overall financial impact of choosing a private school: Opponents point to the rapidly increasing number of ESA recipients as the main cause of debt, while supporters argue that the lower cost of the accounts relative to annual per capita spending on public schools (about $7,500 versus $10,000) would actually result in savings over time.

Matthew Ladner, a senior researcher with the Arizona Charter Schools Association and an advocate for ESAs, called any connection between the program’s growth and the state’s challenging budget projections “completely and utterly false.”

“The Arizona ESA program budget is within the budget of the Arizona Department of Education, and last fiscal year that department issued a press release announcing a $28 million surplus,” Ladner said. He added that it was “impossible” that the department, headed by Republican state Sen. Tom Horne, “has run a surplus while also running a budget deficit.”

Yet many in local education policy still lament the state of K-12 finances, which could prove to be a headache in the coming years under both divided and unified government. Arizona has historically been near the bottom of the U.S. in school spending, ranking 49th in the nation last school year.

This reality resulted in part from drastic cuts in school spending that were enacted during the Great Recession and never fully reversed. Continuing discontent with stagnant teacher pay led to the 2018 #RedforEd school strikes, which helped ignite a major progressive movement in a state that had previously always leaned Republican.

Democrats have benefited from that organizing energy, narrowly winning the state in the 2020 presidential election and winning a series of statewide elections culminating with Hobbs’ election in 2022. Without replicating their successes in the legislature, however, they have been unable to slow the growth of school choice or change education funding. Even a voter-backed ballot proposition that would have raised taxes to generate more revenue was later overturned in state court.

In fact, some dollars that were previously considered safe may soon be in jeopardy. Proposition 123, an initiative passed in 2016 that awards school districts more than a quarter-billion dollars each year from the state’s land trust, will expire next year unless voters reapprove it. Although both parties agree the proposal should be renewed, Hobbs’ own attempt to increase spending clashed during the legislative session with a Republican counterproposal to allocate the funds exclusively to teacher salaries. The deadline to put that proposal before voters has passed, but lawmakers can still call a special election before the money disappears.

Rich Nickel is president of Education Forward Arizona, a nonprofit that works to improve education in the state. He also believes ESAs will likely remain in place, although he says more data should be collected to study the effectiveness of schools that receive money through them.

More pressing, Nickel added, is the need for additional resources for school districts trying to recover from years of COVID-related classroom disruptions. But it’s unclear whether that realization has reached state leaders. In a comprehensive survey of public opinion on education policy, the organization discovered “a gap between what voters tell us they want and what they’re getting from their elected officials,” he said.

“There is broad agreement across both parties, across all races and ethnicities, that our politicians should do more to improve our performance and success rates. But we don’t see any investment in that direction in the current budget, and there’s not much optimism that we’ll see that in the next few years.

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