While Arizona state spending on private education is exploding, public schools can’t even host SATs. Meanwhile, Juan Ciscomani supports gifting more taxpayer funds to inferior private schools and thinks you won’t notice.
Juan Ciscomani has received an excellent public education in Arizona. With the help of scholarships and Pell grants, he graduated from Pima Community College and the University of Arizona. Becoming a politician changed his thinking about the value of public education, and now he is heavily involved with the Patriot Academy, which, among other things, trains coaches of “Biblical Citizenship” to teach these principles in churches. Ciscomani also educates his children through this institution and is eligible for $42,000 in Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) vouchers.
Since 2022, Arizona has allowed anyone who sends a child to a private school or homeschools their children to get taxpayer support for tuition, supplies, and extracurricular programs up to $7,000 per year. Eligibility is considerably higher for a student with learning or other disabilities. ProPublica reported in 2024 that the unlimited vouchers were blowing a large hole in the state’s budget. The costs of vouchers, initially estimated at $65 million per year, grew to $872 million in the fiscal year 2025, according to estimates from the Grand Canyon Institute.
The oversight of the ESA voucher system has been lax from the start. The voucher rules allow for any expense under $2,000 for a homeschooled student to be automatically approved without verification. A recent ESA audit uncovered that more than 20 percent of those purchases are fraudulent. It should not come as a surprise that not only are the vouchers draining our resources, but also some people are lapping at the public’s trough to purchase items that don’t seem to have much in common with education, such as:
- Diamond rings
- Lingerie
- Coffee machines
- Gaming laptops
- Visa gift cards
ESA fraud is not new: 12News in Phoenix reported last year about a family that tried to use ESA vouchers on, among other things, a $16,170 cello. While the state said no funding for the cello, the family secured $11,000 of taxpayer money to purchase a piano, a commercial KitchenAid mixer, private fitness lessons, Chinese calligraphy lessons, and a kayak.
The state’s generosity towards private schools and homeschooled children doesn’t extend to the children who attend public schools. The tax credit limit for supporting a public school is a measly $200 per adult, or $400 for a married couple, no matter how many children in the family attend public schools. This amount has stayed the same year after year, and the use of pre-tax donations is limited to certain educational functions. But if you want to donate to a private school, you can give $769 per adult, or $1,535 per married couple – and the amount of tax credit grows with inflation every year.
For all the money that private schools and homeschooled children get, it might be interesting to ask what we taxpayers get for it. Do private schools educate children better? Are homeschooled children better prepared for adult life and higher education? Are these schools educating the future leaders in science and engineering? Not necessarily. You see, public schools in our state, including charter schools, are subject to several standardized tests that every student takes: AASA, AzSCI, ACT, MSAA… The schools also publish graduation and dropout rates. Private schools, on the other hand, are not subject to reporting requirements or any other accountability standards.
The private education system has mushroomed since the introduction of unlimited vouchers. Back in 2022, Arizona had 302 private schools. It now has 514. For every private school that provides excellent education, several are mostly in business to collect the ESA voucher money. Youth Today reported that ARCHES Academy, a charter school that was subject to state evaluation, was failing its students, experienced financial troubles, and had its charter revoked. It reorganized as the Title of Liberty private school, improved its finances thanks to ESA vouchers, and dropped state evaluation standards. While, as a charter school, 13 percent of its students were proficient in English and 0 percent – yes, zero – in math, we now don’t know whether its students are more proficient than before.
While our state happily showers unlimited public funds on institutions that don’t educate and allows wealthy adults to buy lingerie or KitchenAid mixers with that money, the public school system remains underfunded. The schools in our state struggle with crumbling buildings, teacher shortages, and minimal resources for everything schools are expected to do. Let’s take the Amphitheater School District, for example. Forty-eight percent of its students are proficient in English; 39 percent are proficient in math. Two of its high schools, Canyon Del Oro and Ironwood Ridge, are rated A by the Arizona Department of Education; Amphitheater High School is rated B. Two students in Canyon Del Oro were finalists of the National Merit Scholarship Program last year.
And what do those overachieving students and teachers get in return? An average teacher in the district earns $53,508. The administration has recently decided to close four elementary schools. The district couldn’t host SATs in the spring and fall of 2024. We know of one student who registered for the SAT at Amphitheater and at Canyon Del Oro and experienced test cancellations in both locations. The reason for cancellations was a lack of resources to host an electronic SAT, i.e., not enough school laptops and no dedicated Wi-Fi network for students who would bring their own devices. The student was able to register for and take the SAT in Phoenix because the student’s family had a running car and could afford to stay in a hotel for a night. We don’t know how many students couldn’t take the SAT because their families were less fortunate. Meanwhile, Representative Ciscomani wanted to ensure that the accomplished students and their parents believed he supported public education. The student who had experienced two SAT cancellations received a US Congress Seal folder during a class. Inside was a certificate of special recognition for, we guessed, being proficient in English and math.
Why does Arizona tolerate that a student who excels and takes several AP classes is not able to take the SAT because the student’s family lives in an apartment and their car barely runs? Why does the state support giving millions of dollars to institutions that teach “Biblical Citizenship” instead of English and math?
The Republican majority in Arizona, Representative Ciscomani, many Republicans in Congress, and the very rich elite that support them believe that, as more parents send their children to private schools, public schools will become so deprived of funding that the quality of education will worsen within a few years. They want public schools to fail so that they can present private schools as an alternative to those with means. They don’t want transparency so that they can present private education as superior.
But they may not succeed. The institutions that teach “Biblical Citizenship” because math and physics are too hard will not produce the next generation of scientists and engineers that Arizona and the United States need. This harebrained policy will fuel further growth of China at our expense. Ciscomani and his ilk hope you don’t notice any of these trends.
For now, public education is holding its own. The family that wanted Arizona to buy a cello for their child sent the child to a public school. The student who needed to travel to Phoenix for the SAT is now studying aerospace engineering. Juan Ciscomani and his staff are preparing a list of students in the Class of 2026 who will receive his congressional recognition certificates. We should ask him now how he plans to support public education for real, even if math and physics are too hard.
Discover more from Blog for Arizona
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.