The preceding post was reported by ProPublica, an absolutely essential journalistic enterprise that serves the public interest.

Please read Peter Greene’s take on the same story. He adds additional research and his professional experience as a veteran teacher.

Greene writes:

Call it a zombie school, one more piece of predictable detritus washed up on the wave of voucher laws. Here’s an instructive tale.

ARCHES Academy was a charter school operating in Apache Junction, Arizona. But in March of 2024, the state board that oversees Arizona charters voted unanimously to shut the place down. Mind you, the board in Arizona is pretty charter friendly, but ARCHES had so many problems. Under 50 students were left at a K-8 school dinged for soooo many problems.

Chartered in 2020, promising a “holistic” approach that grouped students by ability rather than age, then put on an Assessment Consent Agreement in 2023. Financial mismanagement. Poor record-keeping. IRS violations. Violations of state and federal law. Academic results in the basement. State rating of D. Founder and principal Michelle Edwards told the board “Mistakes were made and compounded over time.” So, general incompetence rather than active fraudster work.

So ARCHES the charter school was shut down, because charters still have to answer to the state for their performance and competence.

But you know who doesn’t have any oversight at all in Arizona?

Private schools that accept taxpayer-funded vouchers.

So Edwards simply re-launched her school as the Title of Liberty (a name taken from a verse in the Book of Mormon). Some of her pitch was visible in a piece in The Arizona Beehive, a Mormon-flavored newsmagazine, in the summer of 2024.

As changes happen in the public education system, many families who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have become more concerned about the potential influence of conflicting ideologies expressed in their children’s classrooms.

In the article, Edwards addresses her own concerns.

Principal Michelle Edwards, an early childhood specialist, has been in the education system for many years. The academy is a culmination of a dream of hers. “I recently had one student who was really struggling,” says Michelle, “and I couldn’t tell her about her divine abilities, that she’s a child of God, or who her father in heaven is.”

The article promises a Personal Learning Plan and notes that if tuition is an issue, the school will help parents apply for the Arizona ESA voucher to cover costs.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Edwards just had the school, under another name and as a charter, shut down by the state. But then, nobody, not even the state itself, told anyone.

Edwards’s new school went heavily with the religious pitch, with the website announcing “Christ-centered, constitutionally-based, education for all….”

Why doesn’t Arizona have anything in place to help apparently well-meaning folks like Edwards get into the education biz? Why doesn’t it exert even the slightest bit of oversight of the vendors cashing in on taxpayer-funded vouchers? I suspect it hints at what programs like Arizona’s voucher extravaganza are really about– and it’s not about a robust, choice-filled education environment. It’s about defunding and dismantling public education (and the tax burdens that go with it). But you can’t just tell folks, “We’re going to end public education.” So instead, hand them a pittance of a voucher and announce that you’re giving them freedom! And after that, you’ve washed your hands of them. The wealthy can still afford a top-notch education for their kids, and if Those People end up wasting their kids time in sub-prime, fraudulent, or incompetent pop up schools, well, that’s their problem.

If folks like the Arizona voucher crowd were serious about choice, they would provide transparency and oversight, rather than letting any shmoe rent a storefront and call it a school. But Arizona isn’t serious about choice. It’s serious about dismantling public education. It’s serious about getting public tax dollars into private hands and funding religious groups. And people like the families at Title of Liberty and even Edwards herself will just keep paying the price.