Steller: Where is accountability for voucher program?

For years, Arizona’s Legislature has repeated the mantra “accountability” whenever someone suggested paying more for schools.

We’ve measured each public-school child with tests, graded the performance of every school from A to F and audited the spending of each dollar in charter schools and districts.

We are obsessed with “outcomes.”

Mostly, that’s as it should be. We can’t know if we’re doing a good job educating children unless we somehow measure our performance.

But now we’re poised to throw all that out.

The state Senate voted 17-13 Monday to expand the existing, relatively narrow voucher program to all Arizona students. These Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are limited now to certain categories of disadvantaged students and a total of 0.5 percent of Arizona’s public-school students. Under the new plan, which must be approved by the House and signed by the governor, the $5,000-per-student voucher could go to any Arizona students by 2018.

You can criticize this approach for many reasons. Most importantly, because the voucher money comes out of the public schools that the student would otherwise go to, the program could undermine the state’s entire public-education system. That’s why I don’t like it — I think we need that system for all.

A related argument is that in May, voters will likely look more skeptically at Prop. 123, the referendum to raise spending on public schools, if the Legislature first hollows out that spending by creating a universal voucher program. I know that might turn me from a supporter of the proposition to an opponent.

But one of the under-appreciated problems is that the voucher expansion skimps on accountability. From finances to performance, the proposal simply presumes the existing program to be a great thing and then biggie-sizes it.

You would think, for example, that the Legislature would know just how much the program is costing existing public schools before passing an expansion. State senators passed the proposal unaware of such details.

It wasn’t till Wednesday, when the Arizona Republic published an analysis, that we learned which districts are losing the most money to vouchers. In the current school year, $27 million that would have gone to public schools instead was paid out in vouchers to families.

Love that or hate it, the information is key to knowing how and what the program is doing.

It turns out the Tucson Unified School District was the second-biggest loser, at $1.6 million for 229 children. Another Tucson-based school district, PPEP Inc., lost $1.1 million that went to 63 children. This was news to everyone involved.

“We’re not aware of us losing any kids to a voucher program,” PPEP founder and CEO John Arnold told me Friday. “Our enrollment is up.”

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This is consistent with the school officials contacted by the Republic. None had any idea how much their districts had lost because of students who instead took state vouchers.

If we don’t know how much each district is losing now, of course we have no idea how much they will in the future. The only safe bet is to say “a lot” and note that there are no limits on how big the program can grow, unlike the hard limits on public-school spending contained in Prop. 123.

The accountability for vouchers also is shaky at the individual level. That’s because of the way the system must work in order to conform to Arizona’s constitution. An earlier voucher program was found unconstitutional by Arizona’s Supreme Court in 2009 because it paid taxpayer money to private and parochial schools.

The new system, which has been challenged and found constitutional, pays the money directly to the parents of the child by sending them a debit card. The parents don’t have to send the kids to private schools — they can also home-school them. Using the debit cards, parents with voucher money can spend it for 10 categories of expenses.

Those include tuition and fees at private schools, tutoring services by accredited providers and contributions to Coverdell educational savings accounts. Those accounts, by the way, can be used for college tuition. In fact, in 2014, the Arizona Capitol Times found that millions in voucher money had been socked away, not spent at all.

The Arizona Department of Education does monitor the spending, department spokeswoman Alexis Burkhart told me. Voucher recipients receive the money quarterly and must also file an accounting of their spending quarterly, though they don’t have to spend anything right away.

“Every single account is audited four times a year,” Burkhart said.

At times, unauthorized spending has been found. In an incident that must have floored Republican legislators, one Chandler woman was accused of using her voucher money to pay for, of all things, an abortion. She was indicted in October.

But let’s be frank — this sort of program attracts scammers. You can be sure that some will try to categorize personal spending under the “purchase of curriculum” category or under “tuition and/or fees for a private online-learning program located in the state of Arizona.” Has anyone set up a fake online-learning program for laundering voucher money yet?

The current proposal allows the Department of Education to keep 4 percent of each voucher to pay for the administration of the program. Is that too much? Too little? Who knows!

A final piece of accountability that’s missing is measuring the program’s outcomes. For years now, we’ve done that in public schools via mandatory standardized tests. First there was Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards, or AIMS. Now there’s Arizona’s Measurement of Educational Readiness to Inform Teaching, or AZMERIT.

Measures, measures. Both of those tests are intended to account for the performance of students, teachers and schools. However, they are not required of students in private schools or home-schooled children, the precise students who benefit from the voucher program.

So how, exactly, are we to know if the voucher program is producing good outcomes? We aren’t.

Accountability measures, it seems, are for the educational programs the Legislature doesn’t like, such as district schools. The programs lawmakers do like — such as vouchers — are presumed good.