Arizona’s new — and worse — voucher plan

by David Safier

The "educational empowerment accounts" bill, SB1553, has gotten lost in the news shuffle, partly because there are so many jaw-dropping bills it's impossible to cover them all, and partly because it's pretty complicated stuff to explain and analyze. The Capitol Times just revived the story (subscription only). It looks like no one has filed a lawsuit against the very possibly unconstitutional bill. Its proponents are crowing — "See, they know it's constitutional!" But the real reason is, its opponents are up to their eyeballs in lawsuits right now, so they've put this one on the back burner.

This is a terrible new version of the old voucher shell game. It combines vouchers for private schools, a terrible idea, with the "You're on your own" concept behind privatizing Social Security and Medicare, two other terrible ideas. The potential result, if the idea is broadened beyond the physically disabled students and students with learning disabilities covered by the current bill (and conservatives very much want to expand it), would be the end of public schooling as we know it.

Here's the idea. Each year, money for a student's education is put in a state-administered savings account. So far, that's just a slight variation on the standard voucher plan. But with these "empowerment accounts," parents can spend the money on anything related to education: private school tuition, "educational therapies," tutoring, curriculum, online learning programs, AP tests, SAT and ACT tests, to name some examples. And if parents decide not to spend all of it, it can be rolled over year after year and even used to pay for college tuition.

Welcome to the world of winners and big losers. Well informed parents with good incomes will probably figure creative ways to game the system and increase the value of their children's educations with very little extra expense. Home schooling parents will win the lottery — a huge bundle of taxpayer money to pay for college without lifting a finger. And poorer, less informed and less educated parents, whose children are already suffering from a serious educational deficit, will be conned and cheated out of their money by slick salespeople with slicker brochures who will offer little or nothing of educational value for their children.

Oh, and it will probably end up costing the state more money than we spend now while fattening the wallets of educational con men and corporations.

The Republicans are on a mission to End [fill in the blank] As We Know It. Social Security. Medicare and Medicaid. Public schooling. If it's a government service that promotes the health and well being of anyone other than the privileged, it's on the chopping block.