Andy Spears of The Education Report tells the sad tale of unbridled fraud in Arizona’s voucher program.
In 2018, voters in Arizona overwhelmingly rejected expansion of the state’s voucher program. Despite the decisive vote against vouchers, the legislature made vouchers available to every student, regardless of income or need.
Today about 7-8% of the state’s students use vouchers at an annual cost nearing $1 billion a year.
Most of the voucher students never attended public schools. In other words, the universal voucher program is mostly subsidizing the tuition of students already enrolled in private and religious schools.
He writes:
Save Our Schools Arizona reports on the rampant fraud in that state’s school voucher scheme:
Arizona Republican leaders and Superintendent Tom Horne have long insisted that fraud in Arizona’s ESA voucher program is minimal. “One percent or less,” Horne often has said — but 12News has obtained new public records from Horne’s AZ Dept. of Education (ADE) that tell a very different story. Documents show unallowable purchases — spending explicitly banned under ESA voucher program rules — may account for about 20 percent of transactions. That’s one in five.
In 2025, 12News Investigates revealed parents used ESA voucher funds for non-educational purchases, including: diamond rings, smart TVs, gift cards, large appliances, luxury clothing, and lingerie.
These purchases are among more than 100 prohibited items listed in the ESA Parent Handbook. Accounts that make such purchases are supposed to be suspended or removed from the program by the ADE. However, according to 12News, “the spending continues as Horne contends his department uses risk-based auditing that will eventually catch wrongdoing.”
84,000 unallowable purchases??? 12News found an ADE memo covering ESA voucher spending from December 2022 through last September found that of 385,000 ESA purchases reviewed by Horne’s ADE, nearly 84,000 were deemed unallowable — or more than 20 percent of all transactions that should have been refused by the ADE!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I saw this posting on Facebook from a conservative writer. Much to ponder for anyone who wants both a better teacher corps and tax cuts: we can’t have both.
“Of course, I owe who I am to my teachers—both within my family and the small town version of the Mississippi Public School System. My public-school teachers knew my parents, and some knew my grandparents. My first-grade teacher taught my dad in third grade, so my perspective on education is influenced by that. When I got to college, I noticed those at the head of the class were instructors, not teachers.
Big difference.
Assume for a moment that the following questions are valid:
What if there were a job that was, in fact, the most important job in society—not the most glamorous, not the highest paid, not the most publicly celebrated—but the most important in terms of long-term civilizational survival?
What if there were a class of people who, through hundreds of thousands of years of lived human experience, were highly intelligent and uniquely attuned—biologically, psychologically, and emotionally—for nurturing, teaching, and shaping the youngest members of society until they were mature enough to survive on their own?
And what if those same people were systematically incentivized to stop doing that job in favor of something else society declared more important—corporate law, finance, executive management, institutional prestige?
Wouldn’t you expect the output from that first job to decline over time? Maybe slowly at first. Maybe subtly. But inevitably. And if that job were foundational enough, wouldn’t the consequences eventually become catastrophic?
It doesn’t sound like a good situation, does it?
And yet, here we are.
I saw this morning that recent data from GRE, SAT, and ACT performance suggests that teachers now rank among the lowest-scoring university graduates. Year after year, students pursuing education degrees tend to cluster toward the bottom of standardized testing cohorts. Now, standardized tests are not perfect measures of intelligence or character. But over large populations, patterns matter, and this pattern has been persistent.
X user Wesley Yang made an observation that struck me as both provocative and plausible:
“All of the predecessors of the highly intelligent career-oriented women who now serve as lawyers and corporate executives were once teachers. Their career ambitions were artificially capped and routed into the formation of the minds of the next generation. All that residual female brilliance is now fully washed out of the system, which is now populated by the lowest performers among college graduates, with exactly the results in student performance you would expect.”
That is a blunt way of putting it, but the logic deserves consideration. For much of modern history, many of the most capable, intellectually gifted women had limited professional outlets. Teaching was one of them. The profession absorbed an enormous amount of cognitive and cultural capital. Those women shaped generations—not merely academically, but morally and socially.
After barriers began to fall, women rightly entered every profession, but as opportunity expanded, incentives shifted. The brightest minds followed prestige and compensation into law firms, corporations, medicine, finance, and technology. Teaching, meanwhile, remained low paid, bureaucratically constrained, and increasingly siloed and politicized.
Over time, talent flows where incentives point.
I am not suggesting that there are no brilliant teachers today. There are. Nor am I claiming this is the only reason for declining educational performance. Family breakdown, cultural fragmentation, administrative bloat, and ideological activism all play roles. There remains an upper quintile of students—and exceptional teachers—who make it through the educational gauntlet intact.
But when a profession once populated by some of the most capable minds in society gradually becomes a fallback option rather than a first-choice calling, outcomes change—and when ideological activism begins to crowd out academic rigor, the problem compounds. It should not surprise us that classrooms increasingly reflect political fashion, identity preoccupation, and social experimentation rather than disciplined transmission of knowledge.
No surprise Libs of TikTok is filled with a segment of teachers who are angry white lesbians, blue haired and septum pierced radicals, black racists, and gender confused, feminized men who think Drag Queen Story Hour is a great idea. If you reallocate your most cognitively gifted nurturers away from shaping children and into optimizing quarterly earnings reports, you should not be shocked when childhood development suffers.
Civilizations rise and fall on what they teach their young. If the most important job in society becomes sub-optimal for long enough, the consequences will not remain confined to test scores.
They will shape the character of the next generation—and they already have.”
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Jake: what a pile of vile stinking offal that I’ve heard before to denigrate and smear public school teachers. Thanks for your service and please drop dead you useless tenth rate teachers is the message from Jakites. This hideous anti-public school teacher propaganda or Jakism has been going on for a long time and it’s wrong and demeaning, (in service of weakening support for our public schools).
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You have made a habit out of not reading for comprehension. What the author of that posting said is what many other people have also said: in current times many highly capable women who in past times would have been outstanding teachers now work in much higher paid professions. The author regrets that the quality of teachers has overall declined. You appear to be a product of such low caliber teachers and schools.
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Jake,
You are making a case for higher salaries for teachers.
If teachers are treated like professionals, they would not only get higher salaries but more autonomy in the clsssroom. They would be free of inane state and federal mandates. They would decide for themselves which books to use, whether to use textbooks, how best to teach reading and math and other subjects.
Today, teachers do not have that professional autonomy. They should.
I started graduate school in education in 1968-69. At that time, people were saying exactly what you posted. 55 years ago!
They said then that our brightest women were going into law, medicine, and other professions.
Same lament.
Outside commentators have said the same thing for over a century. The old days were always better.
Now we are indisputably the most powerful, creative nation in the world.
Do our teachers deserve any credit?
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Diane, thank you for your much better response to Jake. He can’t accuse you of poor reading comprehension, the usual ploy of trolls. When confronted with legitimate criticism, the trolls always scream poor reading comprehension at the opposing commenter.
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Joe,
When I first began my studies of the history of education, I saw the same complaints registered in almost every decade since the 1890s (even earlier).
It’s always funny to see the same complaints trotted out again and again.
If we paid teachers the way we pay other professionals, people would be eager to teach.
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I never considered the fact that the financial impact of vouchers on public education is threefold. First, funds are diverted to private schools. Second, a good portion is lost to fraud or misuse. And third, additional taxpayer money is spent administering and policing the program itself.
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