Last month, the Arizona Legislature approved the most sweeping school choice law of any state in the nation. It’s worth paying attention to.
The law opens up to all families in Arizona what are called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs).
Under the program, families who decide they want to send their children to schools outside of the traditional public school system are provided roughly $7,000 to spend on the education of their children.
This money can be used toward private school tuition, homeschooling and tutoring, among other things.
“Our expansion of education savings account eligibility ensures that ALL our kids have an opportunity to get a high-quality education,” tweeted Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
It’s an approach Californians should pay close attention to considering the abysmal state of the K-12 system here. Despite spending massive sums of money on K-12, California has long yielded poor educational outcomes.
This includes most students being unable to read or do math at grade level, as well as consistently underperforming most of the rest of the country on national standardized tests.
Efforts to reform the K-12 system have been met with institutional resistance, especially from the teachers unions which dominate education policy in the state.
Public charter schools have been demonized and subject to considerable restrictions in recent years, despite the fact they were once widely supported by mainstream Democratic officials.
Likewise, any talk of reforming teacher tenure laws have been shut down in Sacramento.
Five years ago, the Public Policy Institute of California found that 60% of Californians and 66% of public school parents supported the concept of a school voucher system. This included 73% of Black Californians and 69% of Latino Caifornians.
What Arizona is doing is consistent with what majorities of Black and Latino Californians would like to see in California.
School choice has been smeared in recent years by teachers unions and their puppet legislators, but the central notion that parents, students and teachers should have the freedom to choose the best school for themselves remains as sound an idea as ever.