School's out forever: Arizona moves "to kill public education" with new universal voucher law

Last Friday, while the country reeled from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, Arizona made history of a different sort. In practice, the law will now give parents who opt out of public schools a debit card for roughly $7,000 per child that can be used to pay for private school tuition, but also for much more: for religious schools, homeschool expenses, tutoring, online classes, education supplies and fees associated with "microschools," in which small groups of parents pool resources to hire teachers. RELATED: Salon investigates: The war on public schools is being fought from Hillsdale College From the American Enterprise Institute, education researcher Max Eden happily concluded that "Arizona now funds students, not systems," deploying a formulation that has become common among conservative education activists, as when last week the Moms for Liberty network chastised Arizona public school advocates who opposed the bill as "system advocates" rather than "education advocates." And back in Arizona, the Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank founded in honor of former senator and right-wing icon Barry Goldwater, celebrated the law it had done much to create as a "major victory for families wary of a one-size-fits-all approach to education," plus a cost-saving measure to boot, since the total funding parents would receive through ESA vouchers is $4,000 less than Arizona's already paltry per-pupil funding for public schools. By contrast, Democratic politicians and public education advocates described the law as the potential "nail in the coffin" for public schools in Arizona, as Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona put it.