(The Center Square) – A ballot proposal’s income cap could put thousands of Arizona students at risk of being removed from the state’s school choice program, according to a new report.
Common Sense Institute Arizona released a report showing that if voters approve the Protect Education Act, the ballot initiative’s $150,000 income cap would remove 20,300 current students from the Empowerment Scholarship Account program. ESA provides funding for students to attend alternatives to their public neighborhood school.
The report highlighted that another 400,000 school-aged children could be excluded from the program based on their household income.
Glenn Farley, CSI’s director of policy and research, told The Center Square that this amounts to around 33% of all children in Arizona.
The ballot initiative’s proposed $150,000 income cap will be adjusted yearly at 2%.
The income cap “grows every year with inflation, but incomes on average grow faster than inflation,” Farley said, adding that over time “more families become subject to the cap.”
Factoring in that income grows faster than inflation, the report said by 2045, 52% of Arizona families with school-aged children may be ineligible to participate in the state’s ESA program.
“The trouble with income caps is that once they are proposed it becomes easy to change them,” Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told The Center Square, answering questions by email.
“[Income] caps have a tendency to always go down, and people who don’t think they will get caught by a cap do get caught when it is reduced,” he added.
Olivia Fierro, the communications director for the ballot initiative, said she could not “speculate about population growth decades into the future because our focus is on educating the 1.1 million students already attending Arizona’s public schools and protecting students in the ESA program by adding basic safety protocols.”
“ESA program is blowing a massive hole in the state budget,” Fierro said, answering The Center Square’s questions by email.
“The Protect Education Act balances the need to place guardrails on this billion-dollar program while doing nothing to disrupt how the program serves its originally intended audience: children with disabilities who need extra support,” she said.
Fierro added that the “guardrails should have been part of the program from day one.”
“Our initiative will bring transparency and accountability to the program and end the outrageous misuse of taxpayer money that has been allowed to occur,” she noted.
In addition to the income cap, the ballot initiative would require private schools in Arizona to use the same statewide assessment as public schools. Private schools in Arizona take a standardized test, but it differs from the statewide assessment test required in public schools.
The CSI report found 84% of the private schools it surveyed administered some type of standardized test.
According to Farley, CSI reached out to numerous private schools to ask them about how these potential changes could affect them. He said that, based on the information CSI obtained from these schools, it may lead to fewer schools participating in the program or to schools charging higher tuition.
Matt Beienburg, director of education policy at the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, told The Center Square that Arizona private schools “have the autonomy to select the exams” they are going to give to their students.
“By forcing these private schools to use a specific test,” Beienburg said, it tells private schools that they need to align their curriculum with the public school’s standardized test.
“If the schools now become aligned with the state exam, then what is on that exam becomes the guiding star of what those schools must focus on,” he said.
Proponents of the ballot initiative are attempting to “exert control over [private schools] and restrict their ability to take students through the ESA program,” Beienburg noted.
Fierro told The Center Square that the ballot initiative establishes “a basic level of accountability so parents and taxpayers can understand whether students are making academic progress when public dollars are being used.”
“The proposal provides flexibility by allowing schools to either administer comparable assessments or maintain accreditation through a nationally recognized accrediting organization,” she said.
The report estimates that educating students in the universal ESA program costs about $7,700 per student, compared with almost $15,000 in public schools. An average ESA student, including students with special needs, costs around $10,000 per year, Farley said.
According to the report, moving 20,000 ESA students back into public schools would cost taxpayers $115 million annually.
Horne told The Center Square that the “right to a public education is available to people at all income levels, so the ability for parents to choose the best school for their child should be available to everyone as well.”
