Arizona families love having lots of education options. Three out of four parents support the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program that empowers families to choose the learning environments that work best for their children.

Unfortunately, opponents of education freedom are doing everything they can to eliminate or undermine the ESA.

Previous attacks on the ESA have failed due to the program’s popularity. In 2022, anti-choice group Save Our Schools failed to gather enough signatures to refer the universal ESA expansion to the ballot. Earlier this year, Democratic legislators failed to pass legislation to regulate the ESA to death. Most recently, Gov. Katie Hobbs failed to scale back ESA eligibility in the budget.

Now Attorney General Kris Mayes is usurping the authority of the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) in a brazen attempt to undermine the ESA bureaucratically.

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Earlier this month, Mayes sent a letter to the department ordering them to dramatically change how they implement the ESA program. Under her radical reinterpretation of the ESA statute, ADE could only approve the purchase of supplementary materials “required or recommended” by a written curriculum, even though the ESA statute itself contains no such limitation. Nor has that been the past practice of the department under successive administrations for nearly 15 years.

Mayes is clearly trying to gum up how the ESA works. If the education department were to follow the AG’s interpretation of the ESA statute, families couldn’t even purchase basic classroom supplies or textbooks, let alone museum passes or microscopes, unless they could show the department a curriculum that required or recommended it.

Not only is this an entirely unnecessary burden on parents, but it would take an inordinate amount of time and resources for ADE to review all the curricula that tens of thousands of parents would now have to file—thereby further delaying the approval or reimbursement of ESA purchases.

ESA families are not happy. “We’ve always been able to buy textbooks, books of all kinds, and essential classroom supplies,” said Nupur Tustin, a mother of three ESA students from a rural town in La Paz County. “There should be no distinction between public school children, who receive these items as a matter of course, and ours.”

Fortunately, some politicians are standing up for ESA families.

“Parents are understandably concerned about Attorney General Mayes’ politically motivated investigation of the ESA program,” said Arizona Speaker of the House Ben Toma, a Republican, on X. “I trust [the Arizona Department of Education] will interpret the law and administer the ESA program as the legislature intended.”

Toma sent a letter to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, making clear that the department of education need not adopt the AG’s interpretation of the law.

“ADE is best situated to determine how to implement its policies in a way that fulfills legislative intent but does not burden parents with unnecessary bureaucratic requirements,” wrote Toma.

Regarding the AG’s assertion that “supplementary materials” require a written curriculum, Toma observed that the “legislative record does not support such an overly restrictive view or burdensome administration of the ESA Program.”

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Unfortunately, Horne’s office appears to be caving to Mayes’s demands. Just two days after receiving the attorney general’s demand letter, ADE replied with a letter stating that they would capitulate.

“The [ADE] administration has completely failed,” said Natasha, a mother of two ESA students in rural Mohave County. “Those in charge just rolled right over. Failed the children, failed the parents.”

Now the Goldwater Institute is pushing back. Earlier this week, Goldwater sent Horne’s office its own letter eviscerating the AG’s strained legal logic and demonstrating conclusively why the “practices established by administrations of multiple successive state superintendents of public instruction from both political parties” were correct.

This isn’t the first time Mayes has distorted the law and abused the authority of her office for political purposes. As Goldwater’s Matt Beienburg noted, “just days before firing off its attack against ADE for its application of state statute, the AG’s office was forced to concede and drop its efforts to override the provisions of the recent bipartisan state budget agreement.”

The purpose of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program is to give families the freedom and flexibility to customize their child’s education. The Arizona Department of Education should focus on advancing that purpose and ignore those who seek to undermine it.