Arizona’s universal school voucher program, known as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, has served as a model for other states looking to expand school choice. The GOP-controlled state Legislature has generally resisted efforts to reduce the size of the program, or require private schools that accept ESA money to provide the same data, for example on academic results, as public schools.
A new investigation from ProPublica documents the case of a Mesa charter school that became a private school; both ultimately shut down, leaving parents and students in a lurch.
Eli Hager, national reporter for ProPublica, joined The Show to talk about what he found, starting with ARCHES Academy, the charter school.

Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: It seems like this was a school that was running into some pretty significant financial problems, but not just financial problems. Is that a fair assessment?
ELI HAGER: Right, it had severe financial problems due to not being able to enroll enough students, but it also had academic problems, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in the most recent year.
BRODIE: So when this school closed, it then, soon after reopened as Tidal of Liberty School, how much of Tidal of Liberty School was the same as what ARCHES was?
HAGER: Well, it wasn't, it didn't just close, it was closed down by the state charter board. So it was, which is a rare thing for the charter board to do, so it was, that's how poorly it was performing. And then it reopened as a private school, still able to get public money through the state’s ESA program, voucher program, and it was similar in the sense of its leadership being the same. Some of the students were the same, although there were several new ones as well. The main difference was that it was now a private school, not subject to any public oversight the way that it had been as a charter school.
BRODIE: And when you spoke with the director of both ARCHES Academy and Title of Liberty School, what did she tell you about why she decided to reopen as a private school? Like what went into that thinking?
HAGER: Well, she wanted to keep helping kids. This is somebody who is a career educator and and wants to work with children, but her school had been closed down by the state and the private school offered another option, a way to open the school back up and still get public money through that voucher program and still keep doing what she was hoping to do in terms of educating kids, and this time she could do it with a religious philosophy as a private school.
BRODIE: And how long did Tidal of Liberty School stay open? It sounds like not all that long.
HAGER: Yeah, it was open, I mean it existed for just a couple of months and it was, it only lasted one month into this, into this recent school year.
BRODIE: And what were the reasons for this one closing?
HAGER: It was very similar to what had happened with the charter school version. They, they really struggled getting enough enrollment, and without enough enrollment they could not pay the landlord for the physical space that they were in. And the landlord asked them to leave.
BRODIE: As part of your reporting on both of these schools, you spoke with some of the parents who either had kids there or had kids, you know, as, as part of the charter or ESA programs. I'm curious what they had to say about the fact that, you know, ARCHES Academy was, as you say, shut down and then the Tidal of Liberty School was really only open for a month. Like it seems like a lot of whiplash for families and especially their students.
HAGER: It is a lot of whiplash, you know, these are parents who are largely used to engaging in kind of the school choice way of doing things, so they're used to shifting their kids around from school to school or into homeschooling or into different environments. That being said, a few were left a little bit in the lurch by the school's closure and had to turn to homeschooling or to another private or charter school option right in the middle of the semester.
BRODIE: Well, one of the other things that you write about is that some of the the families who sent their children to Tidal of Liberty school didn't know sort of the the backstory of how this school came to be and, you know, some of the people who were involved with this other school that had been shut down by the state.
HAGER: Right, and I think that's where the onus of responsibility for this situation lies is with the state, and I think that's a really important point. You know, this school again was run by a well-intentioned educator, but this had been a school that had failed before for severe financial issues.
It had been shut down by the, by the state charter board, in fact, but under the state's new universal voucher program, it could get state money anyway and reopen even though it had not proved that it had fixed any of those financial issues, and it could do so without informing parents of its past. And the state did nothing to inform parents of its past either.
BRODIE: Well, and, and to that point, when you spoke with a representative from the state Department of Education, they basically told you, “we specifically cannot get involved in, in these kinds of situations,” right?
HAGER: Right. A spokesperson for the Department of Education cited state law saying that they have no responsibility to oversee private schools, even ones that receive significant amounts of public funding now through the state ESA program.
BRODIE: It seems as though, and and this I thought was particularly interesting, and please, you know, if I'm putting sort of words into somebody else's mouth, please correct me, but it seems as though the woman who was the director of both of these schools, who, as you say, was well-intentioned, was a career educator, she seemed kind of surprised at the lack of oversight as well, and almost kind of seemed to think that maybe there should have been some.
HAGER: Yes, I, I think that's a really good point. When I spoke with her, as you mentioned, she, she meant well with the school, but she was very startled that there would be no state oversight of it. Coming from the charter school world, she was used to some oversight from the state charter board, and so she was calling around to all these different state agencies asking, you know, like, “my school is opening as a private school. What, what will I have to do to, in order to make sure that I'm in compliance? What oversight will there be?”
And the Department of Education and other agencies said, we, you know, “we don't do that for private schools, even ones that are publicly funded.” And so she was just on her own, essentially, in setting up this school and, and, and, and there was no oversight of it as it struggled once again.
BRODIE: Did she indicate that she was maybe looking for some guidance here, or was it maybe just surprised that, that there wasn't oversight?
HAGER: Well, she said on the one hand, you know, you like the freedom of it as a, as a, you know, she's interested in the idea of school choice and not all schools should be run the same way, in her view. But she did think that there should be some oversight, some measuring of whether this, the school is performing well, you know, some standard that the school has to meet, if, especially if they're going to be receiving public dollars.
BRODIE: Do you see this or, or maybe do other folks sort of in the education world in Arizona see this incident, these two schools, as indicative in some way of, of school choice of the, the state's education program or or situations going on within the education world here in Arizona?
HAGER: I mean, absolutely. In this story, we focused on this school, or I guess I should say two schools, the charter school that became a private school because we thought it was a good example, but it's not a one-off. I mean, there's several elements of what happened with this school that are more common than just, you know, happening at one place.
For one thing, new schools opening up to take advantage of voucher money that's happening across Maricopa County and Arizona generally, that's one thing that's common,. And the other thing is the, the lack of transparency and accountability.
So the fact that the school could open without being vetted by the state in any way, it could start accepting money from the state through the voucher program without any standards, without having to have, you know, open meetings without being subject to public records laws, without telling the public how it's using public money, without any of these transparency and accountability measures that would normally come with taxpayer dollars. Those things are common to the whole situation here in Arizona with vouchers.