Heritage Foundation: ‘Education savings account policies like Arizona’s have demonstrated their capacity to empower families'

School choice proponents are using Arizona’s education savings account program as an example while ESA legislation is discussed in state legislatures, including in Texas.

In an op-ed for Education Next, Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, argues that parents will use education savings accounts responsibly.

“Education savings account policies like Arizona’s have demonstrated their capacity to empower families with greater educational opportunities, while maintaining a high degree of financial accountability,” Bedrick tweeted on March 21.

Bedrick noted in his op-ed that Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which is a universal ESA program, was found to have an improper payment rate of less than 1% when it was audited by the Arizona Auditor General in 2018. Since then, the program has improved financial accountability and moved to an online platform called ClassWallet, which caused the rate of improper payments to unapproved merchants to fall to 0.001%.

Spending on Arizona's ESA only makes up about 2% of the education budget, Bedrick added.

He also argued that some of the purchases approved by ESA that have come under fire are logical purchase choices in public schools, reasoning that both ESA families and public schools need extracurricular materials to make a student’s education complete.

An ESA bill was recently introduced to the Texas Senate, which would create education savings accounts of up to $8,000 for families to be used for private school tuition, books, tutoring, transportation, uniforms and other materials, according to The Dallas Morning News. These purchases would require purchase orders that would be overseen by a comptroller’s office. Under the bill, families won’t receive money up-front and it can only be used for private schools and other vendors that are approved by the state.

In his State of the State address in February, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) specifically called for legislation to make ESAs available to all Texas students, calling “education freedom an emergency item.”