You’d be hard pressed to find a homeschooler who hasn’t heard of Arizona’s expansive homeschooling and school-choice policies, largely driven by the advent of the Empowerment Scholarship Account Program four years ago. More than 100,000 children in the state of Arizona are now taking advantage of the program, which provides funds universally through “education savings accounts” (ESA’s) to any family who does not enroll their students in a public school. An ESA is a state government program where families are given voucher funds to pay for homeschooling, private school or other educational expenses.

As more families are ushered into the program, the criticism of its deployment and the rapidly augmenting costs of the program have gotten louder.

In July, supporters of a petition that would increase the oversight for Arizona’s ESA program turned in 420,000 signatures, well over the required amount to get on the ballot. This petition, known as “Proposition 212” or the “Protect Education Act”, needed a total of 256,000 signatures to get on the ballot for the coming November midterm election. The Arizona supreme court’s ruling in mid-August of this year invalidated thousands of these petition signatures, meaning that the petition is short of its required signature count and will not be on this year’s Arizona ballot, effectively killing the measure.  

Opponents of this petition ardently fought the measure by circulating opposing petition initiatives and submitting challenges against signatures on Proposition 212, which ultimately led to the state Supreme Court’s ruling, thwarting the petition effort. 

The Protect Education Act, if placed on the ballot and passed, would have created oversight on all of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, in an effort to protect the program against waste and abuse. Currently, the program is completely universal. This measure would have placed income caps on families to qualify, restricting families that make more than $150,000 a year from participating in the program. In addition to this, it would have returned any unused money in an ESA account to public schools. 

Opponents of proposition 212 are overjoyed by the ruling, seeing this as a win for school choice and ESA’s not only in Arizona but across the country. They see the level of freedom provided in the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (one of the least restrictive in the country) as a guidepost nationally of what a new ecosystem of education innovation and choice can look like. As Chalkbeat reported, Robert Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, said Arizona has led the way in “true parental autonomy.” The freedom has provided many families with the funds they need to start microschools, and other families to experiment with new hybrid forms of education.

Some proponents of the measure are pro-education savings accounts in Arizona who also support certain restrictions to the program. Many of the advocates for Proposition 212 were looking to curb any potential abuse of the program, with certain incidents coming to light periodically over the four years that Arizona has enacted the ESA program. They also wanted to create some accountability via testing to better understand how students were fairing in a program that uses the public’s tax dollars. 

“This does not reflect what Arizona voters want. It does not reflect the overwhelming support of educators, parents and public school advocates across the state who volunteered their time and demanded a voice in reforming a program that abused taxpayer money and pulled funding from their neighborhood public schools. Instead, the hard-earned resources educators raised to fund this were buried under a mountain of big money, political power, and a system that consistently sides with special interests,” a spokesperson for Protect Education said in an email, reported Arizona Family.

This is hardly the start or the end to the debate over school choice policy oversight in Arizona. In Arizona’s primary race for State Superintendent this past July, much of the debate centered around the question of how much (if any) oversight should there be to prevent fraudulent purchases through the program. The primary, which was closely followed and became the most expensive superintendent election nationally to date, highlights how important this central question is.