Politicians aren’t listening; voters oppose the ESA bills

It’s hard to know where to start when listing the bad things about new Empowerment Scholarship Account (private school voucher) bills introduced by Sen. Sylvia Allen, Rep. Shawnna Bolick and Rep. Mark Finchem this month.

There’s the fact that voters rejected these very same efforts merely two months ago, and at a resounding 65 percent. Clearly, some politicians aren’t hearing the voters’ voices.

Then there’s the fact that none of the reasons voters rejected vouchers has changed. The program still has an alarming amount of fraud and abuse because the Legislature has prevented the Arizona Department of Education from using its own budget to hire more auditors.

The voucher program still siphons badly needed funds from already underfunded public schools — the schools 95 percent of Arizona families choose. Loading $5,000 to $30,000 of taxpayer dollars onto debit cards for use at religious schools or even unregulated homeschooling still violates our sense of responsible fiscal policy.

Inventing more vouchers that siphon funding from public education is not the direction Arizona families, educators, employers, community leaders — voters — want to go.

But we at Save Our Schools Arizona, the local group of moms and teachers who joined together to oppose voucher expansion, actually see a much bigger problem here. This year started with Gov. Doug Ducey and the minority and majority leaders of the Arizona House of Representatives and Arizona Senate all calling for bipartisan collaboration, for a government of, by and for the people that actually behaves the way regular people have to — working together, focusing on common ground, emphasizing shared values, accomplishing goals.

Much to our delight, this is already happening. We applauded the governor’s education budget for doing more for district infrastructure needs and critical areas like school counselors and teacher recruitment than we’ve seen from him ever before. Both Republicans and Democrats have introduced legislation to increase public school funding.

There is unprecedented bipartisan agreement on proposals that help public schools, with STO voucher reform and charter school reform bills being sponsored by Republicans and Democrats alike.

These ESA voucher bills threaten all of this progress. They cynically fly in the face of basic voter respect and educator and parent trust. They tell us — Arizona voters that what we say doesn’t matter when national special interests like those behind the Bolick bill have plans to profit off our children. These bills tell us — teachers, parents, business leaders — that when our elected officials say they see the facts, that they share our values and will lead our state to better school funding and better results, they don’t really mean it.

We want to work together on our common goal: strong schools for a strong state. We want to trust that our leaders represent we the people. We want to know that when we cast a vote, it’s not just a fleeting headline that the winners promptly ignore. We don’t want to spend our nights and weekends making signs, marching on the Capitol, flooding the state with petitions and running yet another referendum campaign in 2020 to stop more bad bills from hurting our schools — but we will.

At Save Our Schools Arizona, we want to walk together on a new path forward for public education. These antipublic education and anti-voter voucher bills only take us two steps back.

Dawn Penich-Thacker and Beth Lewis are two of the co-founders of Save Our Schools Arizona, which put Proposition 305 on the 2018 ballot and led to its resounding defeat. They teach full time and have elementary school-aged children in Tempe. Reach them at dawn@sosarizona.org and beth@sos arizona.org.