If you look at the numbers in next year’s state budget, you might think education made out pretty well. There’s all this new money: $136 million in additional assistance for schools; $130 million for teacher raises; $20 million to hire counselors or security officers; $30 million for results based funding.
You might also think I made out pretty well if I told you my boss said I’m doing a great job and handed me a crisp new hundred dollar bill. Until I told you the boss cut my salary by five hundred dollars.
Same thing with the state budget. All that brand spanking new education money sounds good until you realize, the decade-long cuts to education have been so deep, even with the new money, schools are a billion dollars behind where they were in 2008. And back then, Arizona had the lowest per student spending in the country.
To see how we dug ourselves in a hole so deep that adding $300 million to the education budget still leaves the schools a billion dollars behind, we need to start back in 2008 with the Great Recession.
Like most other states, Arizona was hit hard when the economy sank like a stone. The state was desperately short of funds. The budget had to be cut, and education took a big hit. The Republicans in charge told us, shaking their heads sadly, we have no choice. There just isn’t enough money to go around.
A few years later in 2010, after more cuts to education, Governor Jan Brewer decided we did have a choice. She defied the standard Republican “No new taxes” mantra and supported a ballot measure for a one cent sales tax increase for education. The voters agreed with Brewer. The measure passed with 64 percent of the vote.
The problem was, it only lasted three years.
In 2012 a new measure was on the ballot which would have kept the one cent sales tax going. Early polling gave it a good chance of passing, but the opposition put together a heavily funded campaign led by then-state treasurer Doug Ducey and paid for with millions of dollars from the Koch brothers’ donor network. The barrage of negative advertising worked. The sales tax went down to defeat. Once again, the bottom fell out of the education budget.
In 2015, studies compared national education funding to pre-recession levels. They found Arizona had cut more than any other state in the nation, a whopping 36 percent. No other state came close. Florida was next in line with a 22 percent cut.
Once you account for inflation and the increased student population, Arizona’s 2015 education budget was down $1.5 billion a year compared to 2008. That’s in a state that was already at national rock bottom in per student funding before the recession hit.
Over the past few years and including the 2018-19 budget, the state has replaced some of the money it had taken from our children’s educations, but with a $1.5 billion deficit to make up, it still had a long way to go.
Children don’t get a second chance at a their K-12 education. First graders in 2008 are this year’s graduating class. Kindergarteners who began public school at the beginning of the Great Recession will be next year’s class of 2020. All of them have been cheated out of part of their education because funding education hasn’t been a state priority.
This legislative session, the state had a surplus on its hands. The economic upturn brought in more tax dollars than expected. On top of that, changes created by Trump’s tax cut added almost $400 million to the state’s coffers.
Remember back in 2008 when the Republicans said, shaking their heads sadly, they had no choice but to cut funding for education? This year they had an opportunity to hold their heads high and proclaim, “We have only one moral choice, and that’s to use every dollar at our disposal to raise funding for our children’s educations to pre-recession levels.”
That’s not what they did. Instead, they turned the windfall from the new national tax laws into a tax cut. They added to the rainy day fund, topping it off at a billion dollars. Then, almost as an afterthought, they put an extra $300 million into education.
Education got a little more money. Too little to make up for what it lost.
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 5, 2019.
Then we have the distinguished House Speaker, holding improvements to career and technical programs hostage, because he and his now fired Machiavellian EVIT superintendent, got caught running a private fiefdom for themselves. He did all kind of machinations, to the wxtent of trying to stop certain professions from being candidates for JTED boards, to prevent a newly elected board putting an end their activities. This session, in a pique, massively bi-partisan omnibus bills were killed by him at the last minute in retaliation.
To what end? When you are talking about money, you are not talking about education.
______Arizona____Kentucky___Connecticut___West Virginia__Maryland
Jobs Created
Since 1999______690,000____130,000___-14,000______14,000_______280,000
Spending
per student_______$7,501____$10,508____$20,800______$14,271_____ $14,774
Charter School
Students________185,000______0 _______10,000 ________0_________ 24,000
8th grade math scores
Demographic
Black _____________272 ______252__________ 258 _______254 ______262
Hispanic ___________269______269 __________263 ________NA ______267
White _____________296 ______282 __________295 _______274______295
Asian _____________316 ______303 __________311_______ NA ______316
8th grade math Scores by
Mothers education
High school dropout _____265 ______262 ______262 _______259 _______259
High school graduate ____269 ______265 ______263 _______262 ________262
Some college ___________285 _____283 ______280 _______274 ________275
College graduate ________296 _____288 ______295 ________282 _______295
The source of the spending numbers is the National Education Association Rankings
and the job numbers come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The test scores are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress
Whenever you see a comment that includes 8th grade math scores of Black students, you know it was written by John Huppenthal. Blacks are 5% of the population of AZ.
Arizona has over 50,000 African American students. There are two state with less than 100,000 students total. And, I included every demographic.
The shock is that the public and policy makers in Arizona are unaware that our Black students have climbed to the top of the nation. That our whites are in the top six and our Asians are fifth.
If NAEP would separate Hispanics into foreign-born and native, we would be in the top ten in both categories. Only because they are comparing our foreign-born Hispanics to other states native born Hispanics do we rank below 20th in Hispanic test scores.
These are test scores by demographic. Outfits like the Urban Institute’s Matt Chingos have done more detailed econometric models ranking Arizona schools 13th in the naiton in performance.
NAEP’s failure to separate Hispanics into native and foreign born mean that Chingos’s analysis is technically flawed. We can see this most starkly be comparing Arizona and Massachusetts in the Sean Reardon ranking of all U.S. school districts.
In Stanford researcher Sean Reardon’s recent national ranking of school districts, Arizona had three of the top ten school districts and not one of the bottom ten of the 200 largest school districts in the U.S.
Thirty percent of the nation’s success is coming from one medium sized state named Arizona and none of the nation’s failure.
In a head to head match up with Massachusetts of all district sizes, we had 40 districts in the top 10% while Massachusetts? only 37. Massachusetts had 250 districts large enough to be ranked. Arizona? 150. Arizona’s median district was at the 78th percentile nationally while Massachusetts was at the 54th percentile.
Massachusetts had 18 districts below the tenth percentile of performance. Arizona? zero, nada, 0.
The proportion of Arizona school districts above the 90th percentile is 100% larger than Massachusetts.
The discrepancy between the Matthew Chingos’s analysis and Sean Reardon’s analysis means that it is likely that if the Urban Institue would correct it’s modeling, Arizona would not rank 13th, that it would be vying with two other states for the best schools in the nation and neither of those two would be named Massachusetts.
Stop it jhup they hate good news. It stifles the effort to validate the need for mo’ money.