The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 holds up Arizona as a shining exemplar of what education should be in every state. Vouchers for all, rich and poor alike. Everyone choosing the kind of school or home school they like. Happiness reigns. Or so they claim.
In several articles, ProPublica has taken a close look at what’s happening in Arizona. It’s not a pretty picture. Open the link to read this article in full. It was written by Eli Hager of ProPublica, published there and on the Raw Story website.
The reality is ugly. Arizona does have universal vouchers, but most are used by well-to-do families whose children were already enrolled in private schools. About 60,000 of Arizona’s 1.3 million students use vouchers. Clearly, the vast majority of the state’s students attend public schools. Meanwhile, Arizona’s state budget has exploded because of the added cost of paying everyone’s tuition at private schools. And the public schools are underfunded, ranked 48th in the nation for per-pupil spending.
One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix.
Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems.
There would be no more school at Title of Liberty.
Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.
These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.
One mom had even discovered the school by window shopping: It was in the same strip mall as her orthodontist’s office, next to a ChinaPalace, and she’d noticed the flags outside with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imagery. (The school was not formally affiliated with the church.)
An LDS member herself, she was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice.
Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices.
For instance, the state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.
When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.
Yet just a month after the board’s decision, ARCHES was re-creating itself as a renamed, newly religious private school, simply by pivoting to accept voucher dollars.
In other words, it was closed down by a public governing body but found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money.
Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)
There is “nothing” required, said Michelle Edwards, the founder and principal of ARCHES and then of Title of Liberty, in an interview with ProPublica. It was “shocking how little oversight” the state was going to provide of her ESA-funded private school, Edwards said.
According to charter board members as well as parents and family members of her former students, Edwards is a well-intentioned career educator who cares deeply about children. But she has repeatedly struggled to effectively or sustainably run a school.
She said that when she first transformed her charter school into a private school, she and her team called up “every agency under the sun” asking what standards the new school would have to meet, including in order to accept voucher funds. For example, what about special education students and other vulnerable children — would there be any oversight of how her school taught those kids? Or instructional time — any required number of minutes to spend on reading, writing, math, science?
State agencies, she said, each responded with versions of a question: “Why are you asking us? We don’t do that for private schools.”
“If you’re gonna call yourself a school,” Edwards told ProPublica, “there should be at least some reporting that has to be done about your numbers, about how you’re achieving. … You love the freedom of it, but it was scary.”
This school year, ProPublica has been examining Arizona’s first-of-its-kind “universal” education savings account program. We are doing so both because other states have been modeling their own new ESA initiatives after this one, and also because President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. (And Betsy DeVos, his first education secretary, was and remains a leading school voucher proponent.)
These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.
In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.
But the lack of any transparency or accountability measures in Arizona’s ESA model is perhaps the most important issue for other states to consider as they follow this one’s path, even some school choice supporters say.
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