Unions Strike Out Again on School Choice

By Jay Rogers

Arizona teachers' unions just learned what every coach already knows: if you can’t put points on the board, the season ends early. Last week, the state Supreme Court ruled that their petition drive to gut the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program failed to gather enough valid signatures. The Protect Education Act, complete with its income caps and extra bureaucracy, will not appear on the November ballot. The court found the campaign used ineligible circulators and submitted tens of thousands of invalid or duplicate signatures. Case closed.

If that outcome still surprises anyone, they haven’t been paying attention. Teachers' unions keep spending members’ dues to fight parental-choice policies that enjoy broad public support, then act shocked when voters and courts decline to play along. Arizona’s ESA program, launched in 2011 and opened to every student in 2022, now serves more than 100,000 kids. Families use the funds for private-school tuition, tutoring, curriculum, therapies, and other approved educational expenses. The program is not perfect. No government program is. But it is popular, growing, and delivering what public schools too often cannot: options that fit the child rather than the bureaucracy.

Critics love to wave the gross cost figure around like a red flag. The Common Sense Institute projects the full ESA program will cost about $1.04 billion in fiscal 2026. That number is real. What they rarely mention in the same breath is the offset. When a student leaves a district or charter school, the state stops paying the formula aid that would have followed that child. EdChoice’s analysis of the universal expansion found net costs falling from roughly $178 million in year one to $118 million in year two as more switchers entered the program. Even the higher gross estimates remain a modest slice of Arizona’s overall K-12 spending, which runs north of $10 billion. Context matters. Unions prefer the sticker price without the fine print.

I have coached youth football, rugby, and high school track for more than a decade. I have watched kids who thrived once they found the right environment and kids who struggled when the only available option was a one-size-fits-all classroom. Parents know their children better than any central planner or union executive. School choice simply lets those parents act on that knowledge with a share of the tax dollars already allocated for their child’s education. That is not radical. It is common sense with a budget line attached. The same principle that works on the practice field works in the classroom: competition raises standards, and monopoly protects mediocrity.

The unions’ argument keeps shifting. First, they claimed the program would bankrupt the state. Then they claimed only rich families would use it. Then they claimed the funds were being wasted on non-educational purchases. Each claim has been tested and found wanting. Middle-income families make up the bulk of ESA users. Spending rules require an educational purpose and reasonable market cost. Private-school tuition accounts for the majority of expenditure, followed by instructional materials and tutoring. The program has rules. It also has demand that public-school monopolies cannot match. When private and Catholic schools reopened during the pandemic while many district systems stayed closed, parents noticed. The subsequent growth in homeschooling and private enrollment was not a coincidence. It was a verdict.

To be sure, any large program needs accountability. Fraud and misuse should be prosecuted, not papered over. Oversight that improves transparency without choking parental decision-making is fair game. What is not fair game is an income cap designed to kick tens of thousands of kids out of the program so the monopoly can reclaim its customers. That is not reform. That is market foreclosure dressed up as equity. The same unions that spent years resisting meaningful evaluation of their own members suddenly discovered a passion for rigorous oversight once the money started following the student.

The larger pattern is familiar. Unions collect dues from teachers who actually want to teach, then spend those dues fighting the very policies that give families leverage. Rank-and-file educators often support choice in private. Their leadership does not. The Arizona episode is simply the latest data point. Signature drives that cut corners, lawsuits that invent procedural hurdles, and press releases that treat parental demand as a threat to the system all point to the same conclusion: the priority is institutional preservation, not student outcomes. When the product is losing customers, the rational response is to improve the product. The institutional response is to outlaw the competition.

Parents in Arizona and every other state should take the win and keep pressing. Expand the programs. Defend them in court and at the ballot box. Demand that any future reform start with the question of what is best for kids rather than what is safest for the adult employment model. Schools exist to serve families, not the other way around. The Arizona Supreme Court just reminded the unions of that basic order of operations. The rest of us should remember it, too.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.