K‑12 Education and School Choice

Chandler Unified School District, Arizona’s second‑largest district, has voted to eliminate about 60 administrative, dean and coaching positions after losing more than 4,000 students since 2022, a decline Superintendent Franklin R. Narducci links in part to "competition with charter schools" and the state’s universal school‑choice and ESA voucher programs. At a Wednesday board meeting, district finance chief Lana Berry said enrollment has fallen steadily since the legislature expanded Empowerment Scholarship Accounts statewide in 2022, with the exodus expected to continue as families use roughly $7,000 per child in ESA funds to leave neighborhood schools. Chandler Education Association president Laurel Miller blasted what she called the legislature’s "historical underfunding" of public education and a nearly $3 billion allocation to a "fraud‑ridden" ESA system, arguing that those dollars have "forced districts to make dire decisions like cutting beloved staff and closing community schools." A teacher warned that remaining staff will be stretched to do "the work of three people," and predicted more parents will bolt to charters if services like librarians disappear. The Chandler cuts put a concrete face on a broader national trend: as more red states follow Arizona’s universal school‑choice model, large districts are beginning to shed jobs and reconfigure operations in response to shifting student headcount and per‑pupil funding.

Public school enrollment has fallen sharply in several large U.S. districts and states — Colorado lost about 10,000 students this year as homeschooling rises statewide, Houston ISD lost roughly 8,300 students this year (more than 16,000 over two years and about 15,000 immediately after COVID) and now enrolls about 184,109, Chicago Public Schools is down nearly 22% since 2011–12, New York City’s traditional public schools have lost more than 117,000 students since 2019–20, and Washington state’s public‑school population is about 50,000 lower than in 2019–20. Officials and analysts point to growing charter, private, virtual and homeschooling options — and policies such as Texas’s new $1 billion universal ESA program — as intensifying competition, prompting districts to cut budgets or add programs to try to lure families back amid concerns about academic proficiency.