• The US Supreme Court will consider a case that addresses the use of tax credits to pay for private school tuition at a religious school.
• Arizona’s private schools are mostly religious and not bound by curricular standards and can discriminate against students or families who do not comply with the tenets of the school’s religion.
• Arizona redirects about $200 million per year on private school subsidies.
• Arizona’s private school subsidies have increased student enrollment by only 4,000 over 20 years.
• Charter schools are a much more successful and less expensive school choice option, serving 160,000 more students annually than they served 20 years ago.

Assessing the performance of charters schools compared to district schools

Murmurs of the next recession have been around for years. So, let’s say the worst actually does come to pass in the United States, what can we expect to happen?Look nowhere else than an industry which gets hit hard during these times by our legislature’s austerity angst: higher education.

Two policies stand out: Permit to Purchase and prohibiting violent offenders from accessing guns.

Trish McCarty used charter funds for her Hawaiian vacation.  Now she’s being sued.

Governor Doug Ducey released a tweet denouncing Nike for cancelling plans to produce a Betsy Ross Flag version of sneakers—all designed to hit the 5 a.m. Eastern Time Fox News cycle.

While Arizonians were enjoying their Memorial Day weekend, lawmakers and their staff were trapped in the boiler room, desperately trying to keep the collective madness from igniting into threats, ultimatums, or even open rebellion.  Now that the West is a bit less wild and we enter the new fiscal year, let’s take a look at how our esteemed officials left some of the issues that we have been following.

Federal Tax Conformity and the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision give lawmakers an additional $300 million in revenue.  Will they make critical investments in education or reduce taxes?

Mandating district consolidation based on a false premise–massive savings.  The $506 million savings (out of a total of $7.8 billion in state and local K-12 funding) estimated by the bill’s sponsor Representative John Filmore, seem extremely unlikely.

GCI’s work led the way for charter school reform, but that’s only part of what we accomplished in 2018.