Among the big donors to AFC is TikTok investor Jeff Yass, who gave the group $2 million. Yass recently donated $250,000 to a group battling a ballot initiative in Arkansas that would hold schools receiving LEARNS vouchers to the same standards as public schools.
A former lobbyist for the pro-voucher groups who now opposes their efforts told CNN, “This isn’t an overnight success, this is decades in intentional, strategic labor. At a certain point you’ll hit a tipping point where public schools cannot afford to function.”
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and a prominent researcher on vouchers and other education policies who has been outspoken on the issue of LEARNS vouchers, told CNN that vouchers were leading to horrific negative outcomes for students switching from public schools because many of the private schools accepting vouchers are low quality.
“We’re not talking about the school in ‘Dead Poets Society’ here,” Cowen told CNN. “We’re talking about schools run out of church basements.”
This problem is one of the issues that the ballot initiative currently collecting signatures in Arkansas, known as the Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment, is aiming to address, by holding private schools gobbling up public funds to the same standards as public schools. Originally, according to Cowen, voucher proponents liked the idea of conducting comparable assessments at the private schools because they thought the vouchers would improve student achievement. Once it became clear that students making the switch from public to private schools via vouchers were scoring catastrophically worse on tests, they changed their tune and now ferociously oppose efforts like the Educational Rights Amendment.
Arizona goes even further, CNN reports:
But unlike some other states that have adopted voucher programs, Arizona has no standards requiring private schools to be accredited or licensed by the state, or follow all but the most basic curriculum standards. That means there is no way to compare test scores in public schools to students in the ESA program.
“There’s zero accreditation, there’s zero accountability, and there’s zero transparency,” said Beth Lewis, a former teacher who leads an Arizona nonprofit that advocates against school privatization.
The state also allows families to spend the money not just on schools but on a wide variety of items that could be considered educational for homeschooled kids. Parents have been approved to use the taxpayer dollars to buy their children things like kayaks, trampolines, cowboy roping lessons and SeaWorld tickets. Horne said his office was now rejecting some purchases that would have been approved under previous administrations.
The political dynamics that led to vouchers in Arizona are telling, and all too familiar to those who have watched LEARNS unfold in Arkansas. In both states, the groundwork was laid for years by big-money voucher backers. The breakthrough came from a determined push by ideologically rigid Republican governors aiming for a big legacy policy achievement, despite squeamishness from rural GOP lawmakers and less-than-clear enthusiasm from the public. From CNN, here’s how the story played out in Arizona:
Arizona has long been ground zero in the fight over public support for private schools. The Grand Canyon State first adopted its “Empowerment Scholarship Account” program in 2011 for families of students with disabilities. State leaders gradually expanded the program over the years, adding in military families, students in low-performing public schools, and other groups.
But initial efforts to allow any family in the state to take advantage of the program floundered. In 2018, nearly two-thirds of Arizona voters rejected a universal ESA bill in a referendum. And when GOP Gov. Doug Ducey pushed the policy again in 2021, three Republican members of the state house joined Democrats to block it.
Those three holdouts were targeted by YouTube ads paid for by the American Federation for Children, according to Google’s political ad database. When the legislature again considered a universal ESA bill in 2022, all three members flipped to support it, and Ducey signed it into law.
The program in Arizona has been a budget catastrophe. Originally projected to cost $64.5 million during the fiscal year that just ended, the actual cost ballooned to $332 million over that period.
In Arkansas, the potential for massive cost overruns would come in the 2025-26 school year, when all K-12 students become eligible to apply. In practice, the Legislature will set the amount of money available for the vouchers and may simply limit the number that actually get doled out, though that could create a political headache if a supposedly universal program is only available for some students.
In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, who inherited the mess when she was came into office in 2023, tried limiting voucher eligibility and imposing basic standards on private schools receiving public funds, but was blocked by Republican state lawmakers.
It’s notable that when Arizona voters were actually given the opportunity to vote directly in 2018, citizens flatly rejected vouchers. That’s when the successful pressure campaign was launched to squeeze Arizona lawmakers to vote for vouchers anyway. It’s easier to intimidate individual legislators with threats of primaries and offers of campaign cash. This helps explain why voucher advocates will play hilarious jargon games and claim that a voucher is not a “voucher” — people hate vouchers. It also helps explain the massive amounts of money pouring in from Jim Walton, Yass and others to stop the Educational Rights Amendment from ever making the ballot. Voucher cheerleaders are terrified that it will win, and private schools receiving vouchers will actually have to prove their efficacy as the state showers taxpayer money on them.
The budget mess in Arizona is largely fueled by a problem familiar to Arkansas LEARNS: most of the families receiving vouchers did not come from public schools (roughly 75% in Arizona; around 95% in the first year of Arkansas LEARNS). For families that would have been in private schools no matter what, vouchers amount to a significant new expense for taxpayers. Since those who can already afford private school tend to lean wealthier, the resulting policy is a massive cash giveaway to the wealthy.
CNN did a clever analysis to show just how this is playing out in Arizona:
Wealthy communities are disproportionately benefiting, according to a CNN analysis of state education department and US Census data. Almost a third of the students whose families are receiving ESA funding live in zip codes with median household incomes of more than $100,000 – even though only a fifth of the minors in the state live in those zip codes.
“You’re enabling doctors, lawyers, bankers, management consultants who already had their children in private schools to get this subsidy that they were not entitled to before,” said Samuel E. Abrams, the director of a University of Colorado research center on school privatization. “This is costing taxpayers a lot of money that wasn’t anticipated.”
One last familiar point from the Arizona experience: Private schools receiving public voucher money may have extreme curriculums or engage in discrimination that would be unthinkable at a public school. Via CNN, here’s what that looks like in Arizona:
Some of the Christian schools that have raked in the most taxpayer funds publish “statements of faith” on their websites mandating that teachers and staff agree to declarations such as “rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person” and that “homosexual behavior” is “offensive to God.”
Dream City Christian School, the megachurch-affiliated school that is expanding, received more than $1.3 million in ESA funding in 2023 – 10 times what it was receiving before the universal expansion passed, and more than 95% of the private schools that received funding. The school operates a partnership with the advocacy group Turning Point USA, which works to organize conservative students on high school and college campuses. On its website, Dream City encourages applications by declaring that it will “protect our campus from the infiltration of unethical agendas by rejecting all ‘woke’ and untruthful ideologies being pushed on students.” The school did not respond to requests for comment.
Dream City is just one example of Turning Point’s efforts to build a network of conservative Christian schools. During a recent video info session, Turning Point executives described how the program was “restoring God as the foundation of our education” at a time when “exposure to all of the secular, really godless ideologies is on the rise.”
Another Arizona private school, Valley Christian Schools, which received $1.1 million in voucher cash last year, is facing a federal discrimination lawsuit after firing a teacher who expressed support for a student who came out as pansexual. The school’s principle mailed the teacher, Adam McDorman, that it was a “hideous lie” that someone might be both “homosexual or otherwise sexually deviant and also a Christian.” From CNN:
In an interview, McDorman said his former school taught creationism as a scientific fact, and “whitewashed” American history to downplay the harms of slavery. He was surprised to learn about the level of public funding it was receiving.
“That amount of money is pretty staggering,” McDorman said. “They have so much taxpayer support – and no responsibility to treat their students with equal respect.”
Here in Arkansas, a school with a similarly retrograde curriculum and a rigid policy against LGBT students or families was actually promoted by the state’s board of education in what amounted to an informercial for a private school.
The final lesson from Arizona may be the most chilling of all. Even if the voucher money is mostly being gobbled up by families already sending their kids to private schools, some kids are switching from public school. And even small reductions in student population can have a devastating financial impact on public school districts. In Arizona, that’s led to closings at schools that — unlike the unregulated private schools — have a great record of success:
More than 24,000 students have directly left public or charter schools to join the ESA program, according to state data – taking with them hundreds of millions of dollars that previously flowed to those schools each year.
Even small reductions in enrollment can destabilize school budgets in Arizona, which spends less per-student on public education than nearly any other state in the US. Fewer students means less money coming in, while many fixed costs remain the same.
“When kids leave those classrooms for private schools, bills still have to get paid, heaters have to stay on, buses have to run, teacher salaries remain present,” Cowen, the Michigan State professor, said. “So those schools do take a hit.”
The Paradise Valley district, which covers a swath of northern Phoenix and the suburb of Scottsdale, closed two elementary schools and a middle school this year, with students leaving for the final time last month. Two of the three schools had an A rating in the state’s student performance letter grades, a distinction only about a third of Arizona schools have received.