Funding full day kindergarten across the state is back in the news. This being Arizona, the discussion is a mix of the reasonable, the semi-reasonable, the semi-ridiculous and the totally ridiculous. Whether anything will come of it, whether the legislature is willing to commit about $200 million of new money to the enterprise—money that isn’t stolen from some equally valuable program—is in doubt. But it’s good to see people are talking.
Over at Blog for Arizona, Linda Lyon does a better job discussing the issue than I could hope to. Read her excellent post, In Defense of Full-Day K. As an added bonus, at the end of the post, former Ed Supe John Huppenthal chimes in with a comment citing a study which, he claims, explains to her why she’s partly right but not as well informed as she should be. After which, I quote another source which discusses the limitations of the study Huppenthal cites.
I can’t resist adding one footnote from Howard Fischer’s article on the subject. Full day kindergarten was funded in 2005 when Democrat Janet Napolitano was governor. She made a horse trade, giving Republicans the 10 percent cut in state income taxes they wanted in return for full day kindergarten. So far so good. But when money got tight in 2009, the Republican-majority legislature pulled the funding for full-day K, but it held onto the 10 percent tax cut, which, apparently, it figured it still could afford. For Arizona Republicans, investing in children’s educations, and their futures, is something of a yawn. But, to paraphrase segregationist George Wallace’s words, “Tax cuts now, tax cuts tomorrow, tax cuts forever.”
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 2, 2016.
I can’t resist pointing out that “party right” probably should have been “partly right”. Ah, TW, proofreading…
$200 million is such a small amount to provide full time day care to the children and the public education bureaucracy that profits from it. Surely the taxpayers won’t be so greedy as to deny. Just think how many children of Mexico can fill the seats.
Why not take the federal childcare money given to parents and use it to find all day kindergarten.
Thanks for the shout out David! If anyone needs any convincing that our GOP-led Legislature is not concerned about Arizona’s children, just look at the fact that they continually prioritize tax cuts over our children inspire of the fact that tax cuts are a race to the bottom where states compete and the people lose. To put Wallace’s phrase in AZ-speak, I would add “children never.”
What are the advantages of adding full day Kindergarten in a state that has such a severe teacher shortage that it cannot keep the classrooms it already has filled with fully qualified professionals?
Get your priorities straight: first fix the faulty product, then expand the reach of its services to the public. If I were a parent living on the South or West side of TUSD, I wouldn’t want to be required to leave my 5-year-old all day in one of the many TUSD classrooms “staffed” with insufficiently qualified subs rather than with fully qualified professional teachers. (And to have my child reported truant if they didn’t comply with the state’s demand that the child spend 5 full days every week in a classroom with twenty-five other five-year-olds and one adult who has not received proper training in how to manage early childhood education.)
But keep writing in defense of adding money to Arizona’s broken K-12 public education system, David. Because what matters is the ideology, not the reality, right? It’s better to draw more children into the underfunded, malfunctioning, mismanaged public district system because each additional child brings more per-pupil funding that can be mis-applied by the likes of HT Sanchez, with his 40-50 vacation days per year that can be exchanged for $$$, if unused, at the rate of $1,000 per day. (Do the math: that means that if each year he exchanges all those vacation days for cash, he gets an annual reward for not taking two months of vacation that is greater than the annual salary of a Kindergarten teacher. And that’s on top of his more than $200K per annum salary, his inflated expense accounts, and the “bonus” he gets for meeting the annual goals on which he SELF-REPORTS his % fulfillment.)
Let’s see if the electorate has been bamboozled by you and others of your ilk and takes your advice in re-installing a Board majority for our largest local public school district that has proved unable to keep the greedy CEO it is supposed to be managing properly in check. Depending on the outcome of that contest, it might be possible for the community to start repairing the damage done to TUSD during the last three years. If it’s possible to begin repairing the damage, then it might be feasible to expand programming by eliminating things like Pre-K programs that should never have been installed and adding things like full-day Kinder that should perhaps be there, IF the district can fill its full time teaching positions with qualified professionals.
But let’s be HONEST, shall we? We’re definitely not there yet.