Arizona still does not know who will run its public schools. The race for Superintendent of Public Instruction between Republican Kimberly Yee and Democrat Teresa Leyba Ruiz remained too close to call on Wednesday morning, November 4, with the Associated Press yet to call it and Ruiz holding a lead of about 6 percentage points and more than one million votes in the count reported by AZFamily (KTVK/KPHO). The two are competing to succeed Republican incumbent Tom Horne, who lost his own party's primary to Yee. Every figure in this report is from the unofficial count; Arizona counties are still processing ballots, and the result will not be final until the canvass and certification.

Source: AZFamily / KTVK-KPHO

Either outcome makes history in Phoenix. Yee would be Arizona's first Asian-American elected superintendent; Ruiz would be the first Latina to hold the job, AZFamily reported. The superintendent is an elected statewide officer who runs the Arizona Department of Education — the agency that administers state and federal school funding, academic standards and, most contentiously this year, the state's school-voucher system.

The $1 billion question underneath the race: ESAs

The Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program is the centre of this election. An ESA converts a portion of state education funding into a family-controlled account that can pay for private-school tuition, tutoring, curriculum or other approved learning expenses. Created in 2011 for narrow categories of students, it went universal in 2022 — any Arizona family can apply — and grew from about 12,000 students in 2022 to 105,579 by mid-September 2026, moving roughly $1 billion a year, according to the Arizona Luminaria voter guide figures summarised in Masters in Education's October analysis of the race. The next superintendent does not just comment on that program; the Department of Education administers it, including which expenses get approved.

Source: Masters in Education — 2026 State Superintendent Races (Oct 2026)

The two candidates, and the one thing they agree on

Kimberly Yee is Arizona's state treasurer, serving her second term after four terms in the state legislature, and she was a prime sponsor of the original 2011 ESA legislation. She campaigns on school choice and a 'back to basics' message, and supports keeping ESAs universal. Teresa Leyba Ruiz is a certified mathematics teacher and the former president of Glendale Community College. She wants the program tightened: an ESA spending dashboard, an income cap for families earning over $150,000, an independent audit, and a return to the pre-2022 eligibility model focused on students with disabilities, foster children, military families and tribal communities. In their September 15 Clean Elections debate, the two found one point of consensus: both would end the Department of Education's practice, begun in 2024 under Horne, of automatically approving ESA reimbursement claims of $2,000 or less — a practice Horne's office attributed to understaffing, as education reporters summarised on AZPM's Press Room panel in October.

The oversight argument voters were actually choosing between

Ruiz's campaign argued that public dollars require public accountability: she pledged a transparency portal showing where ESA money goes, background checks for private educators receiving ESA funds, and clawing back money spent on non-educational items, and she pointed to an Arizona Auditor General audit — cited by her supporters — that found 34 percent of a sample of ESA transactions unallowable or lacking proper documentation. Yee's campaign downplayed misspending claims and argued in the debate that heavier academic oversight of private schools would run into federal student-privacy law. Those are the two campaigns' positions, reported here as positions; the audit figure is a sampled finding, not a finding about every ESA purchase, and neither campaign's characterisation of the other has been adjudicated.

Beyond vouchers: shortages and district finances

AZFamily noted the winner will also have to grapple with a teacher shortage and a growing financial crisis for school districts. Both candidates said in the campaign that they want higher teacher pay, but neither put forward a specific dollar figure or funding plan, according to the October analysis. Several Arizona districts have weighed school closures as enrolment and funding shift — a local consequence of the same funding argument that dominates the state race: money that follows students into ESAs is money that does not arrive in district budgets, which is precisely why supporters call the program family empowerment and critics call it a drain. Both descriptions were on the ballot; the count will decide which one runs the department.

What this means for Arizona families, including the diaspora

Arizona's Punjabi and broader South Asian communities — concentrated in the Phoenix metro, along the I-10 trucking corridor and in Tucson — meet this office in ordinary places: the public school their children attend, the ESA account a neighbour uses for private tuition or homeschooling, and the district budget that decides whether a local school stays open. A superintendent who audits and caps ESAs and one who expands and streamlines them produce visibly different classrooms and tax bills over four years, which is why a down-ballot education race drew more than a million votes for the current leader alone.

What happens next

Counting continues. Arizona counties must finish processing early and provisional ballots before the canvass, and the Associated Press will call the race when the remaining ballots cannot change the outcome — or the count will settle it first. The winner takes office in January 2027 and immediately owns three decisions the campaign deferred: whether the automatic approval of small ESA claims ends on day one, as both candidates promised; whether an ESA audit and dashboard are commissioned; and how the department responds to district closures and the teacher shortage in its first budget. Until the call comes, the only honest headline is the one the count supports: Ruiz leads, Yee has not conceded the arithmetic, and Arizona's schools are waiting.