Jason Bedrick
Arizona’s trailblazing Empowerment Scholarships Account policy is at a crossroads.
Although the ESA policy is highly popular with families who benefit from it, a new survey of Arizona ESA families by The Heritage Foundation finds they are also highly dissatisfied with the way it is currently being administered.
Fortunately, the Arizona Department of Education is listening to ESA parents and taking important steps to make the program more user-friendly. With a few additional policy changes, such as bringing back the ESA debit cards, they should be able to restore the ESA’s historically high levels of parental satisfaction.
In the Heritage survey, more than 99 percent of families using the ESA said they support the policy. With an ESA, participating Arizona families receive 90 percent of the state funds that would otherwise have been spent on their child in public school via a restricted-use savings account.
Parents can then use those funds to pay for private school tuition, online learning, special education services and therapies, private tutors, textbooks, curriculum, and a host of other education-related products and services. Unused funds can be rolled over from year to year. There are currently about 84,000 ESA students.
Unfortunately, there has been a steep decline in satisfaction since 2023. The most recent surveys of Arizona ESA families’ satisfaction by the Arizona Department of Education were conducted under the Kathy Hoffman administration in the 2021–2022 school year (Q4) and the 2022–2023 school year (Q1), which found that 70 percent and 67 percent of respondents, respectively, were satisfied with the department’s management of the ESA program.
Education Choice at a Crossroads: A Survey of Arizona Families Who Use Empowerment Scholarship Accounts
By contrast, in the Heritage survey conducted this fall, two-thirds of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the department’s administration of the ESA program, including 22 percent who were “very dissatisfied.”
ESA parents are frustrated with the way the department is running the program. » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/arizonas-esa-needs-improvement