Arizona, with a marketplace of school options, offers a window into the GOP vision for K-12 education
PHOENIX — The party at John R. Davis Elementary School was in full swing, but at the snow cone station, the school’s librarian was in tears.
In the cafeteria, alumni marveled at old photographs on display and shook their heads. On a wall of the library, visitors posted sticky notes to describe their feelings: “Angry,” read a purple square. “Anxious,” said a pink one. “Annoyed.” “Heart broken.” “Bummed.” And more than any other word: “Sad.”
Ten days later, John R. Davis Elementary School would close — not just for the summer, but for good.
Now, as the new school year begins, the Roosevelt Elementary School District opens with just 13 schools. That’s almost a third fewer than it had last spring, a response to enrollment declines as the state offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.
The party gave the community a few hours to celebrate the school’s 43 years — to say goodbye.
“It’s a grieving process for me,” Antionette Nuanez, the librarian, told a pair of Davis graduates who dropped by the party. Everyone at the party, it seemed, was feeling the loss — loss of tradition, of community, of simply having a school in walking distance. Nuanez, in particular, was overcome with the emotion of it all: “It’s like a death,” she said.
Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School teacher Bobbie Watterson hugs a student outside the classroom in Phoenix in May. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Students’ end-of-the-year artwork at King Elementary waits to be taken home. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
In an empty library, three posters invite members of the community to express their feelings about the closing of Davis Elementary. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona has embraced market competition as a central tenet of its K-12 education system, offering parents an extraordinary opportunity to choose and shape their children’s education using tax dollars, and developing a national reputation as the Wild West of schooling.
The state has supported a robust charter school system, tax money for home schooling and expansive private school vouchers, which are available to all families regardless of income. Nearly 89,000 students receive Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a form of vouchers, state data show; a second voucher program awarded nearly 62,000 tax-supported private school scholarships in 2024, though some students received more than one. More than 232,000 students attend charter schools.
Together, these programs help explain why just 75 percent of Arizona children attended public schools in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s one of the lowest rates in the country.
Supporters of school choice say families are turning to alternatives because public schools are not serving their children well. It’s only right, they argue, that tax dollars follow children to whatever educational setting their families choose.
Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability. Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.
The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with a small voucher program in Milwaukee and has grown into a central plank of the Republican education agenda, with programs now operating in more than half the states. In 2022, Arizona created the first universal program — open to all, not just low-income families. Since then, about a dozen conservative states have adopted universal or near-universal programs. And in July, President Donald Trump signed into law the first federal voucher program, which will require states to opt in, at an estimated cost of $26 billion over the next decade.
Some state programs have now grown so large that spillover effects on public schools are coming into view. In Ohio, the legislature agreed to increase voucher spending to $1.3 billion by 2027, up from just over $1 billion in 2025, while traditional public schools, which serve far more children, were given a smaller increase — and less than what public education advocates say had been promised under a multiyear agreement to ramp up school spending. In Florida, which has a $4 billion voucher program, public schools districts are seeing enrollment declines, meaning less money from the state and, in many cases, budget cuts.
The ramifications for public education have been particularly clear in Arizona, offering an early picture of K-12 education under the Republican vision of maximum school choice, or what proponents call education freedom. Here, public schools are starting to close.
The challenge: more competition for the same number of students. For the past 15 years, the state’s school-age population has remained steady, though the overall population has grown, said Rick Brammer, principal manager of Applied Economics, a consulting firm that has analyzed enrollment trends, demographic data and the effects of school choice programs in dozens of Arizona school districts.
“You’re taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces,” Brammer said. “As we’ve created and funded alternatives, we’ve just emptied out school after school from the districts. In a tight nutshell, that’s the whole story.”
Librarian Antionette Nuanez takes a picture with a former student during a goodbye party at Davis Elementary. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Districts of all income levels and test scores have seen enrollment declines, Brammer said. In the Phoenix area, at least 20 schools across several districts have closed in the past year or so amid enrollment drops. Last week, the superintendent of the Kyrene Elementary School District said the district would consider closing seven to nine of its 25 schools due to enrollment drops.
In Roosevelt, competition has been particularly fierce.
Twenty-one charter schools operate in or just outside the district — outnumbering traditional public schools, and enrolling nearly as many students as Roosevelt does. More than 800 students living in the district receive money for private, parochial or home schooling through the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, the main voucher program. Additional children benefit from a second voucher program.
Over the years, enrollment in Roosevelt schools has fallen, state data shows, from about 10,500 students in fall 2010 to just over 7,000 last fall.
The declines are driven in part by the district’s reputation. More than half the schools are rated “A” or “B” by the state, though just 13 percent of students districtwide ranked proficient or better in math in 2023-24.
Tiffanie Gilbert, the principal of John R. Davis Elementary, said Roosevelt now offers an excellent education, but she said past struggles linger. She said she often talks with parents considering alternatives.
“Our district wasn’t always doing well,” she said. “It’s been hard to rewrite that narrative.”
Superintendent Dani Portillo knew that closing schools would be painful, and the community room was packed last November as she presented her plan. She called it “Reinventing Roosevelt” and mixed straight talk about the district’s finances with an optimistic sheen for the future.
The schools faced a $5 million deficit, she said, and it would grow each year absent change.
“Sometimes we have to make very difficult decisions,” she said. “We don’t have enough students.”
She then outlined her proposal to close five of 18 school buildings.
‘Roosevelt was failing’
The Roosevelt Elementary School District is set in south Phoenix, historic home of the city’s Black and Mexican populations and an area shaped by segregation and racist housing policies.
In the late 1800s, heavy flooding and the arrival of unsightly railroad tracks along the Salt River prompted White families to flee to the northern parts of town. Housing covenants prohibited Mexican and Black families from doing the same, and they remained or were pushed into what’s now called south Phoenix. In the 1930s, the area was designated “hazardous” by federal redlining maps, warning banks away from investment.
Like many areas with similar stories, south Phoenix suffered from poverty, joblessness and disinvestment. About two in three district students came from families with incomes low enough to qualify for free lunches in 2023-24, federal data show. About eight in 10 enrolled students are Hispanic, and 13 percent are Black.
In 2008, academic performance was so low that the district faced a state takeover, though test scores rebounded later.
Second-grade teacher Staci Harrison-Scott teaches a math lesson at King Elementary. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Kindergarten students at King Elementary sit in a circle to examine a ladybug found at the playground. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
School officials in Roosevelt (and elsewhere) partly blame demographic change for the enrollment declines. But Brammer, the demographer, said 8,600 housing units have been constructed in the past 10 years inside the Roosevelt boundaries. The problem, he said, stems from families choosing alternatives.
“Historically, the district has had a poor reputation,” Brammer said. “I don’t know how else to say it.”
So south Phoenix has been ripe for competition in a state eager to offer it.
The district’s failings help explain the rise of microschools operated by Black Mothers Forum, which began operations during the pandemic, said Rev. Janelle Wood, founder and chief executive. Participating students are home-schoolers who use their state voucher money to pay the $6,000 tuition for the program, where adults who are called coaches help them move through lessons.
Wood says Roosevelt should look inward to understand why some families have chosen alternatives.
“They did not listen to their clients, which is their students and their families,” she said. “When you’re not listening … at some point they stop talking and they start walking.”
A sense of belonging
For others, Roosevelt schools are not failures at all. They are home.
That’s how it is for Antionette Nuanez, who everyone calls Ms. Moreno — or just Moreno, which used to be her last name.
Moreno lives across the street from John R. Davis Elementary — the place that educated her three children, and then her four grandchildren. It’s where she volunteered as a young mother and where the principal noticed that she was always around, helping, and suggested she apply for a paid position. That was 36 years ago.
“And I know it sounds crazy to some people, but I’m very attached to the school,” she said.
For Moreno and others, the school is the center of the neighborhood — the place where parents meet each other, where a church might hold a service or a family host a baby shower, where the youth soccer team hosts games.
In November, emotions soared as the superintendent presented her school closing plan to the community. Some said the consolidation would offer students more opportunity. Others angrily blamed state policy for the situation the district faced.
“They’re putting us against each other. You have this beautiful community of Roosevelt fighting for the scraps,” said one woman, who said she had twins in the public schools. “This is not by accident. This is a coordinated attack to privatize our schools, and I’m sorry that the board has to make these tough decisions*.”*
All the teachers will transfer with their students to other schools in the district, the superintendent promised, which helped calm some concerns, she said later.
Former Roosevelt Elementary School District school board member Lawrence Robinson. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
The proposal was approved by the school board on a 4-1 vote. Lawrence Robinson, an attorney who grew up in south Phoenix, was the only no vote, and he was loud about it. He argued the move was unnecessary and that neighborhood schools were too important to give up.
“It’s the place where you meet your neighbors. You can walk to your kid’s recital,” he said in an interview. “It roots you.”
How Arizona became center for school choice
Arizona has been leading America’s school choice movement for decades.
In 1994, the state was among the first to allow charter schools. In 1997, it created an early voucher program, using a roundabout system of tax credits to direct taxpayer money to private schools that remains in effect and this year was replicated by Congress. In 2011, it created vouchers funded directly by the state called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs.
At first the ESAs were limited to children with disabilities. In 2017, lawmakers voted to open the program to all Arizona children. Voters repealed that effort, but the GOP legislature and governor pushed it through in 2022.
The nation’s first universal voucher program allowed any family to claim vouchers, typically worth about $7,400 for private school tuition or home-schooling expenses.
Students work on their iPads between classes at King Elementary. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Supporters include Tatiana Peña, a member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty, who was elected to the Roosevelt school board last year.
“I support families having the best access to provide for the educational needs for their children,” she said in an email. “Giving families access to resources they otherwise wouldn’t be able to have to educate their kids is a good thing.”
The system is affecting traditional public schools in two major ways.
First, these programs are drawing some students away from public schools, fueling enrollment declines in school districts across the Phoenix area. As vouchers draw away students, state funding — which is based on enrollment — has fallen, too. That’s left districts to cut staff, close schools or anticipate that they will need to do so in coming years.
“Nobody wants that but the state has put our public schools in this dire predicament,” said Patti Serrano, president of the governing board of the Chandler Unified School District, which is losing students and reducing staff.
The expansive voucher program also has strained the state budget, with costs projected to top $1 billion this year, far more than originally projected. Because many voucher students were already attending private schools, including many from wealthy families, funding them is a new expense for the state. That’s drained dollars, critics say, that could and should go to public education in a state that ranks 47th in spending on K-12 per-pupil spending.
‘We will grieve together’
Gilbert, the Davis principal, thought — hoped — that her school might be spared from closure. It got a “B” on the state report card — a fact trumpeted on the tall digital kiosk that greets visitors to the school parking lot. Davis had seen more progress over the last year, she said, using a positive behavior management system.
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When she got the news, Gilbert knew how hard her staff would take it and carefully considered what she should say. She gathered everyone in the library for a hard conversation.
“This is a big loss for us, a moment we will grieve together,” she recalled telling her staff. “We’re like a family here, and families support each other.”
At a goodbye party months later for Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, one of the schools that was closing, there were upbeat words from the superintendent, student art work on display and historic photographs celebrating the school’s history.
Librarian Antionette Nuanez cries while hugging a former student in an empty school library at Davis Elementary. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Custodial staff clean and organize the multipurpose area at King Elementary just days before the school’s closing. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Boxes of books line the library walls at Davis Elementary. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
But at least one parent was feeling nervous. Rose Burney, mother of five, had two children enrolled at King and she had reenrolled them for the fall at their new Roosevelt school. But she also enrolled them in a charter school called Basis and hadn’t decided which one she’ll choose.
As the King party came to a close, she said she probably would not be considering a change if King were not closing, simply because it was familiar to the children.
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But Basis, she said, is closer to her home. She also had heard that at Basis, students are taught a grade ahead. Her fourth-grade daughter, she explained, has been struggling with spelling and writing.
“Maybe I could try something different and see where that goes,” she said.
Weeks later, the school sent testing results for her daughter that Burney had requested, and Burney saw that her daughter was struggling in math as well as writing. “Below grade level,” it said.
In an instant, she made her choice. Next year, her kids will attend Basis, and Roosevelt will lose two more students.