Compare Arizona Education Savings Accounts and Tax Credit Scholarships
To demonstrate the relative size of the ESA and TCS programs, Brookings researchers present data on their relative sizes. Funding. At first glance, this is an odd choice since the most relevant comparison is ESA and TCS. receiver. However, given that students may receive multiple scholarships, it is unclear how many scholarship recipients there are, so the relative funding of a program may seem like an appropriate proxy indicator.
But it doesn’t make sense to divide the scholarship programs into separate categories, as Brookings does. When a family applies to a scholarship agency in Arizona, they can receive funding from all four programs if they meet the eligibility criteria. In fact, after speaking with dozens of Arizona scholarship families, I can attest that they often don’t even realize that there are technically four different programs. What they do know is that the scholarship agency asks for certain information (e.g., household income, whether the child previously attended public school, foster care or disability status), and after verifying that information, they receive the scholarship. Instead of being shown as four separate bars in the chart, TCS funding should be combined into a single, much taller bar to accurately represent the scale.
Additionally, ESA funding data is heavily influenced by spending on special needs students, who account for 18% of ESA students and 41% of ESA funding. A moderate ESA student receives about $7,400 per year, while a special needs student may receive significantly more funding, depending on the funding weight given to disabilities under Arizona law. According to the Arizona Department of Education's second quarter 2024 ESA report, 6,261 ESA students with disabilities each received more than $30,000. Given that much more money is available from ESAs, almost all families of special needs students use ESAs instead of TCS.
Just as Brookings failed to explain how low-income families cluster in the TCS program, it failed to explain how families of students with special needs cluster in the ESA program.
When the three TCS policies, which are not limited to students with special needs, are combined to consider students with special needs separately, the ESA program would spend about $434 million on students without disabilities, compared to $200 million in tax-credit scholarships. (Note that “Lexie’s Law” for students with disabilities and refugees also applies to foster students without special needs. While much money will go to students in each category, the vast majority will likely go to students without special needs.)