Years ago, education reformers coined the phrase “Big Learning Organization Bureaucracies aka the BLOB” to describe the collection of groups associated with the K-12 status quo. Recently the Arizona blob has tried to slime the ESA program, but ESA parents are fighting back in court. Arizona ESA moms Velia Aguirre and Rosemary McAtee have filed a lawsuit against the state to combat absurd requirements on the ESA program by Attorney General Kris Mayes with the aid of the Goldwater Institute. The case Aguirre vs. Arizona will give Arizona’s courts the opportunity to rein in bureaucratic overreach.
Some 13 years into the ESA program, which has been administered by both Republican and Democrats, the current Attorney General Kris Mayes reinterpreted the ESA statute to contain previously undiscovered program requirements. Not coincidentally, these new requirements have gummed up the operation of Arizona’s ESA program.
As noted by the Goldwater Institute:
This new glob of bureaucratic goop makes no sense. For one thing, public and private school curriculum documents don’t even necessarily list items like “pencils” and “erasers.” As Velia explains: “No other teacher in the state has to provide curriculum for purchasing things for their classroom.” So, requiring parents to jump through the hoop of documenting a “curriculum” for materials that are obviously educational does nothing to prevent abuse of the program beyond the extraordinary lengths parents already have to go to in submitting expense receipts for every purchase. It does, on the other hand, needlessly exacerbate a backlog of tens of thousands of purchase orders that state officials must now go through to ensure every single book title and school supply satisfactorily appears on a separate curriculum document.
What’s more, the AG’s new mandate simply ignores state law and violates the Department of Education’s own handbook, which safeguards the ESA program by requiring documentation for unusual purchases, but not for common-sense purchases of items that are “generally known to be educational.”
Even as Kris Mayes gums up the program with goop, another Arizona Blob pseudopod is attempting to slime ESA families for not spending ESA funding fast enough. Yes, while the attorney general forces up the unspent balances of ESA accounts by making the program difficult to use, the Grand Canyon Institute criticizes ESA families for (….wait for it…) having too much unspent money! Never mind that these balances would be considerably lower if not for Mayes gumming up the works. Or that Arizona districts have been hoarding resources on a scale far beyond what is happening in the ESA program with no one to blame but themselves.
I’ll be rooting for Mama Bears to maul the Blob in court.
