How Arizona became America's school choice lab

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

70% : In the middle of the 19th century, the civic vision of Horace Mann, a Massachusetts reformer who helped establish the nation's first statewide, taxpayer-funded education system, saw public education as "the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery.
64% : "The majority of people that believe in school choice don't want public schools to be shut down.
62% :Indeed, one of the biggest issues that those on the left have with taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools, and with the school choice movement in general, is the fact that the vast majority of private schools are religiously sectarian, and maintain the freedom to exclude LGBTQ students and others.
62% :Private Catholic schools have served poorer urban communities for over a century, says Christine Accurso, another parent of a child with learning challenges who's been organizing parents to fight for the state's voucher expansion.
60% : Public education means educating the public."
60% : As a result, many have become attracted to an understanding of freedom that includes a model of education pluralism, supporting state funding for a wide variety of schools that could in turn send an innovative jolt through American education.
58% : And now we're taking taxpayer dollars, funds from public schools, and putting them into systems that are not transparent and for which there's no academic accountability tied to them."
57% : "And if you say that your goal is just to free everybody so that they can pursue their own interests in a free market, what you're also saying there is that we're going to pull down the rules that we have collectively established, that we had democratically established.
56% : "It will give immediate access to educational options for students and bring accountability to our public education in a way that will improve the entire system in ways that are not possible now."
55% : "It will give immediate access to educational options for students and bring accountability to our public education in a way that will improve the entire system in ways that are not possible now."Opponents of Arizona's new law, however, have a very different understanding of the meaning of freedom when it comes to universal education.
54% : Florida, Idaho, Indiana, West Virginia, and other conservative states have also worked to expand programs to help support private and religious schools with state funding.
53% : The state has long had a policy of open enrollment, allowing any family to apply to any of the state's public schools, and it still has a nation-leading percentage of students attending charter schools.
53% :"Arizona is a lot more free when it comes to parent-directed education," says Ms. Visser, who taught public school herself in the mid-1990s, when she lived in Colorado and worked with lower-income students in some of the state's outlying rural districts.
49% : ""School is a place - and it's one of the few places that we have - to try to help young people learn the kinds of ideas and practices that are compatible with a multiracial modern democracy, where there are lots of different kinds of people who also need to be included," says Professor Schneider, who with Jennifer Berkshire co-wrote the book "A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School."
49% : But in many ways, the governor's choice to celebrate the new law at the school reflects the fact that the school choice movement has been dominated by a coalition of religious conservatives going back at least a half-century, scholars say, when private Christian academies began to proliferate after the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s and 1960s.
49% : She sent each of her six daughters to public schools, but she says she used the address of a family member in a different district to send her two oldest daughters to better schools.
48% :This redefinition of public education is intentional, and Arizona has in many ways become not only a leading laboratory for school choice ideas that have simmered in U.S. education for over half a century, but also a battleground in which traditional ideas in public education are clashing with a movement by religious conservatives to bring taxpayer funding to private education.
48% : "My kids are in public schools, and I see teachers leaving," Ms. Clawson says.
47% : "Ms. Visser was among the first to participate in Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account program nearly a decade ago, when it was limited to families with kids with certain challenges or those enrolled in public schools the state deemed failing.
45% : The governor's office had been looking for success stories to highlight some of Arizona's education initiatives, and nearly 96% of Phoenix Christian's students have a significant part of their tuition paid by a "school tuition organization," another financial strategy that school choice thinkers created to indirectly channel funding to private schools.
43% : This decadeslong movement has found momentum after a series of Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for states to fund private religious schools.

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