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.
HERE'S HOW YOU CAN TELL JOE MANCHIN IS SPINELESS
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:
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:
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.