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Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.
This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.
Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that
is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!
SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.
But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.
The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!
But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.
(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)
Couple of scattered thoughts on this:
I have no opposition to public schools in principle, graduated from one myself without too much apparent damage. What I do have strong opposition to is this notion that an educator understands what a kid needs better than that kid's own parents and that we should just surrender the education of our children to the state without question or opposition. There are shitty parents to be sure but there are also shitty teachers in probably about the same proportion.
When topline education funding takes a hit, I predict there will be no firing of excessive administrative personnel like diversity experts or secretaries or superfluous academic committees. The budge hits will be directly to education funding proper, textbooks and materials and the like, so the entrenched education interests can point to a shortage of textbooks and say "See what your ESA is doing to our precious children!?"
This reminds me of the other thing I saw about Arizona education over the summer. I guess a couple years ago there was a bunch of organized protesting demanding a raise in teacher salaries, and the governor and legislature allocated money to give teachers a 20% raise over the next few years. But the public school districts did not pass that money on to teachers as promised, leading to another round of demands for increases in "teacher pay":
(I do wonder how widespread salary increases of 10%+ contributed to Arizona's inflation...) Meanwhile, Arizona district superintendents are pulling down $200,000 annual salaries, plus stuff like this:
The amount of money being poured into "public education" systems in the United States is absolutely gob-smacking. I don't know who first said that "think of the children" is the root password to all government systems, but it certainly seems to be true. It will be interesting to see how things change as more parent groups catch wise to the scam. Something else I saw on social media somewhere, was that the biggest mistake Democrats made during COVID was turning "parents of school-aged children" into a special interest voting bloc opposed to Democrat policies.
Hm, I think Superintendent Chalmers could afford much more than a 1979 Honda Accord these days.
But why would he ever want to?
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