Bob Schaffer: “These proposals have been studied. I am holding in my hand a study of the Arizona scholarship program that exists there.…”

“These proposals have been studied. I am holding in my hand a study of the Arizona scholarship program that exists there. This study was done by Carrie Lips and Jennifer Jacoby. It is only a few months old. And what this study has found is that from 1998 to 2000, the time frame that was studied in this report, the Arizona tax credits generated $32 million for children in Arizona, providing almost 19,000 scholarships for children in the State, and that is through about 30 different organizations that just sprung up after the Arizona legislation passed. But most of those scholarships, in fact, 80 percent of those scholarships were selected on the basis of financial need. So think of that; $32 million invested, a massive cash infusion in the Arizona school system within the State that provided assistance to 19,000 individuals in the State of Arizona. This is money that would not have occurred otherwise. It is money that did not come out of the Arizona school finance act. In fact, that point was clarified at the hearing we had last week, too. These are new dollars. They do not replace, they are not taken from the Arizona school funds, just as our proposal would not take dollars out of the national education budget. But because this tax mechanism exists in another place in the law, it actually creates new money for American education.”