Part 2: Resurrecting Vouchers: The Privatization Plan

A little history about resurrecting vouchers. In 2009, the Arizona Supreme Court unanimously declared Arizona’s school voucher programs unconstitutional, stating that vouchers violate a constitutional ban against diverting taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. This defeat proved only a temporary setback for privatizers. Resurrecting vouchers was all part of the Privatization Plan.

The decision simultaneously handed the privatizers a roadmap to circumvent the Constitution through another route. While the court ruled that vouchers violated the Aid Clause of the AZ Constitution by transferring state funds directly to private schools, the decision noted that vouchers would be constitutional **if** public funds were simply to go to individuals (who then could choose to spend those funds on private or religious schools). 

In its decision, the Court painted a clear description of what would become Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA vouchers), the nation’s first private school voucher program. This mechanism would load tax dollars onto a debit card that would be mailed to parents seeking a private education for their child instead of to the private schools themselves.

Using this cue, in 2011 AZ lawmakers passed a limited $2.5 million ESA voucher program that cracked open the door to a new form of voucher via a sympathetic population—students with special needs, whose families had understandably been asking for better services from public schools whose slashed budgets made it increasingly harder to meet the needs of the highest-need students. The AZ Supreme Court issued its final decision in 2013 (Niehaus v Huppenthal) affirming the constitutionality of this workaround. 

Over the next 5 years, the legislature incrementally expanded eligibility to several new categories of students, including those attending public schools that received a D or F rating, children in military families or foster care, children on Native American reservations, and incoming kindergartners. This strategy of incremental expansion has proved highly effective for the privatizers. Lawmakers who support privatizing public education have largely evaded public scrutiny by systematically passing “small” programs for sympathetic populations.