Arizona’s School Choice Reform is a Model for the Nation

2022-08-10 · Guest: Matt Beienburg (Goldwater Institute) · 52:46

Arizona universal school choice and empowerment scholarship accounts

Bob Zadek and Matt Beienburg discuss Arizona’s landmark universal school choice legislation, which allows all families to access Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). They explore how this model shifts power from the government educational bureaucracy to parents, the role of teachers’ unions in opposing such reforms, and the potential for this model to improve educational quality and transparency nationwide.

Topics: School Choice, ESAs, Education Reform, Arizona, Goldwater Institute, Teachers’ Unions, Milton Friedman, Parental Rights

Speakers: Bob Zadek, Matt Beienburg

Introduction to School Choice and Milton Friedman [00:27]

Bob Zadek: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time today. We hope you will find it worthwhile.

In 1980, Milton Friedman wrote Free to Choose, which was the classic inquiry into the relationship between freedom and economics. It later became a PBS broadcast series hosted by Friedman himself and is still receiving considerable attention over 40 years later. In today’s show, we will apply Free to Choose to public education and we’ll learn from the state of Arizona how citizens can free their children from the monopoly of government schools and the role which the United States Supreme Court has played in enhancing that freedom. We’ll explore Arizona’s universal school choice legislation, what it means to its citizens, and what it promises to the rest of the states if their legislatures are as enlightened as the state of Arizona.

With that introduction, I’m delighted to welcome to the show Matt Beienburg. Matt is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute, a most important and influential think tank based in Arizona, but whose influence is felt throughout the country. Matt has been very important, as has the Goldwater Institute itself, in persuading the legislature of the state of Arizona—and a difficult task it was—to adopt legislation, probably the most far-reaching of any legislation in the country, allowing its citizens to, for the first time, free themselves from the monopoly of government education and pick—choose—the school they wish their children to attend with the tuition substantially, if not completely, paid for by the state of Arizona. Matt, first of all, congratulations to you, congratulations to the Goldwater Institute, and congratulations to the far-seeing legislature in Arizona for finally adopting this legislation. Thank you for joining us to share with us what it means to the citizens of Arizona and to the country.

Matt Beienburg: Well, thank you very much for having me on. Yeah, excited to talk about it.

The State of Education in Arizona Pre-Reform [01:45]

Bob Zadek: Now, we are talking about choosing education of citizens of the state of Arizona. Up until now, Arizona, as the rest of the country, primarily restricted and eliminated any choice which citizens could have to send their children—what school to send their children to. Now, the choice wasn’t really restricted; a citizen could send their child to a private school or a non-governmental school, but that would mean they, the citizen, would be paying school taxes, which means paying for public school tuition, and then paying out of their own pocket private school tuition, which means paying twice for one product. So tell us first of all what the condition of public education funding was in Arizona before the legislation and tell us what the legislation will do to the funding and the paying for of K-12 education.

Matt Beienburg: Sure. This is definitely transformative legislation that just got passed here in Arizona. But as you asked about kind of what’s the state before this piece of law goes into effect, Arizona actually has been one of the best leaders across the country for school choice and for educational freedom. So as you pointed out, you know, most parents, most families, when they’re trying to decide, you know, they have a student who’s just becoming school-aged or just moved to a state and trying to, you know, prioritize their student’s education, the default is usually, well, you have to go to the school district that serves that area. So families have to basically have their student attend a school based upon their zip code, which is obviously arbitrary and means that you are now tying a family’s educational opportunity only to that area.

Now, Arizona actually has been a leader and has several policies that have been on the books to say we already recognize that’s a terrible model. And so Arizona, like a lot of states, actually has put a policy of open enrollment to say we are going to let our public school students opt out of their local public school and go to a different public school or even in some cases to a different school district. We also have public charter schools in Arizona, and those are independently operated. They’re still public schools, but they’re not run by the teachers’ unions and the school districts in the same way as the traditional system. They’re tuition-free; they’re still public schools. But again, these are government-funded public schools that only exist in certain areas. And we saw during the pandemic—we can chat about this a little bit more—families as their traditional public schools were either disrupting in-person student learning, putting on a bunch of mandates, and families were desperate for options. And we saw that in many cases they didn’t have any. Even if there was a charter school nearby, those had waitlists out the door and so families, in practice, really had no alternatives, no options.

How Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) Work [03:30]

Matt Beienburg: And so this new legislation that the Arizona legislature just passed and Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey has signed and called for in his State of the State address at the start of the year says we are going to take this model and now, as you, you know, again kind of referenced Milton Friedman and others, say we’re going to prioritize the education and funding of students, not of a bureaucracy or a particular brick-and-mortar building. So this new legislation takes Arizona’s ESA program, or Education Savings Account as they’re sort of commonly known—we call them Empowerment Scholarship Accounts here in Arizona—and the way this works is it says if you are a family and you would like to, rather than have your child attend a public school, you can take some of what taxpayers were going to spend on that kid, put it into an account that’s operated and managed by the parents, and they can now use that for any educational purpose for that child. So whether that’s a private school, whether that’s at-home education, whether that’s learning pods or micro-schools or tutors or textbooks—basically any resource that you want to use, now you can do that for your student. So it breaks this link that has existed that forces students to have to go through the public school system or else force, as you pointed out, families to essentially pay twice: once as property tax and other state taxes, and then again for their own child’s education. So this establishes that link to prioritize students’ education and funding.

Bob Zadek: Now Matt, so each family is given a payment by the state of Arizona into an account which operates, I would guess, something like an IRA or a—let’s say an IRA, which means it can be invested as the family wishes. That was a question which I’ll ask you to respond to. And much more importantly, the family can then take money out of that account and it is the family spending, in effect, the government’s money, because the money that went in is the government’s money, which was given to the family. So the family is given control over, let’s say, $7,000 of the government’s money and they can spend it towards any approved educational activity. Is that a fair summary of how it works?

Matt Beienburg: Yeah, I might compare it actually to a health savings account. I think might be a little closer of an analogy for folks. You know, a lot of people for their health insurance use these health savings accounts where they may get a debit card, you know, they have funds that they can put into an account and rather than just paying, you know, higher insurance premiums and not really having control of this, it sort of customizes that and says we’re going to put funding into an account. And just like you can use those HSAs, you know, for prescriptions or for health-related expenditures, with an ESA, it goes into that account. Just like you said, the family then has ownership of that. They can draw down the funds each year. They get about $7,000 for a typical student each year and the family gets to use that in whatever way they want. And if they don’t use those funds, they do roll over and allow them to use that. So rather than a sort of “use it or lose it,” you know, like a lot of government agencies have, which, you know, gives a terrible incentive to basically go and blow a bunch of money at the end of the year because you’re going to lose your budget, with the ESA it says we’re going to let families sort of decide how best to spend it and in what intervals to spend that. So if they still have funds left over at the end of the second-grade year, they can push that into the following year and again, whether they apply that to tuition or for tutoring or for textbooks, they can roll that over and then eventually if there are still funds in that account, they can also use it for higher education.

Bob Zadek: Now, if the family decides to send their child to a government school, aka public school, how does the public school recoup the money that it didn’t get because the $7,000 was paid to the family? Does the family pay tuition to the government school?

Matt Beienburg: So the way that government schools are funded is each time a student enrolls in that school, the school gets funding for them. So if a student says, “I’m not going to go to that public school, I’m instead going to opt into the ESA program,” for instance, they just simply do not go to that public school. The public school does not incur the responsibility for educating that student and the public school doesn’t receive funding for that student. So just like, as I mentioned, in Arizona where if a family says, “I’m not comfortable going to my local public school, I’d like to go to a different public school or a charter school,” just like under that system, anytime that happens, if a student leaves a Phoenix elementary school district and goes to a charter school, all of that student’s funding follows that student to the school that’s actually educating them. And that’s the same way that the ESA program works, that says that the public school is not receiving the funding and also not having the responsibility of educating that student.

The Supermarket Analogy and Public vs. Private Funding [05:23]

Bob Zadek: This concept of empowering families to spend dollars as they see fit rather than be forced to patronize the monopolistic public school system, it has often been said that the most profound change and the simplest way to describe it is instead of giving the money to the provider—the school—give the money to the purchaser—the parent. And the analogy is sometimes drawn—at the Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux about a decade ago made a wonderful analogy. Professor Boudreaux asked his readers to imagine: imagine if instead of supermarkets where shoppers select where to buy their groceries, imagine if supermarkets were all owned by the government. You were required to patronize the supermarket in your zip code. You did not get to pick and choose what you bought, but rather you were given—you were told you can spend $100 a week in this supermarket. And Professor Boudreaux asked his readers to imagine: imagine how the quality in that publicly owned supermarket staffed by government workers could try to compare in your heads the quality of the government-owned supermarket with compulsory customers versus the situation we have now. Is that an apt analogy?

Matt Beienburg: Yeah, I think that that is a good analogy. Right, just as it would be absurd to say that everybody has to go to one zip code to find a supermarket and force them to be essentially handed down whatever the government decides they have to have as their groceries, same thing here as you point out. I think that’s a fair analogy that says obviously giving those funds to the client—in this case, right, it’s to the family, to the parent for that child.

I mean, I will say, you know, you mentioned the idea of public funding for private schools, and this is actually an important distinction because what the ESA program does, right, it is not—it is different from there’s other programs in the past where it is literally the government essentially hands a check for a private school. This is taxpayer funding essentially being returned back to taxpayers, and then they have the flexibility to use that. If they choose to go to a private school, they can. If they choose to do at-home education, they can. This is different, right, than just saying these are private schools that the government is paying. It’s really the government has set up a program where part—a small part of what taxpayers themselves pay into the public coffers essentially is returned back to those taxpayers who are then given the ability to use it and direct it as they think best for their children. And the Arizona Supreme Court, for instance, has already ruled on this, that these funds—this is an important distinction because it’s not simply taking public funds and directing it to a private entity. It’s returning taxpayer public funds back to those taxpayers who are then given the ability to use it and direct it as they think best for their children.

Bob Zadek: I’m going to ask what I guess is a very basic question and probably has an obvious answer, but I guess I’ll find out. I presume that in sending the—making the deposit by the state of Arizona into an education savings account, I presume it first determines what the child census is in each family. It’s not that every family in Arizona gets a check even if they don’t have children. They have to qualify by having the right number of children of the right age, and that’s how they get the payment. So that it’s not a windfall for childless couples. I presume that’s the case.

Matt Beienburg: That’s correct. Yeah, it actually sets up a distinct account for each child. So it doesn’t just—if a family has, you know, three or four kids, it doesn’t all get put into just one pot of money for that family. Every child, just like they would be on the rolls for an individual public school, that student, instead of filling out the enrollment paperwork to go to their local public school, has a contract filled out for them for the ESA program and then that money is deposited. So it’s not just a blanket program that goes to everybody. You know, we saw obviously the COVID stimulus checks over the past two years of them just shooting funds out to everybody. This is a targeted program that says again, we as the taxpayer-supported, you know, state agency for the public education system, instead of paying the bills for this child at a public school, we’re going to return a piece of that funding and have that go to the student and that family and they can use it for whatever again educational purpose they think is going to work best.

Opposition and Teachers’ Unions [08:23]

Bob Zadek: Now, this legislation seems so sensible. I’m going to ask a question that will make me seem incredibly naive, but I want the audience to learn from the answer. This is such sensible legislation. Why did it take so long to enact it? And along the way, tell us a bit about who was opposing it, what were the arguments against it, and how did you and Goldwater and all the other proponents of choice overcome those obstacles?

Matt Beienburg: The opposition really comes down to two words, and that’s teachers’ unions. So we’ve seen, you know, Arizona’s ESA program was established—Goldwater helped pioneer this about 10 years ago—and it’s been on the books just for a small portion of Arizona’s students. So about one in four Arizona students were eligible until now. And we’ve seen over that decade a lot of other states try to implement, and many successfully, limited versions of ESAs for some of their students. And at every step of the way, what we’ve seen is that teachers’ unions have radically opposed this.

And I can give you an example. In places like West Virginia back in 2018, we had all these Red for Ed protests, you know, also in Arizona, but we had public school organizers doing protests down at capitals demanding pay raises for teachers. And in West Virginia, there was actually going to be a proposal that was going to increase pay for teachers and also allow ESAs. And the teachers’ unions decided that they would rather forgo extra pay for their teachers than allow ESAs to even be established because they see this as competition. Right, they do not want there to be another game in town. They have a monopoly over the system. The teachers’ unions dominate school board elections; they dominate the policy, the curriculum, and the sort of political weight that all of that carries. And so they see this as a threat to their hold over education. And so for that reason, as a highly organized, mobilized, and politically active group, the unions have been successful at blocking this sort of reform in states up until now.

And so over the years again, we have worked to expand ESAs here in Arizona. Even over the last couple of years, efforts got close and then fell short to pass legislation like this as you see unified opposition now from the left, which is increasingly controlled by the teachers’ unions. And so you sort of see it becoming a litmus test on the left to oppose school choice policies even as they help many of the constituencies that leftists and progressive reformers claim to be trying to help.

Bob Zadek: That constituency group, of course, includes minority immigrants particularly. So did the groups that purport to represent the interests of minorities, were they active in the political fight? And if so, what position did they take? Because these groups, if they are sincere—a big if—in who their constituency is, if they were true to their constituency, they ought to have been the most aggressive proponents for education savings accounts. Were they? On the other hand, they have political loyalty to, as you said, the left. So did they take any position in the political fight? Did they sit on the sidelines? What was their role in that fight?

Matt Beienburg: So those groups largely again, as you kind of alluded, fall in line and take the cues from the teachers’ unions. So the NEA, the National Education Association, which is the largest union in the country, have gone out of their way really falling all over themselves last few years to pass resolutions on left-leaning political progressive social causes, you know, things like going on for extreme CRT-aligned—they describe it as anti-racism, but really this sort of worldview that says we should start treating everybody and viewing them based upon race. Right, very extreme left-wing leftist policies. And yet then when you actually provide an option to a lot of these families, again as you pointed out, a lot of these disadvantaged or minority families, to say, “Hey, we’re actually going to give you equal footing and an opportunity to get a great education so that you can actually, you know, have a shot at success,” you see these groups coming in and opposing it. You see the other groups, you know, lining up with the teachers’ unions. You see the politicians themselves lining up with the unions. And so unfortunately, yeah, it basically does become a sort of monolithic unified front that is really abandoning the constituencies that they purport to help.

And we’ve actually seen polling on this over the years where you’ll find Education Next, a Harvard-affiliated education journal, does polling every year and they did one just before the pandemic, for instance, and they essentially asked what—do you support school choice? If a program would offer taxpayer funding to help, you know, defray the costs of private education. And you see Black and Hispanic families supporting this, you know, at three, four to one ratios. And then you look at the support among unionized teachers and it’s the complete inverse. And so you have these groups that are clearly putting their own desire for professional and political gain ahead of the actual constituencies again that they claim to support.

Why the Bill Passed Now [11:49]

Bob Zadek: Given that background, what happened this time to help you get over the finish line?

Matt Beienburg: So there were multiple factors I would say. And one was, you know, we had very strong leadership from our Governor Doug Ducey. Again, I mentioned at the opening in his State of the State address this year, he was very explicit and said, “Send me the bills and I will sign them,” and was very adamant that this is—this was a priority. And we had a lawmaker, Ben Toma, who ended up sponsoring this piece of legislation, who worked very tirelessly to bring together a coalition of members. In Arizona, the majority party has only a one-vote majority in both the Senate and the House. And so they literally have to have every member on board to get legislation through. And obviously some of those numbers are more moderate, some are more conservative, and essentially bringing together a coalition to say this really is time to do it.

And so part of, you know, I think what you can see here is post-COVID, right, when families in Arizona and around the country were really made an afterthought by public health officials, by the unions, you know, saying, “You’re going to keep your kids home, we need to close down the schools, we need to enforce draconian mask mandates on young children,” and parents were really beside themselves scrambling for options. You know, many having to suddenly work from home, try and juggle childcare, education, and their own work, and desperate for help. And again, a lot of these families turned to things like micro-schools or pods and recognized how necessary it is that you have choice.

And so all these things sort of coalesced to say this really was an environment. And the Arizona state budget, again I think this is telling, they also at the same time that they passed this universal ESA program also added over $600 million of ongoing public school funding each year. So what they did is said, “You know what? We’re going to invest additional funds in our public school system and we’re going to also now provide families full flexibility to go somewhere else.” So they essentially said, “Look, regardless of whether you want to focus on a child going to a public school or opening those opportunities for private education outside of that, we are investing in it.” And that, you know, essentially built a coalition of members. You know, again unfortunately, the folks on the left essentially would rather have, you know, neither if it comes down to it than do both. But I think we saw a successful coalition come together and say we can provide quality education here in Arizona, whether that ends up being provided by the state’s public schools or through the ESA program or elsewhere.

Bureaucracy vs. Customers [14:50]

Bob Zadek: It is a profound statement in favor of small-d democracy. That is to say, it removes the power over educational content, removes the power from the government, which means the education bureaucracy—it doesn’t mean government writ large, it’s the narrow band of government bureaucrats who control education, and that includes teachers and administrators. It removes the power over content from the bureaucracy, from the government, to—imagine that—the customers, the people. So that the people will vote in the most effective way possible, vote with their dollars. Dollar voting and foot voting are profoundly more powerful than ballot voting, which is kind of an empty ritual for the most part. When one votes with one’s dollars, you send a profound message. Just imagine all of the consumer goods companies that fail because they don’t make enough sales. Not enough people vote with their dollars that they support a product, and that company will fail. It is a very clear message. And now the consumers get a chance to vote with their dollars to vote for the type and the quality and the content of education.

One has to sit back and say, how could anybody argue against that system, which simply allows the customer to make the best choice for them? Now, is it too early to tell the effect which the broadening of the ESA legislation in Arizona—the effect that it has on the providers, on the quality, on the nature of the educational process? Is it creating a new industry of enhanced private schools, specialty schools? Is it too early to observe what has happened? If it is, then what do you hope will happen as a result of the expanded ESA?

Matt Beienburg: So the legislation passed and was signed. In Arizona, it takes 90 days for legislation to actually take effect. So it has not yet been enacted, meaning these students have not been able to join the program and actually get on its rolls. There’s currently an effort by the opposition to block the law. So it has not yet gone into effect. Once it does, we absolutely think, you know, just again during COVID as we saw, families who were looking for other options, right? So this is going to make it easier for families who say if they want to educate their kids at home or provide an opportunity through private schooling. So I think what you’ll see is existing private schools will now be able to serve students and families who might not have been able to afford it before. You’ll also see innovation in education. Right, we saw this during COVID, again with micro-schools and learning pods, these sort of small close-knit communities, maybe a dozen students in a sort of, you know, kind of more like the old one-room schoolhouse type of model of it being smaller, more intimate circumstances of education without all the bureaucracy, all the levels of spending and administration.

And so I think this ESA program opens the door to that sort of innovative model and also again helps break that link to say you are now forced to go to a public school or your family has to be able to shoulder the burden of private education on top of paying your property taxes. And you touched on I think an important point, which is this idea of voting with your feet. And that’s ultimately one of the main points about the ESA program and school choice, which is that it brings accountability that you otherwise just do not have. Because if parents are not satisfied with the education that’s being offered to them, now they have a choice to go somewhere else.

And, you know, we’ve seen the Biden administration, for instance, try to hand down from on high essentially funding requirements and carrots to schools that are going to teach things like the 1619 Project or Ibram Kendi’s, you know, racism—as they say, anti-racism—but essentially this content here that is deeply destructive and corrosive. And yet it’s being pushed with this heavy-handed influence from DC. And when you have something like school choice and ESAs, of course none of that has any impact. If parents want to pursue something that’s going to be more politicized, they can go down that route if that’s the road they want to do. But they’re not going to be forced by government bureaucrats in Washington, DC to have to take a one-size-fits-all approach. And so I think for several reasons here, you kind of hit the nail on the head about accountability, parents being able to vote with their feet and go where they think this is going to best serve their kids.

Educational Content and Transparency [17:45]

Bob Zadek: And an underreported part of public education, underreported in my opinion, is content of textbooks. One of the first shows that I did dealt with how the content of textbooks is put together and how the big states—California, Texas, and New York—since textbooks are bought at the statewide level, those states dictate and to the level of very minute detail dictate the content of the textbook. And since they are such large customers, textbook publishers cannot print a California American history text. If it has to satisfy California, that will be the text the rest of the country will purchase as well. Once we break the shackles and we have a thousand schools blooming all around the country, all making independent educational decisions, I can’t imagine what happens to the content and the whole industry of textbooks. Any—now Matt, you didn’t come to the show this afternoon prepared to discuss textbook content, so I’m inviting you just to go off on a flight of fancy. What do you imagine might happen to the content of textbooks when they have to satisfy so many different small customers?

Matt Beienburg: So this is actually a hugely important issue and a great question. It’s actually an area that we are working on at Goldwater as a complement to ESAs and school choice. And so as you pointed out, a lot of these textbooks that have really, you know, traded out academic rigor for political activism. But interestingly, even though states do take kind of different approaches, but as you said, you know, traditionally we have this understanding that says the state is going to or the school districts, whatever it may be, are going to dictate, “Here is the textbook.” What we’ve actually seen, especially as schools have moved toward online, you know, internet-based resources, what we find is that a lot of the most objectionable content isn’t even necessarily coming from the textbooks. A lot of it certainly does, but a lot of what’s happening is school districts are pushing the most radical content through resources that don’t even go through that public review process.

So in Arizona, for instance, we have a law on the books that says if a school district wants to adopt a textbook, they have to make that public so that the parents can know about it and see it. But that doesn’t apply to all the supplemental resources. So the school district can go turn around and have their teachers again teach things like the 1619 Project, which teaches that the United States was founded on slavery, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery—right, this sort of radical revisionist ahistorical content—and they’ll just turn around and say, “Well, we didn’t have to formally get your permission or even tell you about it because it’s just a supplemental resource that we may encourage our teachers to use.” So actually the problem unfortunately is actually even more severe than even you touched on there.

So we at Goldwater have actually pioneered this idea of academic transparency, which says public schools, just as a starting point, should now start posting online a list of what it is they’re using so that we can even know what it is and have that conversation so that parents can say, “You’re using a textbook or you’re using supplemental resources that are clearly not aligned with educational academic values but instead political activism.” So this is actually a huge piece of this, and we feel that as parents become more aware of what’s being taught in their public schools, which they saw during COVID, they are increasingly dissatisfied with that and it’s time that they be empowered to actually stand up to their school boards and demand that the resources being used are appropriate or to have that flexibility to say, “If you’re not going to teach quality content, yes, I’m going to take advantage of an opportunity like an ESA and go somewhere else.”

Paternalism and Parents’ Competence [21:22]

Bob Zadek: In the debate over funding of school choice, in that debate as in many other social issue debates, the tension is between those who claim to know better what’s best for citizens than the citizens themselves. And I guess that argument might become even more emotional when the statement is: these parents, particularly parents who may lack an upper-middle-class education or even a middle-class education, are simply not competent to make the right decision for the education of their children and they need the paternalistic hand of government controlling that. To what extent was that argument made and how welcome or unwelcome was it?

Matt Beienburg: I think that argument is always implicit in the logic from the left and the teachers’ unions. Again, I think you’re absolutely right that their premise is that parents cannot or should not be trusted to make the decision for their kids and that instead it should be left to experts with a master’s degree, even though we’ve seen things, for instance, the academic literature is very clear, for instance, that teachers getting master’s degrees does not actually improve the education that kids get. Right, but there’s this obsession on the left about certification and a stamp of approval from the quote-unquote experts. And the idea that parents would actually have a sense of what’s good for their kids, fundamentally the opposition to ESAs and school choice is built on a mistrust and a—in some cases I would say even a contempt for parents and the idea that they are not operating in the best faith of their own children.

And I think that that is—I don’t think the left and the teachers’ unions are inclined to say that openly, but it truly is what undergirds a lot of that thinking, which is: sure, we as enlightened politicians—you know, we see this so often of politicians who themselves went to private school or send their children to private school and then turn around and say, “Well, you as a low-income or minority family should not have that right because you can’t afford it and so you’re not responsible enough to be able to wield this.” And I think that’s a blatant sense of hypocrisy. And I think that yes, as people are starting to wake up to that, it reveals just how intellectually and morally bankrupt this sense from the left is when it comes to trying to block families from having an option for private education even as they, the enlightened experts, think that they’re entitled to it.

Bob Zadek: And when I hear that argument being made, I say to myself—I don’t bother to make it outwardly since nobody would listen anyway—but the same people, the same pressure groups and lobbyists who argue that parents are simply incapable of making the right educational decisions for their child, those same politicians or pressure groups do not suggest that therefore parents should not be allowed to decide what food their children eat, what medicines they take, what healthcare they get, what clothes they wear, what time they go to bed, what activities they should engage in. But there’s something special about the educational decision; that decision alone must be removed from the parents and given to those people who directly benefit by their salaries, i.e., the parents and the administrators. The hypocrisy is overwhelming, but yet the argument is still being made. It’s astonishing to me.

Childless Taxpayers and the Public Good [24:12]

Bob Zadek: Now, have there been any groups who represent the beneficiaries of school choice, the middle class, the lower middle class? Do they even have representation in the legislatures around the country, or are they simply the beneficiaries of the great work that Goldwater and all your related organizations have done? Are there groups that have allied with you in this fight?

Matt Beienburg: So we have had great allies in this. Unfortunately, for years there’s been this asymmetry, this imbalance where the teachers’ unions are hyper-organized, hyper-mobilized, and able to again essentially smother any dissent from amongst their ranks. And parents, on the other hand, are not organized in that same way. And yet we have seen now, especially over the last two years as parents have organized and stood up, we have seen all sorts of groups around the country from things like Moms for Liberty popping up over the last couple of years, Parents Know Best here in Arizona. We are seeing these groups, and even in Arizona where there are existing ESA families based on the program that existed before the universal expansion, who have been able to connect and say, “We are going to come together because ultimately there are more parents than there are teachers’ union members.” And so even though the unions may have concentrated power and lobbying influence as a function of their ability to organize and coordinate, what we are seeing indeed is that parents are organized and mobilizing and able to come alongside groups like Goldwater and others who are working on the policy side and also the lawmakers who are providing that leadership.

Bob Zadek: Matt, you and I understand, and most of my audience understands, the economic concept of concentrated benefits and diffused costs. The cost to one family of inferior education, while it profoundly affects that family, one family will not—the parents simply do not have the time, the organization, or the motivation to spend hours and hours trying to affect change. The cost of this public education monopoly is diffused and spread over a large number of families, but the cost per family is low. On the other hand, the benefit per teacher in salary and in tenure and in job security, lifetime job security irrespective of performance, the economic benefit is quite large. Therefore, teachers collectively have a lot more at stake as on an individual basis than do the parents. So I think what you’re describing is exactly that, and it’s only when the parents are able to organize so that the larger number of parents have an effect and have a single voice through Goldwater and others that actual change is made.

Matt Beienburg: That’s right. And you know, again we had an extraordinary example during COVID. The teachers’ unions managed to essentially get their way and get almost $200 billion of federal COVID stimulus bailout funds for public schools at the same time and in the same breath essentially that they were closing down schools over those two years. And of course the literature now has made very clear just how devastating that has been to students academically, emotionally, their mental health, their physical well-being—all of these things. And yet this policy was demanded by teachers’ unions who were literally organizing protests in Arizona and elsewhere with fake tombstones, fake coffins, fake obituaries saying that if you made us go and do our jobs and teach, that you are essentially calling for the death of teachers or students. And yet those union-demanded policies have essentially derailed the education of a generation of students. We’ve seen the academic damage that this has caused for kids, putting them back essentially two years of disrupted education. And yet the unions, because they had that concentrated power, were able to extract $200 billion for public schools as thousands of students—we had there were a million students across the country, thousands in Arizona alone and over a million across the country who dropped out of public schools during the same time that public schools gained a windfall at the hands of the union and politicians and their allies.

Federalism and the Future of Education [25:58]

Bob Zadek: Matt, we have a few seconds left. Can an argument be made that public education—that is, the government operating a school system as opposed to merely paying for education—can an argument be made that public education as an institution has outlived its usefulness?

Matt Beienburg: Well, I think it would be fair to say that public education has been divorced from its original purpose, which is to say that the teachers’ unions have really taken it from being something that was focused on students and focused on education to essentially a model for them to push again a political agenda. And again I reference the NEA and others that have essentially gone all in and said the purpose of this and the focus of our teachers needs to be on indoctrination, pushing concepts like CRT, the 1619 Project. And so I think that it’s less about the form than it is to say what we have done is created a system of a monopoly with the force of government behind it that is now dominated by one constituency, the unions, which is literally, you know, the worst of all worlds where you essentially have collusion of a sector taking over and essentially the teachers’ unions now exhibiting undue influence over that and turning education into something short of actual academic enrichment.

Bob Zadek: Bob Zadek saying thank you so much to Matt Beienburg of the Goldwater Institute for his good work in persuading the willing legislature of the state of Arizona to expand their educational savings accounts to allow the citizens to choose, as Milton Friedman would prefer and recommend, choose how their children are educated. Thank you so much, Matt. Be sure to extend my good wishes to all of your colleagues at Goldwater. And thanks to our loyal audience for giving us one hour of your time. I hope you are the better for it. Thanks a lot and have a great day.

Matt Beienburg: Thank you very much for having me on.