Are Arizona’s School Vouchers a Threat to Public Education or the Two Big Teachers’ Unions?

Several public schools in Phoenix, Arizona, are closing. Enrollments have dropped too low to justify the schools’ costs. Part of the decline is due to Arizona’s popular “Empowerment Scholarship Account Program,” popularly known as a voucher plan. As of this writing, the Arizona Department of Education has enrolled 88,676 students for the coming school year.

Concerned Parents and Empty Public Schools

Given Arizona’s average school size of 466 students, the voucher program’s students would fill 190 schools. Those nonexistent schools point a dagger at the heart of the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

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The idea behind vouchers is simple. The government continues to collect tax money for education. However, instead of sending that money to local schools, the government would allocate it to parents according to the number of school-age children in each family. Then, the parents would choose their children’s schools among the available options. One now-common expansion of the idea would allow parents to purchase equipment and supplies to homeschool their children.

When the idea began gaining traction in the early eighties, the NEA and AFT warned the public that education would deteriorate. Perhaps that argument made sense forty years ago but now it no longer works. Public education has already deteriorated.

Between 2017 and 2023, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the adult illiteracy rate increased from 19 percent to 28 percent—a nine-point leap in only six years. The “experts”—including NEA and AFT leaders—have disappointed America. Parents are actively looking for alternatives.

The Teachers’ Union’s Nightmare

For the two unions, Arizona’s voucher system is the stuff of nightmares.

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There is good reason for the unions’ fears. If every state adopted such a plan, the “mother’s milk” of public education, tax dollars, would be diverted. The premise that a “free public education” financed by tax dollars goes back to the very genesis of American universal education. It was first popularized in the eighteen-thirties by Horace Mann, who rightly bears the title “Father of American Public Education.”

For over a century, Mr. Mann’s ideas ruled the day. The only serious challenge came from Catholic bishops who mounted, and lost, a campaign to have some of the public money allocated to Catholic schools. Protestant America simply accepted that system.

That acceptance lasted until the early nineteen-sixties. The first chink in the public school’s armor was the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision forbidding teacher-led classroom prayers. Soon, other issues arose, most centering around the general degradation of discipline and educational standards.

Glory Days

However, the sixties and seventies were halcyon years for the NEA and AFT. Previously limited largely to big cities and their suburbs, the public school employees’ unions now expanded rapidly. As the number of dues-paying teachers grew, so did the unions’ political power.

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One sign of that increased power was the establishment of the federal Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1953. Twenty-six years later, the Department was separated into two separate bureaucracies, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. As those departments grew, so did the influence of the NEA and AFT. A strong and entrenched educational bureaucracy thrived, even as public schools lost their luster during the last five decades.

However, even in the sixties, another plan for organizing schools began to take root. Popularized by the conservative economist Milton Friedman, it acquired the moniker, the voucher plan. That three-word phrase was anathema for the NEA and the AFT, and both organizations fought with every weapon they had.

Battles of Words

Some of the weapons are rhetorical. A 2024 AFT resolution minces no words.

“[A] free public education for all is perhaps the singular defining virtue of our American society; and vouchers pose a real threat, not just to the soul of public education, but to the very existence of public education itself… the AFT will publicly and powerfully oppose the diversion of public funds to any discriminatory voucher or tax credit program, federal or state, that reduces public financial support to our cherished public schools”

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In its national magazine, the NEA aimed more directly at the Arizona program.

“In December 2022, Arizona became the first state in the nation to enact a universal school voucher program. The Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA), as it is called, provides roughly $7,000 of taxpayer dollars per child to cover a wide array of broadly defined ‘educational expenses,’ including private school tuition, homeschooling, and other private expenses—with very few strings, if any, attached. Enrollment has skyrocketed, quickly surpassing 70,000 students by the beginning of 2024.”

Whose Money Is It, Anyway?

Both organizations chose their words carefully. Although the emphases of these two quotations differ, the positions of both organizations are identical. Both statements share a single assumption, that school monies belong to the schools, not the taxpayers who provided them or the students who are, supposedly, the beneficiaries.

Both unions sidestep the most obvious way to defuse the voucher plans’ popularity—improve the schools. Of course, improvement means different things to different people. To some, it means promoting social order and common decency. Others measure quality by the achievements of the schools’ graduates. Some taxpayers argue that the best schools are those that cost the least.

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Doubtless, the NEA and AFT give lip service to achievement and opportunity. They also use the language of fiscal responsibility to attack voucher plans. However, one cannot read their literature for very long before realizing that, for them, the best schools are the ones that cost the most, discipline the least, promote leftist “social justice” goals, and have the highest percentages of union members among their faculties.

Voucher plans, although far from perfect, directly target the NEA and AFT. That, in and of itself, is a good reason to support them.

First published on TFP.org.

Photo Credit:  © spass – stock.adobe.com

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