Why does the Arizona Legislature hate public schools?
The Arizona Legislature marched forth Monday in its ongoing, unending quest to dismantle Arizona's public schools.
The Senate voted 17-13 to approve a bill that would dramatically expand the number of students eligible to get taxpayer funding to go to private schools.
Senate Bill 1279 phases in vouchers for all students over the next few years until 2020, when every one of Arizona’s 1.1 million public school students could get state funding to attend private school.
Those hallelujahs you hear? Those are the parents in Scottsdale and Paradise Valley who've been planning to send their kids to schools like Phoenix Country Day or Rancho Solano, learning now that taxpayers will now pick up a portion of the tab.
The Republican-led Legislature has long schemed for ways to divert money to private schools in the name of parental choice. But our leaders ran into a bit of trouble in 2009 when the state Supreme Court declared Arizona's voucher program an unconstitutional use of public funds on private or religious schools.
Thus was born the Empowerment Scholarship Account. Basically, the state loads tax money onto a debit card and hands it to you, the parent, to spend as you wish provided it's used to educate or get therapy for your child, either now or post high school.
ESAs began in 2011 as a narrowly-focused program, allowing children with serious disabilities to attend private school using public funds. It was a decent thing to do for a small group of children whose needs the public schools couldn't or wouldn't meet.
Then, the program was expanded to the children of active-duty military members and to children in foster care. Then to certain kindergartners and to children attending public schools that received a D or an F rating from the state – because heaven forbid we actually fix our failing schools. Then to Native American students who live on reservations.
Currently, about 2,200 children have ESAs.
Should taxpayers fund private education?
Republicans want to expand the program so that every Arizona child is eligible for a taxpayer-supplied private-school education. Assuming, that is, that every Arizona child’s parents could afford to pay the difference between what the state would provide and the actual cost of a private-school education. Assuming, too, that they are the sort of kid a private school would want.
Arizona taxpayers still will have to provide public schools for the have-nots – the kids whose parents are too poor to send them elsewhere or too otherwise occupied to worry overmuch about where and whether their kids are getting an education.
The suckers, we'll call them.
For years, the Legislature has been sucking money out of the public schools. Arizona public education has endured some of the nation’s deepest cuts to public education.
Total spending on K-12 education was $412 less per student in 2014 than it was in 2009, according to a report last year by the Arizona auditor general. And that's in a state where our $7,500 in per-student operational spending already trails the national average by about 42 percent – or more than $3,000 per student.
That’s not counting the money they siphon away via tuition tax credits for private schools and now by approval of a full-blown voucher program.
Supporters of the expansion plan say current limits on ESAs make it too difficult to score a voucher.
Opponents say expansion would decimate the public school system, robbing an already starved system of badly needed funds.
Which is, of course, the point.Roberts: Why does the Arizona Legislature hate public schools?:
