A billion dollars. That’s on the high end of the figure you hear when people talk about increasing Arizona’s K-12 funding.
Governor Ducey came in at one-tenth of that, $100 million. At the latest Koch brothers summit, Ducey said to the assembled multi-millionaires and billionaires, “I didn’t run for governor to play small ball. I think this is an important idea.” But that “important idea” in his pitch for campaign cash wasn’t public education. It was private school vouchers, which are near and dear to the Koch network’s hearts and wallets. When it comes to increasing public school funding, Ducey plays the smallest ball he can manage and still call himself “the education governor” with a straight face.
But education groups and a sizable number of business leaders say, if we’re going to give our teachers a reasonable wage and provide the needed resources for our students, it’s going to take an extra billion dollars in this budget and every budget in the future.
So who is this radical group that recommends we add $2 billion a year to the school budget? And a one-time allocation of $1.3 billion to make up for past budget shortfalls? And get rid of the law requiring a two-thirds majority in the legislature to increase taxes so all it takes is a simple majority to add to our revenue base?
All those radical proposals come from a not-so-radical group of participants in the 110th Arizona Town Hall held last November. The Arizona Town Hall’s topic changes each year. For 2017, it was “Funding preK-12 Education.” Community town halls were held in 15 locations around the state, each attended by a few dozen to a hundred participants, and each group submitted a report with findings and recommendations. Then in November, about a hundred people representing community members, business people and educators gathered for three days at the Hilton Hotel in Mesa. (The Hilton venue is an indication of the un-radical nature of the organization, as is the makeup of its executive committee, which includes wealth advisors, realtors, engineers, and even Lea Marquez Peterson, recent CEO of the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and current Republican candidate for the CD-2 House seat occupied by Rep. Martha McSally.)
The Town Hall produced a 17 page report explaining why Arizona’s current education funding is inadequate and what needs to change. The crowdsourced set of recommendations does a better job of recognizing what it will take to meet the financial needs of our K-12 public schools than just about any other document I’ve read, including its understanding that we need to get rid of the two-thirds majority the legislature needs to get a tax hike through the legislature.
Here’s the short version of the report’s recommendations.
“In simple terms, we need to invest at least $1.3 billion (to be updated to reflect the current need) on a one-time basis – and at least $2 billion annually, with annual increases for inflation in the future – to position our preK-12 education system to meet the educational goals that we have identified for it.”
The increased funding is allocated as follows: $900 million to increase teacher pay “with a view toward bringing Arizona’s teacher salaries in line with the national median”; $380 million to restore the capital funding formula; $18 million to restore the cuts in Charter Additional Assistance; $250 to update and fully fund the building renewal fund; $250 million for new school construction (with an additional $343 million the first year); $240 million to fund full-day kindergarten; and $200 million to develop and implement a state-funded preK program.
Tax increases are in the report’s mix of funding sources. The problem is, it’s nearly impossible for the legislature to raise taxes because of Proposition 108, passed in 1992, which requires a two-thirds majority of the legislators to vote in any new taxes. The report recommends that Arizona voters overturn the 25 year old proposition so new taxes can be voted in by a simple legislative majority.
(When I spoke with Tara Jackson, President of Arizona Town Hall, she told me that Proposition 108 comes up repeatedly in the gatherings, with the majority of participants wanting to get rid of it. Why this idea isn’t talked about more, and why we haven’t seen a major push for a “Repeal Prop 108” ballot measure is a mystery to me.)
The AZ Town Hall’s radical-sounding funding increases really aren’t very radical. They only sound extreme because we’ve been in the funding cellar for so long, it takes some real money for us to climb out. When it comes to dollars spent per student, we’re one of the bottom three states in the country. If we added the recommended $2 billion, our funding level would move past 9 states and pull even with Georgia, Florida and Michigan, but we’d still be well below New Mexico, Louisiana, Kansas and Kentucky and 34 other states.
This article appears in Feb 1-7, 2018.
More taxes. Sounds great!
Now is the time to make fundamental changes in how we are funding education in Arizona. Education across the country is changing in methods and structure so Arizona could rebuild our system to take advantage of new approaches. With charter schools making more progress each year, Arizona’s public school system needs to adapt to the changing landscape and update the why and how of education. In the next 10 years education will change faster than ever and new funding of our schools provides us with the opportunity to catch the wave of change and push Arizona’s education to be one of the best in the country.
Thank you, David. It was nice talking to you about this! We all appreciate your spreading the word about the outcomes of our most recent Arizona Town Hall.
How is it that in the clamor for additional funding, a bill that would protect the endangered Classroom Site Fund languishes for want of a hearing? This isn’t a bill proposed by the minority with no support. It is a bill sponsored by a Republican Senator, Kate Brophy-McGee, and a Republican Representative, Doug Coleman, with two thirds of the members of both houses signed on as ‘co-sponsors’. Yet, all of this hasn’t led the leadership to schedule a single hearing on the measure in either house. Not an informational hearing or a move to gain a due-pass recommendation out of any of the committees it’s been assigned to.
What does this mean? It means that they have plans to rip up the law as it’s currently written and insert other provisions to ensure a greater proportion of the funding goes to K-12 teachers. The current law provides funds for a number of other needs, and those needs aren’t going away. What will likely happen is that the funding will be used to support the Results Based Funding (aka reduce the waiting time for that charter school rich kids want to go to) agenda of the same folks mentioned above.
We have the opportunity to lock in what we have before we start talking about what comes next. The threat of the ‘fiscal cliffs’ created by Proposition 301 and Proposition 123 are real, and the end of that funding for public education is closer than it appears.
There are real consequences of increases taxes as a state. Over the last 45 years, those states who were most frugal, i.e. in the bottom ten of taxation, increased jobs at twice the pace of those states who were consistently in the to ten of taxation.
That’s the cost of higher taxes: fewer jobs for our high school and college graduates, a big cost.
What is the benefit? We temporarily reduced the stress that policymakers and administrators feel from constrained budgets. But, that reduced stress is only temporary. New York City, which spends three times as much per student as all of Arizona, feels financially stressed. It is just the organic nature of how education is organized to feel deprived and victimized.
In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that quality will improve at a faster pace if no additional funding is injected from the center. That was the environment of the 2011 to 2015 when Arizona led the nation in academic gains. Funding was reduced by $400 million a year during that period.
The only way to get more money during that time period was to get more students. Lack of funding from the center makes students much more precious to each district. In other words, enhancing competition with frugal funding greatly improved results.
It’s not going to be easy to get the taxpayers to fund more money despite all of the polls out there.
The key will be to understand why there was so much support for Prop 301. Prop 301 significantly advanced school choice.
What additions to school choice will the new Prop 301 offer to the natural opponents of higher taxes?