PHOENIX, Arizona — On a scorching Sunday afternoon in August, Jenny Clark, who runs the non-profit Love Your College AZ, stood within the cool atrium of the Phoenix Artwork Museum, providing swag to households passing by on their approach to story time and collage-making. “Would you like a pin?” she requested. Brilliant blue and pink buttons with slogans in block letters beckoned to kids at eye-level: You Rock. Too Cool. And, for fogeys, I like my children — “On sure days,” Clark joked, as she held out a pattern to a mom with two younger kids draped round her waist. The biggest pins — and never by chance — mentioned “Ask me about ESAs.”
ESAs are Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, the varsity voucher program that in 2022 opened to each household in Arizona. Initially created for college kids with disabilities who wanted providers they may not get at their neighborhood public faculties, ESAs have morphed over the past two years right into a budget-busting free-for-all utilized by greater than 50,000 college students — practically 1 in 20 school-age kids within the state — lots of whom had been already enrolled in non-public and non secular faculties or home-schooled. Households, largely from high-income zip codes, have utilized the taxpayer funds for every little thing from ski elevate passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, greater than one million {dollars} in Legos, on-line ballet classes, horse remedy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these within the identify of fogeys’ prerogative to form their kids’s training or by pointing to wasteful spending by public faculties. Because of this, ESA prices have ballooned from the legislature’s authentic estimated price ticket of $100 million over two years, to greater than $400 million a yr — a determine, critics have famous, that will clarify greater than half of Arizona’s projected finances deficit in 2024 and 2025.
And the individual most accountable for organizing this rising cohort of fogeys, and steering their newfound curiosity within the trivialities of state training funding, is Jenny Clark.
A longtime ESA mother who homeschools all 5 of her kids, Clark is the bubbly, upbeat tradition warrior at the vanguard of the nationwide motion for what she calls “training freedom” — a messaging successor to “college selection,” the time period the time period favored by conservative funders like Betsy DeVos, the previous training secretary beneath Donald Trump. The place college selection sought to increase constitution faculties and “open enrollment,” permitting households to ship their children to varsities in different neighborhoods or districts, proponents of “training freedom” wish to finish public faculties’ reign as the popular vacation spot for public training {dollars}, inserting them on equal footing with non-public and non secular faculties, or certainly, homeschooling.
Via its web site, social media channels and 10,000-user Fb group, the non-profit Clark based in 2019 acts each as an on-ramp for fogeys navigating the paperwork required to join ESAs and a nerve heart to answer public criticism that may curtail this system. And Clark has emerged as the general public face for the brand new and rising constituency of fogeys who’ve come to depend on taxpayer {dollars} to teach their kids the place they need — anyplace, that’s, however public faculties.
Since Arizona handed its common voucher invoice in 2022, eight extra states have adopted go well with: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Indiana expanded current voucher packages. Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa and Utah joined West Virginia, whose Hope scholarship program started in 2021, in creating new packages set to develop into common. Clark’s Love Your College AZ has expanded to Alabama and West Virginia, and Clark has began a sequence of associated teams to bolster the nationwide ecosystem supporting college vouchers. She’s additionally develop into one of many motion’s key messengers, aided by the status of an appointment to the Arizona board of training, and probably the most seen antagonist of the state’s public college advocates.
On the museum’s household enjoyable day, Clark wore denims and a pink button-down and made small discuss with a fluid cadence honed over lengthy hours mingling at kids’s birthday events. She and three Love Your College employees members stood by a folding desk and a vertical banner that learn “Celebrating College Choices in Arizona.” Clark’s grasp of Phoenix’s Okay-12 choices appeared near-encyclopedic, however the pitch supplied on the heels of each “Youngsters Rule” pin was extra narrowly tailor-made. A mom and her sixth-grade son paused to soak up the scene whereas they walked previous a Keith Haring sculpture within the corridor. Clark took a small step out from the desk to supply a pin and to ask the place the boy attended college. “We’re Love Your College. We’re a faculty selection group. We assist households navigate your choices,” she mentioned.
“That may be nice,” the mother mentioned. Her son cherished his present constitution college, she mentioned, however couldn’t proceed previous eighth grade. “I’m panicking regardless that it’s like two years away.”
“Have you ever heard about ESAs?” Clark requested, brochure on the prepared. “In case you did wish to take into account a non-public college, that might provide help to pay tuition.”
“That may be even higher!” the mother replied.
Clark had the identical suggestion for a grandmother whose grandson attended a specialised public college for kids with particular wants; an immigrant mom making an attempt to enroll her little one in one other district; the daddy of a gifted son reaching the higher bounds of the mathematics curriculum supplied at Phoenix’s solely free Montessori program. As Clark and her staff chatted with dozens of fogeys over the course of a day, not a single change glided by with out some model of the query: “Have you ever heard about ESAs?”
The expertise that set Clark on her trajectory as a voucher advocate got here within the fall of 2013, when she started to fret that her five-year-old wasn’t progressing extra rapidly as a reader. “I imply, we’d spend all day, like, on a letter, after which, like, the following day, he wouldn’t bear in mind the letter or the sound. And I’m like, ‘What?’” Different mothers in her orbit instructed taking him to get a free analysis on the native public college. In Clark’s telling, it was a humiliating expertise, with college employees insinuating that the actual downside was her instruction. “Mainly, like, it’s your fault, you dumb home-school mother, you realize?”
Clark and her husband determined to request an impartial analysis, additionally on the district’s expense, each for her eldest and his youthful brother. Each boys had been discovered to have dyslexia and dysgraphia. With the diagnoses in hand, they returned to the varsity district and discovered they might qualify for the sooner model of the Empowerment Scholarship Account, for college kids with disabilities, so long as the boys first spent a yr in a district college. They enrolled in an internet constitution college for 9 months, after which returned to home-schooling, this time, with tens of 1000’s of {dollars} in public assist. (Clark declined to disclose how a lot her kids obtain in ESA {dollars}.)
Clark’s private introduction to ESAs coincided with the state legislature’s first try and make this system common, which ended up galvanizing a motion to oppose it. Beth Lewis, a fifth grade public college trainer outdoors Phoenix, spent the legislative session organizing dad and mom and lecturers to foyer towards the invoice in pursuit of upper trainer pay and per pupil spending, a metric by which Arizona ranked forty seventh out of fifty states. When the voucher growth invoice handed on a celebration line vote in April 2017, Lewis and a small group of allies shaped a non-profit, Save our Faculties Arizona, and picked up sufficient signatures to have the invoice “referred” to the poll the next yr in hopes that voters would rise to defend public faculties and reverse the legislature.
On the time, Clark’s husband, Michael, was working on the Middle for Arizona Coverage, whose political arm was a significant voucher supporter, and Jenny Clark started operating publicity for the pro-voucher facet of the referendum, making tv and radio appearances touting ESAs.
In 2018, the legislature’s voucher growth was defeated on the polls by practically 30 factors, reprising an extended historical past of unsuccessful pro-voucher poll measures in states as numerous as Massachusetts and Utah. Clark thought she understood why. Afterward, she met with the funders behind the voucher marketing campaign, and made the case that it had been defeated for lack of a transparent constituency amongst dad and mom. “No person’s on the market serving to dad and mom really get their children evaluated, discover a college for them. It’s virtually like social work,” she mentioned. The Middle for Arizona Coverage and the Goldwater Institute agreed to assist fund Clark’s non-profit: Love Your College AZ.
Lewis had a decidedly extra cynical view of this origin story, calling Love Your College a car for conservative donors. “It’s not natural, it’s not grassroots,” she mentioned. “These individuals assessed the panorama and mentioned, ‘Hmm, we want some mothers, proper? If we’re going to do that entire parental selection factor, if we’re going to essentially deal with these parental rights, and that’s what we’re doubling down on, we want some dad and mom.’”
Whereas the 2018 invoice known as for common eligibility, it additionally capped this system at round 5,000 college students statewide; the invoice Republicans introduced ahead in 2022 was a dramatic growth, with no limits to participation. As soon as once more, Save our Faculties Arizona launched into a drive to place common ESA laws earlier than Arizona voters. This time, they confronted organized opposition from dad and mom Jenny Clark was serving to to mobilize. SOS dad and mom gathering signatures in suburban grocery store parking tons had been met by opposing teams wielding printed indicators that learn “DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING FROM SOS ARIZONA,” paid for by the American Federation for Youngsters, based by Betsy DeVos to advance voucher packages across the nation.
Clark’s enviornment was largely on-line. Love Your College AZ steered dad and mom in its community via the ESA utility course of whereas Clark pumped out blue and pink graphics and cheerful Instagram reels calling SOS an “anti-parent activist” group prepared to “mislead and deceive the general public.” Clark has the sunny have an effect on of a pre-school trainer, and on video, she delivers even her most withering commentary with a resting half-smile and the tone of somebody talking to a small little one. SOS’s supplies on the time known as common ESAs an “entitlement for rich households” that will “successfully dismantle public training,” and opposed opening this system to kids already attending non-public college. “Let me simply say that’s disgusting and reprehensible and we must always all name it out for what it’s,” Clark countered on Instagram. “All kids deserve entry to a fantastic training and that’s what the common ESA does.” By the tip of September 2022, the secretary of state’s workplace introduced that SOS hadn’t collected sufficient signatures for a second referendum; the brand new legislation would stand. Greater than 10,000 candidates had been ready for common ESAs to enter impact.
If Jenny Clark delivers her jeremiads wrapped in pink, Lewis is sharper, and infrequently equally strident. Once we spoke, she didn’t hesitate to name Clark a “charlatan.” However Clark’s upbeat-warrior tone dovetails together with her broader presentation because the mom-next-door, and downplays the extent of her political advocacy and connections with the conservative community of energy that has sustained and expanded voucher packages across the nation. Clark’s appointment by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey as a lay member of the state board of training got here in April, 2022, two months earlier than common ESAs handed the legislature, and she or he spoke at a ceremonial invoice signing for common ESAs in August. She’s been a fellow of the Membership for Progress Basis and spent a portion of the afternoon on the museum reviewing her schedule for the Koch-funded State Coverage Community convention in Phoenix. Clark was featured as a panelist for a dialog about passing the “symbolic end line” of common vouchers and figuring out the “subsequent race for training freedom.”
This fall, college districts across the nation are lastly going through the complete fiscal implications of the Covid pandemic, as a $190 billion infusion of federal funding handed in 2021 runs out. Nationally, vouchers nonetheless assist solely a tiny proportion of the general pupil inhabitants. Voucher advocates, like Clark, are desirous to argue that college students “taking their training {dollars}” elsewhere gained’t damage public district faculties left behind. However the proof from Arizona and different states is that per-pupil funding for public faculties tends to freeze or lower as voucher packages increase. In Arizona, the governor’s workplace initiatives that ESAs will steer greater than half of recent training funding this yr to simply 8 % of the state’s kids.
A part of what first attracted different states’ consideration to Arizona’s proposal was the “extraordinarily low” finances estimate, mentioned Mike Griffith, a researcher on the Palo Alto, California-based Studying Coverage Institute, who co-authored an evaluation of the prices of Arizona’s ESAs. “That originally bought loads of states as a result of they thought, ‘We are able to provide common vouchers in our state and it could solely value $60 million. We’ve $60 million,’” he mentioned. However with prices in every of the primary two years estimated at greater than 5 instances that quantity, “Most advocates understand they’re not going to get one thing like Arizona handed,” Griffith mentioned. “There’s no restrict to the price of this system.”
Alabama was a kind of states that noticed Arizona’s instance as each one thing to emulate and a lesson within the dangers of a voucher program with no higher restrict. As Alabama senate appropriations chair Arthur Orr put it to me, “The historical past of Arizona fed into the proverbial smoky again rooms” of Alabama’s state legislature. “We needed one thing that was manageable, and that we had management of.”
The invoice Orr co-sponsored, the CHOOSE Act, handed in March 2024, with household revenue limits for the primary 5 years. Like Tennessee and Florida, and even mannequin voucher laws proposed by the conservative American Legislative Trade Council, it additionally stipulates common audits of personal faculties and distributors, and requires taking part college students to take standardized checks. It caps homeschooling bills at $4,000 per household. (In, Arizona, most college students obtain between $7,000 and $8,000, and youngsters with disabilities obtain as a lot as $43,000.) Lastly, Orr mentioned, he was anxious to be sure that allowable expectations tracked with the general public’s concept of what “college” means. “We’ve all learn the horror tales of the household going to Disney World with their voucher cash to speak about velocity on the curler coaster,” he mentioned. “We needed to keep away from that categorically.”
Over the long run, voucher packages have tended to increase, like each Florida’s and Arizona’s, and fogeys like Jenny Clark have defended the outer flank of any arguments over proposals for reform. Clark argues, amongst different issues, that non secular faculties getting taxpayer {dollars} needs to be free to discriminate — as an illustration, a Muslim college excluding Christian college students; that audits are pointless since a certain quantity of waste is inevitable in any public program; and that there’s no distinction between subsidizing a rich household’s attendance at public faculties and paying for his or her non-public college tuition. In lieu of nearer oversight of personal faculties, she envisions a parental whisper community, organized by teams like Love Your College. “That’s like Yelp, proper? They’re like, ‘Don’t go to this restaurant. The service is actually dangerous.’ That’s good. That’s competitors.”
Clark has argued that the time period “voucher” is inaccurate as a result of ESA {dollars} stream via accounts managed by dad and mom, not on to particular faculties, and that this system saves state {dollars} for each pupil that enrolls. Actually, roughly half of ESA college students have by no means earlier than attended public faculties, so that they symbolize a completely new value for the state averaging some $9,800 per pupil per yr. Once I challenged Clark on this level, she started pointing to gaps within the knowledge. For the reason that Division of Training estimates of prior public-school enrollment solely coated the yr earlier than a pupil signed up for an ESA, she mentioned, it was not possible to know whether or not that pupil had really by no means been in public faculties, or, maybe, solely attended till the pandemic.
Griffith, of the Studying Coverage Institute, shared some frustration with the standard of public knowledge on ESAs: “If the info had been obtainable, it most likely would have taken us simply a few days to place collectively a value evaluation, however it took us a number of months to do it,” he mentioned. Up to now, Arizona hasn’t reported the variety of ESA children in non-public faculties, what number of college students come from which districts, what their academic wants are, or the proportion that switch again into public faculties throughout the college yr — all data the state division of training already collects.
Clark isn’t essentially arguing for higher knowledge. She’s towards imposing standardized checks or monetary reporting necessities on non-public faculties and fogeys who obtain ESA funds. “Any authorities program goes to have some type of proportion of misuse,” she instructed me. “We simply know that that’s the case. However I don’t assume that we must always have a look at ESA packages like we have to prohibit them much more as a result of we don’t need dad and mom shopping for Legos.”
However one state’s horror story is one other state’s coverage victory.
After Florida’s Step up For College students program quietly added theme park entrance charges as an authorised voucher expense in 2023, the following controversy ended up affirming Disney tickets as a legit expense. Earlier this yr, a proposal to excluded related bills was stripped by an modification handed two days earlier than the tip of the legislative session. “Many households contacted their lawmakers or testified at committee hearings opposing the modifications, arguing they might restrict their potential to offer arts and different enrichment alternatives to their kids,” Step Up’s spokesman reported. Tellingly, each the proposal for reform and the modification that killed it had been sponsored by Republicans, tussling over the outer limits of what “college selection” means.
Regardless of the debates inside legislative chambers across the nation, Clark continues to deal with the constituency that almost all issues — specifically, conservative households on the lookout for publicly-funded choices outdoors public faculties.
Love Your College expanded into West Virginia in 2022, simply because the state started accepting functions for its personal voucher program, the HOPE scholarship, which began later that yr and is ready to develop into common in 2026. On the time, Leah Peck had a job recruiting foster dad and mom, however she had a superb rapport with Clark throughout their first assembly over Zoom, and she or he was floored by the pay she was supplied to hitch Love Your College — $3,500 a month to work at home on a mission whose outlines remained hazy to her. “We had been paid to sort of float round and publicize the HOPE scholarship,” she mentioned. “For what we had been doing, I used to be like, ‘The place was all this cash coming from?’”
Over the following two years, Peck co-hosted a podcast, posted about Love Your College in dozens of Fb teams and did outreach throughout the state, handing out pens and stickers at church buildings, storefronts and libraries. At most occasions, she mentioned, she spoke with fewer than 5 individuals. “It might be trying to find individuals to assist.” As in Arizona, Love Your College’s remit was to supply ostensibly impartial “navigation” providers, however in follow, she mentioned “it was undoubtedly HOPE scholarship, HOPE scholarship, HOPE scholarship.”
Peck was impressed with Clark’s poise and charisma, and with the way in which that she appeared to have grown a base of assist amongst Arizona ESA dad and mom, however she felt Love Your College was an odd slot in West Virginia — practically everybody she met who was within the HOPE scholarships had both been in a position to determine issues out on their very own, or had already gotten assist from a longstanding native non-profit. Peck didn’t see the necessity for what one native college selection advocate described as “franchising a mommy group.”
Jennifer Wolverton, a homeschooling advocate in Alabama, had an identical response to Love Your College’s growth there, the place the group’s sole worker is a frontrunner of the state Republican celebration who rapidly started publishing op-eds defending Alabama’s CHOOSE Act with arguments reprised from Clark’s speaking factors on Arizona’s ESAs. She worries that Alabama will replicate the expertise of different states the place the majority of voucher funds go to current non-public faculties.
“The highly effective individuals of the varsity selection motion have determined to fund a franchise,” Wolverton instructed me, citing the Koch brothers’ community, and Ed Selection, a non-profit based by the conservative economist Milton Friedman, who first proposed college vouchers in 1955. Final October, Wolverton attended a weekend-long media coaching for advocates at Ed Selection’s Indianapolis headquarters, the place individuals bought suggestions on filmed mock interviews at the start and finish of the session. In between, the organizers used one in all Clark’s previous media appearances as a featured instance, a “Good Morning America-type setting,” Wolverton recalled, the place Clark parried each try and steer her off-message. “I hear what they’re saying, and I wish to reply,” Wolverton lamented, of her personal media appearances. Clark “is aware of how to enter an interview and have your belongings you wish to get out of it with out getting derailed,” she mentioned. “She is aware of what the speaking factors are.”
Clark has continued to look past Arizona. In October, Clark wrote an op-ed for the Louisville Courier-Journal, and appeared on public tv in Kentucky supporting a constitutional modification that will clear the way in which for a voucher program. On TV, Clark was launched not as an operative of conservative funders who’ve been pushing vouchers for many years however as an Arizona mom “who says college selection is working for her household.” ESAs “utterly reworked our lives,” she mentioned. “We had been in a position to afford one of the best therapies, one of the best packages, one of the best tutors, and now all 5 of my children are on an ESA as a result of now, it’s common.”
The modification in Kentucky failed, simply as voters rejected pro-voucher measures in Nebraska and Colorado, however Clark doesn’t see the consequence impacting ESAs’ nationwide trajectory. “The longer term that oldsters overwhelmingly need is one filled with decisions for his or her child’s training,” she wrote to me by e-mail. If that’s true, it’s a choice that hasn’t proven up on the poll field but. However should you take Arizona’s expertise as a template, it could not have to.
