Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

Hi everybody.

Welcome welcome.

Hi everyone.

It's early evening in a small office in Phoenix, Arizona and Rachel a former teacher

is running an online phone bank on behalf of a campaign group Save Our Schools, Arizona.

She's getting volunteers to call voters ahead of

local elections. Their mission is to drum up support for candidates who back public

school education. For Arizona is at the forefront of a political battle

over the future of education in America.

All right so we are actually going to be making calls into two different areas today.

In 2022, Arizona's then Republican Governor introduced a controversial new policy, Universal School

Vouches called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts or ESAs.

Now if any parent chooses private over public education they can apply for a voucher

roughly equivalent to the amount of money the state would have given to a public

school to educate their child.

The parent can then spend that voucher on private school or on homeschooling their kid.

In essence, taxpayers are now subsidizing private education.

So we've really been the kind of laboratory for school vouchers here in the country.

We know that at the same time that us standing up and fighting back it's also showing the rest of the country that we

don't have to give up on our public schools.

On average vouchers are worth around seven to 8,000 dollars a year but can be much more if the child has special needs.

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