Arizona case study: Well-intentioned school choice program snagged by bureaucratic red tape
Image by Wikimedia Commons
City Journal analyzes why the nation's first Educational Savings Account (ESA) policy, from the Sunset State, is leaving families increasingly dissatisfied: accessing students' funds is laborious, confusing, and often delayed. CA lawmakers, take notes.
ESAs let families use a portion of the public funds allocated for their children’s education to cover expenses such as private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curricula, special-needs therapies, and more. In eight states, every K–12 student now has, or will shortly have, access to an ESA.
Arizona, however—the first state to enact an ESA plan, in 2011—offers a cautionary tale … [of] the importance of effective implementation and the dangers of bureaucratic overreach.
Arizona initially reserved its ESA plan for students with special needs. … By 2022, lawmakers had expanded the plan to all K–12 students, with then-Governor Doug Ducey’s enthusiastic backing. …
Unfortunately, as a recent Heritage Foundation survey reveals, satisfaction with the program’s administration has plummeted. While 99 percent of families still support the ESA concept, two-thirds report frustration with how the program is run. Parents describe a growing tangle of red tape that makes accessing funds time-consuming and stressful. …
The problems stem from changes in how the plan is administered. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, issued an opinion in July 2023 reinterpreting the ESA statute to require families to justify nearly every purchase with curriculum documentation. This has slowed the approval process, caused delays in reimbursements, and added hours of paperwork for parents. “You have to have a curriculum for everything—a pencil, a piece of paper, a book,” Bell says. “It takes me an average of an hour to make a curriculum. Imagine all the time it takes away from my child’s education. It’s ridiculous.”
Other parents echo Bell’s experience. “It takes me days to come up with the curriculum and tweak it, copy it, and upload it, especially if you have more than just one or two items,” says Candy South, who is raising three adopted grandchildren in rural Yavapai County. She adds, “Why should we need curriculum for pens and pencils and notebook paper?”
Mayes’s reinterpretation departs dramatically from how the initiative had been managed for over a decade. The ESA statute itself does not contain the curriculum requirement that Mayes has imposed, and critics argue that her new condition clashes with established legal principles. The Goldwater Institute, representing two ESA families, filed a lawsuit calling the mandate “contrary to well-established rules of statutory construction” and in direct conflict with the law’s plain language.
Arizona lawmakers have pushed back as well. House Speaker Ben Toma, a Republican, publicly criticized the new requirements, arguing that they create unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles. …
Parents report waiting weeks for approvals and months for reimbursements. For families like Bell’s, these delays mean that they often can’t afford necessary services as they wait for payments to arrive. “Things used to be auto-approved or approved in five or six days,” says Bell. “Now we’re lucky if they’re approved in three weeks.” She has been waiting more than two months for $1,400 in compensation for her son’s tutoring. “I can’t even get more tutoring sessions for my son because there’s no more cash in the account,” she says. …
The Heritage Foundation survey found that nearly half of ESA parents experienced expense denials due to insufficient documentation or unclear connections to a curriculum. One-third said that denials were issued without understandable explanations for how to fix the problem.
These issues disproportionately affect rural families and those with limited resources. Ash Langenberg, a single mother raising two kids with autism in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, says that she spends 30 to 45 minutes on paperwork for each item she purchases. Waiting two months for $900 in reimbursements has forced her to seek help from a food bank to cover other expenses. …
Arizona’s experience serves as a warning for states looking to implement or expand ESA plans. Excessive bureaucracy and poor implementation can undermine even the best-designed policies.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
We prize letters from our thoughtful readers. Typed on a Smith Corona. Written in longhand on fine stationery. Scribbled on a napkin. Hey, even composed on email. Feel free to send your comments to us at opportunitynowsv@gmail.com or (snail mail) 1590 Calaveras Ave., SJ, CA 95126. Remember to be thoughtful and polite. We will post letters on an irregular basis on the main Opp Now site.