The first thing she saw were the flags outside. Bright against the Arizona sun, LDS imagery is displayed next to an orthodontist’s office in a Mesa strip mall. Next door was a China Palace. And there, tucked away in the middle of everyday business life, was Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K–8 school that, to at least one mother looking for alternatives to public school, seemed to be just what she had been searching for.
Her son was enrolled. She began taking money out of his Empowerment Scholarship Account, Arizona’s equivalent of a school voucher that provides families with more than $7,000 annually in taxpayer funds for private education. For a brief moment, it seemed as though the system was operating precisely as planned. The individual parent pickup meetings followed. The kind where you are called in by yourself.
At that point, she discovered that Title of Liberty would no longer be a school.
There isn’t a single negative story about what transpired in Phoenix. In a state that has adopted school choice more vigorously than practically any other in the nation—and with fewer restrictions than most people are aware of—this pattern is subtly recurring. The private schools that receive taxpayer funding are subject to virtually no transparency requirements under Arizona’s ESA program. Financial stability disclosures are not required. No data on academic performance that has been independently verified. In a very real sense, parents are shopping blind when it comes to schools.
Formerly known as ARCHES Academy, Title of Liberty was a charter school. Its charter had been revoked by regulators. It reopened as a voucher-funded private religious institution, and new families were never made aware of its past. That series of actions—closing one door, opening another, collecting public funds, and so on—makes it difficult to ignore its sinister convenience.
Phoenix Modern presents an alternative narrative, albeit one that is not wholly comforting. In order to replace a broken air conditioner, the K–8 school near Central Avenue and Indian School Road, which was founded on the notion that kids are self-directed learners rather than students in the conventional sense, began crowdfunding.
That’s not a small annoyance in Arizona’s desert heat; rather, it’s an indication that something is seriously wrong. When parents began investigating, they discovered what they had feared: a school that would most likely close on its own and a governing body in financial ruin. As a result, they created their own nonprofit, put together a board with real experience, and pushed through a hasty charter transfer. It was approved in April by the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools. It was a minor, unyielding triumph that shouldn’t have been required.
Perhaps the most sobering warning is found in StarShine Academy from 2018. Following a $12 million expansion that it was unable to maintain, the school declared bankruptcy. Nearly $3 million was still owed when the charter was revoked. Even at that point, the founder continued to insist that a solution was on the horizon. Charter operators seem to have a certain faith in their own story, which can be either beneficial or detrimental.
What’s happening in Phoenix and increasingly in other states that are following Arizona’s lead isn’t just about education. It’s a story about public funds going into places with virtually no accountability architecture, about parents having to do all the due diligence that institutions should, and about kids having to live with the fallout from decisions made in boardrooms and strip-mall offices they will never see. It turns out that the free market doesn’t grade on a curve, and when schools close, children suffer the consequences.
