Arizona superintendent candidates spar over private school vouchers in debate

Candidates running to be the state’s top schools chief sparred over the best way to administer private school vouchers in a debate on Tuesday.

Democrat Teresa Leyba Ruiz and Republican Treasurer Kimberly Yee are running for superintendent of public instruction.

Ruiz opposes the universal expansion of the state’s private school voucher program — Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. She supports putting guardrails on the program.

Yee wants to streamline school vouchers without strictly limiting them.

Reporting and accountability for ESAs

Ruiz said that since private schools are receiving taxpayer dollars, they should be subject to academic accountability and reporting, like public schools are.

But Yee said asking private schools to report that kind of information could be illegal.

“Many of these children are students with disabilities, so once you start digging into their educational environment and their educational needs, you start violating the HIPAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] laws, the health related privacy laws for those young children,” Yee said.

She went on to say that reporting requirements could also violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a federal law protecting student records.

Yee didn’t clarify how the accountability and reporting requirements that public schools comply with are not themselves a violation of those same federal laws.

Ruiz said her family put their kids in school without vouchers, and other families can do the same.

“We did not use ESAs, nor would I because my husband and I believe, as most Arizonans do, that if you can pay for it you should, and my husband and I worked really hard to pay for our children’s education because that was our private decision,” Ruiz said.

Both Yee and Ruiz said they’ll end the current administration’s practice of automatically approving all ESA expenditures under $2,000, then auditing the spending later on.

Current Superintendent Tom Horne has said that his office is understaffed and doesn’t have the bandwidth to check all ESA purchases quickly. To avoid a massive backlog, he said they had to implement the $2,000 and under approval policy. 

Yee said she’ll create and implement a new financial system which identifies all education related purposes and ensures that families can only purchase those approved materials in real time, or the “card won’t swipe.”

She said Arizona’s ESA program is a model for school choice across the nation, while Ruiz called it a “canary in the coal mine” and an example even other conservative states have shied away from copying.

She noted that many ESA purchases have been flagged for not being used for educational purposes and that the program has ballooned in cost and size without precautions.

Teaching experience vs political experience

Ruiz repeatedly touted her long career in education. She was a math teacher for several years, then served as the president of the Glendale Community College.

Yee bashed Ruiz for claiming to have been an educator for most of her career, even though she worked in administration for a chunk of that time, but Ruiz said that’s just a distraction.

“I am proud of becoming a college president. … I am a proud product of our public schools,” Ruiz told voters.

Yee served several years in the Arizona House and Senate before she was elected treasurer in 2018. She’s termed out of that role.

Testing scores, teacher shortage

Yee said the biggest issue in the world of Arizona education is low proficiency rates in math and reading.

She said phonics, a method of teaching reading and spelling, needs to be taught better and that students rely too much on calculators in math.

Yee also said schools should bring back home economics and shop classes.

Ruiz said those programs still exist under different names. Home economics, for example, is now under the umbrella of “family and consumer sciences.”

Ruiz said the number one issue is the state’s teacher shortage. She said addressing that will ultimately lead to boosting students’ math and reading scores, which she agrees must be the Arizona Department of Education’s priority.

“It’s not that phonics is not being taught: we don't have enough teachers,” Ruiz said. “When 4,000 have left the profession in one year alone, that’s an automatic impact on our students’ readiness.”

Along with higher pay, Ruiz said having a more welcoming tone from the top will encourage teachers to stay in the profession. She accused politicians like Yee of pushing “culture war” attacks at public schools, like voicing the debunked claim that teachers are putting out cat litter for students at a local Legislative District 3 meeting.

“In some school districts across the state, they have litter boxes for those furries who want to have you know the opportunity to think that they are a cat,” Yee said at the meeting.

Yee didn’t repeat the claim on the debate stage Tuesday but did say that students as young as five years old are being indoctrinated with “pronouns.”

School and teacher funding

Yee said schools need more funding, but also a different distribution of funding. She said there’s too much administrative bloat and not enough money going into the classrooms, which Arizona Republicans commonly argue.

She said she supports extending Prop. 123, a voter approved measure which funnels money from the state’s land trust into public education. Arizona lawmakers have disagreed on what kind of Prop. 123 renewal to put on the ballot and when.

Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs advocates for taking a higher percentage of funding — 8.9% — out of the land trust to boost teacher salaries and fund other school-related projects. That’s two percent more than the state is taking now.

GOP lawmakers have advocated for only using Prop. 123 money for teacher pay and for tying the renewal to protections for ESAs. They also advocate for continuing to use about 6.9%.

As treasurer, Yee has weighed in on that conversation to advocate for a lower percentage, of around 4.5% to protect the stability of the trust.

Ruiz agreed that schools need more funding, but said the idea of administrative bloat is a misconception.

School safety 

To address school safety needs, Yee said she’d ideally like to see school resource officers on every campus, which she said would require more investment from the legislature. Yee also suggested folding in other safety officials to school campuses, like retired police officers and juvenile correction officers.

Ruiz said she supports having SROs at schools that want them, but said if other schools prefer to put those resources into other positions like hiring counselors and social workers, she believes in respecting their wishes.

Artificial intelligence in schools

Both candidates agreed, but were vague, that AI should be used responsibly in schools.

Yee said that many teachers, as well as students, find AI useful and said we should embrace the technology while being sure to teach ethics.

“We have to make sure that our parents are part of this discussion because they need to know where that data is going,” Yee said.

Ruiz said some screentime is appropriate for older students, and they should be familiar with rapidly evolving tools.

“I think we need to prepare our students for the future,” she said.