Who would support a program that “price-gouges” families and spends more than a billion dollars of Arizona taxpayer money every year by subsidizing the education of wealthy families at an inflated cost per student?
Well, for those eager to condemn Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, there’s just one problem.
The scheme described above isn’t the state’s ESA program. It’s the state’s public school system.
In fact, as revealed in two reports newly issued this year from the Goldwater Institute, where I work — and which helped pioneer the original concept — Arizona’s ESA program is successfully delivering educational opportunity to students of all backgrounds at a far lower cost per student than the traditional public school system.
How could that be, you might ask, when the “experts” have assured us that the ESA program costs state taxpayers more money per student than public school, that private schools simply shovel ESA funds into higher tuition bills, and that ESAs are simply “a handout to the wealthy?”
Well, let’s........