Gee, Here's a Surprise

Supporters of private school vouchers in Arizona claimed that they would save the state money.

They haven't.  They never were going to save the state money.

While giving a (for example) $10,000/student voucher seems a money saver compared to the $15,000/student cost of a public education, what has happened, as it was foretold, is that most of the money is going to people who are already putting their kids in private schools or home schooling their kids.

That does not matter to voucher supporters, because their real goal is to defund public schools so that they can create their own segregation academies:

In 2022, Arizona pioneered the largest school voucher program in the history of education. Under a new law, any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million, the Grand Canyon analysis found; another $429 million in costs is expected this year.

………

Advocates for Arizona’s universal voucher initiative had originally said that it wouldn’t cost the public — and might even save taxpayers money. The Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank that helped craft the state’s 2022 voucher bill, claimed in its promotional materials at the time that the vouchers would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide.” Families that received the new cash, the institute said, would be educating their kids “for less than it would cost taxpayers if they were in the public school system.”

But as it turns out, the parents most likely to apply for these vouchers are the ones who were already sending their kids to private school or homeschooling. They use the dollars to subsidize what they were already paying for.

The result is new money coming out of the state budget. After all, the public wasn’t paying for private school kids’ tuition before.

(Emphasis mine) 

I pretty much guarantee you that the private schools and home schooling collectives started holding classes on how to apply for the vouchers as soon as this was passed.

The people lobbying for this and the legislators voting for this knew that this would happen, and they did not care.