School-Choice Opponents Can’t Accept Defeat in Arizona

By Charles Hilu

Friday, July 08, 2022

 

Well, they’re not going down without a fight.

 

In response to the Arizona legislature’s passing a massive school-voucher expansion, anti-school-choice groups announced a campaign to kill it. Though Governor Doug Ducey has signed HB 2853 into law, if Save Our Schools Arizona reaches its goal of 118,823 valid signatures by September 25, the measure will go on hold until 2024, when voters will determine its fate as a ballot measure.

 

In its video announcing the effort, it is clear the group is overconfident, assuming that their past victories indicate sure success in the future.

 

By voting to expand school choice, the legislature “dismissed and degraded the will of 1.5 million Arizona voters who overwhelmingly rejected this incredibly unpopular expansion a few short years ago,” says one member of Save Our Schools Arizona.

 

This is a reference to 2018’s Proposition 305, which would have instituted a program similar to the one the government just approved. Although voters rejected the proposal by a margin of 65 percent to 35 percent, it is a mistake to view that earlier defeat as an outright rejection of school choice.

 

While HB 2853 makes all of Arizona’s 1.1 million students immediately eligible for the state’s voucher program, Prop. 305 would have limited the program to a growth of 5,000 per year. This is far from the beau ideal of educational-freedom proponents. As a result, the American Federation for Children, one of the largest school-choice interest groups in the country, as well as the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, both abandoned it before election day.

 

Even if the numbers hadn’t been skewed by Prop. 305 not going far enough, we should remember that people’s views in 2022 aren’t necessarily the same as what they were in 2018 or will be in 2024. In the past few years, parents have seen a global pandemic in which teachers’ unions strong-armed public schools into endorsing virtual learning. Their actions resulted in massive learning loss and social isolation, something few Arizonans, or Americans in general, will forget.

 

For that reason, more policy-makers are growing warmer toward school choice. Last year’s version of HB 2853 failed because three Republicans in the state house sided with Democrats to defeat it. This year, those same three Republicans voted in favor of the measure.

 

More importantly, recent polling has borne out this trend. According to Morning Consult, support among all Arizona adults for education savings accounts, vouchers, and charter schools are all upwards of 60 percent. In polls of only parents of school-aged children, support rose above 70 percent for all three items.

 

It is not unlikely that Save Our Schools Arizona will find the nearly 120,000 people they need to sign their petition, but getting voters to strike down the expansion two years from now will prove much more difficult, especially with the energy from proponents of school choice.

 

Moreover, Save Our Schools members are not making the effort easy for themselves. Each week they put out a report on business in the Arizona legislature. The most recent one includes a meme that implies vouchers are akin to throwing money down the toilet. Considering these types of programs predominantly benefit children from families with lower incomes, that type of rhetoric may not be the most beneficial to them.

 

The case for school choice is stronger than ever. People are realizing that parents — not teachers’ unions and their supporters — know best how to spend money on their children’s education, and they will vote accordingly in 2024.