Grand Canyon Times

A national school choice advocate criticized Gov. Katie Hobbs (D-Ariz.) after Hobbs said Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program is “not sustainable.”

“You went to a private school, hypocrite,” tweeted Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, in response to a tweet by Hobbs that criticized the ESA program.

“The school voucher program in its current form is not sustainable, and Republican legislators need to explain why they are forcing this runaway spending on Arizona taxpayers,” tweeted Hobbs. “We need to bring an end to this out of control and unaccountable spending, and I will work tirelessly to make that happen.”

In 2011, Arizona became the first state to create an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program that “allows parents to opt their children out of public district or charter schools and receive a portion of their public funding deposited into an account for defined, but multiple, uses, including private school tuition, online education, education therapies, private tutoring or future educational expenses,” according to EdChoice.org. 

That program expanded to a universal ESA program through a law signed by then-Gov. Doug Ducey (R) in July 2022. 

Steve Smith, Arizona state director of the American Federation for Children, told the Grand Canyon Times that, "The ESA program is designed to provide education equality to all students as they receive the same amount of funding. This is a dream come true to so many low-income and minority families [who] have typically been those disenfranchised the most." 

In February 2023, the Grand Canyon Times reported that newly-elected Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs' (D) proposed budget included repeal of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program.

That same month, Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream questioned Hobbs' opposition to the ESA program, given that Hobbs attended private school.

"Shannon Bream CALLS OUT Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs for opposing school choice for others after attending private school herself," tweeted DeAngelis, with a link to the video.

In a January 2023 blog post, Matt Beienburg, the Director of Education Policy at the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, wrote that "Arizona’s ESA program serves two students for the cost of every one student in a district school."

"Arizona’s ESA program offers awards of approximately $7,000 per child. While the program was designed to provide funding equal to '90%' of what the state funding formula would provide to public school children, that formula doesn’t include the thousands of dollars of extra funding that goes into the typical public school child’s costs—including facilities, supplemental local property tax 'overrides,' federal funds, and more," wrote Beienburg. "That means that in practice, ESAs provide funding for each child at a rate of about half of the roughly $14,000 that is now spent on Arizona school district children (on average) each year."

Beienburg also wrote that "the total dollar value of all new ESA awards combined adds up to less than 2% of the total cost of Arizona’s public education system."

"Approximately 35,000 new students have joined the state’s ESA program to date under the universal expansion, putting the total value of their awards in the ballpark of $240 million each year," he wrote. "In comparison, Arizona public schools receive roughly $15 billion per year. This means that roughly 98% of Arizona’s K-12 funding goes to public school students."

Earlier this month, despite her proposal to repeal ESA funding, Hobbs signed a state budget that did not include a cap or repeal of ESA funding.

As of May 30, 2023, "57,833 Arizona Students benefit from" an ESA, according to the Arizona Department of Education. 

According to the department's most recent available quarterly report, as of September 30, 2022, 8,028 students with special needs were receiving an ESA. That report also showed 1,285 ESA students were in military families, 444 reside on a Native American reservation, and more than 600 are in the adoption/foster care system.

In April 2023, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne expressed his support for the ESA program on an interview on the “Students Over Systems” podcast.

“Competition’s good for everyone,” said Horne. “If a school is complaining that the fact that they have competition from a private school means that a student may leave, the solution to that is for them to do a better job academically, get better results academically, so the parent will want to keep the student there.”