Arizonans have a pet peeve involving people from “back East” who judge us before they understand us. The Washington Post jumped into this with both feet by publishing a story with the headline Public schools are closing as Arizona’s school voucher program soars.
The story, which prominently features the long-troubled Roosevelt Elementary School District’s decision to close five schools, has multiple problems. The paragraphs below will document one of the main problems. Before moving to that, the reader should note that multiple people made efforts by both email and phone to alert the Post reporter to these data during the research process, including the sharing of many of the links to the same state data sources that will be used below.
Arizona K-12 choice is complex with multiple types of choice operating simultaneously and interacting with each other: the nation’s largest state charter school sector, multiple private choice programs, and (the granddaddy of them all) district open enrollment. No one should fault anyone for failing to appreciate the complexity of a situation from afar, but ignoring data to formulate a fundamentally misleading narrative is another matter.
Just to set the stage, under the Arizona education formula, spending follows the child. From the perspective of a school district, it makes little financial difference as to whether a child transfers to another district, enrolls in a charter, takes an ESA, or moves to California -- you either have enrollment to get funded, or you do not. Because districts also generate local funding with enrollment, they are (by a wide margin) the best-funded K-12 system in the state on a per-pupil basis on average.
The Arizona Department of Education tracks public school students by district of residence and by public district or charter school of attendance. The 2025 report includes a tab called “District by Attendance,” and it reveals that of the total public-school students residing with the boundary of Roosevelt Elementary and attending a Roosevelt Elementary district school amounts to 6,551 students. The same report reveals that 5,764 students live within the boundaries of Roosevelt but attend charter schools. Finally, the open enrollment report documents that 2,741 students live within the boundaries of Roosevelt but attend other district schools through open enrollment.
Separate reports from the Arizona Department of Education document ESA use by school district. The most recent quarterly report currently available finds that 803 students reside within the borders of Roosevelt Elementary and are enrolled in the ESA program (see page 22). If we stopped the story there, the conclusion that the fiscal impact on Roosevelt Elementary from other school districts was more than three times larger than that of the ESA program would appear unavoidable. “Public schools are closing as a majority of families choose other public schools” does not seem quite as exciting but would be far more accurate.
But we should not stop the story there. Another report from the Arizona Department of Education tracks not only which districts ESA students reside in, but also what school they previously attended. Page 17 of this report reveals that the number of students residing in Roosevelt Elementary district and which previously attended a Roosevelt Elementary school stood at 129. Put it all together, and the picture looks like this:
School boards don’t close five schools in a 6,551-student district because of the loss of 129 students. Enrollment in Roosevelt Elementary began to decline years before the ESA program existed. “Public schools are closing as Arizona voucher enrollment soars” is akin to “Sun rises as rooster crows” as it pertains to Roosevelt Elementary. If the ESA program did not exist, we have every reason to believe that a large majority of ESA students would employ other choice programs.
The fault lies not in Roosevelt’s stars, but in itself -- a large majority of the community it serves prefers schools other than the ones they are operating. Statewide Arizona school districts spend an estimated billion dollars annually on underutilized and vacant school buildings -- funds they could be spending on teacher salaries and academic recovery, and which also happens to approximately equal the budget of the ESA program, which 90,000 Arizona students use for K-12 education.
The Roosevelt school board has decided to focus their efforts, and good luck to them. The unstated thesis of the Washington Post’s narrative, however, is that readers should sympathize with the interests of Roosevelt employees rather than with those of the Roosevelt families exercising agency in the education of their children. This is the greatest misdirection of all. We fund schools first for the benefit of children, not the adults working in the schools.
This is all an all-too-common sort of thing in K-12 journalism these days, and it is hardly unique to Arizona. Florida, for example, has no shortage of hugely exaggerated claims regarding the impact of choice on school districts. Author Amanda Ripley, interviewed for a book she wrote on deep problems of journalism, noted the “strange and insular world of journalism prizes,” which encourage simplistic “us versus them” stories. “This adversarial model that we’ve got going in education, journalism, and politics no longer serves us. There’s a good guy and a bad guy, and everything’s super clear; it just breaks down. And we keep awarding prizes in that model. But 99 percent of stories are not that clear-cut,” Ripley noted.
What is clear-cut: Roosevelt Elementary may have 99 problems, but losing 129 kids to the ESA program ranks far from being one.
The Florida Education Association, which is virulently opposed to private school vouchers, has released a perfectly predictable fiscal impact “analysis” of the new Family Empowerment Scholarship. Less foreseeable was the bounty of uncritical coverage it received from news media.
From last Thursday through Monday, at least 10 media outlets covered this “analysis” (examples here, here and here) and another, the Miami Herald, mentioned it in a related story. FEA “researchers” concluded the scholarship will “divert”/”drain”/”draw” about $1 billion from school districts over the next five years.
They reached this conclusion by adding up the projected cost of the new vouchers without considering the savings to districts that are a given because: 1) districts will have tens of thousands fewer students to educate, and 2) the cost of the voucher is far less than the full per-pupil cost in district schools.
This wasn’t analysis. This was propaganda. Yet 10 media outlets thought it worthy of a story, an 11th thought it worthy of mention, and only one bothered to offer a contrasting voice – a private school principal who had probably never delved into the issue.
The report and the coverage ignored 18 years of financial data to the contrary from the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, on which the new scholarship is modeled. Since the tax credit scholarship’s creation, there have been eight fiscal impact analyses. Two were done by OPPAGA, the Legislature’s respected research arm (in 2008 and 2010). Two were done by the now-defunct, center-left Leroy Collins Center for Public Policy (2002 and 2007). One each was done by Florida Tax Watch (2003); the Revenue Estimating Conference (2012); the Florida House Education Committee staff (2014); and the advocacy group EdChoice (2016).
Every single report concluded the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship saves taxpayer money that can be re-invested in traditional public schools. Arguably the most rigorous of these analyses, by OPPAGA in 2008, erred on the side of caution. It still determined taxpayers saved $1.49 for every $1 that corporations contributed to scholarships in return for tax credits.
All these analyses found the same thing because the amount of the scholarship is so much less than average per-pupil spending in district schools – a fact rarely, if ever, reported in coverage of scholarship programs. In a report released in March, Florida Tax Watch determined the scholarship in 2017-18 was worth 59 percent of all-in per-pupil spending for district schools, which Florida Tax Watch pegged at $10,856. Keep in mind the value of the scholarship has grown in recent years, and so was worth even less in past years relative to the district per-pupil figure.
It will cost the state about $130 million to award Family Empowerment Scholarships to 18,000 students so they can attend private school this fall. Adding in the basic per-pupil funding increases over the last two years to the Florida Tax Watch figure from 2017-18, it would cost the state about $200 million to educate the same students next year in district schools.
I’d think any fair-minded reporter would find this evidence worth noting in any story where choice critics make the drain claim. Over the past few years, there have been scores of such stories.
But in the seven years since I left The Tampa Bay Times to work for Step Up For Students, exactly one reporter, at one small paper, has mentioned the existence of these multiple analyses. One. This, even though we’ve communicated their existence to scores of reporters, including some who wrote the recent pieces on the FEA’s new “analysis.”
I don’t want to be harsh. I was a reporter my entire adult life before joining Step Up. But I can’t think of a good reason for this disconnect. It may be true that some if not most reporters writing about the FEA “analysis” knew nothing about the other reports; the turnover rate for local education reporters is crazy bad. But how to explain why none of them sought a response from an authoritative source?
Here’s another reason for frustration: Given its track record, any apocalyptic claims of fiscal calamity by the FEA should be met with skepticism. Remember, the FEA was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that sought to kill the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship. But the Florida Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the suit in 2017 because, in part, the plaintiffs couldn’t provide any evidence to back its much-publicized claims of harm to public schools. In that case, the FEA actually submitted a similar “analysis” to the courts, which appropriately gave it zero credence.
To accompany the new “analysis,” the FEA furnished gloomy quotes from FEA president Fedrick Ingram, who claimed the draining via vouchers would lead to overcrowded classrooms; cuts to music, art and AP programs; and deteriorating school buildings. All 10 outlets published some of those quotes. No hard questions. No polite push back. Just literal cut and paste.
We’ve been hearing the same sky-is-falling from choice critics for 20 years. Somehow, they continue to get a receptive hearing from reporters, even though the predicted parade of horribles has never materialized. Instead, Florida’s rapid expansion of choice has come at the same time the state has seen some of the biggest academic gains in the nation.
I know a reporter’s job is tougher than ever. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask that reporters be equal opportunity scrutinizers. There are hard questions worth posing to all sides in the debate over choice. There are plenty of reports worth telling readers about. But the FEA “analysis” was not one of them.
To allegedly help parents understand Amendment 8, one of Florida's biggest school districts has distributed 69,000 fliers, punctuated by scary claims, in all of its school lobbies and reception areas. "VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6," they say. "Amendment 8 could impact your public school."
The Orange County school district tells redefinED the fliers don't cross the line into advocacy because they're for informational purposes and state, at the top, "IT'S YOUR DECISION." But the fliers are filled with the same misinformation being spread far and wide by the Florida Education Association, Florida School Boards Association and Fund Education Now - and left unchallenged by Florida journalists.
"If Amendment 8 passes, potentially billions of state dollars could be diverted from public schools," the flier says. "If Amendment 8 passes, public funds could be redirected into private hands by funding the education of hundreds of thousands of students in private and religious schools."
Not true. We've detailed why here and here. Amendment 8 would remove the no-aid to religion language in the Florida Constitution, which is a proposition that deserves debate. But to suggest it opens the door to private school vouchers is more than a stretch; it's wrong. Like the same claims made at school board meetings and in press releases, the ones on the district fliers don't offer any supporting evidence - and, as far as we can tell, no reporters have asked for any. In Florida, truth continues to go off the rails.
