Arizona Regulators Closed a Failing Charter School. It Reopened as a Private Religious School Funded by Taxpayers.

[Celerity]

https://www.propublica.org/article/arizona-private-school-vouchers-no-transparency

One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix. Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems. There would be no more school at Title of Liberty. Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty. One mom had even discovered the school by window shopping: It was in the same strip mall as her orthodontist’s office, next to a China Palace, and she’d noticed the flags outside with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imagery. (The school was not formally affiliated with the church.) An LDS member herself, she was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states.

ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice. Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices. For instance, the state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.

When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down. Yet just a month after the board’s decision, ARCHES was re-creating itself as a renamed, newly religious private school, simply by pivoting to accept voucher dollars. In other words, it was closed down by a public governing body but found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money. Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

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