Discharge notice. From the desk of the Agua Fria Classical Academy (Buckeye, AZ).

To the parent or guardian of Jasmine Reyes,

Date of issue: May 14, 2026 Effective term: 2025–2026 academic year

Dear Parent or Guardian:

We regret to inform you that Jasmine Reyes, having completed the Agua Fria Classical Academy’s K-3 instructional sequence, will not be invited to return for the 4th-grade term. The decision reflects the student’s documented reading benchmark falling below the Agua Fria’s instructional baseline. The Agua Fria Classical Academy’s instructional staff has determined that Jasmine Reyes’s learning profile is best served by an instructional environment better matched to the student’s current instructional readiness level.

The Agua Fria Classical Academy thanks you for the privilege of instructing Jasmine Reyes. Your tax-credit remittance under the Empowerment Scholarship Account for Jasmine Reyes’s instruction will cease as of June 30, 2026. A final transcript of Jasmine Reyes’s academic record is enclosed.

Sincerely, [ADMINISTRATOR] Agua Fria Classical Academy, a DBA of [SHELL ENTITY]

The notice in your hand is yours or your neighbor’s — the state’s letterhead, informing you that the public subsidy you chose produced the result you chose. The notice is the visible fruit. The credential is the cost. God bless the credential, which I never sit for.

Jasmine is the 9-year-old I’m discharging at the bottom of that letter. She has been mine since August. The teacher who produced her reading benchmark is an uncertified apprentice named Shawna, 26, in 1B of the Agua Fria Classical Academy I own through 3 shells outside Buckeye, Arizona. She’s been in the room for 4 months. The certification she doesn’t hold would have cost me $9 an hour more than I pay her. I kept the $9. The 3rd-graders she keeps quiet for 7 hours a day are the children your tax dollars routed to me through the Empowerment Scholarship Account at $7,300 a head. Robert Maranto writes this week in National Review that teacher certification has become a useless compliance exercise and that “accountability” regulations rarely hold anyone accountable. He’s correct. He’s correct for the wrong reasons, and he’s done me a favor he doesn’t know he’s done.

Now I want you to see what the favor cost a different body in a different wing, because the principle travels and I want it to land.

Cassie is 26, and she proctors the second-grade floor of my Ozark Classical Academy in Northwest Arkansas. She takes the $7,000 state Education Freedom Account for each of her 22 children. The canvas backpack I branded with my academy’s crest — the one on your second-grader’s shoulder — is paid for by the exact margin I extracted from her eardrums. She’s got a ringing in her left ear that sounds like a dial tone. She submitted a requisition for industrial earmuffs. $89. I marked it Denied and routed it to the shredder. Across my 42 classrooms, denying the earmuffs, the anti-fatigue mats, and the physical-therapy copays saves me $31,108 a year. That’s the dividend. That’s the “freedom” Maranto is defending.

Maranto wants the paperwork off the back of the classroom. I want the wage off the back of the floor. We want the same thing. The difference is that Maranto thinks a freed teacher will teach better. I know a freed teacher will teach at a lower rate, which is the only reform that has ever made my accountants content. The certification was a price floor. The exam itself was free. The wage it priced was not. When the state requires the credential in the public system and declines to require it in the private system, the credential stops being a quality signal and starts being a pay band. I sit on the side of the pay band that doesn’t require it.

Here’s the arithmetic. A certified teacher in Maricopa County commands about $22 an hour, fully loaded. An uncertified apprentice in my academy commands $13. No benefits. No pension. No payroll tax from me. No tenure clock. No grievance procedure. No recourse when I close the wing in November and reopen it in February with a different roster. The hourly spread is $9. The yearly spread, on a 7.5-hour day and a 180-day year, is $12,150 per teacher. The campus runs 22 apprentices. The campus spread is $267,300 a year. I run 3 Agua Fria campuses and the Arkansas one. I won’t run the full multiplication in front of you. I want the per-teacher figure to land before the per-campus figure erases the humanity of the woman in 1B.

Same company, different wing. DeShawn is the resource-room apprentice I hired in March to manage the IEP paperwork for the 11 special-education students on the Agua Fria roll. He has a bachelor’s in communications. He doesn’t have a special-education credential. He files the compliance documents the state requires to keep the ESA funding flowing. The children are not served. The paperwork is served. The funding continues. DeShawn’s hourly is the same as Shawna’s, and his conscience has adjusted accordingly.

In Cassie’s wing there was no line item for the boy’s nervous system. The six-year-old in her room presented with an auditory processing disorder and a behavioral tremor. The public school would have written an Individualized Education Program. The public school would have assigned a dedicated aide at $34,000 a year. The public school would have installed acoustic paneling. Maranto calls it “burdensome equity regulation.” I call it a maintenance cost I refuse to pay. So I told Cassie to manage him. She manages him by keeping him in the room. The boy screams when the fluorescent lights hum. The screaming goes on for 6 hours. Cassie’s tinnitus started in November. By February she couldn’t hear her own car’s turn signal.

I am not an anomaly you can vote out. I am a curriculum. The graduates of my thirty-year seminar now sit in the statehouses writing these ESA rules, and they sit in the headmasters’ offices of the very academies taking your taxpayer money. The young woman who hired Shawna was in the cohort of 2021 at Warden University’s College of Business. I taught her the chapter on “Apprentice as Cost Line” in her second week. She ran the subtraction faster than I did. By Thanksgiving of her second year she’d signed the apprenticeship pipeline for the entire Buckeye corridor. She is, today, the director of operations for the 3 Agua Fria campuses. I have, with a teacher’s pride, watched her hire 41 uncertified apprentices in the 18 months since she took the seat. She’s faster than I am. She’s colder than I am. That is the curriculum’s gift to the Buckeye corridor, and to its children, and to you. One of them priced your child’s desk. The best of them subtract the compliance costs before the ink dries.

Now widen the frame, because the academy is the small thing and the system is the large one, and the small thing is the visible fruit of the large one.

The school choice movement is the public subsidy that lets me sort children by parent income and the state’s money. The workhouse sorted the poor into productive use. The Freedmen’s Bureau school sorted the freedman into the trades the planter required. The classical academy sorts the child of the parent who chose poorly into the wage band the state will subsidize. I am not new. The vocabulary changes. The instrument does not. Maranto has helped me replace the word reform with the word choice and the word deregulation with the word freedom, and the children are still being sorted, and I am still doing the sorting, and the state is still funding the sort.

The apostle saw the arrangement long before the Empowerment Scholarship Account was invented. He wrote the load-bearing verse on labor compliance for an institution that ran on labor compliance, and he didn’t soften it.

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ.” — Ephesians 6:5

The apostle did not write a grievance procedure. The apostle didn’t anticipate a state-funded certification exam that doubled as a wage floor. The apostle anticipated Shawna.

Jasmine will leave Agua Fria at 12. She will read at a 6th-grade level. She will work at one of my other floors, where the wage band is what the state subsidizes. The Buckeye corridor has a hotel I hold through the same family of shells, a packing house I hold through 2 more, and a call center I hold through 3. The roster at each of them is staffed by former Agua Fria graduates at the apprentice rate. The compliance is absolute. The corridor wasn’t built by design. It was built by arithmetic.

Cassie resigned last week because she can no longer hear the children. I haven’t opened the letter. The autumn roster is full, and Medicaid will buy her hearing aids, and subsidized housing will cover her rent, and I’ve eliminated the wages that would have allowed her to buy her own earmuffs and arranged for the taxpayer to buy them for her anyway. The state will feed the worker I can’t pay, and medicate the worker I’ve broken. Shawna’s signature is on the offer letter. Mine is on the shell. The children are yours now. I have done what the state asked of me. The books are tidy.

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.