Facing a multimillion-dollar deficit, the board of the Roosevelt Elementary School District in Phoenix Arizona recently began a debate over a proposal to close as many as five schools, a third of the district total. This is the result of the decisions of Roosevelt families to pursue other public school options, and their decisions should be respected rather than vilified.
Americans tend to react to school closure proposals with an irrational romanticism, which is to say, we hate them, and we are not overly concerned about practical considerations. It won’t be long until opponents of private school choice attempt to blame these closures on the ESA program, but as I will demonstrate below families residing within Roosevelt Elementary but choosing other public school options have played the primary role.
The single largest source of enrollment for Roosevelt students, the Academy of Math and Science South, demonstrated a rate of academic growth 14% above the national average. The second largest, Laveen Elementary School District also sports an academic growth rate 14% above the national average and has bus stops within the boundaries of Roosevelt Elementary (wisely allowed by Arizona law.) We should always bear in mind that parents have a great many factors to consider outside of academics when selecting a school, including student safety and bullying.
Arizona lawmakers passed a statewide open-enrollment statute and charter schools in 1994. Twenty-eight years later, we find most Roosevelt students attending public schools from outside their zoned district school. This represents the decisions of Roosevelt families, not choice advocates.
The most recent ESA quarterly report by the Arizona Department of Education shows 900 residents of the Roosevelt Elementary School District used ESAs. Public school choice students thus outnumber ESA students by more than 7.5 to 1. Whether that ratio remains or changes will depend entirely upon the decisions of Roosevelt area families.
Lawrence Garfield famously noted in the shareholder speech in Other People’s Money, “I didn’t kill it! Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here.” Even if Arizona anti-school choice leader Beth Lewis stole Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet and snapped away the ESA program, it would only be a matter of time until Roosevelt lost those 900 students and more to other public schools unless the district made their schools more desirable to families.
Hopefully the Roosevelt authorities will succeed in streamlining the district and create a set of schools that successfully compete for enrollment in the highly competitive south Phoenix area. We are almost three decades into a plebiscite conducted by shoe leather. Arizona families are free to pursue happiness in education, rather than be funding-unit peons herded by their ZIP codes.