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Gov. Katie Hobbs Sounds The Alarm Over A School Voucher Program She Agreed To Fund
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Hobbs Warns Cost Of Universal School Vouchers Will Rise To $943.8 Million
PHOENIX — Gov. Katie Hobbs is citing new cost estimates for universal vouchers in her latest bid to convince lawmakers to scale back the new program.
The total cost of all vouchers may hit $943.8 million in the school year that just started, Hobbs said Tuesday. That is about $319 million more than the budget lawmakers approved and she signed.
But the Democratic governor said the rising cost isn't a surprise.
She said it has been clear the state pays out up to $800 more for a voucher for a student without special needs than it provides in state aid for the same student in a public school.
That's just part of the problem, Hobbs said.
The 2022 law provides universal access to vouchers. That means it allows parents who already were using their own money to send their children to private schools or to teach their children at home to now get vouchers of taxpayer dollars.
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That has created an average new net cost of $7,223 per student — with perhaps more than 40,000 students shifting the cost of their private education to the state, Hobbs said.
House speaker disputes figures
House Speaker Ben Toma is disputing her figures. The Peoria Republican has been a chief proponent of allowing all parents to get state dollars for private and parochial schools.
He is sticking with an estimate that about 68,000 students will be getting vouchers this year, which would put the price tag at about $624 million.
By contrast, Hobbs estimates total voucher enrollment will top 97,000, which is where she got the $943.8 million estimate.
The governor's figures are more in line with those of Republican state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne than Toma's, however.
Horne estimated four weeks ago that there will be about 100,000 students who get vouchers, formally known as "empowerment scholarship accounts.'' He put the cost of that at $900 million.
Hobbs had no role in creating universal vouchers, having inherited the expanded program when she took office in January.
She called in her State of the State speech in January for a repeal of the expansion; legislative leaders ignored it. Efforts to cap year-over-year increases in enrollment fared no better.
Now Hobbs is using the new estimates in a bid to pressure lawmakers to make changes, such as requiring students to attend public schools before getting a voucher to transfer.
Toma called her figures "baseless.'' Beyond that, he said the focus should not be on the costs but on the policy.
'Popular with Arizona families'
"It's clear the ESA program is popular with Arizona families and continues to experience growth, a serious frustration for those who oppose school choice,'' Toma said in a written response. "House Republicans support funding each student according to their need, whether they use their funding at a district, charter or an ESA'' school.
Toma also maintains the vouchers are a relative bargain.
He said the typical voucher for a student without special needs is about $7,200 a year. By contrast, Toma said the average school district gets more than $13,000 a year per pupil from all sources.
That latter figure, while accurate, is misleading. At the very least, it takes into account not only federal aid but also locally collected taxes.
Looking only at state funds, the Arizona Association of School Business Officials did its own computations. It concluded that a voucher for an elementary school student costs state taxpayers $425 more a year than basic state aid; for high schoolers the figure is $543 more.
Then there's that entirely new cost to the state of students who already were in private schools at their parents' expense or being home schooled and not costing taxpayers for their education until now.
Toma told Capitol Media Services that does not concern him.
"Those parents were still paying taxes,'' he said. "And those grandparents were still paying taxes.''
He took a dig at Hobbs and Democrats, who have argued for years for more education funding, for now complaining about the expenditure.
"Isn't it ironic that now, all of a sudden, they seem to have an issue with additional money to K-12 just because it's not going to the K-12 bucket that they happen to like or prefer,'' Toma said.
Voucher access was expanded last year
The rapid growth has occurred because, until last year, vouchers were available only to students who met certain conditions. These included having special needs, being foster children, residents of tribal reservations or attending schools rated D or F.
Total enrollment was just shy of 12,000 — far short of any of the current projections.
All those preconditions are now gone, making any of the 1.1 million students in K-12 schools eligible.
In making his own $900 million estimate of voucher costs, Horne sidestepped the question of whether there is enough money in the $17.8 billion state budget to support the increase in the number of private school students now expected to rely on state funds for their education.
"Right now, we're relying on basic state aid,'' he said, based on the premise that these students actually were going to public schools until now. "If we conclude that more is needed, we will have to deal with that at the time.''
At least part of the reason there has been a big influx of applications for vouchers is due to Horne himself.
State lawmakers agreed to set aside $10 million to administer the voucher program. But Horne acknowledged he has been using some of that to advertise the universal vouchers.
Get your morning recap of today's local news and read the full stories here: http://tucne.Ws/morning
Howard Fischer is a veteran journalist who has been reporting since 1970 and covering state politics and the Legislature since 1982. Follow him on Twitter at @azcapmedia or email azcapmedia@gmail.Com.
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Will Greg Abbott Keep Losing On School Vouchers?
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Gov. Greg Abbott speaks at a pro-voucher event held at the Texas Capitol.
This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.This year, Governor Greg Abbott made "school choice," or vouchers, one of his top legislative priorities. He counted on riding the wave of "parent rights" crusades into the national political arena. But Texans didn't buy it.
Since 1995, the Coalition for Public Schools in Texas has assembled a broad spectrum of religious, child advocacy and education organizations, now with 50 groups representing some 4 million Texans. Its member organizations range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Texas Baptist Christian Rights Commission. For 28 years, the coalition has beaten repeated efforts to privatize public schools through a voucher system. This year's regular legislative session was no different.
Abbott and the state Senate made multiple attempts to implant vouchers — after the House voted not to use public dollars for private schools — including offers to buy off rural school districts, back-door deals to vote without any hearing, and busing in a scant showing of supporters at the governor's expense. These were countered by thousands of emails and phone calls and dozens of opposition rallies featuring coalition members. Still, Abbott has promised a future special session on vouchers. The Texas Observer spoke with Charles Luke, who coordinates the coalition, and the Rev. Charles Johnson, who leads the member organization Pastors for Texas Children, who together suggest that Abbott give up and focus on Texans' real needs.
Can you describe Abbott's attempts to convince rural residents to support vouchers and pit them against urban communities?Charles Luke: There was a measure that would have given districts $10,000 for each student on a voucher if that district had less than 20,000 kids. It would be a period of two years and then after that it was upped to five years. Also, the lieutenant governor, when he was running for office and doing his tour of Texas, said he was going to bracket out the rural districts from the voucher programs. He got a lot of pushback from people saying, "If this is such a good idea, why are you leaving us out of it?" So he quickly changed his opinion and even reportedly told senators who were also using that as a talking point in their campaigns to stop talking about vouchers because it's not popular.
What are the conditions in rural schools?
Charles Johnson: The big headline is we're sitting on a $33 billion pot of money. And the governor wants the money to go to private schools instead of public schools. That's the nub of the matter right there. So we didn't get the classroom support we needed; we didn't get the teacher salary increases, even though our classes are too full. And with teacher retention so low, you have fewer teachers working harder, longer hours without the fair pay associated with that extra effort. All this time, we have money in the bank; we have all these infrastructure needs, and we're spending all our time using the voucher issue to hold hostage school finance.
Luke: The other issue that hasn't been talked about is that schools are trying to make it under double-digit inflation. Everything they're purchasing, from construction materials to food for the cafeteria, has gone up since COVID. So they're doing all of this without any extra money. At the same time, we're limiting their ability to raise local taxes.
Why did Abbott's fearmongering about "critical race theory" and other efforts fail?
Johnson: Because it's ludicrous. When [rural Texans] really look around the school, they see their family members and their church members. For example, the Baptist preacher's wife is the principal or their teacher is the mayor's daughter. In a rural community, where people know each other and have organic relationships, this is the key. They've grown up together, the children have been in school together. There are cross-racial relationships. The teacher who harbors a humanistic concern for the well-being of every child is going to guard the freedom and dignity of the child's religious expression. But there are shrill and well-funded political interests in this country that do not want to have that kind of diversity. It does not advance a particular right-wing political agenda.
Do you think the anti-"critical race theory" narrative is on its way out then?
Johnson: Absolutely. We're addressing all these manufactured crises that don't have any real direct existential connection to where Texans live and what they need: a great public school for ranch kids, roads to get products to market, broadband, water. All those things are very important. That's what we ought to be addressing here in Austin.
Luke: I think the people of Texas are just worn out. They're angry and frustrated, and then there's this narrative that keeps on coming up, this baloney narrative that we don't really see happening anywhere. After decades of being in the schools, I can count on one hand the number of times somebody taught something that shouldn't be taught. But here's the problem: A lot of these people, who are pushing this problem and pushing the privatization of public schools, haven't been inside a public school in years. And every time I hit a pothole that didn't get filled in because the state spent money fighting "critical race theory," well, that's a frustration for me.
What should religious liberty look like in the public schools?
Johnson: This is our number one objection to the privatization of public education. The public school is the laboratory of American democracy, where children learn to respect each other across all kinds of differences. And the protection of religious liberty is a fundamental human right. Government has no proper authority over religion. Period. Now our children can already express themselves religiously in schools in all kinds of ways. They can have a silent prayer. Religious organizations can meet on their own time before or after school or during lunch hour for a prayer group. Principals spend a good bit of their time protecting individual religious expressions of children and teaching tolerance to children for all the diverse expressions of religion. One of the foundational pieces of curriculum in a public school is tolerance, respect, and anti-bullying. It is the social and emotional support that children need to grow up into full adulthood. So, it is an egregious violation of human rights for public dollars to advance a religious doctrine.
Dr. Luke gave the best response this session to [Republican state] Senator Mayes Middleton.
Luke: Mayes Middleton had asked me [during a Senate Education Committee hearing] to explain a tweet from Pastors for Texas Children: "The governor is leading in the indoctrination of children by promoting vouchers." Well, if you've got a child in a religious school, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever, they're gonna teach that child their religious doctrines and that's the dictionary definition of indoctrination.
What do you foresee for Abbott's special session on vouchers?
Johnson: If Abbott calls a special session to get a voucher program, we've been told by a lot of House members that the opposition to a voucher program will increase. This has already been quite an embarrassment for Abbott. Now, he wants to call the legislature back into session, after what they've been through these past 140 days, just to once again vote on something that they have defeated time after time after time for the last 28 years.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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