Picture a quiet ESA family in north Phoenix. Their daughter spent three years falling behind in a one-size-fits-all classroom, coming home in tears, convinced she could not learn. Today she attends a small school where teachers know her name, her faith is honored, and she is finally reading at grade level. Her parents did not need a politician to rescue her. They needed the freedom to choose.
She is one of 102,852 Arizona K–12 children whose family has made that choice through an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA).
Now picture someone approaching her parents at the grocery store with a clipboard, asking for a signature on a petition that would slam the door on her future. Then picture a second canvasser, on a different corner, with a different clipboard—offering to “save” ESAs while quietly imposing the same kind of regulation. That is the choice Arizona voters now face.
Two Petitions. One Target. Your Family’s Freedom.
Petition One, backed by the Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona, is dressed up in the language of “accountability.” It would impose an arbitrary income cap that removes 15% of current ESA students and locks out more than a quarter of Arizona families with school-age children; force private schools to administer the same mandatory state tests that have produced district proficiency rates below 40%; reclaim unspent funds from families who save responsibly; and bury parents in a reimbursement-only process that forces them to pay out of pocket and wait months for bureaucratic approval.
Petition Two, filed by a PAC called Fortify AZ and bankrolled by the national American Federation for Children, is wrapped in the language of “educational freedom” itself, which makes it the more deceptive of the two. It leaves eligibility alone but eliminates the program’s flexibility: a state-run online marketplace replacing parents’ debit cards, state-approved exams for non-traditional students, government-maintained lists of approved curricula, and new vendor oversight layered onto a program that already has it. Its heaviest weight falls on homeschool and alternative education families.
Sixty-six percent of Arizonans support ESAs (EdChoice/Morning Consult, February 2026). Roughly twenty percent of ESA students have disabilities. Two well-funded petitions on the streets at the same time also raise a practical danger: a voter who hears “ESA reform” twice in two weeks may sign one petition thinking they have signed the other. And once a ballot measure passes, the Legislature cannot fix it. Only voters can undo what voters approve. The damage from either measure would be permanent.
Decline to Sign. Both of Them.
When a paid signature gatherer approaches you, know what they are really asking. Whichever clipboard they carry, union-backed or Fortify AZ, the ask is the same: surrender the freedom of more than 100,000 Arizona families to choose what is best for their children. Read every petition before you sign anything. Then decline both.
Tell your friends, your neighbors, and your church to do the same.
Visit azlovesesas.com to take the pledge against any ESA ballot measure, download yard signs and shareable graphics, and equip your community to defend educational freedom. Arizona families are not going back.
A Bigger Picture: Strong Families Build Strong Students
ESAs matter because parents matter. And that same principle—that flourishing flows from the family—was reaffirmed this spring when the Institute for Family Studies and the Center for Christian Virtue released the 2026 Family Structure Index. Arizona ranked 35th in the nation.
That number is sobering. But it is a starting line, not a finish line. Arizona has climbed four places since 2020, and the path forward is remarkably clear.
Social scientists call it the Success Sequence; three life choices that, taken in order, give young adults a near-guaranteed path out of poverty and into the middle class:
- Graduate from high school.
- Get and keep a full-time job in your twenties.
- Marry before having children.
The data is striking. Ninety-seven percent of young adults who follow all three steps avoid poverty in their late 20s and 30s. Eighty-six percent reach at least the middle class. And the benefits cross every demographic line: more than 90% of Black, Hispanic, and young adults from lower-income families who follow the sequence escape poverty as they enter adulthood.
The rewards extend well beyond a paycheck. Young adults who follow the Sequence are 50% less likely to be emotionally distressed and twice as likely to still be living in an intact family in their thirties.
This is not abstract policy. It is hope made practical, a truth every parent, pastor, coach, and teacher can pass on to the rising generation. It is the foundation that makes educational freedom, and every other family policy CAP champions, possible.
Whether the question is who chooses your child’s school or what choices your child makes as a young adult, the answer is the same: families and communities of faith are the engines of human flourishing.
That is the Arizona we are building. And we are doing it together.
America Reads the Bible
From April 18 to 25, nearly 500 leaders read the entire Bible aloud—Genesis to Revelation—at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., for America Reads the Bible. One Week. One Nation. One Book.
The headline moment came Tuesday, April 21, when President Trump became the first sitting president since Reagan to read Scripture aloud from the Oval Office—2 Chronicles 7, where God promises, “if my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray … I will heal their land.” Watch it here.
ICYMI
- Sign up for our webinar discussing the FSI report
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