What an unregulated school voucher program looks like

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.)

There is “nothing” required, said Michelle Edwards, the founder and principal of ARCHES and then of Title of Liberty, in an interview with ProPublica. It was “shocking how little oversight” the state was going to provide of her ESA-funded private school, Edwards said.

According to charter board members as well as parents and family members of her former students, Edwards is a well-intentioned career educator who cares deeply about children. But she has repeatedly struggled to effectively or sustainably run a school.

She said that when she first transformed her charter school into a private school, she and her team called up “every agency under the sun” asking what standards the new school would have to meet, including in order to accept voucher funds. For example, what about special education students and other vulnerable children — would there be any oversight of how her school taught those kids? Or instructional time — any required number of minutes to spend on reading, writing, math, science?

State agencies, she said, each responded with versions of a question: “Why are you asking us? We don’t do that for private schools.”

“If you’re gonna call yourself a school,” Edwards told ProPublica, “there should be at least some reporting that has to be done about your numbers, about how you’re achieving. … You love the freedom of it, but it was scary.”

* * *

This school year, ProPublica has been examining Arizona’s first-of-its-kind “universal” education savings account program. We are doing so both because other states have been modeling their own new ESA initiatives after this one, and also because President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. (And Betsy DeVos, his first education secretary, was and remains a leading school voucher proponent.)

These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.

In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.

But the lack of any transparency or accountability measures in Arizona’s ESA model is perhaps the most important issue for other states to consider as they follow this one’s path, even some school choice supporters say.

“If you’re a private school that gets most of its money now from the public, which has happened in Arizona, at that point there should be accountability for you as there is for public schools,” said Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right and pro-voucher education reform think tank. “If the public is paying your bills, I don’t see what the argument is for there not to be.”

To illustrate this double standard: Private school parents can speak at public school board meetings, and they vote in school board elections. But public school parents can’t freely attend, let alone request the minutes of, a private school governing body’s meetings, even if that school is now being funded with taxpayer dollars.

Defenders of universal voucher programs counter that the goal of American education should be a free market of educational options for families to choose from, unburdened by excessive state regulations and paperwork. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank associated with Trump, has maintained that in such a system, schools would have “a strong incentive to meet the needs of their students since unsatisfied parents can take their children and education dollars elsewhere,” which the group says would create “direct accountability to parents.”

Yet in a truly free market, opponents say, consumers would have information, including about vendors’ past performance, to make purchasing decisions in their own best interests.

And if the product fails and has had a history of similar problems — as Title of Liberty did — there would be recourse, as with “lemon laws” that protect consumers who’ve unknowingly bought a defective car.

Several ESA parents across the Phoenix area said in interviews that they absolutely want educational choice and flexibility, but that they also want the sort of quality assurance that only government can provide. Most said that the Arizona Department of Education should provide at least some information as to the background and credentials of private schools and other educational providers that accept voucher money, and also that the department should do something to protect families from badly unqualified providers.

Rebekah Cross, a mother of five in the northwest Phoenix suburb of Peoria, said that the ESA program, overall, has been “life-changing” for her family; she is also an administrator of multiple Facebook groups of ESA parents. Still, she said, it’s “on you” to check the credentials and the criminal history of every private school founder and provider to whom you’re considering paying your ESA dollars, because in Arizona, “anybody can start a private school, you have no idea.” There are mostly “just rumors to rely on,” she said.

Cross pointed out that many local private schools and other educational vendors have started advertising on Facebook and elsewhere that they are “ESA certified,” even though there’s no state “certification” beyond simply signing up to receive the voucher payments. “There’s no criteria; that’s not a thing,” she said.

“You’re putting your kid in [a school], hoping it’s going to work,” Cross said. “If it closes midyear, you’re kind of screwed.”

Doug Nick, spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Education, responded that state law “makes it clear that we have no authority to oversee private schools,” even ones receiving public dollars.

Regarding publicly funded private schools closing midyear, he said that parents “have the wherewithal” to find another schooling option “regardless of the time of year,” and that the law “does not contemplate the department making recommendations to parents” at all.

Asked if the department knew how much public money had gone to Title of Liberty, Nick responded, “We don’t track that information since there’s no business reason to do so.”

* * *

Edwards, the Title of Liberty founder, first had the idea for her own school more than a decade ago. She’d long been an educator; she even ran a tutoring business in high school, she told me. At the beginning of her career, she taught Head Start and kindergarten in public and charter schools.

Through that experience and also seeing her own six kids not always having their individual needs met in Arizona’s K-12 system, she came to the conclusion that “to try to teach every child the same is ridiculous.”

Edwards began pitching the state charter board on a concept for a school that would meld principles of hands-on learning, borrowed from the Boy Scouts of America, with a proposal that students be grouped by learning level — “novice,” “apprentice” and so on — rather than into standard grade levels.

The board ultimately allowed her to open this school, ARCHES, in 2018. But it kept a close eye on her finances, in no small part to try to prevent a damaging outcome for students like a midyear closure. While giving her room to innovate, which is a chief goal of charter schools, the board monitored her enrollment numbers and staffing.

As it turned out, Edwards had persistent problems not just with low state test scores but also with unsustainably low enrollment, which would later plague Title of Liberty.

In our interview, she attributed those issues to the transience of many students during the pandemic and post-pandemic period as well as her business managers not being as experienced “as they probably should have been.”

This March, the charter board issued a notice of its intent to revoke ARCHES’ charter contract — a rare, serious move, according to ProPublica’s interviews with board members. (Edwards later reached an agreement with the board to surrender the charter.)

At that hearing, one of the board members commented to Edwards that “I love the fact that you have, you know, ideas and plans and things. … [But] I’m concerned about the kids. I’m concerned about the staff. I’m concerned about the families.”

Another added: “Don’t let that take away personally, on your end, the value of your intent.”

She didn’t. Edwards wanted to keep helping kids, she told me, including several ARCHES students whose families decided to stick with her.

She had the private school idea almost immediately. A post appeared on ARCHES’ Facebook page: “Hey parents! Interested in joining us next year at Title of Liberty Academy?” This was accompanied by an invitation to an “ESA workshop” to help them fill out voucher applications.

Meanwhile, Jason Mow, an ARCHES board member who was helping with its transition to Title of Liberty, tried to recruit new students: “Get your kids out of the government run schools,” he posted, adding, somewhat paradoxically: “The state ESA program will pay for tuition!!!!”

At one point, a parent asked him whether — if state money was going to be funding the school — it would be required to take part in state testing.

“As a private school using ESA, we have a great deal of latitude and not mandated to,” Mow answered.

He also said, “This is how we save the Republic.”

This last comment was part of a larger move that Edwards’ school was making: not just from charter to private and from some public accountability to none, but also from secular to religious with a right-wing bent, which was fully allowed even though it would be bankrolled by taxpayers. So, where ARCHES had touted an “American Revolutionary Classical Holistic Educational System,” Title of Liberty would simply be a “private faith-based school focused on the values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Meanwhile, Edwards had already been planning to move the school into a new space: a series of storefronts in a strip mall that another charter school had previously occupied.

Over the summer, largely through sheer force of personality, she enrolled about two dozen students.

But Title of Liberty was ultimately even more disorganized than ARCHES had been. For one, Edwards told me, “We didn’t yet have [enough] students enrolled to be able to afford teachers. … But we had to have teachers in order to be able to get students.” She ended up hiring mostly her own family members, both for teaching positions and to do much of the school’s financial paperwork.

She also blamed difficulties with the ESA process, like some parents being told that they hadn’t submitted their email addresses or signatures in the right format. She made clear that none of this involved the state actually scrutinizing her school; still, she wasn’t able to obtain ESA funding as quickly as she had expected to.

The landlord, waiting on unpaid rent, finally asked Edwards to pack up the school and leave. According to one of the property managers, “She just left the space for us to deal with this shit,” which he said amounted to six large dumpsters’ worth.

Edwards responded that she couldn’t afford moving vehicles or storage space for all of those desks, bookshelves, books and files. She said that she’d provided the landlord with information about another school that could have moved in and used the furniture and supplies. (A representative of the owner of the building said that they were done with questionably funded schools by that point, and that they gave Edwards time to clear out.)

“It all depends on how you define success,” Edwards told me. “I feel like the time that our kids had with us was valuable and they learned a lot and took a lot with them from that.”

“We did try to hold to a super high standard,” she added, noting that there’s no one at the state level checking on all the other private schools out there that might not care to meet that standard.

* * *

Calls for school transparency and accountability used to be a feature of the center-right education reform movement. No Child Left Behind, one of President George W. Bush’s signature legislative achievements, mandated that public school students in certain grades undergo standardized testing in core subjects, on the grounds that schools should have to prove that they’re educating kids up to state standards and, if they’re not, to improve or else risk losing funding.

That testing was often rote, providing incomplete information as to the varied lives of students and pressuring many teachers to “teach to the test,” critics alleged. But it did offer a window into school performance — which, in turn, gave the voucher movement ammunition to criticize failing public schools.

Still, early voucher efforts too included basic transparency and accountability measures. When vouchers were first proposed in Arizona, for instance, a state task force said that “private schools must also participate in the same accountability process as public schools in order to qualify for state funding.” Louisiana’s voucher program, similarly, required participating private schools to administer state student achievement tests just like public schools did.

But voucher advocates changed course between 2017 and 2020. By that time, several academic studies had found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.

Asked about a set of particularly negative findings out of Louisiana, DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, blamed the state’s voucher program for being “not very well conceived.” Part of the problem was that it was overregulated, she and other advocates said.

In the years since, fully unregulated universal ESA programs have become the favored program design of many school choice supporters.

The result is a situation in which, on the one hand, the Arizona Department of Education annually publishes detailed report cards on all public schools in the state, including charter schools. You can look up any Arizona public school’s overall letter grade (ARCHES had a D when it was still a charter school); the academic performance and progress of that school’s students, including by demographic categories; the experience levels of its teachers, and so on.

On the other hand, Arizona private schools receiving public funding have to do no public reporting at all. If they want, they can self-report their enrollment and performance numbers to be published on websites like Niche.com, but they are free to exaggerate.

In other words, it’s not that this newer ESA model has been a clear academic success or failure. It’s just that the public, and more specifically parents, can’t know.

Not all states keep information as hidden as Arizona. At least five, for example, require schools that accept voucher money to be accredited or to provide evidence that they don’t have financial troubles.

Yet even these minimal efforts at transparency and accountability have been opposed by big-money voucher supporters.

Walmart heir Jim Walton, for instance, gave $500,000 this year to defeat a proposed Arkansas state constitutional amendment that would have required private schools receiving state funds to meet the same educational standards that public schools do. At the Ohio Legislature, provisions of a proposed bill that would’ve made voucher schools submit an annual report showing how they’re using state funding were recently removed under pressure from voucher advocates.

And in Arizona, Republicans in the Legislature have opposed every effort by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to increase oversight of private schools that receive ESA money — except for one reform: They decided that such schools must fingerprint their teachers.

But the new law doesn’t require the ESA schools to run those fingerprints through any database or to use them in any way.

* * *

About a month ago, I asked parents if they could still pay Title of Liberty from their taxpayer-funded voucher accounts. I was curious not because I thought Edwards was collecting voucher money for a closed school but because it remained listed in ClassWallet, the Arizona Department of Education’s privately owned payment interface for ESA schools and vendors.

One mom sent me screenshots showing that she could indeed still pay the shuttered school from her ESA account, though she would need to produce an invoice.

What’s more, when she’d clicked on it in ClassWallet, “ARCHES Academy” was what had popped up — the name of the failed charter school that was repurposed into Title of Liberty.

The school, whatever it was called, was still open, as far as the state of Arizona was concerned. (It was only disabled in ClassWallet after recent inquiries from ProPublica.)

Wanting to make triple-sure that I wasn’t missing something, I drove over to the strip mall a few weeks ago to see if anything was still going on there.

What I found inside was a scene of school choice in its endstage. A sort of zombie voucher school, with dozens or possibly hundreds of books and papers scattered across the floor. Student records, containing confidential information, had been left out. There was food in the cafeteria area, molding.

Under quotes from the Book of Mormon painted on the walls and a banner proclaiming that Title of Liberty would strive to be a “celestial stronghold of learing [sic],” a document was sitting on a table. It offered guidance for parents on how to select the right school for their little ones, including this line: “You might be surprised how many schools are just flying by the seat of their pants.”

And on top of a file cabinet next to that was a stack of postcard-sized flyers that had been printed off at Walmart, reading, “Sign up your student for ESA.”