Teachers Union-Backed Effort To Restrict Arizona School Choice Falls Short After Supreme Court Ruling

A multimillion-dollar campaign backed by state and national teachers unions to restrict Arizona’s universal school-choice program has effectively failed to qualify for the November ballot after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the method used to count disputed petition signatures.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in Clark et al. v. Protect Education et al. that a lower court correctly handled duplicate signatures submitted by the campaign behind Proposition 212, the Protect Education Act. The justices remanded the case to Maricopa County Superior Court to apply the county validity rate and formally determine whether the campaign reached the 255,949 valid signatures required for the ballot.

The remaining calculation is expected to leave the measure short. In a joint filing submitted one day before the ruling, attorneys for both the initiative committee and its challengers agreed that the duplicate-signature dispute was the only remaining issue capable of deciding whether Proposition 212 qualified. They stipulated that if those challenged duplicate signatures were treated as invalid under the final tabulation, “the measure does not qualify for the ballot.” The Supreme Court subsequently upheld that treatment.

Supporters acknowledged the defeat following the decision. Arizona’s Family reported that education advocates behind the initiative no longer expect Proposition 212 to appear before voters in November. Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said the outcome “does not reflect what Arizona voters want” and said educators would spend the remaining campaign season supporting candidates aligned with the union’s education priorities.

Arizona House Speaker Steve Montenegro celebrated the expected defeat Monday, saying, “The teacher unions came after Arizona parents and lost. They set out to gut Arizona’s ESA program and take school choice away from families who depend on it. Instead, Arizona voters will not face that threat on the ballot this November. That is a major victory for parents, students, and educational freedom.”

🚨🚨🚨BREAKING: Union-Backed Attack on Arizona School Choice Fails

“The teacher unions came after Arizona parents and lost.

“They set out to gut Arizona’s ESA program and take school choice away from families who depend on it. Instead, Arizona voters will not face that threat… pic.twitter.com/RG4wOulV6h

— Arizona House Republicans (@AZHouseGOP) August 17, 2026

The campaign represented a coordinated effort involving the Arizona Education Association and Save Our Schools Arizona, which were identified as the initiative’s primary sponsors. AEA is the state affiliate of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

The national union supplied the overwhelming majority of the campaign’s financing. The latest campaign-finance figures reported by Capitol Media Services showed Protect Education Accountability Now had spent more than $7.2 million, with approximately $6.5 million coming from the National Education Association and about $500,000 from the Arizona Education Association. Earlier filings showed the national union was already providing nearly all of the campaign’s money during the first quarter of the year, according to Cronkite News.

The campaign said it submitted 421,451 signatures in July, substantially more than the 255,949 valid signatures required for an initiated state statute. The Secretary of State’s initial review subsequently reduced the number eligible for county verification, and opponents challenged additional petitions based on duplicate signatures, circulator registrations and other alleged defects. 

The Goldwater Institute filed the signature challenge July 20, arguing that the petition drive had submitted enough invalid signatures to fall below the constitutional threshold. The organization said more than 75 percent of the signatures had been gathered by paid circulators and characterized the measure as an attack on Arizona’s school-choice program financed largely by an out-of-state union.

The Supreme Court rejected some arguments that would have removed additional signatures while affirming the duplicate-signature calculation that ultimately proved decisive. The court reversed a lower-court ruling that had discarded entire petition sheets when another person appeared to have written a voter’s name or address, holding that only the affected signature line should generally be removed absent evidence that a circulator knowingly submitted a false or fraudulent affidavit. 

On the duplicate-signature question, however, the justices upheld Superior Court Judge David McDowell’s calculation. Arizona law requires officials to retain one signature when a voter signs a petition more than once and discard the duplicates. The initiative committee argued that the lower court’s calculation could effectively penalize it twice for duplicate signatures because county validity rates were also calculated from a sample. The Supreme Court found that the campaign had identified no specific signatures that were actually subtracted twice and held that McDowell had applied the proper method. 

Proposition 212 would have made a series of changes to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, including generally ending eligibility for families earning more than $150,000 per year, with exemptions for certain students. It also would have imposed new requirements on schools and tutors receiving ESA funds, restricted permissible purchases, required fingerprint clearance cards in specified circumstances and generally returned unused annual ESA balances to the state, with 90 percent of returned funds directed to the classroom site fund.

Arizona’s ESA program uses state funding to allow parents to pay for approved education expenses including private-school tuition, curricula, educational supplies and tutoring according to the Arizona Department of Education (ADE). The Legislature expanded eligibility to all Arizona students in 2022, and the Department of Education said this year that participation had grown from about 11,000 students to more than 100,000 in three years. 

The teachers-union-backed initiative was one front in a broader fight over the program during the 2026 legislative session. Republican lawmakers and AEA officials held negotiations over a possible compromise that would have enacted some ESA restrictions in exchange for withdrawal of the initiative, but those negotiations collapsed as reported by Arizona Capitol Times.

School-choice advocates welcomed Tuesday’s decision. Goldwater Institute President and CEO Victor Riches said the unions had spent heavily trying to restrict school choice and failed to secure enough valid signatures. 

“Despite spending an unprecedented amount of money in an effort to deceive voters into restricting school choice, the unions could not convince even a small fraction of Arizonans to sign their petition,” Riches said in a statement.  “Instead, they had to resort to unlawfully collecting thousands of signatures to try to game the system and dupe their way onto the ballot.”

The decision leaves Arizona voters without an ESA-related measure on the November ballot. The Arizona Supreme Court also ruled Tuesday that Proposition 145, a Republican-backed proposal involving scholarship accounts for military families and future changes to the program, cannot appear on the ballot. The justices unanimously affirmed a Maricopa County Superior Court ruling that the measure violated the Arizona Constitution’s separate-amendment rule.