Rarely does a day go by in which your author does not come across yet another would-be Cassandra predicting the death of public education. Those rare days only occur during brief breaks from social media; otherwise, they happen almost hourly. Lacking telepathic powers, I can never be sure whether those making these claims are either misinformed or aiming to misinform others. A 2021 EdChoice report hilariously compiled some of the most apocalyptic predictions of doom regarding the adoption of school choice policies over the decades, none of which ever came to pass.
Arizona has had an unusually high level of education choice for an unusually long time. Lawmakers passed the nation’s strongest charter school law (today almost 22% of public school students attend charter schools) and a statewide district open-enrollment law in 1994. Arizona lawmakers followed this with the creation of the nation’s first scholarship tax credit program in 1997, and lawmakers expanded the credit multiple times since. Arizona lawmakers also created the nation’s first account-based choice program in 2011 and made that program universally available to K-12 students in 2022.
Every one of these expansions of parental choice met with predictions of doom, death, and destruction for Arizona public education. Accordingly, I decided to look up the actual statistics on Arizona school districts between 1993 (the year before the advent of choice) and the most recent available.
For the benefit of those of you squinting at your phones, the number of Arizona district schools has expanded by over 800 since 1993, the number of students by more than 200,000, and the total revenue for Arizona school districts approximately quadrupled in nominal dollar terms. Even adjusting for inflation, the total revenues of Arizona school districts more than doubled between 1993 and 2022.
In the imaginations of choice opponents, this is what the “destruction” of public education looks like. During this period, Arizona’s choice programs took the edge off of district enrollment growth, created a more diverse system of schools and delightfully led to Arizona students leading the nation in the rate of academic growth.
