Scale back Arizona's school voucher expansion, before it's too late

On the education front in Arizona and across the country, hammers are in search of nails.

That may be fine in carpentry, but not when they are wielded by politicians seeking targets to help their reelection.

Arizona shares the dubious distinction with Florida as top states spawning a proliferation of bills and laws aimed at curbing the dangers posed by public schoolteachers, those “insidious groomers of children” who devote decades of their lives to their profession but, without a master’s degree, can’t reach an annual salary of $60,000.

These graduates of teaching programs, our first responders in the struggle against illiteracy, apparently transform into “monsters of indoctrination” when they cross the classroom threshold.

Gone is their passion for ideas, for discussion of all sides of a question, for the satisfaction of seeing the glow of understanding on a student’s face when reading “To Kill a Mockingbird,” or the triumph of finding the area of a rectangle.

Arizona's 'cure' is worse than the 'threat'

Don’t be fooled.

Out-of-touch lawmakers, who believe that teachers really want to “transmit the liberal agenda” and “critical race theory,” are completely devoid of reality.

And so those lawmakers, few of whom have teaching experience or have ever visited a classroom, have come up with solutions to this threat.

In Arizona, they’ve proposed legislation that would:

• Require teachers to post gender, race, discrimination and diversity curricula online before introducing them in the classroom. (What happens to the proverbial “teaching moment” – the best part of a class – when a student spontaneously brings up a topic that’s not been posted?)

• Require schools to remove from their libraries certain banned books, including widely taught classics. Public school curricula are designed by educators whose responsibility is exposing all students to a wide range of ideas. Don’t students and their parents have a right to this exposure? What gives politicians the right to disregard the judgments of professionals?

• Ban any instruction on America’s history of race, which may teach students that members of their race have oppressed or been oppressed. (This is the bogeyman “critical race theory,” which politicians say is rampant in our schools, causing shame, resentment and divisiveness. Teachers say that’s baloney: They teach history, period.)

• Allow parents to carry a loaded gun on school campuses if they have a concealed weapons permit.

Vouchers violate the founders' ideals

Our lawmakers are playing games. Our public schools are under-resourced and crumbling from lack of maintenance.

Where are the hammers for these real nails?

America’s founders realized a community focus on education was essential to a democracy. According to George Washington University’s “History and Evolution of Public Education in the U.S.”:

“They believed strongly that preserving democracy would require an educated population that could understand political and social issues and would participate in civic life, vote wisely, protect their rights and freedoms, and resist tyrants and demagogues ... . Soon after the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and other early leaders proposed the creation of a more formal and unified system of publicly funded schools.”

The rest is history.

Yet one Arizona law defies that ideal of the founders, given the dire condition of our underfunded public schools: Arizona has expanded its voucher program (the Empowerment Scholarship Account) to allow all parents to use taxpayer dollars to send their child to private or home-based schools.

Expansion is costly, hardly transparent

The outcome: an enormous drain on public school funding and resources.

So far we have racked up $200 million in unbudgeted costs with projections of $376 million next year.

So much for transparency and accountability.

More cash: Vouchers to cost $200M more than expected

Arizona now has the nation’s most expansive private school voucher law.

Parents of more than 1.2 million school-age children can get 90% of the state money that would otherwise go to their local public school and use it for private or other school costs.

That amounts to about $7,000 for a nondisabled student.

The sad irony is that many if not most students newly benefiting from the expansion were already enrolled in private schools.

An added irony is that private schools do not have to follow the myriad new restrictions lawmakers would impose on instruction.

Scale back vouchers to their original vision

Has the time arrived to return the voucher program to what it was intended before the expansion?

Previously, only disabled children, students living on Native American reservations, students attending low-performing public schools and others were eligible for the voucher funds.

We hope for mindsets in Arizona and across the country to change – and indeed, teachers and parents have a welcomed and common responsibility, not only in the education of children but also the blunting of political interference.

We live in divided times. We don’t need more vehicles to divide our communities or contest our sense of all being in this together.

Reginald “Reg” M. Ballantyne III is former chairman of the American Hospital Association and commissioner of The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Reach him at reg.ballantyne3@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: School voucher expansion is an assault on Arizona public education