Hello John, ​

The word is out about the successful expansion of school choice in Arizona. It's the “biggest school choice victory in U.S. history.”

Working with the Arizona Legislature, Gov. Doug Ducey has transformed Arizona into a shining example of giving families access to schools that best fit their needs. The National Review and the Washington Examiner take a look at the significant impact this will have on not only students, but the state as a whole.

Check out both articles below.

National Review: Arizona Passes Universal School Choice for 1.1 Million Students

The news got lost in the tsunami of coverage over the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, but Arizona governor Doug Ducey is about to sign a new law that will allow every one of the state’s 1.1 million students to take advantage of an education scholarship to attend a school of their choice — public, private, religious, or charter.

School-choice advocates call the legislation the “new gold standard” for student freedom, one that will be a model for states across the country to emulate.

The Center Square, a website focused on state policy issues, reports that all of Arizona’s school-age children will be eligible for the Empowerment Scholarship Account. An ESA is a decade-old, state-funded account that allowed some parents to spend up to $6,400 a year on anything a student needs.

Up to now, ESAs have been limited to disabled students, those in badly failing schools, and kids on Native-American reservations. This coming year, legislative analysts believe that 25,000 students — double the current number — will use the expanded program and have access to up to $6,400 a year. I predict the program will then grow dramatically after parents learn about other families successfully using it to pay for everything from tuition for a private school to tutoring to homeschooling materials.

“And they said it couldn’t be done! The most expansive school choice program in the nation has passed the legislature and is on its way to the Governor’s desk,” Arizona house majority leader Ben Toma tweeted last Friday. The expanded ESA bill passed the state house 31 to 26 and the state senate by 16 to 10. Sadly, the vote was along party lines, as previous Democratic support for school choice has melted away.

GOP representative Jake Hoffman said the impetus for its passage was the “woke agenda” of many public schools as well as the fact that, during the pandemic, many parents learned that their kids were receiving a very low-quality education in the public schools. “Public sentiment against public schools has boiled over,” Hoffman told me. “With the state having a $5 billion budget surplus, parents are demanding real reforms.”

The ESA program provides that $6,400 in student funding will follow the student, just as it already does each time a student leaves one public school for another public school. State and local taxpayers already spend more than $11,000 per pupil in public schools, and every public school will get some of the savings from students who use an ESA to leave the system — even though they are no longer serving that student. A 2021 report found that school-choice programs nationwide saved taxpayers an average of $7,500 per student that participated.

Kudos to Governor Ducey and Arizona legislators for giving parents the power to go around the Education Blob and take control of their children’s education.

“This win is the biggest school choice victory in U.S. history,” Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, told the news website Center Square. “Education funding is meant for educating children, not for protecting a particular institution. School choice is the only way to truly secure parental rights in education.”

A coalition of pro–public-school groups said the move came from a “corrupt Arizona legislative majority” that will be “making Arizona once again the laboratory for predatory national privatizers.” They vowed to repeat their 2018 success in blocking implementation of a previous school-choice effort. In a referendum, voters rejected the concept. But Toma countered, “We’ve learned from that election and have designed this measure to have broader support that will make a true difference in the choices parents have.”

This isn’t the first time that Governor Ducey has decided to take on the teachers’ unions. In January, he announced he was completely frustrated by Arizona teachers’ unions that were pushing for the shutdown of in-person learning in public schools. Study after study has shown that depriving kids of in-person learning has many negative consequences, including an increase in depression and suicide attempts, and steep declines in scores on achievement tests.

Ducey chose to announce that he would allow eligible families to take their children’s education dollars elsewhere if their public school closed. Any school that closed for even a single day because of Covid would see attending families earning less than $66,000 annually become eligible for $7,000 in child care, school-coordinated transportation, online tutoring, and school tuition. It’s no shock to reveal that the number of schools trying to close their doors plummeted.

I was born in Arizona, and I can say I’ve never been prouder of my native state than now. Kudos to Governor Ducey and Arizona legislators for giving parents the power to finally outflank the immovable Education Blob and take control of their children’s education.

Washington Examiner: Arizona opens the final frontier for school choice

In search of educational freedom? Go west, young families. Unless you live in California, in which case, head a little east to Arizona.

Last week, the Arizona Legislature passed the most expansive school choice initiative in America: the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program. ESAs are the purest version of school choice. Whereas charter school policies allow for a more diverse array of public schools to flourish, and voucher systems enable public money to flow to private schools, ESAs put purchasing power directly into the hands of parents.

Arizona’s ESA program would give about $6,500 directly to any family that decides a public school isn’t quite the right fit for their child. While this will certainly be a boon for the state’s private schools, the most significant consequence may come from a sector that essentially didn’t exist just a few years ago: “pods” or “microschools.”

In the midst of the pandemic, groups of parents banded together and partnered with entrepreneurial teachers to resurrect the one-room schoolhouse in their living rooms. In the fall of 2020, the media covered this development with a mix of respect and trepidation. Many of the stories started by lauding the initiative of these parents and teachers but ended by lamenting that “pods” must necessarily be a luxury good.

But this luxury good is now within reach of every Arizona family. If a teacher were to advertise and attract a dozen students, she stands to draw nearly $80,000 in public funding to her microschool. After curriculum and supplies, she’ll still be making far more than the median teacher salary of approximately $50,000. More importantly, her students will get far more specialized attention, likely suffer through far fewer distractions, and are less likely to fall behind or slip through the cracks.

The market has already signaled that there is great pent-up demand among parents for microschools. In 2018, an Arizona entrepreneur named Kelly Smith opened a pod in his home with seven neighborhood students. Smith realized that by partnering with an online charter school, he could deliver tuition-free microschools to Arizona families, and his company Prenda was born. Today, Prenda serves over 3,000 students with its blend of self-paced Chromebook lessons and group problem-based learning.

However, many parents would prefer a more classical approach: less time on laptops, more time with pen and paper, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and a focus on reading great books. Indeed, polling suggests a significant majority of parents want their child to benefit from aspects of classical education. Arizona’s flexible and robust charter school system engendered the birth of the nation’s preeminent classical charter school network, Great Hearts Academies. Today, Great Hearts serves 22,000 students at 33 schools in Arizona and Texas and has a waiting list of over 14,000.

During the pandemic, Great Hearts developed an online school and then launched a new initiative, Great Hearts Nova, which franchises classical microschools by partnering with families to provide courses, curriculum, and teacher support. If Great Hearts cracks the code on these partnerships, it could put a high-quality, highly personalized, classical education within reach of every Arizona student. And if they don’t, someone else surely will.

The beautiful thing about Arizona’s ESA program is that it can eliminate any mismatch between what parents want for their child’s education and what they can get. Arizona now funds students, not systems. For many independent-minded parents, the idea of taking their child’s education directly into their own hands and partnering with other families to form small educational communities will be deeply attractive.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey’s steady leadership on school choice is to be greatly commended. When he steps down at the end of the year, part of his legacy will be cementing his state’s position as the nation’s leader in school choice. Conservative state leaders across America ought to watch closely how parents and educators respond to this new system. And if they want to attract young families — and unlock the true power of parents in education — they ought to consider following in Arizona’s footsteps.

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