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Home - Political News - 2 Anti-School Choice Campaigns in Arizona Mislead Voters

2 Anti-School Choice Campaigns in Arizona Mislead Voters

Arizona’s trailblazing Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program enables the families of more than 102,000 students to choose the learning environments that work best for their children.

All Arizona K-12 students are eligible for an education savings account, which lets families direct their children’s education funding toward private schools, tutoring, curricula, therapies, and other educational expenses that fit their children’s unique needs.

Families love it. Three-quarters of parents of school-aged children in Arizona support it.

Yet, although the ESA program is very popular and highly accountable, special-interest groups pushing two separate ballot initiatives are seeking to curtail and regulate it. Advocates working on both campaigns have been caught on camera giving false information to voters whom they are soliciting to sign their petitions.

Ballot Initiatives to Curtail School Choice

The first campaign, calling itself Protect Education Now, is a joint project of the Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona, an anti-school choice group that has failed to push anti-ESA ballot initiatives in the past.

The initiative aims to regulate the Empowerment Scholarship Account program in several ways, including restricting eligibility to families earning under $150,000 annually—less than the median income of an Arizona firefighter married to a registered nurse—which could kick tens of thousands of children out of the program.

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Although students with special needs would still be eligible, they would have to spend 45 days in a public school before getting access to the ESA.

As the Goldwater Institute detailed, the initiative would impose a host of unnecessary and harmful regulations on private schools and homeschoolers. It would also severely restrict what families can buy with their ESA funds, and it would confiscate any unspent funds remaining in a family’s ESA at the end of the year, punishing families who have spent wisely and saved. Those funds would be redirected to district schools that did not educate the ESA students.

The second campaign, Fortify AZ, is more surprising. It is backed by the American Federation for Children, a pro-school choice group.

Their initiative mostly mirrors the union-backed anti-ESA initiative, including a modified version of a provision that the Goldwater Institute has warned........

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