Local opinion: ESA demand is a symptom, not the disease

At Meet the Teacher night last week, my kids didn't just come home with a supply list. They came out of a campus storm drain clutching two baby frogs in their hands.

They begged to keep them, but I knew better. A Tupperware container with tap water isn't a habitat. It’s just a slow way to watch something die. So the next afternoon, we drove down to the San Pedro River, found a warm, slow-moving eddy, and let them go. We spent an hour hunting crawdads and tracing bird tracks in the mud. My kids didn't just release frogs that day; they figured out that the right environment is the difference between merely surviving and actually thriving.

It’s a basic truth, yet it’s entirely missing from how Arizona treats its youngest children.

Right now, the state manages early childhood education like a restaurant inspection. Preschools and child care centers are licensed by the Department of Health Services, not the Department of Education. The rules check staff-to-child ratios, mandate background checks, and make sure the fire alarms work. That’s all necessary, but none of it asks whether a four-year-old is learning to hold a pencil, share a toy, or observe the world with curiosity.

Twenty years ago, Arizona voters tried to fix this. We passed a ballot initiative to create Quality First, program that actually coaches child care centers on early learning and rates them on a five-star scale. It works beautifully, but it only reaches about 1,300 programs statewide. Less than half.

Why? Because the funding we voted for is spread impossibly thin. It pays for the coaching, but it’s also being cannibalized to cover the state match required to draw down federal child care subsidies. Even with that money stretched to the limit, we have a waitlist of more than 13,000 kids.

Lawmakers simply refuse to make preschool a priority. State support for child care collapsed during the Great Recession and never bounced back. This year, the legislature finally approved $44.9 million, by far the largest general fund investment in child care in over fifteen years. Sounds great, until you realize it takes $160 million just to clear the waitlist.

Meanwhile, the tobacco tax funding Quality First brings in half of what it did two decades ago. Great for public health, terrible for preschools. A bipartisan bill to tax vaping and close that gap quietly died in committee this year. If we let this tax revenue keep shrinking, Arizona won't just lose Quality First. It loses the federal match, too.

The fallout is predictable. Kids show up to kindergarten without the basics, and the disadvantage multiplies. Teachers spend precious early grades managing behavior and playing catch-up. By third grade, only about 1 in 3 Arizona kids reads at grade level.

This is exactly where our school choice fights begin. Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) participation climbs steadily through elementary school, peaking around third grade. Parents who valued early education watch their child stall in a bottlenecked classroom, get frustrated, and finally reach for a voucher.

Voters will see competing ESA initiatives on the November ballot. But here’s the painful irony: ESA demand is a symptom, not the disease. Public school outcomes would naturally improve if Arizona invested upstream.

If we want public schools to actually compete, we need to stop managing early childhood like a health issue and start funding it like an education before the money dries up and takes the whole system down with it.