Montini: Billionaire voucher vultures are circling your money (and your schools)

It’s going to get ugly.

The billionaire Koch brothers, with the help and support of their local lackey, Gov. Doug Ducey, are about to spend millions of dollars to convince you to give your money to wealthy people and to ruin public schools.

It’s that simple.

Last year the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that would expand the school voucher program called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) to anyone who wants one.

Like Robin Hood ... in reverse

The program was originally intended to provide taxpayer education funds to those who are genuinely in need.

The new law would have given any parent who wanted to send a child to a private or parochial school somewhere around $5,000 a year.

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Sounds good. Except private schools cost a lot more than that and often include a bunch of other fees. So the new voucher program won’t do much good for a working class family.

Good private schools are much more expensive than that. And it wouldn’t include those ancillary fees, uniform costs, expected “donations,” and more.

An affluent family, however, would do great. Parents who already could afford to send their child to a $15,000-per-year school (like Ducey) would get a $5,000 check, each and every year, from the state.

In other words, it is welfare for the wealthy.

Paid for by the middle class.

You.

A volunteer group called Save Our Schools Arizona (SOS) decided to fight this, and filed petitions with 111,540 Arizona voter signatures on them to challenge the law by putting it before voters in the 2018 election.

The billionaire Koch boys, along with the billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, love the idea of the wealthy taking money from the rest of us by way of vouchers.

And elected officials like Ducey love the big, big, BIG money the Koch boys bring to the table for ambitious politicians, and are happy to serve as their political vigilantes.

In this instance, he’s working against the people who elected him. You.

A promise to help billionaires

At a fancy summit sponsored by the Koch brothers Ducey promised to carry the flag for the wealthy, saying, “This is very real fight in my state. I didn’t run for governor to play small ball. I think this is an important idea."

He’s right. Saving public education and protecting the middle class is an important idea.

If only that’s what he supported.

As it is, the good folks who fought to get the Legislature’s bad law on the ballot, where citizens will get to decide, will now have to deal with millions of dollars from out of state pouring into an advertising campaign.

As it is, the ESA program is a mess.

An investigative report by The Arizona Republic’s Rob O'Dell and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez found oversight of the program to be “almost a sham,” in the words of one critic. The state couldn’t produce audits of the program or any number of other records.  Money was misspent. The state recovered almost none of it. And many of the vouchers went to the wealthy.

Expansion without accountability

“There has been too little attention to the accountability and administration of it and much more attention on expanding it,” said Dana Wolfe Naimark, president and CEO of the Children’s Action Alliance.

Now our Koch brothers-owned Legislature and governor want to make a program current used by a few thousand kids available to all 1.1 million Arizona students. It won’t be an easy sell – hopefully. That’s why they’ll spend so much on a deceptive advertising campaign.

Terry Goddard, Arizona’s former attorney general and co-chair the grassroots Outlaw Dirty Money campaign is trying to prevent just this type of interference.

He issued a statement a while back saying in part, “What will happen now is front groups will spring up in Arizona through the Koch Brothers’ network. They’ll move cash from one innocent sounding operation to another so that when you see a TV ad, online video or a piece of mail you won’t see their fingerprints… Arizona citizens have a right to know who is playing politics in our state, trying to fool us into supporting their agenda.”

He’s right. You do.

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