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Capitalizing on headlines about misspending and concern about ballooning costs, some Arizona public school advocates want voters to do something lawmakers haven’t: add certain guardrails to the state’s education savings account program.
A proposed ballot measure in Arizona is one of several recent efforts nationwide to scale back or add oversight to state voucher programs, which direct public funding to private education expenses.
Together, Democratic and Republican Ohio lawmakers proposed a bill in January that would place a $500,000 income limit for families receiving a type of state voucher. West Virginia lawmakers tried and failed to curb voucher spending by limiting how families could spend the money.
These efforts might signal that opponents are taking a measured approach to battling this form of school choice, rather than coordinating all-or-nothing campaigns to kill vouchers. This may reflect an admission by school choice opponents that these programs are here to stay.
Voucher programs started out as targeted programs to give students in poverty or students with disabilities more options. But after decades of lobbying from some conservatives, at least 18 now states have universal choice programs.
And some programs have grown to cost state taxpayers billions of dollars. Florida’s cost the state an estimated $3.9 billion in the 2024-2025 school year, and Arizona’s had a price tag of over $1 billion last year.
Choice advocates say the spending means there’s an appetite for voucher programs, and families should take full advantage of money the state would be spending anyway if the students were in public school. Critics see the spending as raiding public school budgets — and maybe an opening to argue for more guardrails and limits for these programs.
Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program, known as the ESA program, allows families to draw funds from the state for educational expenses such as homeschooling, private school or tutoring.
But families have reportedly used taxpayer money to buy items like diamond rings, lingerie and gaming laptops. That news has become an argument for critics of the ESA program in proposing limits on the program.
Save our Schools Arizona and the Arizona Education Association in February proposed a ballot initiative that would attach an annual income limit of $150,000 on families seeking an ESA. It would also require that private schools and other ESA providers get a basic background check from the state, and subject ESA students to academic oversight. That could mean requiring that private school students receiving ESA money take an assessment or requiring that the private schools themselves receive independent accreditation.
“We have data that shows that this billion dollar program is fraught,” said Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s labor union for public educators. “This is something that every taxpayer should care about.”
To appear on the ballot, the measure needs almost 256,000 signatures and state officials must approve language the group filed with the Arizona Secretary of State.
Opponents of vouchers have had some success at the ballot in Arizona and other states before. In 2024, voters in Kentucky and Nebraska rejected state voucher programs. Arizona voters rejected an expansion of the ESA program in November 2018, after a campaign from Save Our Schools, with 65% voting against the creation of universal ESAs.
However, the state legislature in 2022 passed a major ESA expansion anyway. Save Our Schools tried and failed to get enough signatures for a referendum on the expansion in 2022. This time, the group is focused on placing more rules on the program, a step that Garcia says polling shows voters support.
Garcia said the $1 billion it costs to fund the ESA program from the state budget comes out of the same pot of money that funds the state’s public schools. Another provision of the ballot measure would rollover any unused ESA funds every year to public schools.
With ESAs, she said the state “turned on the water faucet and just let it go.”
But it may be too late to completely erase the program or go back on universal expansion, if proposals to cull spending are any indication.
The ESA program in Arizona has grown massively since 2022, giving rise to a slate of new educational models and empowered homeschoolers.
Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, a school choice advocacy network, said opponents are “trying to kill programs through a death of 1,000 cuts” with oversight measures that are ultimately not needed.
“These programs are very transparent, and the data that’s coming out is showing how transparent,” he said. “We welcome that data to show how transparent they are, because we would rather have it cleaned up faster than not if there are any problems.”
But others aren’t convinced voucher programs are bastions of transparency. Jessica Levin, an attorney with the Education Law Center, said voucher programs can sound good to some before they pass, but harm state budgets, with transparency issues surfacing after people begin spending taxpayer funding.
While Levin believes such programs should be eliminated entirely, proposals such as the one in Arizona “would still have a big impact on curbing some of that waste, getting some money back in the public schools, getting some basic safety standards for kids that are taking vouchers, some basic academic accountability” and other effects, she said.
Some Republicans appear open to limits. In Ohio, one of the sponsors of the bill to set an income limit on which families can receive vouchers, Republican state Rep. Justin Pizzulli, told a TV news station that the proposal would help sustain the program and ward off concerns about misspending.
“By setting a reasonable income cap, we protect taxpayers, keep the program sustainable, and restore confidence that education dollars are being used fairly,” Pizzulli said. The Ohio bill has been referred to the state’s House Education Committee.
Democratic Lawmakers in West Virginia in February also tried to add guardrails to the state’s Hope Scholarship program after a recommendation to cap spending on the program from policy analysts lawmakers hired to study the program.
State Rep. Sean Hornbuckle, a Democrat, said it would be irresponsible not to put limits on the program, which opened to all West Virginia residents this month. Lawmakers had proposed a ban on using the money for out-of-state schools and tutoring services.
“We are hemorrhaging money and the public education system is failing because of it,” Hornbuckle told the West Virginia Watch.
Instead, West Virginia lawmakers did not cap spending and the effort ultimately failed.
Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.
