Arizona was the first state in the country to enact Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, also known as Education Savings Accounts, in 2011. Championed by the state’s Goldwater Institute, a libertarian think tank also tied to the Kochs, these accounts allow families taking their child out of public school to put 90 percent of the child’s share of state education funding toward private education—tuition, tutoring, or other expenses. Eligibility for the program was initially limited to a small group of students, including those with disabilities, but Lesko’s law opened it up to all 1.1 million of Arizona’s public-school kids. “That makes the Arizona expansion the broadest to date,” The New York Times reported when Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed it into law in April of last year.

There are limits to this program, even under the expansion. Total enrollment, for example, will be capped at 30,000 students in 2022. But the downsides of the policy are glaringly apparent: It siphons funds from existing public schools without ensuring that the money is then invested in promising alternatives. And that’s to say nothing of the program’s management. As The Arizona Republic reported in June: “The warnings of lax oversight and little accountability proved prescient. Money was misspent but the state recovered almost none of it.”

For example, some parents transferred all of their scholarship money into a 529 college-savings account and then left the program—preventing the state from recouping the funds. Others pocketed the money and sent their kids to public schools. Some purchased books or other materials using their state-issued debit cards and then immediately returned them. The refunded money was put on gift cards, allowing parents to spend it with no scrutiny. And despite the Legislature’s vehement opposition to public money paying for abortions, the ESA program became one of the only state programs to allegedly fund the procedure. In 2014, payment to a health clinic led education officials to believe ESA money had been spent on an abortion.

“You can’t even make some of this stuff up,” said Carol Burris, the executive director of the national Network for Public Education. “It’s just a really crazy scheme that’s draining the money out of public schools.” Which is why Tipirneni rejects the idea that reforming education requires privatizing it. “If you’re going to invest in new innovative teaching methods and creative approaches to curriculum, I say put that in the public schools,” she said. “That’s where the majority of our kids are going. We should be encouraging that growth, because honestly our public schools are at the center of our communities.”

Whether or not Lesko wins the special election in April, defenders of her law will still have plenty of reason to worry about the referendum this fall. As Chalkbeat education reporter Matt Barnum points out, “When school vouchers have been put up for a vote, they’ve almost always lost, including in DeVos’s home state of Michigan.” The Arizona policy only passed the legislature with a razor-thin margin, drawing opposition from all Democrats and even some Republicans. But winning the referendum is a top priority for Lesko’s wealthy allies. The Washington Post reported in January that “Koch donors see Arizona as ground zero in their push” to transform America’s education system this year. The newspaper covered a Koch seminar at a resort outside Palm Springs, California, where Ducey touted the ESA expansion and “warned that, under Arizona law, if advocates lose at the ballot box, they will not be able to legislate on the topic in the future.” “This is a very real fight in my state,” Ducey reportedly said.