Two GOP National Committee members are calling for the removal of the Arizona Republican Party chair partly because she properly criticized the state’s failed school voucher program.
Gina Swoboda’s allegedly “egregious conduct” was cited by anti-democratic state Sen. Jake Hoffman and expelled former state representative Liz Harris. It provides a perfect opportunity to review just how abysmal Arizona’s voucher program has been.
In his tweet demanding Swoboda’s removal, Hoffman laughably claims that she spoke out against “Arizona’s nationally renowned” school voucher scheme. In fact, Arizona’s voucher program is ripe for criticism, since it has been an abject failure since its inception. The program was created in 2011 as a narrow measure for special education students, but lawmakers have steadily chipped away at those limits. Eventually, lawmakers blew the program wide open by making vouchers available to every K-12 student in the state, as has been the trend from voucher proponents around the country.
An Arizona Mirror exposé noted the toll that the expansion took on the state budget. When passing the 2024 budget, legislators assumed 68,380 students would participate at a cost of $625 million. But those estimates have already proven unrealistic: As many as 70,173 students are enrolled, and costs are now expected to balloon to roughly $780 million before the fiscal year ends. That’s not terribly surprising, provided that private schools continue to raise their tuition to maximize their voucher profits. This unchecked expansion threatens to drain hundreds of millions from public schools while primarily subsidizing families who were already able to afford private education.
What’s more, the majority of the students who take advantage of Arizona’s voucher program have never even been to a public school. This fact cuts deep into the facade constructed by voucher proponents to make people believe that these schemes promote “school choice.” The very students that voucher supporters claim will benefit are often excluded from the program. Rural, less affluent communities lack private school options, so their community members have no choice but to send their children to a public school that is scraping for pennies.
Arizona’s voucher scheme is riddled with accountability and transparency problems. For example, a ProPublica article highlighted a charter school in Mesa that had been shut down by regulators in 2024 for financial difficulties and poor academic performance, only to reopen as a private religious school. In doing this, Title of Liberty Academy, as it was known after the transformation, could escape the regulatory oversight that it was once subject to when it operated as ARCHES Academy Charter School. The Title of Liberty Academy was able to rake in public funding while being absolved from needing to correct the shortcomings found by state regulators. Sending public funds to unregulated schools is a disservice to the public and to the students using the funds.
Arizona’s voucher program has invited fraud and opportunistic grifting even from the lawmakers who put it into effect. The New York Times revealed how Arizona Senate President Steve Yarbrough advanced the tuition tax credit system while in office and personally profited as the program ballooned fivefold, thanks to his ownership of a company handling voucher processing. The article warned that “when public education dollars are shifted out of public oversight, it creates opportunities for powerful politicians to both shape and exploit the system for personal gain.”
“If pointing out the pitfalls of Arizona’s voucher program is the type of ‘egregious conduct’ that Hoffman and Harris seek to rid from their party’s ranks, they truly are in a race to the bottom,” says FFRF Action Fund President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Despite desperate attempts to spin the narrative surrounding vouchers by supporters, the facts clearly show that Arizona’s voucher scheme has benefited the wealthy and left behind the poor. School choice is, and always has been, a myth to siphon public money to unaccountable private, often religious, schools.”
FFRF Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) organization that develops and advocates for legislation, regulations and government programs to preserve the constitutional principle of separation between state and church. It also advocates for the rights and views of nonbelievers, endorses candidates for political office, and publicizes the views of elected officials concerning religious liberty issues.