PHOENIX — The Goldwater Institute has scored a major victory in the battle over the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, with the Arizona Supreme Court finding the union-backed Protect Education Act fell below the number of valid signatures necessary to qualify for the November ballot.
But school choice supporters say the defeat was not the result of a single lawsuit or a last-minute intervention. They say it was the culmination of a months-long fight waged on multiple fronts — involving strategic decisions by Arizona House Speaker Steve Montenegro and his staff, the creation of a competing ballot initiative by House Chief of Staff Grant Hanna, millions of dollars in support from the American Federation for Children, petition-review efforts by school-choice advocates, and ultimately the Goldwater Institute’s successful court challenge to the validity of signatures submitted by the union-backed campaign.
“The teacher unions came after Arizona parents and lost,” said Montenegro. “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.”
Saving School Choice fight began months before anyone entered a courtroom
After the Arizona Education Association and its allies launched the Protect Education Act, Montenegro made defending Arizona’s universal school-choice program a top priority.
His chief of staff, Grant Hanna, responded by creating Fortify AZ, a competing ballot initiative offering voters ESA reforms while preserving universal access to the program.
Hanna later publicly confirmed his role in creating the effort.
“After the unions [introduced] their petition, [House Speaker Steve Montenegro] told me saving school choice was priority #1,” Hanna told the Arizona Agenda.
Hanna said he formed Fortify AZ as an alternative and managed the effort alongside the American Federation for Children.
The strategy changed the battlefield
Instead of allowing opponents of universal ESAs to gather signatures uncontested, Fortify put another ESA proposal into circulation and competed for petition circulators, voters and resources.
The American Federation for Children (AFC) supplied the financial muscle.
AFC invested approximately $1.3 million in Fortify, with nearly all of that money going toward paid signature gathering. Hanna later explained that Fortify was also intended to create leverage by increasing the costs facing the union-backed campaign and creating an opportunity for negotiations.
That strategy would prove consequential.
The Unions Now Blame the Competing Petition
Months later, the very campaign Fortify was designed to counter is pointing to the competing initiative while explaining problems with its own signatures.
The Protect Education campaign submitted 421,451 signatures — seemingly providing a substantial cushion above the roughly 256,000 valid signatures necessary to qualify.
But after duplicates, circulator problems and other invalid signatures were removed, that cushion disappeared.
Protect Education spokesperson Olivia Fierro has defended the campaign by arguing that the competing ESA petition contributed to voter confusion.
“Regarding duplicates, voters sign petitions all the time, and it can be hard to remember which one they signed — especially when a decoy petition was out there trying to confuse people,” Fierro wrote, referring to the competing ESA measure that would have preserved universal access.
“When we turned in 421,451 signatures, we knew we turned in far more than enough to qualify.”
The statement, argue politicos, was a remarkable acknowledgment of the effect the competing initiative had on the battlefield.
The union-backed campaign had previously attacked Fortify as a “decoy.” Now that duplicate and invalid signatures kept its measure off the ballot entirely, its own spokesperson is pointing directly to the existence of that competing petition.
AFC Put Millions Behind the Fight
Fortify was only one part of the American Federation for Children’s involvement.
AFC says it committed more than $6 million in 2026 to defending Arizona’s ESA program and defeating the union-backed effort, including its $1.3 million support for Fortify and a substantial six-figure investment supporting the eventual court challenge.
“AFC is proud to have fought on every battlefield to save the Arizona ESA program from calamity, and we celebrate alongside parents across Arizona at today’s news that the unions are below the amount of valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot in November,” said AFC CEO Tommy Schultz.
AFC maintains that its involvement forced the union campaign into critical strategic errors that ultimately became important to defeating the measure.
But Schultz also warned Arizona Republicans against treating the apparent victory as the end of the fight.
The Protect Education campaign still managed to collect more than 420,000 raw signatures in a matter of months, demonstrating the political vulnerability surrounding the ESA program.
AFC is now calling for Arizona leaders to strengthen the program with reforms that preserve school choice while ensuring responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
Republicans Had a Chance to End the Threat — Until Hoffman Helped Kill the Deal
There was another moment when the Protect Education Act could have disappeared without a court battle at all.
Using the leverage created by Fortify, Hanna and other Republican staff entered negotiations with the Arizona Education Association during the closing days of the legislative session under Montenegro’s direction.
The negotiations produced an extraordinary potential agreement.
Republicans would enact narrower ESA accountability reforms while preserving universal eligibility. The AEA would withdraw its far more restrictive Protect Education Act. Fortify would also withdraw its competing initiative, and lawmakers would step back from two ballot referrals opposed by the teachers’ union.
In other words, Arizona could have removed the existential threat to universal ESAs while accepting targeted reforms to strengthen the program.
Fortify ultimately withdrew its initiative.
The legislative compromise then went before the Senate as HB 2142.
And that is where the strategy nearly collapsed from within Republican ranks.
Senator Jake Hoffman joined Democrats in voting against the compromise, helping defeat it 14-15.
Senate President Warren Petersen also recorded a no vote, although reporting indicated Petersen’s vote was procedural, preserving his ability to move for reconsideration.
Hoffman’s opposition was substantive. The distinction matters.
Hoffman did not oppose school choice. He objected to the concessions contained in the agreement. But the practical consequence of his vote was that the negotiated pathway for getting the union-backed initiative withdrawn disappeared.
AFC responded furiously.
Schultz accused Hoffman and other opponents of destroying a bipartisan agreement that would have protected ESA families from the far greater threat posed by the union initiative.
The disagreement exposed two fundamentally different approaches to protecting school choice.
One demanded ideological purity in the legislative package. The other recognized the political reality facing the ESA program and attempted to use leverage, negotiation, and limited reforms to remove a much larger threat.
Had the Protect Education Act survived the subsequent legal challenge, Hoffman’s vote could have had enormous consequences for more than 100,000 Arizona students participating in the ESA program.
Instead of locking in universal eligibility with narrower accountability reforms, Arizona could have been forced into a statewide campaign over a union-backed initiative imposing significantly greater restrictions on the program.
Fortunately for school-choice families, Republicans had not placed all of their hopes on a single strategy.
Goldwater Takes the Fight to Court
With the negotiated solution dead and the union-backed initiative moving forward, the battle shifted to the validity of its signatures.
The Goldwater Institute challenged the petitions in court, identifying alleged problems involving duplicate signatures, circulator eligibility and registration, incomplete information, and signatures gathered by individuals legally prohibited from circulating petitions.
Other school-choice organizations helped review petitions and identify potentially invalid signatures.
The Arizona Free Enterprise Club was among those heavily involved in scrutinizing the petitions.
According to the Free Enterprise Club, many of the disqualified signatures were duplicates or were collected by legally ineligible circulators with serious criminal histories.
“This is a major victory for Arizona parents, students, and the integrity of our elections,” said Free Enterprise Club President Scot Mussi. “The unions spent millions trying to dismantle school choice and still failed to collect enough lawful, valid signatures. Arizona’s election laws apply to everyone.”
The Goldwater challenge ultimately delivered the blow that the political and legislative strategies had been designed to avoid needing in the first place.
After the challenged signatures and county recorder validity reviews were taken into account, the union-backed campaign fell below the threshold necessary to qualify for the ballot.
A Victory Built on Strategy, Money, Grassroots Work and the Law
Politicos say it would be easy to characterize what happened simply as a Goldwater Institute courtroom victory. Goldwater deserves enormous credit for delivering the legal victory. But the full story is bigger.
Montenegro recognized the threat early and directed his team to make saving school choice the priority.
Hanna created Fortify AZ and, alongside AFC, forced the opposition to fight on a second front.
AFC put serious financial resources behind the strategy — ultimately committing more than $6 million to the Arizona fight.
Fortify created leverage that brought the teachers’ union to the negotiating table.
When a legislative compromise presented an opportunity to eliminate the union initiative entirely, Hoffman helped defeat it, forcing school-choice supporters to continue fighting rather than securing an earlier off-ramp.
The Free Enterprise Club and other advocates scrutinized the petitions.
And Goldwater ultimately took the signature challenge into court and delivered the legal victory.
Perhaps most tellingly, the union-backed campaign is now pointing to the competing petition itself while attempting to explain why some of its signatures failed.
That is what a coordinated political strategy looks like: not relying on one bill, one organization, one lawsuit or one election, but fighting on every available battlefield.
“But no one should mistake this defeat for the end of the fight,” Montenegro warned. “School choice opponents have spent years trying to roll back educational freedom in Arizona, and they will keep trying. Arizona House Republicans will keep standing with parents. We will defend ESAs, protect school choice, and make sure parents, not unions, bureaucrats, or politicians, remain in charge of their children’s education.”
The warning is warranted, say politicos. The union campaign demonstrated that it can gather hundreds of thousands of signatures and mobilize millions of dollars against the ESA program.
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