Arizona School Choice Program Comes Under Bureaucratic Attack

Families like guiding their kids’ education, but the governor and state attorney general disagree.

Arizona's governor, Democrat Katie Hobbs, a nonentity who won because Republicans ran a Trump sycophant instead of a viable candidate, hates school choice. So does Attorney General Kris Mayes, who won by 280 votes against another Trump acolyte. Both officials have targeted Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA), a state program that lets students use a portion of the funding allocated for education in public schools to pay instead for private school tuition or homeschooling costs. Hampered by the popularity of the program among Arizonans, Hobbs, Mayes, and their allies pursue a strategy of death by bureaucracy. Families are fighting back in court.

Treating Classroom Materials as Fraud

In July, Phoenix's KJZZ reported that Mayes "opened an investigation into the Arizona Department of Education over allegations it approved school voucher expenses not authorized under law, prompting the department to stop approving the expenses in question."

The Attorney General's office had contacted the Department of Education, which is led by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, objecting to approval under the ESA program of the purchase by families of "supplementary materials" for education without documentation that the materials are linked to approved curricula. Classroom supplies, museum passes, and educational books are now off limits unless specifically required by a curriculum—a challenging requirement for homeschoolers, many of whom customize lesson plans to meet the individual needs of their children.

"The absence of requirement for documentation of a curriculum nexus may enable account holders or vendors to engage in fraudulent behavior," Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Boughton insisted in a not-so-subtle threat to families.

The Department of Education promptly caved without a fight, agreeing to require families to provide proof that supplemental materials purchased with ESA funds are directly tied to approved curricula. This drew a strong rebuke from the Heritage Foundation's Jason Bedrick (disclosure: Jason is a friend), a school choice advocate and Arizona resident who warned that "opponents of education freedom are doing everything they can to eliminate or undermine the ESA" and calling out Horne and his department for failing to stand its ground against an attempt to undermine education freedom through bureaucracy.

When the Public Is Against You, Weaponize Red Tape

It's no surprise that Hobbs, Mayes, and company are targeting school choice with red tape rather than through legislation or at the ballot box. The GOP controls both houses of the legislature and supports school choice. Speaker of the House Ben Toma urged the Department of Education to ignore the attorney general's foray into education issues. State residents also favor choice. A September survey of Arizonans found 67 percent support for the ESA program—72 percent among parents of school-age children. That's very close to the 65 percent support for ESAs in a 2022 Data Orbital survey. If given a choice, the people of this state will keep ESAs, so opponents of education freedom are trying to make the program difficult and legally fraught to use.

Horne weakly defended himself for failing to fight over what he called a "minor issue" and insisted he would have lost in court. He did, though, offer to support lawsuits against the attorney general challenging that office's interpretation of the program's requirements and its threats against families and vendors of educational materials. Whether or not he'll follow through, that's exactly the path chosen by Arizona families backed by the state's Goldwater Institute.

New Rules Create 'Impossible Burdens'

"The government is changing the rules and putting impossible burdens on me," homeschooling mom Velia Aguirre, a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the state comments in a Goldwater video. "It's been really challenging and hard having to meet the expectations that the AG wants with a curriculum."

Fellow plaintiff Rosemary McAtee, also a homeschooling mother, points out that under the new rules, the ESA rejected the purchase of reading books for her children because they weren't linked to a specific curriculum. "The A.G. clearly doesn't have any interest in what an education looks like for a homeschool child," she comments. "She just wants to shut down and eliminate this program."

For its part, the Goldwater Institute points out that "public and private school curriculum documents don't even necessarily list items like 'pencils' and 'erasers,'" leaving little ground for any educators in the state to justify the purchase of classroom materials if the A.G.'s position is taken seriously. In addition, the organization emphasizes, "the AG's new mandate simply ignores state law and violates the Department of Education's own handbook, which safeguards the ESA program by requiring documentation for unusual purchases, but not for common-sense purchases of items that are 'generally known to be educational.'"

School Choice Deserves To Survive

But logic is beside the point in Mayes' weirdly restrictive reinterpretation of ESA purchase rules and Hobbs' ongoing attempts to hobble school choice in the state. If good sense mattered, they'd acknowledge the massive popularity of an ESA program that now serves almost 80,000 students, up from 13,400 students when the program was introduced in 2022. They would give a nod to the state's improving National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) student achievement, which was among the top ten in the country for growth in reading and math scores among both fourth graders and eighth graders even as education spending remained under control, rising from an inflation-adjusted $10,353 per student in 2002 to $10,790 in 2020. Both achievement gains and cost controls are documented in the Public Education at a Crossroads report from the Reason Foundation, which publishes this magazine.

Hobbs and Mayes could even admit that the ESA program, which gives families 90 percent of the funding that would have otherwise been allocated to public schools on students' behalf so they can seek education they prefer elsewhere, has contributed both to better outcomes and to controlling spending.

Arizona could do even better. The state traditionally ranks lower in reading and mathematics than the national average in NAEP assessments—though it held its own as students lost ground post-COVID. But Arizona is improving as it advances educational choice and lets families choose what works for kids.

The lawsuit by Aguirre and McAtee, and backed by Goldwater, seeks "declaratory and injunctive relief to vindicate Arizona parents' right to use ESA funds for common-sense educational purchases without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops and complete arbitrary paperwork."

It deserves to succeed. And Mayes and Hobbs need to back off their attacks on their own constituents.