Going into last year’s state legislative session, Gov. Greg Abbott’s top priority was educations savings accounts, or ESAs, also called school vouchers. And it looks like the issue will again be a priority during the next session in 2025.
The proposal would give each student a set amount of money annually to pay for education expenses, including private school tuition. Supporters believe that the program gives parents and students more academic choices and opportunities, while its detractors say it will take money from public education and essentially subsidize private schools.
One state already has real world experience on how such a plan might play out, though. Arizona passed a bill that entitles each student to between $7,000 and $8,000 dollars each school year.
Eli Hager, a Phoenix-based reporter for ProPublica, recently took a close look at who was actually using the program and spoke to Texas Standard about his findings. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: When you started reporting this story on a similar program in Arizona, what big questions were you trying to answer?
Eli Hager: Well, we were trying to answer two questions. Number one, the premise of school vouchers is that it should help lower income families. And number two, that there’s actually interest among lower income families, including in rural areas, in vouchers.
Our questions were, would they actually be able to use this program and would it benefit them?
Well, what did you find out?
Well, what we found out is that the program is disproportionately being used by more affluent families.
For example, in the Phoenix area where I live, there are zip codes that are lower income where just 1% of families are using the voucher program, whereas in wealthier zip codes, 25% to 30% of families are using the voucher program. And so there’s a great disparity by income and who is benefiting from this.
A large part of the reason for that is that private school families, families whose kids are already attending private school, can just use the voucher to subsidize the tuition that they’re already paying. Whereas lower income families might live very far away from a private school and not really have any way to get there.
So a transportation issue is how you see it.
That’s the number one issue cited by the lower income families that we interviewed. We mapped all of the private schools in the Phoenix area, and they’re disproportionately in more affluent suburban areas.
And so the lower income and working class families in south and west Phoenix said, “well, how am I supposed to get to those private schools? Would I send my kids on Ubers every day the whole year? Would I put them on city bus rides that might be multiple hours?” And so on. [It’s] a problem that’s even worse in rural areas.
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Well, I totally understand that and I certainly see it in rural areas. But what I thought you were going to say was that amount of money that Arizona is giving to in the form of of these subsidies might ultimately not pay completely for private school education. And if you were from a lower income household, you still might not be able to afford going to a private school. And that would perhaps explain the discrepancy.
Correct. That’s another obstacle faced by lower income families in Arizona. The ESA amount or the voucher amount is typically between $7,000 and $8,000, whereas many private schools here the tuition is over $10,000.
So, you know, even if you get a discount, you might still not be able to pay the tuition. And that’s on top of fees and other costs, like the fact that meals aren’t provided at private schools the way that they are in public schools.
What about public schools? I mean, I know you folks probably have a different way of funding public schools in Arizona, but have public schools suffered in any way as a result of these ESAs or voucher programs?
Well, that’s been a real concern. And certainly if students are leaving public school en masse to go to private school using vouchers, that would cost the public schools in terms of their per student funding.
But interestingly, we’re not seeing much of that so far, precisely because most of the people using the program so far are parents with kids already in private school.
So a majority of the families using it, they’re not taking their kids out of public school and sending them to private school. They actually were already in private school and they’re just using a voucher as a subsidy for the tuition that they’re already paying.
