In 2022, Arizona lawmakers made a state school voucher program universal, just four years after voters shot down the proposal by a two-to-one margin. Now, at least 42 educators, counselors and other support staff in Mesa Public Schools, Arizona's largest school district, are feeling the hurt, receiving notice that they’re the victims of a reduction in force earlier this year.
Kelly Berg, an educator at Dobson High School and local union leader who’s spent nearly 30 years teaching in the state, told Salon that cuts like these will have dire consequences for public schools.
“Just slightly over half [of the 42 Mesa Public Schools employees] were counselors. So that's a big impact. We no longer are going to have full-time counselors in our elementary schools,” Berg told Salon. “Having that extra layer of support for when a student needs some extra support is going to be detrimental because now that's gonna fall on the teachers.”
Berg, who is also concerned about losing federal funding as the Trump administration dismantles the Department of Education, says the impacts on students and faculty will be sweeping.
“It might be that we have fewer instructional assistants for those [special education] classrooms… [or] instead of having a dedicated instructional assistant for the classroom, they now have to share that person,” Berg said. “So it's gonna impact student behavior and the workload for the teacher. The students might not get one-on-one assistance like they used to get if we have to spread ourselves thinner and thinner.”
Programs like Arizona’s allow parents to claim more than $7,000 in vouchers for educational expenses – like private school tuition, homeschooling costs, even a piano or ski resort visit – if their kids exit the public school system. The purported goal is to give parents more flexibility over their students’ education and enable working-class families to attend non-public schools.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January prioritizing federal government support for “educational choice” initiatives in the states, many of which have taken action to create voucher programs since.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy manifesto for the second Trump term, called for the Trump administration to follow in the footsteps of Arizona’s education voucher program and pave a path for universal school choice, a policy the document calls “a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue.”
But educators, advocates and officials in Arizona say the White House and other state governments should heed their warnings on the massive costs to taxpayers, students and public school employees that voucher programs can have.
Marisol Garcia, the president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s labor union for public school teachers, told Salon in an interview that the state had become known as the “chemistry lab of terrible ideas.”
“We hit a head last year when we got to spending almost $700 million out of the general fund to the universal voucher system,” she said. “That's money that could be going to not just education – because our general fund provides for education – but healthcare, transportation, housing, a lot of the money that goes to state-funded wildfire protection. The impact is now broader than just education and students, and it keeps getting bigger.”
In addition to the $900 million that the state paid out to support the voucher program in 2024, far surpassing the $64 million estimate from the state’s budget committee, Economic Policy Institute economist Hilary Wething told Salon there was another indirect cost plaguing public school students.
“It's the cost to public schools from students who were previously attending public school and then take up the voucher and leave and go to private school,” Wething said. “The cost of providing that same level of education to the remaining students in public school is this second indirect cost of vouchers.”
Certain school expenses – physical real estate, equipment, desks, even some staff – are difficult or impossible to scale back on a year-to-year basis, so planning ahead requires accurate headcounts of students for years into the future. However, voucher programs have made estimating enrollment more difficult.
“If you're not investing in salaries, investing in upkeep, investing in resources, the strain on the workforce, the strain on the district becomes untenable.”
“What we have continued to find is that a lot of students who do go to a charter school using the voucher monies may or may not find what they're looking for and then they'll return to the public schools,” Berg told Salon, adding that students in need of special resources are especially likely to make the switch back into public schools. “When there's a constant ebb and flow of students and parents moving in and out of the public school systems, it's incredibly challenging to come up with a budget.”
Wething agrees, adding that schools “can't effectively educate children if they can't plan.”
“In the long run, all of these costs are variable, right? In the long run, you can actually close a building down,” she told Salon. The problems really stem from the short-run unpredictability of enrollment due to voucher programs.”
This uncertainty means that per-student variable expenses are often the first to get cut. For public school students, that means less equipment, fewer books and even larger class sizes as more districts are forced to make cuts to educator and support staffing and keep teacher pay stagnant.
“We're having to do more with the same amount of pay… if a position goes unfilled, someone has to pick up the work from that position,” Berg told Salon.
“It’s not good for morale. It never is. As long as I’ve been teaching in Arizona – and next year, I’ll reach my 30th year of teaching in Arizona. – we have always been underpaid compared to the rest of the nation,” Berg said. “It's a labor of love that we do what we do, we would just like to be paid what we're worth.”
And while cuts could mean bigger class sizes, experts also worry the impacts are disproportionately harmful to lower-income Arizonans.
Studies conducted since the program went universal suggest that the vast majority of voucher beneficiaries are those who could already afford a private education. A Brookings Institute analysis last year found that those in the state’s highest-income ZIP codes were the most frequent voucher users, while the lowest-income areas were approximately a fourth as likely to make use of the program.
With COVID-era federal funds drying up and a 2016 voter-approved funding measure expiring this summer, the state's public schools face an impending crisis, despite already ranking near last place in per-pupil spending.
“Public schools should be public for every single student,” Garcia told Salon. “Over 70% of the students that are utilizing the ESA voucher programs never attended a public school… We are now essentially giving these families a $7,000 almost tax break for sending their child to this private school.”
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And while just about one-third of the recipients of vouchers are leaving public schools, reducing headcounts by a small margin, the funds exiting the public system can have a dramatic effect on education quality.
“If I had a class size of 32, and it goes down to 29, I still have 29 kids in my classroom, so I still have to provide everything for those kids,” Garcia explained. “If you're not investing in salaries, investing in upkeep, investing in resources, the strain on the workforce, the strain on the district becomes untenable.”
While wealthier families can choose to opt out of a public school system with rapidly dwindling funding, not all students in the state can. Wething told Salon that “school choice” is a “false dichotomy” for many students in low-income neighborhoods or rural areas, who don’t have access to charter or private school options anyway.
“Public school students who are not enrolling in voucher programs, they are bearing the brunt of the cost in terms of, one, fewer dollars to spend on their educational needs,” Wething said. “Many students, particularly students in rural areas, public schools are the only option. So when a state invokes these voucher programs, they're getting stuck in terms of risking having fewer costs, fewer resources coming to their districts for a choice that doesn't exist for them.”
As for the private schools that students are moving to, advocates say they’re a black box.
“Private schools have very little accountability, standards or transparency in how they provide education, who they provide education for, and what that looks like,” Wething told Salon. That lack of transparency doesn’t just hurt students, it makes long-term planning more difficult for public schools, too, she added.
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Families receiving vouchers frequently jump back into the public school system, either because of disappointment with instruction quality or unexpected disruptions to their students’ enrollment. Wething says non-public schools in the state have “very low accountability and transparency on how they select students, how they keep students and how they retain students.”
Berg, too, worries that students outside of public schools are working with unvetted and unevaluated educators.
"A lot of charter schools and private schools that can now use the voucher money aren't held to the same standards that public schools are held to in terms of funding in terms of state testing that they have to take, so it's just not equitable," she said.
And there aren’t many guidelines for who can take state dollars and work with kids outside the public school system, either.
“There is a huge concern for the safety of these students. There is no mandatory reporting [for private entities],” Garcia said, warning that there aren’t any safety measures for voucher students. “Anyone who is around children under 18 and any sort of educational capacity, so receiving an ESA voucher, even a karate class, a bouncy house or Catholic church, they should all be fingerprinted. That's not happening.”
Garcia added that Governor Katie Hobbs’ proposals to add fingerprint requirements and tighten the rules on what expenses funds could be put towards in the last budget session went nowhere in the GOP-controlled legislature.\
With momentum building in state legislatures across the country to implement their own voucher programs and an ongoing dismantling of the Department of Education, Garcia’s advice to Americans is to keep schools public.
“At least once a week I'm on the phone with leaders, public school champions throughout the country on why not to be Arizona,” Garcia told Salon. “This is a privatization scam. The intent of this is to help privatize public education.”
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