Guest blogger Stuart Buck is the author of Acting White: The Ironic Effect of Desegregation, published by Yale University Press in May 2010. He is currently a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow in the Education Reform department at the University of Arkansas.
The Arizona Empowerment Scholarship program should serve as a model for other states. Like other states’ voucher programs, it gives parents of special education students in public schools the chance to send their children to private school. But it does so in a novel manner: it gives parents access to a special bank account in which the state deposits 90% of the money that the state would have spent on that student’s education. Parents can then spend that account on private schools, tutoring, and services that best help their child. Indeed, parents even have the option of saving the left-over money for college education, if they’re able to find a more efficient K-12 school.
This innovative program both saves the state money and gives families the chance of finding a better fit for a special education child who may not always be well-served by the public school in the parents’ neighborhood. Who could object?
Entrenched special interest groups. Unfortunately, like the voucher program that preceded it, the new Empowerment Scholarship program is under legal attack. The Arizona School Boards Association, the Arizona Education Association and the Arizona Association of School Business Officials filed a lawsuit that was just heard before an Arizona state court on Monday, Nov. 28, 2011. The lawsuit is based on a 1910 provision in the Arizona Constitution stating that “[n]o tax shall be laid or appropriation of public money made in aid of any church, or private or sectarian school, or any public service corporation.” This provision was likely inspired in part by the early 20th century nativist bigotry towards Catholicism.
Does this lawsuit have any chance of success? That is hard to predict, but there are glimmers of hope. In a 2009 case (Cain v. Horne), the Arizona Supreme Court struck down the previous special education voucher program based on this same constitutional clause. The problem with the Arizona voucher program was that it transferred “state funds directly from the state treasury to private schools,” and the Arizona Constitution “does not permit appropriations of public money to private and sectarian schools.”
But even the Arizona Supreme Court acknowledged that “there may well be ways of providing aid to these student populations without violating the constitution.” Moreover, the new Empowerment program was designed with the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling specifically in mind: rather than giving every cent to private schools, the new program gives money directly to parents, who have the choice to spend money on a wide variety of services, tutoring (including tutoring from public school teachers), curriculum, college expenses, and yes, private schools.
Since private schools are just one among many options selected freely by parents, the Arizona government is not making an “appropriation” to private schools any more than when Arizona state employees spend part of their state salaries to send their own children to private schools.
Thus, if the Arizona courts properly apply their own precedents, they will reject the attempt by powerful interest groups to stiff-arm special education students.
