The Arizona Supreme Court effectively killed a ballot measure that would have brought significant oversight and an income cap to the state’s school voucher-like program in a ruling Tuesday.

The battle over the measure brought high drama to the desert — and exposed cracks forming between conservatives over oversight of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, which families can use like vouchers on homeschooling, private school, and other expenses.

Those divisions are still in play: In the state superintendent’s race, Arizona voters will choose between two candidates who disagree sharply about whether the ESAs need more regulations. Yet the ballot measure’s failure demonstrates that enacting new rules for longstanding universal school choice programs can be a difficult task in the current climate — even if some voucher supporters express qualified support for those limits.

Arizona has long been a proving ground for the school choice movement. ESAs became open to all families four years ago. Some say the program represents a huge victory for families and triggered a much-needed explosion in new education models. To others, the accounts have become a boondoggle ripe for abuse.

about misspending and ask voters directly whether to impose new regulations. Conservative school choice supporters treated the proposal like an existential threat to educational freedom, and used every tool from competing ballot measures to signature petition challenges to thwart the effort.

The signature challenge ultimately carried the day. The state Supreme Court invalidated enough signatures that it appears impossible for the measure, known as the Protect Education Act, to make the ballot. The state teachers union, one of the measure’s key supporters, .

While a large contingent of notable Republicans, including former Gov. Doug Ducey, , officials behind it wrote that the court’s ruling “does not reflect what Arizona voters want” .

Polling from late last year had an appetite for better management of the ESA program. What to do with that public sentiment divided school choice supporters.

The American Federation for Children — a staunchly conservative organization once chaired by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — backed a compromise measure intended to defang the Protect Education Act. It accused other pro-voucher groups of “playing Russian roulette” with Arizona children’s futures. Critics of the federation shot back that the group through its efforts in Arizona.

Brian Jodice, a spokesperson for the organization, said in a statement after the state Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that the American Federation for Children would “continue working for real solutions.”

“It is wrong and reckless to risk 100,000 scholarships, every year, to keep this program unchanged and out of step with all other similar programs across the country,” he wrote.

But with the Supreme Court ruling, that gamble appears to have paid off, at least for now.

Robert Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, said Arizona has led the way in “true parental autonomy.” Imposing any guardrails risks reversing that progress for the school choice movement, he said.

“Arizona is way out in front of everyone else,” he said. “That’s where it has the real national impact.”

The court’s ruling comes just weeks after the question of whether and how much to regulate ESAs emerged as a key issue in the election for the top education job in the state.

Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne, a strong school choice supporter, lost his reelection bid in the July Republican primary to state Treasurer Kimberly Yee.

Yee accused Horne of overstepping his authority because his office rejected some Empowerment Scholarship Account purchases by parents because it deemed them not educational expenses. Such decisions should be up to state lawmakers, she said. Horne shot back that Yee’s logic would allow people to use the accounts for suspect items, like Rolex watches.

Republican primary voters favored Yee in a race that became , according to The Beam, an investigative news outlet.

In an email to Chalkbeat, Yee wrote that she’d protect taxpayer dollars “with transparency and accountability.” She did not answer questions about whether she feels the program needs more oversight or specific new guardrails.

Yee will now face Democrat Teresa Ruiz — a former community college president — in November.

Ruiz, who wants to build up oversight of the program if elected, told Chalkbeat that management of the ESA program is the “number one” topic that’s come up when talking to prospective constituents.

“While there are, I’m sure, some appropriate educational expenses, we also know that the un-educational things have gone through,” she said.

With the ballot measure essentially dead, the superintendents’ race could become the next test for how voters feel about regulating school choice.

Passing such regulations through Republican-dominated legislatures has proved challenging. And at least one recent election suggests GOP politicians could pay a price for indicating interest in them.

In 2025, Florida Republicans considered legislation that would , after an audit flagged millions of dollars that weren’t accounted for. They ultimately abandoned the effort. This year, lawmakers in West Virginia considered but did not advance legislation to .

In this year’s Iowa GOP gubernatorial race, U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra using the state’s education savings accounts — only for . He lost his June primary election, despite getting .

Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee in that election, Rob Sand, believes that .

He has conceded, however, that there’s “no chance” Iowa will repeal the program, since Republicans have firm control of the legislature.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

After expressing opposition to the pro-voucher movement he embodied, she added, “Side note — Corey A. DeAngelis, the face of school choice, was a model that catered to the gay community” and included a black-and-white photo of what appeared to be a shirtless DeAngelis in a suggestive pose. 

At the time, the revelation didn’t cause a stir or interfere with DeAngelis’s hectic schedule as a leading lobbyist for “funding students, not systems.” He his book, “The Parent Revolution,” which earned from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. And and other conservative outlets continued to feature him and that schools focus too much on the “LGBT’s as opposed to the ABC’s.”

But that abruptly ended Friday when , a far-right fringe account on Substack, reported that DeAngelis had a gay adult film career under the pseudonym “Seth Rose” and appeared in a 2015 film set in a college. The Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children, where DeAngelis has been a senior fellow pushing school choice bills since 2021, quickly erased him from its website. 

“We have placed the employee on leave as we investigate this matter further,” a spokeswoman for the pro-school choice group said.

Has anyone heard from Corey DeAngelis in the last few days? He normally tweets at me incessantly- he’s been very silent. Hope he’s ok.

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

Known for aggressive online rhetoric aimed at school districts, unions, and particularly American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, DeAngelis has been uncharacteristically silent on social media since the news broke and didn’t return texts or a phone call from �鶹��Ʒ. His on Thursday referenced a video of Vice President Kamala Harris talking about children being “of the community.”

“They think they own your kids,” he wrote.

Online and in person, DeAngelis has been an avid culture warrior and perhaps the most visible face of a brand of school choice that paints traditional districts as failing institutions that are forcing left-wing ideas on students. “School choice defeats the woke mind virus,” he commented in response to from House Speaker Mike Johnson featuring a “lesson plan” parody that included “drag queen story hours” and transgender students’ participation in school sports. 

He frequently browbeat Democratic opponents to and trolled them when they blocked him.

But the news of DeAngelis’s alleged past ultimately came not from his many critics on the left, but rather has its origins in an intra-MAGA dispute involving right-wing Texas groups that trade in conspiracy theories and oppose Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan for school vouchers.

The Texas Freedom Coalition, which is run by Fields, calls itself a network of “patriots” who opposed COVID lockdowns. They view vouchers as another form of government overreach.

Fields gave Current Revolt, a far-right site that has , credit for digging into gay porn sites to find the film and other photos. But she told �鶹��Ʒ, “My post is what caused several people to start asking questions about his past.”

A screenshot of what appeared to be a policy expert for DeAngelis with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization raised red flags for her and other conservative parents who view talk of “global” partnerships as a threat to U.S. independence. One of UNESCO’s is “inclusive and equitable quality education.”

“School choice isn’t merely a lucrative scam; it’s a cunning ploy to enable government oversight of all educational avenues through a web of regulations and accountability tied to public funding,” Fields wrote in her July post about DeAngelis. 

DeAngelis any connections to the U.N. group.

Mary Lowe, a conservative activist who split from Moms for Liberty — another — over the issue of school choice, was also skeptical. She said she never understood why conservatives flocked toward DeAngelis after in 2020, “I didn’t vote for Trump — and I’m not a Republican.”

But Gov. Greg Abbott and pro-voucher advocates like the Texas Public Policy Foundation — who have for years to pass a school choice law — embraced DeAngelis’s take-no-prisoners style of advocacy. Following other states with similar laws, they want Texas to give parents roughly $10,000 a year to spend on private school tuition or homeschooling. At Republican lawmakers’ invitation, he testified before the Texas House education committee on the topic of “parent empowerment” in 2022, despite the fact that he was single with no children at the time.

“Our moms’ intuition was like ‘There is something missing to this story,’” said Lowe, who founded a new group, Families Engaged for Effective Education, after leaving Moms for Liberty. ‘There is something not right here.’ ”

DeAngelis a “slick salesman” for the school choice movement.

It wasn’t until last week, however, that news linking DeAngelis to porn films spread like wildfire on social media.

Immediate reaction to the graphic images spread on porn-related websites and among who saw the scoop as “” for one of their bitterest foes. , an Oklahoma City attorney, asked how Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and state Superintendent Ryan Walters “who are so anxious to privatize Oklahoma public education never vetted Corey DeAngelis?” DeAngelis supported their campaigns in 2022, and Walters similarly accuses public schools of spreading “woke gender ideology” in schools and frequently posts examples of what he considers left-wing indoctrination.

The school choice grifters at the American Federation for Children deleted Corey DeAngelis off their site

— Jess Piper (@piper4missouri)

The Hoover Institution, a Stanford University think tank where DeAngelis has been a visiting fellow for the past year, no longer lists him as an expert, but retains his articles on the site. There have been no changes to his profiles on the sites of two libertarian organizations where he’s been a contributor, the and the .

On his Eduwonk blog, Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether, a think tank, “a little grace” toward someone he described as a “deeply troubled person.” But he argued that , which include about drag shows and Pride festivals, are “going to be hard for his allies to defend.”

Other school choice advocates were already pointing fingers back at traditional public schools.

“What’s better? A person with a sinful past trying to do a virtuous thing?” , a conservative Latino broadcaster and political analyst asked on X. “Or those claiming virtue, like defenders of gov-ed’s debauchery, who knowingly push evil today?” 

But others said the episode serves as a warning to education activists who place too much faith in one polarizing individual to carry their message.

“Oftentimes these character traits go hand in hand. Being a very outstanding speaker and charismatic leader … comes with a degree of narcissism,” Morgan Polikoff, a University of Southern California education professor, who is gay, told �鶹��Ʒ. “The feeling that you’re above reproach can lead to questionable judgment.”

Disclosure: Corey DeAngelis wrote several opinion pieces for �鶹��Ʒ between 2018 and 2023. The Hoover Institution, where DeAngelis served as a visiting fellow until this month, provides financial support to �鶹��Ʒ. Andy Rotherham sits on �鶹��Ʒ’s board of directors.