Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Your recent column on the corporate tuition tax credit contained an important misconception that I would like to address.

Until May of this year, I served as Director of State Projects for the Advocates for School Choice. As such, I worked every day at getting the corporate tuition tax credit and other school choice measures passed in the state legislature.

You evidently feel aggrieved that you were told the corporate tuition tax credit would benefit poor children. You shouldn’t. It will benefit poor children.

The bill provides tax credits for businesses making donations to scholarship organizations. The bill contains a means-test, which excludes from participation a family of four earning $68,000 or more. The law, therefore, aids low and middle income families.

As a liberal in good standing, your suggestion that this means test is too high is a bit odd. The crown jewels of the American welfare state, Social Security and Medicare, have no means test at all. Arizona’s commitment to k-12 education and university spending likewise is not means tested.

This puts you in the position of supporting state and local taxpayers providing $8,717 per year to educate the child of someone in North Scottsdale, even if their income is $5 million, but opposing a $4,000 scholarship for the child of a family making $67,999.

Regardless of the income limit, several Arizona scholarship organizations are implementing the bill in a fashion to favor the poor. The Arizona School Choice Trust gives significantly larger scholarships to the lowest income families, for example. The Catholic scholarship organizations likewise focus their resources on the lowest-income families.

Many parents with children on waiting lists at these organizations have very low incomes and have been desperately seeking a way to get their children into better schools for years. They will be the first served. The law simply set a maximum income level, not an implementation outcome.

Maybe you prefer a lower means test to ensure money reaches the neediest children. Or, perhaps you support measures to provide a sliding scale for lower income children. Let’s talk. I am confident that you would find school choice reformers open to those ideas.

Arizona is a state which will double its under 18 population between the years 2000 and 2030. As reported in your own newspaper, the state can’t keep up with the demand for new public schools as it is, despite nearly 500 charter schools and some limited private choice programs. Almost half of Arizona 4th graders in public school can’t read.

Increased school choice options will be part of the solution to these problems. The sooner, the better. But, the devil is in the details. In other states, the left has had a seat at the table in designing such programs.

I am proud of bills which make foster children, children with disabilities, and middle to low income children eligible to exercise choice. I would, however, certainly welcome a more open dialogue with your side of the ideological divide. When school choice advocates have to pass bills with almost exclusively Republican votes, you shouldn’t be surprised if their preferences predominate.

Together, we can improve the status quo of a state which spends 5 years and tens of thousands of dollars, only to see that 48% of our public school 4th graders lack basic literacy skills.

The root word of “progressive” is “progress” and right now, we’re not making as much as we need. If you’d like choice to be fashioned to more closely suit progressive values, it will take more than complaining. It’s going to take working with people you don’t normally agree with and telling friends that their interests can’t come before those of children.

If school choice in Arizona doesn’t take a more progressive turn in future years, it won’t be from a lack of an invitation to sit at the table. You’re invited. Will you take a seat?

Dr. Matthew Ladner is the former director of state projects for the Advocates for School Choice and is currently the vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute.