About 100,000 Arizona students, 19 percent with a disability, most new enrollees coming from district schools. What the data shows — including the strongest evidence against our side.
If the only thing you have read about Arizona's education savings accounts is a story about somebody buying something ridiculous with public money, you have an incomplete picture. Here is the fuller one.
The basic numbers
- About 100,208 students were enrolled as of late July 2026.
- Roughly 19 percent — about 16,500 kids — are students with a disability, against about 14 percent in district public schools. Fifty-two percent of them are autistic.
- 57.2 percent of new enrollees came from a public school, up from 21 percent in 2023.
- Roughly 20,300 students would lose eligibility immediately under the $150,000 cap.
That third number matters. The caricature is that this program subsidizes families already paying private tuition. Increasingly it does not. Most new families are leaving a district school.
Why families leave
The other caricature is that parents are chasing prestige. National survey data says otherwise. What moves a family is usually that something went wrong.
- Bullying — 33 percent, now the single most common reason parents give for switching schools.
- Excessive stress or anxiety — 27 percent.
- Difficulty with teachers — 26 percent.
- Academic needs not being met — 24 percent.
Among homeschooling parents, the top reason given is a safe environment, at 46 percent, against 25 percent of district public school parents.
The strongest case for the cap
There is real evidence on the other side, and it is worth putting in front of you in full.
In May 2024, Brookings found that participation rises with neighborhood affluence: about 74 recipients per 1,000 children in Arizona's highest-income decile against 20 per 1,000 in the lowest. Maps of ESA density and median income in metro Phoenix, they wrote, look remarkably similar. That research is real and well executed.
Here is why it does not settle the question. Brookings measured the uptake rate — what share of kids in an area sign up. A different measure is composition — what share of the people in the program come from each income band. Wealthy families can sign up at higher rates while still being a small slice of participants, simply because there are far more middle-income Arizonans than wealthy ones.
Both things are true at once. And it is composition, not uptake rate, that decides who a $150,000 cliff removes. Fewer than three percent of ESA families are estimated to be above $200,000. The students cut off in year one come out of the middle, not the top.