The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Most conversations about Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) tend to be adversarial — it’s the Civically Responsible Public School Parents against the weird, unsocialized homeschool parents. I’m one of those weird homeschooling parents. I have seven children, and six use an ESA.
My oldest is a junior in high school, and during our home education journey, we’ve experimented with nearly every curriculum, plus all kinds of co-ops, home-based charters, and educational centers. We’ve homeschooled with zero budget, and with an ESA.
I can’t speak for other families, but I’ll be honest about how we use our funds: Reading books. Art supplies. Music lessons and sheet music. Fees to join the local FTC Robotics team. Personalized math tutoring. School supplies like binders, sticky notes, dry erase markers, and crayons. Workbooks and textbooks. Admission to museums and zoos. University-level independent study courses and a laptop for my high-schooler.
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The purpose of an ESA is to open the world of possibility to our children, and for us it has done just that. My oldest was the captain of that robotics team this year. Two of my children are enrolled in a Shakespeare class and have between them read all of Shakespeare’s plays. My 8-year-old knows how to solder electronics and can safely do so unsupervised.
If your initial reaction upon hearing this is a wish your own children could have those opportunities, you can! ESAs are available to every K-12 student in Arizona.
That’s why you should decline to sign the current ballot initiative designed to pull the rug out from under ESA families.
They want to limit ESAs to families with a gross income of $150,000 and below. Setting an arbitrary income amount is setting up the law to be useless after years of runaway inflation. $150,000 isn’t what it was even three years ago. The talking point is, “rich families can already afford private school.” But for large families like mine, we chose a wealth of children over wealth in cash; $150,000 with seven children is not a “can already afford private school” lifestyle.
Currently, unused ESA funds roll over year to year. They want to remove that feature, sweeping remaining funds at the end of every year. But this “use-it-or-lose-it” mindset would actually punish families who are good stewards of their resources and incentivize spending for the sake of spending.
To those who believe the ESA program should be limited to students with special needs, I would point out that many families choose an ESA because their children are just functional enough to be denied a formal diagnosis, but exceptional enough to struggle in a traditional classroom. Additionally, receiving a formal diagnosis is a long and costly process, and many parents feel that they can’t afford to jump through hoops just to be told, “sorry, your son doesn’t qualify for individualized education.”
The loudest argument I’ve heard against ESA is that “public funds should be used for public schools.” But if investment in the wellbeing and education of the rising generation is the priority, then you won’t see a more efficient method than ESA-funded education, where parents are judicious and wise in using their funds, and some might even have a little left over for in-state college.
If, however, the point of publicly funded education is to prop up the institutions themselves, then let’s take a moment to consider those institutions. The pandemic response made academic achievement tank, and after five years it still hasn’t recovered. High school English teachers are moving away from requiring students to actually read books or write essays. High schools are graduating students who are functionally illiterate, and you don’t have to dig very deep to find concerns from college professors that publicly educated students are not prepared for the rigors of university.
If that is the reality after decades of programs and spending, is it really possible that dismantling the most important educational innovation in history is the answer?
Let’s invest in Arizona’s future by keeping ESA available to all children.
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Beth Buck is a homeschooling mom of seven children. She is a self-published author, self-reliance specialist, and baker of bread. In addition to educating her own children she teaches classes on spinning wheels and fiber arts, European geography, and creative writing in her community. She makes her home in Tucson.
