School Choice and School Closures

What critics get wrong

There’s a famous statistical truth frequently shared in college courses and pop economics books: crime rates are strongly associated with ice cream sales. If this was the level of rigor we used to make public policy decisions, we might move to ban ice cream in the name of law and order. This would be a mistake, of course. Ice cream does not cause crime, but it is more popular during warmer months, which also happens to be the time of year crime rates are higher.

This may sound like a silly example, but the human need to find patterns and certainty in the world around us leads us to succumb to this simplistic thinking often.

The Washington Post published one such example on August 6.

The story (in greatly simplified form) used the Roosevelt Elementary School District in Arizona to illustrate two trends: public school closures and the pressures of school choice.

While stopping short of saying one thing is causing another, the structure of the piece, its selection of quotes, and the context it elected to incorporate implies that Arizona’s school choice system is an existential threat to its public school system and spurred school closures in Roosevelt.

It did not.

Both extremes cannot happen at the same time

Before we get to that though, we want to make sure not to gloss over an important point. Both within this piece, and in the larger conversation about private school choice, opponents have made two arguments:

Argument #1: Private school choice drains students and their funding from public schools

Argument #2: Private school scholarships overwhelmingly go to children already in private schools.

See the problem?

Both of these things cannot be true at the same time. If the program led to massive new costs for the state, then students are not mass-exiting public schools for the ESA program. On the other hand, if growth in the ESA program primarily represents public school students leaving for private education, the state is not bearing a new financial burden. Beware of anyone (or any article) that makes both claims.

A microcosm of public school trends

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the Washington Post piece uses the Roosevelt Elementary School District as a case study for public school concerns. We will take that case study one step further—let’s look at the history of Roosevelt in data.

In Roosevelt’s case, we have clear data: the number of ESA switchers is small, and the fiscal impact is minimal. The real story is a district that has been losing students for years, well before universal ESAs arrived, and has not adjusted accordingly.

Let’s look at the big picture. Between 2013 and 2022, the most recent year with federal data available, enrollment in Roosevelt Elementary School District fell by 27%. That’s not a post-ESA phenomenon. Arizona didn’t expand its ESA program universally until 2022. The downward trend was already well underway.

This pattern isn’t unique to Roosevelt, or even to Arizona. Public school enrollment has been declining nationwide, driven by a mix of demographic change, pandemic-related disruptions, and a growing number of families opting for homeschooling, microschools, or alternative private options. States with and without robust school choice programs are all facing the same headwinds and grappling with the fiscal and operational challenges of educating fewer students in facilities built for more.

It is misleading to suggest an ESA program created in 2022 is triggering a mass exodus from a district facing such issues for so long. Even if one was concerned about the ESA exacerbating issues, a look at the data shows there is no straw breaking the camel’s back here.

A drop in Roosevelt’s bucket

According to the Arizona Department of Education’s latest ESA report, just 129 students currently in the ESA program were previously enrolled in a Roosevelt public school. To put that in context, the district enrolled about 7,300 students in 2022, so we’re talking about less than 2% of enrollment in the district.

The financial impact was similarly negligible. The average ESA award that year was $10,287. Multiply that by 129 students, and you get about $1.3 million in reduced funding. That may sound significant in isolation, but Roosevelt’s total revenue was $150 million, according to federal data. The ESA-driven “loss” amounts to less than 1% of the district’s total budget. We don’t think it’s accurate to call this migration of students an “exodus” and significant harm when 99.1% of the district’s budget remains intact from one year to the next.

Staffing Trends: A Misaligned Response

Even if you’re still concerned about the sustainability of Roosevelt, you can at least rest easy knowing its financial standing has only improved as its enrollment has declined. Data reported by state education agencies to the U.S. Department of Education reveal an interesting pattern.

We mentioned earlier that Roosevelt saw enrollment declines long before Arizona expanded ESA eligibility to all K-12 students in 2022. Between 2013 and 2022, the most recent year available from the U.S. Education Department, Roosevelt’s enrollment declined by 27 percent. During that same period, total district revenue (adjusted for inflation) increased by 20 percent, and revenue per student rose by 66 percent. A significant part of these resources were from Covid relief (ESSER) funds in 2022. Looking at the period up to the prior year (2021), real total funding still increased 2% despite enrollment declining 25%. This means that the district today has significantly more real resources, both overall and on a per-student basis, than it did a decade ago, not less.

The article stated that declines in enrollment have caused “districts to cut staff, close schools or anticipate that they will need to do so in coming years.” We don’t know what Roosevelt is anticipating, but we do know what they have done as their population has shrunk. It might surprise you.

Between 2015 and 2024, Roosevelt’s student population declined by 24%. Over that same period, the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) teachers fell by 20%. But the number of non-FTE teaching staff (such as paraprofessionals, aides, and specialists) actually increased by 10%.

In other words, the district shrank its core teaching staff while expanding its non-teaching or part-time personnel. We’ll avoid editorializing here and leave it up to readers to decide if that is a wise response to changing circumstances.

Facing Reality, Not Finding Scapegoats

School closures are never easy. They disrupt communities, strain families, and carry a heavy emotional toll. But they’re also a reality when a district is serving far fewer students than it once did.

District leaders have hard decisions to make. But blaming ESAs for a long-term enrollment trend, and for a less-than-1% drop in funding, doesn’t help anyone. It distracts from the need to adapt, innovate, and rethink how we deliver public education in a changing world.