Colleen Hroncich
In her recent State of the State address, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs painted the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program as an unaccountable “entitlement” riddled with fraud. This is a flawed portrayal that ignores the benefits of the program. ESAs enable parents to use state education funds to choose educational options that work best for their children.
Interestingly, Governor Hobbs seems to be using the “entitlement” framing pejoratively. In the same speech, she bragged about protecting Medicaid and school meals, both of which are federal entitlement programs. I don’t think it was an accident that she did not refer to them as the “Medicaid entitlement” or “school meal entitlement.”
If ESAs are entitlements then so are conventional public schools. Both receive taxpayer funding to educate children. The difference is that ESAs allow families to direct those education dollars toward the schools and services that best fit their children’s needs, rather than being assigned to a school based solely on their address. Denigrating one as an entitlement while praising the other is disingenuous at best.
Governor Hobbs highlighted extreme examples of ESA misuse. While these stories make headlines, they don’t represent the bulk of the program. Audits have consistently shown that ESA fraud rates are significantly lower than other government programs. While no program is perfect, these results show that most Arizona families are using these funds as intended: for educational purposes such as tuition, tutoring, curricula, and therapies.
This shouldn’t be surprising given the program’s built-in accountability measures. Unlike public school spending, where districts handle billions of dollars with limited transparency about individual expenditures, every ESA purchase requires a receipt or invoice. Parents must document how they spend their education funds, and the state reviews these transactions. That level of oversight doesn’t exist in conventional public schools.
The governor’s claims about a lack of accountability reflect a worldview that prioritizes the system over individual kids. By equipping parents to take their children—and funding—to a new provider, the accountability inherent in an ESA program is far superior to the public school system. Rather than engaging in political and legal battles or waiting for a school board to change a policy, ESAs enable parents to quickly choose the educational options that work best for their children.
Keep in mind, we aren’t talking about abstract statistics. ESAs are benefiting diverse families across Arizona. Whether children with special needs who weren’t thriving in their assigned schools, military families dealing with frequent relocations, or lower-income parents seeking alternatives they couldn’t otherwise afford, ESAs have opened doors that were previously locked to many families.
Rather than restricting a program that’s working for hundreds of thousands of children, Governor Hobbs should embrace it. Arizona families deserve the freedom to pursue the educational paths that work best for them.