by David Safier
Brewer signed SB1553, the so-called "Education empowerment accounts" bill.
But it deserves another name: the "Pull your kids out of school and we'll pay for college" bill.
The law sets up vouchers savings accounts for students. (At this point, it's only for students with learning disabilities, but its advocates are very clear, this is a trial balloon for an expanded bill to cover all Arizona children.) The money can be used as vouchers for private school education, but it goes much further than that. It allows the money to be spent for "educational therapies," tutoring, curriculum, online learning programs as well as AP tests, SAT and ACT tests. So if you want to mix and match your kids' education, cafeteria style, that's fine. If you want to home school your kids, the state will pick up the tab for any related expenses.
But that's not the worst part.
As with all voucher laws, this one is about furthering the conservative cause of defunding public schools. But another provision turns this into a bribe to get parents to pull their kids out of the public education system.
Any money in the "education empowerment accounts" parents don't spend on their children's educations in a given year is rolled over to the next year. After the children graduate high school (though it's hard to know exactly what the term "graduate" will mean in the future), whatever is left in the accounts can be used toward college tuition.
Before you start rubbing your hands together at the thought of saving money painlessly for your children's college education, think how insidious this is. Conservatives defund colleges, raising tuition. Then they tell you, you can defray some of the added expense of college by taking money that is supposed to go for your children's K-12 education and saving it for college. "If you're stupid enough to leave your kids in public schools," the bill says, "don't blame us if you can't afford college!"
But it goes even further than bribing parents to pull their kids from public schools. The law encourages parents not to send their children to private schools charging tuition equivalent to or higher than the cost of public education. The bribe is, "If you do your kids' education on the cheap, you'll have money left over to pay for college." So if someone sets up a cut-rate, barebones private school that charges a couple thousand a year . . . hey, honey, that means we can save more money for college! — which the child probably won't be ready for, because he/she went to a shoddy private school. If someone sets up little substandard, storefront tutoring shops . . . hey, honey, that means we can send the kids there instead of school and save money for college! And if you really want to go full out on your college savings program, home school your kids, even if you have neither the time nor the background to do it. Because then, you'll have the money to send your woefully uneducated child to college.
We need to pull back the curtain on this bill. To my way of thinking, it's the worst incarnation of the voucher idea I have ever seen. The. Worst. Ever.