School choice is winning nationwide, and state after state is following the Goldwater Institute’s lead in enacting education savings accounts, giving students the opportunities they deserve. But opponents of school choice—and their allies in the media—aren’t happy with the success, so they’re on the attack.
Case in point: The Washington Post launched a biased and untrue attack on Arizona’s pioneering school choice program this week, profiling a Phoenix school district and pinning blame for its shuttered schools on the state’s expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.
But it just isn’t true. In a new blog post, the Goldwater Institute reveals that though students have left the Roosevelt Elementary School District in south Phoenix, only 102 students who previously attended the district left for an ESA. Meanwhile, 8,440 students left to attend a different public school. Why spin a false narrative? Simply put, opponents of school choice see that it’s working—and they’re pulling out the stops to shut it down.
In a pair of briefs filed with the Arizona Supreme Court today, the Goldwater Institute urged the justices to take up two cases involving one of the most sacred of constitutional rights: the trial by jury.
That right—which the state constitution pronounces “inviolate”—is routinely undermined by bureaucracies who insist on trying cases in their own in-house administrative “hearings” instead of in ordinary courts. But last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional at the federal level in a case called Jarkesy. Now, we’ve asked the state’s high court to implement the same principle at the state level.
Click here to read more about the issue from Timothy Sandefur, Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute.
There’s probably no aspect of individual freedom that’s more celebrated than freedom of speech. The right to express our opinions and advocate for our beliefs is a basic part of how we live in a constitutional democracy. But there’s also a lot of misunderstanding about how free speech really works.
Watch our Foundations of Freedom video featuring Goldwater’s Timothy Sandefur to learn more about this fundamental right.
