The teachers’ unions and their cronies just won’t quit their crusade to end education freedom—even if that means submitting invalid signatures for a destructive ballot measure aimed at removing tens of thousands of families from Arizona’s landmark school choice program. But that won’t fly on the Goldwater Institute’s watch, which is why we filed a lawsuit to challenge those signatures and protect families.
The truth is that Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program is thriving; more than 100,000 families are using it to choose the educational options that work best for their children. And the program has rigorous guardrails to prevent misspending—state data show it is one of the most efficient and accountable programs serving taxpayers. Despite that, union activists are doing all they can to tear down the program and lock kids into failing government-run schools they control.
To get an anti-ESA measure on November’s ballot, a Washington, D.C., special interest group spent millions of dollars to pay circulators to collect signatures from the public. The problem: evidence shows tens of thousands of those signatures are invalid.
The Goldwater Institute will always stand up for education freedom and will vigorously fight this shameless attack by union activists who are attempting to game the system.
No student should be suspended for asking a legitimate question about school safety, but that’s exactly what happened to a young student in Jackson, Mo. Now, the Goldwater Institute is standing up for that student’s constitutional rights and taking her case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case involves a seventh grader who came across a troubling social media post that she thought might target her school. Worried, she messaged another student about it. But when he shared the seventh grader’s message publicly, it caused widespread alarm, and the seventh grader was suspended for 180 days—essentially an entire school year—even though police quickly determined it was all a misunderstanding.
The case raises several important free-expression and due-process questions, including whether the girl’s First Amendment rights were violated when school officials punished her simply because they misinterpreted her innocent words.
Public schools exist to educate children, not to act as round-the-clock speech police. The Goldwater Institute will never stop fighting for free speech for students—and everyone else.
It may be the most basic principle of individual rights: the right to own something necessarily includes the right to decide how to use it—including the right to rent it. That’s why the Goldwater Institute has filed a brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals defending the right of Texas homeowners to rent their property on a short-term basis.
The case involves an ordinance in New Braunfels, Texas, which bans homeowners from renting their property short-term, even if no one is harmed by it. The owners sued, arguing that the ordinance violates their property rights. But the federal judges dismissed the case, saying the homeowners couldn’t come to court because the property right they claimed doesn’t even exist. By the court’s logic, the government has unlimited power to restrict your right to use your property whenever it feels like it.
The Goldwater Institute has argued for years that home-sharing is a long-accepted use of private property that has been practiced for centuries. The Fifth Circuit should review this case and recognize that property rights necessarily include the right to rent.
