When it comes to school funding, Ducey has spoken: No. New. Money. But the voters have spoken too, for the second time. They want: More. New. Money.

Immovable object, meet unstoppable force. Something, or someone, has got to give on the school funding front.

Back in 2015, a Morrison Institute poll found that 74 percent of Arizona voters wanted the state to spend more on K-12 education. It was Governor Ducey’s fondest wish that he could throw the people a portion of the money the state owed to the schools via Prop 123, mainly using the state land trust fund instead of the state budget, the peasants would be satisfied and he could get back to the important business of giving tax cuts to his rich friends. Looks like it didn’t quite work out that way.

The latest Arizona Republic/Morrison/Cronkite News poll found—drum roll, please—74 percent of voters still think we spend too little on K-12 education, just like they did in 2015. Even among Ducey’s people, the Republicans, 63 percent say we’re not spending enough. Among Democrats, the number is 88 percent. When Ducey told everyone Prop 123 was only the first step, implying, deceptively, that he thought the next step should be more money, the voters apparently agreed.

So what’s next? Voters aren’t actually an unstoppable force. Elected officials block the will of the people on a regular basis. And politicians aren’t entirely immovable. Fear of losing an election has been known to move them a few feet in one direction or the other. So who’s going to give, and how much?

Elections are looming, which should make candidates worry about the will of the people, but the primaries are over, and most of our neatly gerrymandered legislative districts don’t lend themselves to much competition in the general election. The immovable objects have the edge. But a 75 percent agreement among the voters that schools need additional funding has got to have Republicans feeling just a bit edgy, while it puts a spring in the Democrats’ step.

Governor Ducey’s office has weighed in on school funding since the poll came out, as has Don Shooter, Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Their sleight-of-hand responses are too maddeningly delightful to stick at the end of this post. I’ll save them for later.

This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2016.

7 replies on “Ducey ‘Next Step’ Watch: Day 117. Vox Populi Edition”

  1. I would bet that 75% or more of the people don’t know the full costs of education. Add in the Qatar grant to teach Arabic. We need the total amount. No more lies.

  2. I wonder what percent of TUSD constituents would agree that HT Sanchez needs to be given more money to allocate as he thinks best. Guessing it wouldn’t be 75%….

  3. If you want to put real money into education, repeal Prop. 108. Prop. 108, you may recall, was the initiative passed in 1992 that says that it takes a 2/3 vote of both houses of the Legislature to raise state revenue — while existing law allows tax cuts to go into effect with a simple majority. Prop. 108 is the reason that the Legislature only spends real money on education by referral to the ballot. Prop. 108 is anti-democratic and should be repealed.

  4. Sad but reality, I’m afraid. We were promised in the ’90’s that “Cut taxes and the jobs will come”. Well we have, at the cost to education thus disenfranchising our children, and our economy still is in the tank, new jobs come in at a trickle and most are low-paying service jobs. In fact, Governing Magazine, ranked the Arizona economic outlook as 41st among the States and, yes, education funding played a part in this. Time to wake up and restore the funding.

  6. Maybe we should set up a “accurate reporting on the education scene” watch on David Safier. Wonder how many days would go by before he comes up with a single post that honestly acknowledges the reality of what we’re dealing with in Southern Arizona public education: a poverty-stricken public school district “educating” close to 50,000 students every year that has gone completely off the rails and that is being grossly mismanaged by its current “leadership.” I’ve been reading Safier’s blogs for three years now and I have yet to see a single piece that accurately reflects that conspicuous and extremely relevant feature of our local “public education” landscape.

    (David: That’s well more than 1,000 days of highly selective and misleading “journalism” or “blogging” or whatever you call what you do. In terms of amount of time spent failing to do what you have given people the impression you will do (in your case, you try to give the impression that you will cover education policy responsibly and honestly), I think you’ve got Ducey beat.)

    Public schools in Arizona do need more funding. But it’s difficult to rally the electorate behind getting that accomplished when there are hundreds of thousands of people in this region (students enrolled, their extended families, their neighbors, their friends, graduates of TUSD, their extended families, their neighbors, their friends, everyone who has taught or worked in the district in recent years, their neighbors, their friends) who get their primary impression of what “public schooling” means from the educational and fiscal malfeasance we’ve been looking at in this district, which is an embarrassment and a scandal in the field of “public education.”

    Public education can be great, when it is well managed. Let’s put a stop to the mismanagement of this district so we can have some chance of moving the cause of increased funding to our public schools forward in this state.

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