Arizona Department Of Education Must Be Sure Taxpayer Funds Are Spent Wisely – Arizona Daily Independent
The Arizona Legislature designated the Department of Education to manage the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program which is universal vouchers. This gives the parents ability to choose what school or homeschool program best meets their children’s needs. It is empowerment of parents which I fought for in my election and in my administration.
The ESA is a great program that is a big success. It has given parents more choices and students more opportunities to get an education that meets their needs. Parents and students across the state are benefiting which is why it has grown so fast.
Of course we must be sure taxpayer funds are being spent wisely. And sadly, like every government program there are those who would attempt to misuse the funds.
We have turned down requests for a $5000 Rolex watch, a $24,000 golf simulator, a vasectomy testing kit, among 35 other examples.
People on the left like to focus on the negative as they prefer the monopoly system of education that promotes mediocrity. Or they think it’s appropriate to spend tax dollars on Rolexes. But the real story is the 87,000 students benefitting from this program by getting a chance to go to a private, parochial, technical or home school that they would not have been able to afford without an ESA grant.
Recently Jason Bedrick and Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman have been attacking me. Bedrick wrote a long article in the Independent carrying forward that attack. This is my response to that article.
Bedrick and Hoffman for some time have been espousing a wacky theory that the Department of Education, which was designated by the legislature to manage the ESA program, has no authority to limit payments to requests that have a legitimate educational purpose, and a reasonable price according to market prices.
When Bedrick claims that outlandish requests are already contrary to the statute, he admits that someone has to decide what is contrary to the statute, which is in direct contradiction to his theory that we have no authority to deny any requests.
I listed above the kinds of outlandish payments I would have to have made if that were the rule.
If I had paid those requests, it would have generated major publicity, there would have been a public reaction, and this would have questioned the sustainability of the program. One of my jobs is to protect the sustainability of the program.
Ironically, Bedrick praises Kathy Hoffman, my Democrat predecessor, who was so opposed to ESA’s that she went door-to-door to get signatures for an initiative to cancel the legislative authorization for them. Accordingly, she paid the most outlandish requests, such as for ski tickets, and then gave the message to Beth Lewis, of the SOS anti-school choice group, to publicly claim that ESA’s were wasteful and should be abandoned. That is Bedrick’s hero.
When liberals attack the ESA program they typically attack me personally as well. Even when they attack only the program, reporters come to me for a response. Here’s what I say: We have families with three children. Two of them are doing fine in the neighborhood public school. Even a good school does not necessarily meet everyone’s needs, and their third child’s needs are not being met. Under this program, they can choose a school that does meet the child’s needs. I do not understand how anyone could take the position that the family cannot do that unless they are so immersed in ideology that they lose sight of what is best for the students.
The effect of what Bedrick is doing is to create a split in the Republican party, which will make it more easy for the Democrats to take over, which would mean the death of the ESA program.
Hoffman has been claiming that I cannot win a general election. I have won 16 elections. I am much more likely to win than someone espousing a wacky theory.
Under my administration, the ESA program has grown quickly to where we have over 55,000 families with over 87,000 students. Of those 55,000 families, exactly 216 people wrote to complain about restrictions on expenditures. Any denial by us is subject to an appeal. A number of families have appealed, and the judges have ruled in our favor in every single case because the requests were outlandish.
Those complaining about delays and reimbursements, by contrast, have had a legitimate complaint, and I took very strong action to solve it. There were three causes: 1.The growth of the program, without any growth of the legislature’s authorization of the ESA employees; 2. The Attorney General’s requirement that we check every request for an obvious educational expense, such as books and pencils, with the users’ curriculum. We are joining with the Goldwater Institute’s Court challenge to that dictum from the Attorney General; 3. The legislative measure that permitted parents to avoid our vendor, class wallet, to avoid its fee, which was previously required for private school tuition, and permitted them to pay directly and seek reimbursement, which overwhelmed our reimbursement department.
The legislature provided a solution: risk based auditing. All expenditures over $2000 will still be checked before payment. Expenditures under $2000 will be subject to risk based auditing afterwards, and if we find any improper use, the money will be clawed back. The delays that parents legitimately complained about no longer exist.
In the 1990s, when I was in the legislature, I was chairman of a conference committee, and the first thing I did in that context was to kill a Senate bill that would have limited the growth of charter schools. As a result, when I left office after the first time I was superintendent, Arizona was first in the nation in the percentage of students going to charter schools, and Florida was second, a reversal of their usual claim to be first.
Now I fight for our ESAs and sustainability of that program and we are again first in the nation. In fact, our program has much more freedom for users than any other state.
