The Arizona Supreme Court ruled against groups that had been suing the state in an effort to gather initiative signatures online. Similar efforts had been rebuffed in the federal court system, and the Save Our Schools group announced the suspension of its effort aimed at limiting family access to the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program shortly after the ruling.

The court’s ruling is not available online at the time of this writing.

Prior to the current effort, Save Our Schools spokespersons claimed on multiple occasions that they had no desire to take choice away from special populations eligible for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program. Those special populations include children with disabilities, children living on Native American jurisdictions, foster care children, children attending D or F rated public schools, military dependents and orphans.

The proposed 2020 statewide ballot initiative would have created an overall participation cap on the program of 1 percent of the total student enrollment of the public school system. That cap would have been reached within a year or two of normal growth.

To put this in perspective, about 1.7 percent of Florida students used special education private choice programs last year. Under the provisions of the initiative once reaching the cap, the Arizona Department of Education would have been required to remove students other than those with disabilities from the program. Afterward, it may have been only a matter of time until new applicants with disabilities would have been denied access to the program.

Arizona ESA families, like everyone else, are facing plenty of challenges these days. The biggest challenge in terms of remote learning involves providing services to children with disabilities. The Navajo Nation faces a severe challenge in the health crisis. Taking this off its plate for 2020 will be a welcome ray of sunshine during a very challenging period.

Our perceptions of inadequacy of public schools has led politically to our infatuation with standardized testing, and that has upended the mission to educate the whole child, writes Philip V. Robey, an executive with the National Catholic Educational Association and a former principal and teacher in public schools and Catholic schools.

In his Education Week commentary, Robey says the larger field of education could learn some things from the administration of Catholic schools:

When Catholic schools say they teach the whole child, they mean it. By nature and mission, these schools operate in such a way that moral choices and character values are just as strongly emphasized as educational performance. This emphasis contributes to a culture fostering the notion that it is important to use our gifts well, and be appreciative of them ...

... In high-stakes testing environments, the educational emphasis falls on adults and their ability to raise students’ scores. The stakes are important enough that financial incentives are sometimes used as enticements. While, on the surface, this sort of rewarding may seem harmless, it can undermine the educational process by putting such a heavy emphasis on test scores that there is little energy for much else.

Statements like that would find a friendly audience in Diane Ravitch, Matt Damon and the masses behind Save Our Schools. So why do these same advocates become unraveled at the prospect of publicly funding a scholarship that could bring a low-income child to one of Robey's schools?

by Doug Tuthill and Adam Emerson

Thirty-nine years ago, author and activist Jonathan Kozol reflected on an enterprise that began when a dozen parents of the children he taught in Boston convened in his kitchen to plan their own school outside the traditional public education system. “We were very much aware of doing something different and, as we believed, unprecedented in this city and this nation,” Kozol wrote in Free Schools. As he joins perhaps thousands of others for the Save Our Schools rally Saturday in Washington, D.C., Kozol is taking part in a protest that appears so philosophically distant from these older observations that they appear to be written by a different person.

Public education remains as over-regulated as when Free Schools was published in 1972, so we sympathize with Kozol and the other marchers who say more government regulation is not the answer. But we don’t think the solution ends with the plea, “Send us more money and leave us alone.” Educators spending public funds should be publicly accountable, but instead of more government regulation, public education needs more teacher and parent empowerment.

That kind of empowerment once inspired Kozol’s ambitions as an educator, but unfortunately he and the others who will gather on Saturday oppose parental choice. They prefer a command and control structure that centralizes power in the hands of school boards because they can’t conceive of a public education system that’s not a government-owned monopoly. But prior to the 1840s public education was a decentralized system consisting of what today we’d call publicly funded vouchers and charter schools. The systemic disempowerment of teachers and parents did not begin in earnest until the mid-nineteenth century and wasn’t completed until the mid-twentieth century.

People -- teachers, students and parents -- are public education's greatest resource. We need an education system that utilizes their assets and maximizes their effectiveness. This can best occur in a well regulated system that empowers educators, both individually and collectively, to create more diverse learning options, and empowers parents to match their children with the learning options that best meet their needs.

Saturday’s event will be steeped in irony. A group of anti-corporate “progressives” will rally to conserve a 150-year old command and control corporate structure that disempowers them and their students. Unfortunately these well intentioned education activists aren’t educated enough about the history of public education to know this is what they’re doing.