This is the second episode in a new partnership between ProPublica and On Point.
Arizona was the first state in the country to adopt universal school vouchers. But who is benefiting from this program, and who gets left behind?
With school voucher questions on several state ballots right now, we look at lessons from Arizona.
Today, On Point: Our latest collaboration with ProPublica.
Guests
Eli Hager, ProPublica Reporter covering the Southwest. Author of School Vouchers Were Supposed to Save Taxpayer Money. Instead They Blew a Massive Hole in Arizona’s Budget. More of his school voucher reporting will come out in October.
Deven Carlson,Professor of Political Science and Associate Director for Education at the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Oklahoma.
Also Featured
Brittany McConahay, Mother of three homeschooling her children in Chandler, Arizona.
Curtis Finch, Superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona.
Angelica Zavala, Mother of two living in West Phoenix, Arizona.
Interpretation and translation by Andrea Perdomo-Hernandez.
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Meet Brittany McConahay.
BRITTANY MCCONAHAY: I'm the mother of three kids: a 12-year-old, 10-year-old and seven-year-old.
CHAKRABARTI: McConahay and her family are recent transplants to Chandler, Arizona.
MCCONAHAY: Yeah, we moved this June. So June 2024.
CHAKRABARTI: Her kids started school right away.
MCCONAHAY: August 2024.
CHAKRABARTI: McConahay's children aren't in the Chandler Public Schools. She homeschools them with help from funds provided by the state of Arizona. Chandler is in Maricopa County. Curtis Finch is also in Maricopa County, about 40 miles north of where Brittany McConahay lives. Finch is superintendent of the Deer Valley Unified School District, one of the largest districts in the state, serving 33,000 students.
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CURTIS FINCH: I think I have the longest superintendent tenure in the state of Arizona today.
CHAKRABARTI: Eight years and counting.
FINCH: I'm an old timer.
CHAKRABARTI: And Superintendent Finch oozes Deer Valley pride.
FINCH: It's great. We just win everything. We are highly successful. There's a Deer Valley award, we're going to win it.
CHAKRABARTI: Maricopa is Arizona's largest county, home to more than 4.4 million people. So Brittany McConahay and Superintendent Curtis Finch don't know each other, but they are both experiencing the effects of the largest voucher program in the history of American education.
In 2022, Arizona made an historic change to its school voucher program. It had been limited to certain students, but that year the Arizona legislature passed a law expanding vouchers to all families, regardless of income. The nation's first truly universal school voucher program.
So if it's true that there's much to learn by those who have gone before, states may be wondering: Two years later, what's the impact been on Arizona?
MCCONAHAY: Just give tax dollars back to families and let them handle it themselves. And yeah, I think the freedom to choose is a better way to go when it comes to education.
FINCH: The whole point of this choice movement is really not to give the students choice. It's really to destroy public ed.
CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti. And this is the second episode in On Point's special collaboration with ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative newsroom.
And today we're looking at one of the most divisive subjects in education: School choice. Nearly a dozen states have enacted some kind of expanded voucher program since 2022. This year, school voucher plans will either be on the ballot or a major legislative priority in even more states, including Colorado, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Texas, to name a few.
Arizona is the pioneer in this massive post-COVID education reform wave. Two years later, it offers the rest of the country some lessons. To state Republican officials, it's a lesson in just how strong the appetite is for school choice. To Arizona's current governor, a Democrat, it's a lesson in what happens to students when private schools receive hundreds of millions of tax dollars with no oversight or accountability.
Arizona has long lived up to its maverick reputation in education. In 1994, it became one of the first states to welcome charter schools. By 2011, Arizona had a limited voucher program in place to help students with disabilities. Then, in 2018, came Proposition 305, a ballot measure to massively expand the program. Deer Valley Superintendent Curtis Finch says school choice advocates hit a wall: The voters of Arizona.
FINCH: It's actually been voted down in Arizona, and they jammed it through anyway.
CHAKRABARTI: Voters rejected the measure by a 30 point margin. However, just four years later, 2022, the Republican controlled legislature made universal school vouchers a reality.
GOVERNOR DOUG DUCEY: Arizona is now the gold standard for educational freedom.
CHAKRABARTI: In July 2022, then-Governor Republican Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2853 into law. Now any Arizona parent, regardless of income, could get an average of $7,000 annually in taxpayer-funded vouchers, also called "Empowerment Scholarship Accounts."
DUCEY: Under House Bill 2853, our educational savings accounts will be available to all K-12 students across the state.
CHAKRABARTI: The funds pay for schools outside the public system, including private, religious and home schools. So what happened between 2018 and 2022? Well, a lot. But perhaps most importantly, the COVID pandemic and school closures. And that is what drew mom of three Brittany McConahay to Arizona.
MCCONAHAY: We had our kids in the local public school in Washington State, northwest Washington. I can't think of too much good things to say. It was a medium experience.
CHAKRABARTI: In Washington State, COVID school building closures lasted a year and a half. McConahay says all her kids had fallen behind. And when schools reopened, students were at such different levels and behavior issues so rampant, McConahay, a teacher who was working at a private school at the time, says it felt like there was more babysitting than learning going on.
MCCONAHAY: But I just realized, 'Nah, we could do this better as a family.' And if more families could see what was happening in the classroom, I think they would realize, 'Man, I could do this better on my own.'
CHAKRABARTI: McConahay has a master's degree in education and years of experience teaching fourth grade in public and private schools. Christianity is also central to her family's life. Her husband is a pastor and he's the one who heard that...
MCCONAHAY: Arizona will actually give you funds to help with the homeschooling process. We decided, 'Hey, that'll be great.' Because we want to be a single-income family because I'd like to stay at home and be with my kids and have just my husband working and still be able to afford homeschooling.
CHAKRABARTI: So they pulled up stakes and moved to Chandler, Arizona earlier this year. The early COVID months were also an extraordinarily tough time for Superintendent Curtis Finch, even though he says Deer Valley schools were among the first to reopen in Arizona.
FINCH: It was around the masks time, COVID time. So it was like, 'Oh, our superintendent. He's a communist, he's a blah blah blah.' And then, 'Well, we need to do something about it. Where does he live?' I've had windows of my car shot out. I've had my house egged. I've had people, protesters, show up to my adult kids' houses over the years in Arizona. It's just next level here.
CHAKRABARTI: The misinformation around COVID may have prepared Finch for what he believes is a mischaracterization of Arizona public schools when the voucher debate intensified the very next year.
FINCH: I think that was an initial argument was that we need to get kids out of these bad schools. Well, that makes no sense. So I call it legal segregation.
CHAKRABARTI: More than 12,000 students participated in the first year of Arizona's expanded voucher program in 2022. That number soared the next year to more than 55,000 students. And of those kids, roughly 75% did not previously attend public schools, according to the state Department of Education at the time. Meaning, the state of Arizona is now paying for private school tuition or homeschooling supplies it previously did not have to cover.
FINCH: All it did was welfare for the wealthy is what it turned into being.
CHAKRABARTI: Brittany McConahay doesn't see it that way at all. She says that without the voucher program, her family would be hard pressed to make their homeschooling plan work.
MCCONAHAY: Because we're talking about $7,000 a year for each student. And of course, that's not money that they just hand to you to spend. And actually, they changed it now so that you have to write a curriculum for every single thing that you want to get approved by the state. But it allows for me to stay at home, and even though it's a little bit of a slow process, at least I have these funds to put towards my kids' education.
CHAKRABARTI: McConahay uses the money to buy curriculum materials and pay for extracurriculars like sports, art, and cooking classes.
MCCONAHAY: I feel like I'm able to give so much more attention to their education right now, because I'm sitting right next to them. Right now, we're only schooling for two hours a day, and then we're done, and we take the afternoon to do extracurriculars. And I don't think this is a secret, but I think most teachers would say that it only really takes two hours to get what we often stretch over six hours.
CHAKRABARTI: But Finch says families using vouchers don't have to meet anywhere near the level of transparency the state requires of Arizona public schools.
FINCH: If I buy a stick of gum, I gotta have three receipts and a note from my mother. But they can do whatever the hay they want and it's no big deal. I'm actually not against choice but that's my tax dollar and I have to prove to the public why I bought that gum. It's a part of a science project that happens to be part of a state standard. So my books are wide open. Their books are not.
CHAKRABARTI: And then there's accountability. As Finch says, public schools must teach to Arizona state standards. Public school funding is tied to meeting those standards. The same is not true for parents using vouchers for home or private school. Brittany McConahay believes that is a strength of Arizona's voucher plan, not a weakness.
MCCONAHAY: I'm not really impressed with national standards and state standards. A lot of times we don't even know how they create those standards. They go into a small room with people who we think are specialists, but the taxpayers don't know who are making those standards. And again, I just think families aren't dumb. They can figure out what their kids need to know in order to be successful in life.
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CHAKRABARTI: While differences over educational accountability can be argued in the abstract, Arizona's universal school voucher program has had an impact in the very real, very concrete world of state budgeting. The voucher program was originally estimated to cost the state $65 million last fiscal year. That jumped to more than %330 million. he state is likely to have to pay out another $429 million this year.
Well, last year, in her State of the State address, current Governor Democrat Katie Hobbs called the program a "budget buster."
GOVERNOR KATIE HOBBS: Funding this expansion is poised to cost Arizona taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion over the next 10 years if left unaddressed.
CHAKRABARTI: Hobbs says the state could be headed toward bankruptcy. So she's begun a controversial push to cut back the universal voucher program. School choice advocates such as State Superintendent Tom Horne, a Republican, are fighting back.
TOM HORNE: It's a myth that the ESAs are causing bankruptcy for the state.
CHAKRABARTI: And this may be another important lesson for other states: Vouchers do nothing to stop battles over education in America. On this, both Deer Valley Superintendent Curtis Finch and mom Brittany McConahay agree.
MCCONAHAY: You know, even in Arizona, you can tell on those Facebook groups, it is a heated issue.
FINCH: It's just highly political. And again, I've been doing this a long time. It's never been so hot.
CHAKRABARTI: And neither of them see things cooling down anytime soon, especially this election year.
MCCONAHAY: I'm just worried about where public schools are going. And I think it's time to try something new as a state. You know, I think each state should be able to choose. I don't know. I feel like I'm in a homeschooling mecca where there's just, you know, so many different opportunities. So I do think it's time to get more creative with education.
FINCH: And I predict in November, I have eight people running for three spots. There's no reason why I couldn't be fired on January 14, the first board meeting of the new year. Just because I'm just doing my part to fight for public ed and fight for what's right. And if that costs me my job, then so be it.
CHAKRABARTI: When we come back, is there a better way? ProPublica's Eli Hager joins us to further tease apart lessons for the rest of the country in Arizona's pioneering school voucher program.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: I want to bring Eli Hager into the conversation now. He joins us from Tempe, Arizona. He's a ProPublica reporter who covers the Southwest and has been looking in great detail into the story unfolding in Arizona. Eli, welcome to the show.
ELI HAGER: Thanks for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: So, I actually want to take a minute to have you explain a little bit of the mechanics of how these Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, work in Arizona. If a family wants to take advantage of them, what do they do?
HAGER: Right, so it's a slightly different concept than a school voucher, which goes directly to a private school. In the case of Education Savings Accounts, or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, as they're called here in Arizona, the parent gets an account and the state fills it with money each year, median amount of $7,000 each year.
And the parent can then use that money toward private school tuition, toward afterschool extracurricular programs like music lessons or sports, or, if they're homeschooling, toward the supplies that they say they need for homeschooling. So it's more flexible than a voucher, although it's very similar to a voucher in the sense of providing money to parents to pursue private or other options other than the public school.
CHAKRABARTI: But then you also said that if a child is going to public school, for example, the parent could use the money for after school extracurriculars?
HAGER: No, that's not correct.
CHAKRABARTI: That's not correct, okay.
HAGER: No. If you go to public school, you cannot use an ESA. So, essentially, if you go to public school, you have the right to have this money for extracurriculars.
CHAKRABARTI: Even if you go to a charter school?
HAGER: Correct.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So this is why it matters because then, but then it's called truly universal school choice in Arizona. Why is it called that?
HAGER: It's called universal school choice because any parent of any income can choose to opt out of the public schools and then have this money to choose another option.
CHAKRABARTI: Which was different than what Arizona had before, when they had some form of voucher system, correct?
HAGER: Right, before they still had the ESA program where you get money in account, but it was limited to specific groups of people. Originally, parents of students with disabilities could get an ESA to send their child to a school that had that specialty. And then it was expanded to some other groups like students that were in failing schools, their families could get an ESA. But now it's been expanded to everybody, including the wealthiest parents in Arizona.
CHAKRABARTI: Got it. Okay. And originally it was some $7,000 a year. Is it still that amount or has it grown?
HAGER: It's not set in any amount, but $7,000 remains about the median amount that gets put in these ESAs.
CHAKRABARTI: Understood. The reason why I wanted to go through all these details is because as we, you know, finished that previous segment, we talked about the considerable controversy that's going on regarding the budgetary effects of two years of these ESAs or universal school vouchers.
As I mentioned, Governor Hobbs is saying it's a budget buster. And her claim is that it could lead Arizona to the road of bankruptcy, with only something like around 55,000-ish or thereabouts students using these ESAs out of Arizona's, what, 1.2 million public schools — or, excuse me, 1.2 million K-12 aged students. What's the logic behind its budgetary impact?
HAGER: Well, the reason why it has cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than it was expected to is that a majority of the parents that are using the money so far are ones whose kids were already in public — sorry, already in private school or who are already homeschooling. So that's a new cost to the state, right? We, as taxpayers, we're not paying private school kids' tuition before.
If it were public school students switching to use the ESA program, then the money, the funding for them would sort of follow them into funding their ESA. But when it's parents who are already able to pay their private school tuition or were homeschooling before taking advantage of this new money, that's all a new cost to the state budget.
CHAKRABARTI: And we're talking, I mean, as I quoted earlier in the hour, it's more than $420 million expected this year of those new costs?
HAGER: In costs, correct.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And this was never predicted or projected when the original legislation was passed in Arizona and then signed by the former governor?
HAGER: Legislative budget analysts here did predict new costs to the program. Their prediction as of 2022 was just much lower than it's turned out to be because of all these new parents turning up to take advantage of the program.
CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. So you've been reporting very recently about exactly who is taking advantage of the ESAs or the vouchers in Arizona. Earlier I had mentioned a number sort of backing up your reporting that something like at least 75%, or around 75% of them were people who had never previously had their kids in the public school systems of Arizona. What more do we know about this cohort?
HAGER: Well, at ProPublica, we analyzed the State Department of Education data, and we found that despite the fact that lower income families say in surveys and in interviews they did with us that they're very interested in using the program, you know, they're very interested in the idea of having choice to send their children to a potentially better private school and a potentially safer, smaller private school, lower income families just are not using the program so far in great numbers.
For example, we found that in some West Phoenix zip codes, which is a lower income area of the metropolitan area, ESAs are being used at less than 1%. So only 1 in 100 kids is getting a voucher. Whereas in some Paradise Valley zip codes, which are much more affluent, that number's over 25% of families using these vouchers. So there's a real difference in who's using them, at least so far.
CHAKRABARTI: And the difference is primarily socioeconomic?
HAGER: Income, yes.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And is there a racial difference?
HAGER: We can't say that for sure, although we can certainly see that in zip codes that have a higher percentage of Hispanic families, they're also being used less, even though, again, Hispanic families have said in interviews that they are interested in the program. It's just not translating into use.
CHAKRABARTI: So take us then, compare this to how some of the original and frequent arguments that are advanced by advocates for school choice. The argument they make is, well, this is the way to very rapidly help families whose current public schools are not serving them in the way that the kids deserve. It sounds like that's not what's happening as Arizona's program sort of unfolds year after year.
HAGER: Well, those original voucher programs were, in fact, targeted at lower income families. So some of the first voucher programs in the country were in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Cleveland, Ohio. And you were only allowed to get a voucher if your child was in a failing or underperforming public school in Milwaukee or Cleveland. So it was only those groups that vouchers were for.
And Arizona's program was a little bit like that as well. It was only for the parents of children with disabilities, or, eventually, it was expanded to some other groups like students in those lower performing schools. But now it's available for absolutely everybody, no matter their income. And that means that it's not a program that's actually designed for lower income families anymore in any real sense.
That said, the conservative groups who support vouchers still make the argument that it's a route to school choice for these lower income families. They keep making that argument, even though voucher programs are available to anybody regardless of income now.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So they're making the argument that because it's available to everyone, that means it's also available to those less advantaged families. I'm going to come back to you in a second about what you found about why those families may not be taking advantage of Arizona's universal program here. But to sort of describe that from the perspective of an actual mom, we spoke with Angelica Zavala.
She's a mother of two, lives in West Phoenix. And many years ago, when Arizona's voucher program was more targeted, as you've been talking about, Eli, it included eligibility for families from certain struggling school districts. And at the time, Zavala's daughters were in a district whose performance was quite concerning to her.
Then after 2022, she heard about Arizona's Empowerment Savings Account program on the news and thought, "Hey, maybe this would be better." So she toured a local private school and even started filling out an application.
ANGELICA ZAVALA: (TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH) At that particular private school that I went to look at, it had dual language programs and it had more sports and things that the other one didn't have. It had music classes and it had more extracurricular activities.
CHAKRABARTI: But when she looked deeper, things got more complicated. The voucher program wouldn't cover the full cost of tuition, let alone some of the other expenses required for her daughters to attend the private school.
ZAVALA: (TRANSLATION) I know that the uniforms needed to be purchased there or needed to have the logo of the school according to the dress code. And then maybe I couldn't acquire things like a computer and items like that that they don't provide. So all of those things gave me extra worries.
CHAKRABARTI: Zavala was also keenly conscious of the significant class difference between her family and others at the private school. And she was also conscious of how kids would judge her daughter.
ZAVALA: (TRANSLATION) It makes a big difference — the car, the clothes. Which might sound superficial, but for me it is important. I think for me it isn't an option to have my daughters in a private school where I don't have the sufficient economic means to help them be at the same financial level as their peers.
CHAKRABARTI: In the end, Angelica Zavala decided not to apply for an ESA and instead she took advantage of open enrollment, which we'll talk about in a minute, sending her daughters to a nearby public school district with higher academic performance and more resources. So, Eli, how does Angelica's story there sort of track with what you found about reasons why lower income families have not taken advantage of the universal ESAs as much as maybe Arizonans had hoped?
HAGER: Right. Well, part of what we're trying to do at ProPublica is talk to working class and lower income families like Zavala's who are interested, at least at first, in vouchers. Their voices haven't been heard as much in this whole debate. But when we talk to them, there's a lot of reasons that they give for why they're not using the program, so far at least.
A lot of working families say that they do not know about the program because they don't have access to the same parent networks and there's information barriers. Or the ones who did look into it found logistical barriers, just like Zavala did. We looked at all the private schools in Maricopa County and they're overwhelmingly located to the north and east of the city, which are the more affluent areas. Only six out of the hundreds we looked at were in census tracts that were below 50% of the county's median income.
So, with that said, what would transportation look like for these families? If you want to get to these faraway private schools in these more affluent suburbs, would you send your children on Ubers every day for the whole year? Would you send them on hours-long city bus rides with multiple transfers? Would you have to drive them every day and pay that amount of money for gas? Because remember private schools do not provide school buses the way that public schools do.
And then the tuition. As Zavala mentioned, you get this probably about $7,000 amount. But we looked at the tuitions of private schools across the valley, and they're often in the $12,000-$13,000 range. So, you know, as one expert put it to me, "Even if you get a 50% off coupon at Saks Fifth Avenue, you might not be able to afford to shop at Saks Fifth Avenue."
And then, you know, meals aren't provided the way they are at public school. Uniforms with the private school's branded logo cost hundreds of dollars. There's the kind of cultural and class concerns that Zavala was mentioning in terms of how children will feel and how parents will be treated in that private school environment. So there's all sorts of logistical and practical reasons why this program isn't being used so far by lower income families.
CHAKRABARTI: Mm. So the availability of the funds isn't overcoming these other barriers. But for clarity's sake, Eli, before the expansion of the ESAs in 2022, when the funds were more targeted, did they cover at least the cost end of the concerns that lower income families might've had if they wanted to send their kids to private schools?
HAGER: These factors would have existed already. So we were already seeing some disparities in the use of ESAs even before the universalization. The Arizona Republic did some good reporting on this showing that even when it was more targeted, it was still slightly higher income families that were using it more often. In terms of covering the practicalities, you can expense transportation under the ESA program, but the thing is, if you've already spent your $7,000 on the private school tuition, you don't have anything left over for Ubers and city bus fares the whole year. So these things are covered, but the distance and the amount don't allow for that to actually be practical.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now, there's another major issue that has been brought up since the expansion of Arizona's program, and that is the question of accountability and transparency. Let's start with the transparency piece. Because you heard mom Brittany McConahay earlier in the show say, well, in order for her to get the funds to support her homeschooling, you know, she does have to fill out forms and kind of say what the funds are going to be used for. How does that square with what you found in terms of the required transparency?
HAGER: That's true that you have to create a curriculum that basically tells the state why you need certain items to homeschool your children. That being said, it can be any curriculum. It could be a curriculum teaching any range of things, not the science and history that are taught in the public schools.
In terms of transparency, I mean, as a reminder, this is all of our money as taxpayers, is public money being spent on private schools and homeschooling. It seems to me that that should come with some level of accountability. So, like, I, as a reporter or any other citizen of the state can't see private schools' budgets to see how our taxpayer dollars are being spent or homeschoolers' budgets.
We can't see at the academic outcomes, as Superintendent Finch was saying, to see if this experiment is working academically for kids. We can't go to school board meetings the way that we can with public schools. Private schools don't have to be accredited, teachers don't have to be certified. So there's all these things that as a reporter and I think as citizens we'd like to be able to see into just to see if the program is working, but we simply can't.
CHAKRABARTI: Have you — I'm sure you've requested such information from the state. What has their response been?
HAGER: No, I haven't because you can't request information from private schools. You can make public records requests of public agencies, but you cannot of private schools.
CHAKRABARTI: But you've requested at least some information from the Department of Education on how — because they have to, they do have to approve, at least for homeschooling, the curriculum that's being used, et cetera.? Do I have that wrong? I mean, what has the state told you when you've asked them about this?
HAGER: They do not keep track of the academic performance of private schools or homeschools at all. So there's nothing to request. In terms of the purchases, like that the homeschooling parent might purchase, I've requested documentation of those from the state Department of Education. And they said that they do not have any such documents, that those are all kept by Class Wallet, which is the private provider that administers these funds.
CHAKRABARTI: So they're not even keeping track of what the funds are being used for, at least at the state level. Okay.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Eli, before we get to the bigger national picture, there's two quick follow-up questions I have for you. Because you did mention that there's no way for the state to track the outcomes for the students that are using these vouchers or ESAs as they're called in Arizona. Is that because the state also doesn't require any sort of testing for families who are in private school or homeschool who are using these taxpayer funds?
HAGER: Correct. Yes, there's no testing. You don't have to meet, if you're a private school or homeschooling, you don't have to meet state academic standards. There's no window into it whatsoever.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And even though they're receiving now these taxpayer dollars?
HAGER: Correct.
CHAKRABARTI: Whereas the students in public schools, do the schools have to follow the state standards? And I presume there's testing that goes along with that.
HAGER: Yes, of course. You know, ever since No Child Left Behind, there's been a heavy focus on testing and accountability and the public schools have to go to great lengths to meet those standards every year. And charter schools as well, which are public, have to, they're overseen by a charter board and they have to meet regulations as to their quality, their financial sustainability and how they're serving students.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So with that in mind, have the original advocates for universal school choice in Arizona discussed at all that there should be some sort of accountability measure with these taxpayer dollars for the private and homeschools that are that are receiving them in Arizona?
HAGER: That's certainly up for debate. You know, as you mentioned earlier, Governor Hobbs has pushed for accountability measures. But so far, Republicans in the legislature have been resistant to those.
CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Okay. And then one more question here. As far as I understand, if you include Washington, D.C. with the 50 states, so amongst 51 entities, Arizona ranks near the bottom, third lowest in per pupil spending on average. Has that per pupil spending increased measurably for the public or charter schools at the same time that the universal school vouchers were put into place?
HAGER: Right. Just to be clear, it ranks near the bottom in spending on public schools. It ranks near the top on spending on vouchers for private schools. But yes, no, that funding for public schools has not increased. Arizona of the 50 states went from 50 to 49th recently, but it's still near the bottom.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let me bring Deven Carlson into the conversation now. He's professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma and associate director for education at the University of Oklahoma's Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis. He's in Norman, Oklahoma. Professor Carlson, welcome.
DEVEN CARLSON: Hello. Thank you for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So now it's time for us to sort of draw the lessons out from Eli's reporting in Arizona and see how they might apply nationally. And first and foremost, Professor, how would you characterize the shift, if any, in terms of advocacy for school vouchers in the post-COVID era?
CARLSON: Yeah, I think there's been a tremendous shift post-COVID. Pre-COVID, it was, you know, a handful of mostly targeted programs on the basis of income or geography, relatively small in scale. After COVID, we've seen these programs grow across a number of states: Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia, Oklahoma, mostly red states. And that's where the effort's been so far. So it has been a red state phenomenon, but it hasn't been everywhere. There are efforts to expand it in notably Texas, Nebraska. But we really haven't seen this happen in blue states yet.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. The Texas example is one that a lot of people are paying attention to because Texas is so huge. As far as I understand, that's a legislative effort, right? And not necessarily a question being put to voters.
CARLSON: Correct. Yep. It's before the state legislature.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Why would you say that Texas matters so much?
CARLSON: Texas matters, I think, just because of the size and scale. Texas has been at the forefront of a lot of educational reforms, from No Child Left Behind, the Texas-style accountability, and George W. Bush's governorship. And so, if this goes through Texas, I think it's someplace that everyone looks to see how it operates, to see what happens.
CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Now, again, I focus on this post-COVID period because, as you know, and Eli, I'm sure you've heard in your reporting, and we've heard through many shows that we've done, in a lot of cases, the time that kids spent outside of school buildings and were learning remotely is a time that parents saw both the good and maybe not so good of what their kids were learning. And it perhaps raised a lot more questions that families had about public school education than they did have before. I mean, do you think that that's a significant driver here?
CARLSON: Absolutely. I think for a lot of parents, COVID was really the first time they got an up-close look of what was happening in the curriculum, on the day to day in their child's schools. And some of them might have been happy, but others might have been less than impressed and wanted some other options that they could draw upon for their children's education.
CHAKRABARTI: Eli, is that what happened? Is that what contributed to the Arizona state legislature being able to pass the universal expanded program in 2022?
HAGER: Oh, certainly there was a lot of consternation among parents who got that window into their children's public schooling during the pandemic. And that led to the increased demand for a program like this. But it should be said that this effort was actually put to voters. And it lost handily at the ballot box. And then the legislature pushed it through. So it's not clear to me that it has overwhelming majority support. But definitely the pandemic contributed to the interest.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And it was put to voters in 2018, right? That's what we had mentioned earlier.
HAGER: Yeah.
CHAKRABARTI: Good point. So Professor Carlson, let me turn back to you. Okay, so looking at Arizona specifically now, let's look at the first lesson. Financial impact, right? Because as Eli has very clearly laid out, even though the state had made some estimates about what kind of budgetary impact this could have about expanding it to a universal program, essentially it was — I don't know if it was accidental or not — but it was a lowball by like an order of magnitude at least. Is that giving lawmakers some pause, even in places where there's a lot of enthusiasm around universal vouchers?
CARLSON: I think so. I think there are some states that have learned from the budgetary impact seen in Arizona. Oklahoma, where I'm from, their version of universal choice is done through the tax code, and they cap annual expenditures on their tax credit vouchers, on their voucher program at about $200,000,000- $250,000,000 a year. And so they gave themselves some cost certainty after seeing what has happened in some other states where the dollars have exceeded projections.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so they're looking for cost certainty. Got it.
CARLSON: Exactly.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. In order to not have those runaway costs that Arizona is seeing. Okay, so the second thing that Eli discussed was the question of transparency. I mean, it is quite something that in an era where a constant, like, political talking point is, "Well, it's taxpayer dollars, taxpayer dollars, we have to know where they go," here's an example where the purported advocates of transparency aren't even collecting any information at the state level on how this $400 million is being used. So is that something that may be playing out differently in other states that more transparency measures are being considered to be necessary if the, if voucher programs are to be expanded?
CARLSON: Yeah, it's interesting because states have kind of gone two ways on this. There are states like Arizona where there aren't testing requirements. But there are other states — Indiana, Louisiana, Iowa — that do include testing requirements in their version of the voucher, their voucher programs.
How those data are ultimately used isn't fully clear. I don't think there's going to be the accountability seen on the public school side, but there is the requirement that students take tests in a handful of states, but there are others where there aren't any of those requirements.
CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Okay. And one more important thing that Eli laid out for us is that for families who vouchers would ostensibly, could potentially help the most, those families in lower socioeconomic brackets, there's still these virtually insurmountable barriers to use them. Like transportation costs, there may not be other educational opportunities or schools in their area that are easily accessible. Do you see that in other states? Is that producing some kind of divide when it comes to voters' enthusiasm for expanding vouchers?
CARLSON: Yeah, I think there are a couple of really interesting divides here. One is the socioeconomic divide, where, as we saw earlier, about two thirds to three quarters, depending on the state, of voucher users were already enrolled in private schools or had never attended public schools. And so there has to be a level of socioeconomic advantage to already attending private school.
The other interesting divide is the rural-urban one. The proponents of vouchers in many states are disproportionately concentrated in urban and suburban areas. And you see a lot of resistance actually from rural legislators. This played out in Oklahoma. It's what's really driving the inability of Texas to get it through the legislature is the resistance by rural legislators who are overwhelmingly Republican. And so there's a socioeconomic cleavage, but also a rural-urban cleavage on the issue.
CHAKRABARTI: And the rural legislators are opposed to it because of what?
CARLSON: I think there's a couple of reasons. One, there just aren't that many options, schooling options, non-public schooling options out in rural areas of states. And so they don't really see vouchers as something benefiting their constituents. I think that's the major concern.
And then kind of the flipside of that is they're concerned that investment in a voucher program will reduce investment in their public schools, which in many states and rural areas are already struggling financially.
CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay. So Eli and Professor Carlson, we're sort of rounding out to the last five minutes of the show here, unfortunately. This is such an interesting topic. But Eli, can you just quickly walk us through what's happening in Arizona now, in this election year? Because I've been seeing reporting that says in the possibility or chance that the, let's say the political complexion of the Arizona state legislature changes, that maybe that could bring an opening to Governor Hobbs to make some significant changes in the ESA program there?
HAGER: It would, yes. Governor Hobbs has laid out several different things that she would like to do, reforms that she would like to make with the ESA program, including for cost-saving reasons and to produce more accountability. But she hasn't been able to do so because Arizona's legislature has been a Republican legislature for a very long time. But only by narrow margins. So if that changes, then there could be more of a pathway for her to achieve those reforms.
CHAKRABARTI: Has that galvanized supporters of the ESAs and universal vouchers in Arizona in order to preserve the program as it is?
HAGER: I think it has to a certain extent. Although with Arizona being a swing state in the presidential election and with a key Senate race between Ruben Gallego and Kari Lake, so much attention has been focused on those races that I think this issue and what might happen to it in the coming years has been a little bit lost.
CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. So, Professor Carlson, I'm pausing here because I'm trying to think about how to frame this question. Many, many years ago, about a decade ago, in Massachusetts, there was a move to expand this state's, the state of Massachusetts', very highly regulated charter school system. And I covered that because I was a local reporter at the time. That ballot measure eventually failed. It was very strongly resisted by the state teachers unions here.
And in the process of reporting that, I spoke to several families who were deeply in support of expansion of charter schools. And we're talking charter, not private here. But it's their reason that I wanted to put to you. Because they said, "Everyone talks about improving our public school. And yeah, we want that, too. But we can't wait." Like I talked to a mom whose child was in fourth grade and she said, "By the time my local school gets better, if ever, it'll be too late for my kids. They'll have graduated. And I don't want to hamstring their education waiting for a slow-moving public school system to improve."
And I can't stop thinking about that. Because it does make me wonder if there's a better way forward that maybe isn't universal vouchers, which bring up all the complications and pitfalls that Eli has reported or, you know, no choice at all. Is there some kind of middle ground?
CARLSON: Yeah. And the reality is, I think most states have that middle ground. Charter schools are present in the vast majority of states across the country. Almost every state offers some version of inter-district open enrollment, which allows students to attend public schools in a district where they don't live.
And so choice options are out there. It's just that the conversation has moved from charter schools and open enrollment to this universal choice, which spans private schooling, homeschooling, and pretty much any form of education that you can imagine.
CHAKRABARTI: But you heard why from Brittany McConahay earlier. She said that people should just trust parents to know what's best for their kids. I mean that seems to have a lot of resonance now.
CARLSON: Absolutely. And, you know, in a lot of ways parents do know best for what their kids' education should look like. At the same time, all communities have a stake in children's education and they need to — you know, as taxpayers, as community members, we want to ensure that that high quality education is accessible and being provided to all students.
And there are different ways of doing that. Private school choice, universal choice is one way. The public schooling, the traditional public schooling sector is another and we are, we're going to have a look at different states taking different approaches to providing education to students.
CHAKRABARTI: Eli, I've got 30 seconds left here and last question's for you. What would you advise voters and legislators in other states to think about when they think about the example that Arizona has put forward in the past two years with truly universal voucher programs?
HAGER: Well, I don't know that I want to be giving policy advice. But I would say that clearly looking at whether some accountability measures and transparency measures could be put in place so that we can at least see how these programs are faring and these programs that have become so popular, that would be a good step.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, Eli Hager covers the Southwest for ProPublica. He's been reporting on Arizona's universal voucher program extensively. Eli, thank you so very much.
HAGER: Thank you.
CHAKRABARTI: And Deven Carlson, professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma and associate director for education at the Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis there. Professor Carlson, thank you so much.
CARLSON: Thank you.