Katie Hobbs will make any excuse to kill school choice
David Freddoso
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Studies show that school choice voucher programs save states money. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, in particular, is expected to save the state about $500 million in education expenses this year while costing only $377 million. Statewide public school enrollment has declined by 31,000 since the ESA program began and is currently 70,000 below budget projections, as Corey DeAngelis and Jason Bedrick pointed out the other day in the Wall Street Journal.
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Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-AZ), however, has argued recently, including in an interview and her State of the State address, that this program is going to “bankrupt” her state. She argues that the absolute cost is not the issue in question:
“Many of these students that are applying for and receiving these vouchers are in districts that aren’t getting the per-pupil funding from the state. They’re just relying on the property tax base,” Hobbs said. “It’s not hitting the bottom line of their school districts at all, but it’s pulling money out of the entire system … the school system that roughly 80% of families and students still continue to choose in Arizona. … The public district school system is being robbed of those resources. And that is creating an unequal playing field where those resources aren’t going to the schools that need it the most.”
If I read this correctly, her contention is that so many of the students choosing vouchers come from school districts that take no state money, which means that the voucher money parents receive out of state funds would otherwise go to other school districts, which suffer as a result.
OK, fine. I’m no expert in Arizona’s school-funding formula, but a proper fix to this problem — and a bipartisan fix, if it is indeed a real problem and some consensus can be reached — would seem to be to change how the funding formula works for those districts, not to abolish a program that can unburden the state from an extremely expensive task that it performs very poorly. As both New Orleans and Washington, D.C., can attest, governments are great at funding schools — they are not so good at running them. And if you think about it, there is no reason to think a government would be good at running a school, even if experience did not confirm this so clearly.
Washington and New Orleans are unique not for vouchers but for their charter school revolutions, which similarly take the task of running schools out of government hands. In New Orleans, charters took over everywhere after Hurricane Katrina demolished the existing system. They became an instant success story, especially beneficial to lower-income students. In Washington, charters have sprouted up gradually over the last 20 years thanks to congressional intervention. They now teach 48% of the city’s public school students. Their quality varies, to be sure, as do their curricula — Montessori, classical education, and Chinese immersion are but three of many options. But their overall superiority is again attested to by the thousands of parents who still languish on waitlists to get their children out of their lousy local public schools and into a charter school.
If too many students from affluent school districts are taking ESA money in Arizona, then the state government should act now and hire “navigators,” as they were called in the old Obamacare program, to help families in poorer and worse-performing districts take advantage of ESAs as well. This will increase the savings that the state enjoys, avoid fiscal concerns, and guarantee that more students in poorly performing districts get a decent education instead of being collateral damage for some teachers union’s guaranteed job program.
Fortunately, Hobbs has no power to defund this program. Not only do Republicans control the state legislature, but it was placed into the hands of two statewide elected executives who support it, as Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute pointed out last week:
“Policymakers should remember that the only Arizona incumbent to lose a statewide race (of either party) in Arizona this past cycle was the left-leaning champion of the teachers unions who opposed school choice and ESAs, and who voters replaced with State Superintendent Tom Horne, who has pledged to uphold and protect the program,” he said. “And fortunately, the continued distribution of funds for ESA families rests squarely with the offices of Superintendent Horne and school choice champion Treasurer Kimberly Yee — neither of whom report to the governor.”
That’s a relief. Hobbs’s motive is to help her masters in the teachers union. I hope she fails and that this program succeeds and expands — also that it comes to my state soon.
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