The 12News I-Team looked into the use of school vouchers in Arizona, and found that the promise of “rescuing” low-income students from low-performing schools was not being fulfilled. Craig Harris reports.
When former Gov. Doug Ducey signed into law Arizona’s landmark school voucher program in summer 2022, he boasted: “Our kids will no longer be stuck in underperforming schools.”
Ducey, who left office the following year because of term limits, doubled down on that claim in March.
That’s when he was invited to Texas to promote that state’s voucher program, largely modeled after the Arizona program.
“These kids are trapped in failing public schools, and it’s time to set these families free,” Ducey said, sitting beside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
However, a 12News investigation has found that many of the best public districts and charter schools in Arizona are among the biggest losers when it comes to vouchers. That’s because families are taking their kids out of those schools and using vouchers for private or home schooling.
Those public schools are losing millions of dollars in state money with the loss of students, resulting in layoffs in some cases.
The 12News I-Team is examining the impact of Arizona’s nearly three-year-old voucher experiment that is projected to cost taxpayers $1 billion this upcoming school year.
12NEWS analyzed state and federal public records and found 45 percent of the nearly 87,000 students enrolled in the Arizona voucher program were never in public schools.
That means taxpayers are now picking up the tab for kids they never had to pay for before the voucher expansion in 2022.
“This is the privatization of education,” said Beth Lewis, who leads the 20,000-member Save Our Schools Arizona.
She adds that vouchers are “setting up a whole new system of education that creates a two-tiered system for winners and losers.”