Here’s something I never thought I’d say. Arizona is throwing money at education.
I’m not talking about the K-12 budget. The raises for teachers still leave them far behind the national average. The rest of the public school funding is ridiculously low as well, and it will stay that way as long as Republicans control every part of state government.
No, I’m talking about the state throwing money at the libertarian outposts at University of Arizona and Arizona State University. They’ve received so much state funding, they don’t know what to do with it. Literally. Both have multimillion dollar surpluses from the past two years. And there’s more where that came from in next year’s budget.
I’ve written a lot recently about the UA’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom (aka, the Freedom Center) and the Department of Political Economy & Moral Science. In the process, I’ve talked a bit about the money they’ve gotten from the state budget, but I found out this morning I’ve failed in my attempt to follow the money, as have many media outlets I’ve been reading. I’m going to do my best to get the budget numbers right here. If my explanations are a bit garbled, forgive me. This old English teacher is doing the best he can. And if I don’t get it 100 percent right, I guarantee it’s far closer than what I’ve written before.
Thursday, the Star ran an article, Conservative centers at UA, ASU will get $7.5M more amid surpluses. It’s an edited version of a piece of investigative reporting by Jim Small, executive director and editor of the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. The funding numbers Small reports astounded me. I had written that the Freedom Center received $2 million in 2017 and is set to receive another $1 million in the current budget — $3 million total. Small puts the figure at $5 million over the past two years and another $3.5 million in the upcoming budget, for a total of $8.5 million. ASU’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership has received even more, a total of $10.5 million counting next year’s allotment. They literally don’t know how to spend it all, according to Small. UA’s libertarian outposts will have $5.5 million left over at the end of this fiscal year. The ASU department will have $4.25 million remaining.
I called Jim to try and understand how his budget figures are so much higher than what I’ve arrived at using a combination of government documents and media reports. He explained that baseline budgets are sometimes ignored when people report a budget item. True, next year’s budget has a $1 million dollar expenditure for the UA programs, but, according to Small, that’s on top of a $2.5 million baseline. That means the UA programs are getting $3.5 million total for the 2019 fiscal year.
He sent me a link to the 2018 baseline budget for UA created by Arizona’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC). The numbers basically confirm what he wrote. Here’s a screen shot of the Special Line Items in the budget. I’ve highlighted the money for the Center for Philosophy of Freedom.
The three columns of numbers list the actual amount spent in the 2017 budget, an estimate for 2018 and the baseline for 2019. The 2017 figure is less than Small indicated — $779,800 rather than $1.5 million. The estimated budget for 2018 is $3.5 million. The baseline for 2019 — that is, the starting figure before additions in the budget — is $2.5 million. Adding the $1 million allocated in the budget just passed by the legislature, UA’s Center for Philosophy of Freedom will receive a total of $3.5 million for the 2019 fiscal year. Put that together with the previous two years’ budgets and the total is $7.8 million, a bit lower than Small’s $8.5 million figure but still more than twice what I have stated in earlier posts.
Here is the JLBC 2019 baseline budget for ASU for anyone who wants to go through the three year budget for the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.
While I’m correcting my errors in previous posts, let me add one more. I wrote that $100,000 of UA’s $1 million funding was for developing K-12 curriculum. I was wrong. It’s not UA. It’s ASU’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership with the $100,000 pull-out, to be used “to support research on the Arizona state constitution and the development of a civics and constitutionalism curriculum for K-12 and postsecondary education institutions.” In other words, ASU’s libertarian outpost will be getting into the K-12 education game begun by their colleagues at UA.
I have to wonder how a group of small government academics who talk and write so much about morality and ethics — after all, the UA department’s name includes the words “Moral Science,” and its high school course is called Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship — can morally and ethically accept so much money from the state without blushing, or without being morally weakened by depending on the state’s redistribution mechanisms.
Maybe this anecdote will help reconcile taking money from a government you think spends far too much. Ayn Rand, the pop icon of libertarianism, received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits during her senior years. How did she reconcile sucking at the teat of the welfare state she despised? It goes something like this. Since the two programs already indulged in legalized plunder of her income in the form of payroll taxes, she was fine taking it back, even if her takings exceeded her contributions. According to Rand, it’s OK to take the money if one “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism.”
I’m sure the staff at UA and ASU’s libertarian outposts are enraged at the thought of paying “legalized plunder” in the form of state taxes. So I guess, in the spirit of Ayn Rand, they think it’s perfectly OK to take it back, and then some. Just call it restitution.
This article appears in May 3-9, 2018.
This will sound to many Libertarians like a bigoted hate-article. Can the author prove that formal large-L Libertarians have anything to do with this matter?
That said, many might react that it would seem teaching on economics is just what is needed on all sides!
First, it’s disputed whether or not Ayn Rand actually took Social Security payments or received Medicare services. She was, after all, moderately wealthy at the end of her life as a best-selling novelist.
However, that’s irrelevant. Both Social Security and Medicare are programs that we are forced to pay into throughout our entire working lives. They are not “welfare,” but are rather an involuntary health care insurance plan (Medicare) and an involuntary retirement plan (Social Security). If one does accept either when eligible, then one is merely receiving what one has paid for. Not accepting either would be like paying for auto insurance, getting into an accident, and then refusing to let the insurance pay for the damages.
Bravo to both of you. I was just waiting to see the Koch Bros trashed again.
Could you write about anything else?
Mark Coppock, is it true that Rand used the words “regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare statism” when talking about when it’s OK to take money from programs like Social Security and Welfare since, as you say, you pay into them? I believe that’s a direct quote.
“…her takings exceeded her contributions”
Does this mean you oppose receiving of SS and Medicare once one’s receipts reach the level of “contribution?” AKA sucking at the teat?
So that must mean WE are taking advantage of the government? Spoken like a caring socialist.
The hypocrites funding this program would never actually want a true market system. That assumes all consumers have access to equal information on the quality, true overall costs (including the effect on the environment) and prices of any item or service. A true market economy would then allow the consumer to choose based on quality, price, etc., from a large number of providers. We do not have this system. We have one based on oligarchy, a limited number of providers, who occasional compete but rather a have a tendency to fix prices and control quantity and hide outcomes and full information. The example of Internet providers in Tucson illustrates the point. We do not have a free market for ISPs in Tucson because they have carved out service ares and there is the illusion of competition when there is none. So bull cookies on the idea of teaching a “free market economy” when they really want to teach, “how to maintain an oligarchy, or better yet, a real monopoly,” that’s where the big money is made.
Thanks for another great article, David!
Two things – first, the Kochs and others put up quite a bit of their own money, something like $5M for each organization. So, the State is essentially putting in matching funds, and its money is therefore going farther than it otherwise would.
Second, as I’ve argued before, injecting some libertarianism into the social sciences brings much needed ideological diversity. A paper published last month found that, among 50 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges, Democrat professors outnumbered Republican professors by 10:1. At 40% of those colleges, there are NO Republican professors at all. See https://www.nas.org/articles/homogenous_po….
That sort of viewpoint homogeneity is bad for students. It creates cults of uncritical groupthink. Kudos to the Kochs for bringing some ideological diversity to college campus.
A casual glance at the other line items in that budget makes it clear that the legislature has a bloody ax to grind and is ideologically motivated. Every other item there is associated with the nature of the University as a land-grant charter institution – as it has basically been since the beginning. Those items were grandfathered into funding at the legislative level as core features of the land-grant nature of the institution. Academic departmental level funding is and always has been decided by the Regents. The legislature has no business with its paws on academics. This appears to be beyond the comprehension of the cheerleading Libertarians here leaping passionately to the defense of this travesty. Of course, they never would have approved of setting up a land grant university system in the first place.
Good job, David. Whether we agree or disagree with this funding allocation, the full extent of it should be known so the knowledge of it can affect votes this November. In the same spirit of ensuring the democratic process works as it should, no doubt we can rely on you to keep us informed about how the funds granted to TUSD as a result of the recent REDforED action are actually applied in the district: to improve teacher salaries or not, and, if applied to teacher salaries, to improve which salaries and by how much, to install how many fully qualified teachers in classrooms currently covered by outsourced long term subs. Looking forward to reading that coverage here.
Unfortunately, most commenters on developments in higher ed are missing the primary means by which neoliberal free market values are influencing student and faculty thinking and decision making. That would be through the cost structure and the use of loans to “finance” tuition and fees. It works like this: in both public and private institutions, drastically inflate tuition as a percent of average income. In financial “aid” offers, ignore parents’ annual salary as a relevant variable and look primarily at student ability and willingness to pay tuition by taking on un-dismissable debt, indenturing themselves to the American banking system for the majority of their working lives. The results are manifold and so effective in reducing the overall quality of thinking of American citizens and the overall capacity for students to make educational and employment decisions in ways that are independent of the “bottom line,” how much an employer will pay you to do what kind of work.
*One sub-set of the population that would have attended college will opt not to attend college at all. *Another sub-set will opt, instead of attending 4 years of the land grant institutions, to attend community college for the first two years and then a land grant institution.
*Another sub-set will opt to attend land grant institutions instead of private institutions.
*Another sub-set will opt to attend private institutions, but with substantial debt.
*Seats that cannot be sold at inflated costs to American students will be sold to foreign students who pay higher rates.
*Among all groups except those bypassing higher ed entirely, larger cohorts will be taking on larger debt burdens than in past decades, making attending graduate or professional school instead of going directly into the workforce untenable and ensuring that their choice of employment will be more heavily influenced by which employers make it easiest for them to pay back their debt.
How many Arizona students are affected by “the FREEDOM INSTITUTE !!!”? How many are affected by the cost structure and the use of debt in higher ed? Check out the graphs here:
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/publictuition
AZ tops the nation in percent cost increases in tuition in public universities 2000-2014, its graph conspicuously higher than that of every other state in the US.
It would be nice if journalists and bloggers could keep their eye on the ball that will be kicked into the goal to determine who wins and loses the game, and stop spending quite so much time chasing squirrels that happen to run by on the sidelines. But perhaps tracking the main ball is less and less of interest to a citizenry that, increasingly, has not been given access to the best kind of education in critical thinking.
To “A suggestion: keep your eye on the main game.” Here’s something you might be interested in. The AZ Republic ran an article a few days ago about the teacher pay plan.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/polit…
At the end of the article is a table of teacher salaries in all Arizona school districts. I recommend you click on “County” at the top of the table, then move through it until you get to all the Pima County districts. You’ll find a list with the average teacher salary in each local district. I don’t know how the authors arrived at the average salaries — I don’t know how accurately they reflect teacher pay — but the difference between them is substantial, and worth taking a look at.
That article does not expose the pitiful health insurance benefits that TUSD hires have to suffer with. Why are they unwilling to at least match the standard policy benefits provided by other districts in Arizona?
Yes, David, I saw that. And, as you say, we don’t know how they came up with those numbers because they don’t disclose their methods or their source. When I served on a TUSD Site Council and saw some of the salary information for that site as part of the job, it was clear that people who had been teaching for decades, some of them with PhDs, were making in the upper 40s, none of them over 50, so how could the average salary in the district be 50 something? In any case whoever put the data posted in the AZ Republic together could not possibly have included the classrooms in TUSD still covered by underpaid long term subs rather than qualified professionals, which is currently the largest problem with the quality of education in the district and the main problem the REDforED funding supplement should be used to solve. But it appears the district’s Dem machine has successfully indoctrinated some of the teachers and is deploying them to express support for spreading the money more broadly, to janitors and support staff, etc. I’m all for paying everyone who works in schools sufficient wages, but here’s the problem with that use of the REDforED funds in the near term: not to admit that the classrooms that don’t have permanent, qualified teachers are priority number one is dishonest and damaging to the best interests of students.
At this point, the district has settled into a pattern of chronic dysfunction and I no longer see the point of any response other than exit. Individuals can notice problems and comment, but there is no organization that can systematically counter the misguided “advocacy” the machine produces, which is, in every instance I have ever seen of it, running counter to the delivery of quality education and student best interest.
Here’s a link to the Catalina Foothills School District Salary Schedule:
http://www.cfsd16.org/application/files/7215/2451/7662/Professional_Salary_Schedule_2018-19.pdf
Step 1 is $40,000.
Here’s a link to the TUSD Salary Schedule:
http://www.tusd1.org/Departments/Human-Resources/Certified-Pay-Schedule
Step 1 is $35,700.
So if I’m a new teacher or a teacher that has been out of the work force for a while and is re-entering at the bottom of the ladder, where would I choose to teach? Keep in mind that working conditions are also a factor. A district that has a bad reputation in the teaching community for poor enforcement of discipline policies and / or abusive administrative practices like blacklisting will need to pay Step 1 more to attract the same quality applicants.
If TUSD does not make raising Step 1 enough to fill the classrooms now covered by long term subs its top priority in applying REDforED funds, it is irresponsible. And the disingenuous talk of social justice in wages for support staff, etc., may well be masking the fact that the machine wants to keep filling those classrooms with outsourced, underpaid long term subs because millions of dollars are saved every year by that filthy practice the district stumbled into during the incompetent reign of HT Sanchez.
So, this takes us right back to what I wrote in my first post in this stream: “no doubt we can rely on you to keep us informed about how the funds granted to TUSD as a result of the recent REDforED action are actually applied in the district: to improve teacher salaries or not, and, if applied to teacher salaries, to improve which salaries and by how much, to install how many fully qualified teachers in classrooms currently covered by outsourced long term subs. Looking forward to reading that coverage here.”
Tell it like it is!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q02HcwGxllY