Giving Compass' Take:

• Matt Beienburg examines the stagnant funding per student in Arizona and how ESAs could help put money back into schools.

• What are the benefits of ESAs? How can the attention be focused back on the individual students experience?

• Read more about ESAs for children of the military.

Arizona funding is up roughly 40 percent. So why don’t our schools feel 40 percent wealthier?

It’s because what matters isn’t total funding, but rather funding available per student. And thanks to some of the fastest population growth in the country, Arizona has many more public school kids than it used to, meaning all those extra dollars are spread thinner.

The Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) programs take part of what the state would have spent covering the cost of a student’s education in a K-12 public school and instead deposit that money into a personalized account that allows the child’s family to pay for special education therapies, private school tuition, curriculum materials, and other teaching tools.

Yet over the last two years, organized opposition groups have persuaded voters that ESAs threaten to defund public schools by draining away students—and therefore dollars.

Omitted from these messages entirely, however, is the fact ESAs actually increase per pupil public school funding. As a new report from the Goldwater Institute documents for the first time, ESAs redirect over $600 per participant back to remaining public school students for teacher pay and other operational uses every time a child opts out of public school and into an ESA.

Read the full article about how ESAs can help funding in Arizona by Matt Beienburg at In Defense of Liberty.