I admit I’m a layman when it comes to economics. I studied a little Econ in college, though not enough to hurt me. Now and then I read newspaper and magazine columns by economists. So I don’t claim any expertise in the field. But isn’t the idea of Supply and Demand pretty basic? If the supply of a good or service is low and the demand is high, don’t you need to raise the price so supply equals demand? Sure, there are other factors to consider, but that’s where the discussion begins, right?
So if the supply of teachers in Arizona is far lower than the demand, if there are more classrooms than there are teachers to fill them, isn’t it just economic common sense to admit we have to raise the price—the salaries—of teachers to meet the demand?
I guess we could try other strategies. We could lower the demand for teachers by cramming a few more kids into every classroom. Give six teachers five or six more kids each, and that would empty a classroom and eliminate the need for one teacher. The problem is, Arizona is already near the top in class size nationally—that’s what happens when your education spending is at the bottom—so adding more students only bends our numbers further from the national average. Not to mention, it would drive some of our already over-stretched and over-stressed teachers around the bend, driving them out of the profession. That would make the problem worse, not better.
I guess everyone could try Governor Ducey’s strategy of saying how much we all respect teachers. To be honest, that would help a little. When teachers work their asses off and are told what a lousy job they’re doing, it doesn’t make for a happy, healthy work environment. Who needs that kind of abuse to go along with a miserably low salary? The problem is, conservatives have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars trashing teachers—especially what they like to call “failing teachers” in “failing government schools.” It’s part of their campaign to lower school spending, demonize teacher unions and push school privatization. And it’s worked. I’ve never seen a time when teachers get less respect from the public. So I doubt they’re about to change their ways and mount a massive “love your local teacher” campaign. And even if they did, it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference so long as teachers are having trouble paying for food, housing and other basic living expenses. Giving them a gold star won’t stop teachers from leaving or encourage new teachers to join the fold—not even if we include Ducey’s other strategy of adding a dollar a day to show teachers how much we value them.
Or you could raise the supply by adding cheap knockoff teachers to the pool, kind of like putting faux-Gucci purses on the shelf alongside the real ones, by opening the classroom to people without teaching credentials. Who knows, maybe you could even save a few bucks by starting them at a lower salary. After all, charter school teachers aren’t required to be credentialed. Of course, that helps explain the high teacher turnover rate, the “burn and churn” rate, at charters, which is significantly higher than in school districts. People can use teaching as a stopgap profession while they’re deciding what they really want to do if they don’t have to expend all that time and effort getting a credential. And even those who plan to stick around awhile are likely to be more shocked by the stresses and strains of the classroom than teachers who have some theoretical and practical training before they try to manage classrooms on their own. You’ll probably uncover a few gems if you lower the teaching standards, a few natural born educators, but you’re more likely to end up with people without the training or dedication they need to succeed.
I say, let’s get back to economic basics and pay teachers enough to increase the supply.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2017.
Your analogy would be accurate accept for that age old problem of theft by control. You and I both know that the schools have been given plenty of money. But how they chose to use it bypassed their most important asset, the teachers. And the tax payers that are paying attention know it. So they are not about to give more money to a bottomless pit. Fix the school district…get the money.
Are you really going to wait until Trump spanks you? Get to it.
So could the various “MORE FUNDING!!!” pressure groups attach a specific purpose to their demands: “MORE FUNDING FOR TEACHER SALARIES NOW!!!” ?
Could they demand that teacher salaries go up across the board, in all schools receiving public funds, including charters and privates receiving tax credits? (And, while they’re at it, could they attach stipulations that teachers in those schools be properly credentialed and that the schools be fiscally transparent?)
If not, why not? Why are demands for increased funding in public district schools never attached to requirements that the funds be spent on specific things, like desperately needed teacher compensation increases? Why are they always coupled with demands that funding to alternative schools be brutally CUT OFF? Why is there no advocacy for requiring that alternative schools have proper oversight, rather than what we see: advocacy that they be destroyed?
Answer these questions and you’ll have taken a salutary first step towards being HONEST, a necessary prerequisite to earning your readership’s trust and perhaps persuading us that you have the best interests of students (not politicians) at heart.
This bunch is always spewing about “market based solutions” to problems. The funniest one is health care, “market based solutions” where every procedure and drug has 40 different prices, none that reflect the economics of the thing. It’s hard enough comparison shopping for cellphones and service. But I once asked one of one party dictatorship member of legislature how many teacher candidates we would have if the Statewide starting salary was $60,000. Well, hundreds she said. Very selective “market based solutions”.
You got it all wrong. When worker supply is low you import low-wage immigrants to take the jobs that “Americans won’t do”.
Good job, Frances. You figured out that the right wing side of the education policy debate is not really about what it purports to be about, allowing free market mechanisms to improve the quality of the “product” — or it is only about that selectively, when talking about the free market serves the purpose of expanding market share for right wing cronies, but not when it comes to raising wages to increase labor supply.
Now take another step: figure out that a large and influential faction of the left wing side of the education policy debate is not really about creating high quality public services and delivering them uniformly to all comers, rich and poor. What IS it about? You have to take a close look at bidding and hiring practices in a district like TUSD and what is going on (or NOT going on) with desegregation funding to get a clear view. Between $300 and $400 million a year is a LOT of money to allocate, and it can be used to build a network of donors and supporters, rather than, through proper bidding and hiring practices, to secure the best hires and the best contractors to provide supplies, etc. When it comes to deseg money, why is the district so eager to get out from under court supervision, which comes along with the additional $60 million funding supplement to improve services to minorities? Could it have something to do with the fact that that large funding supplement comes with the annoying oversight of people who will actually require documentation that the funds are being used to secure real STUDENT BENEFIT?
Entertain yourself some time by reading court orders in the desegregation case and the dialogues between the Special Master, plaintiffs, and representatives of TUSD. Much of it is available for public viewing through the district’s website. Sadly, if those of us who are actually focused on STUDENT BENEFIT feel that we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole with Alice when examining Ducey’s education proposals, we feel as much that way when examining any number of TUSD’s choices in interacting with funds that actually come with some degree of informed oversight.
Ducey and HT Sanchez: there are no white hats in this drama. Sanchez pitched Ducey’s bad-deal-123 to the gullible electorate with the specific, explicit promise of increasing teacher salaries with the funds, if they were granted. What happened with that money in TUSD? What has happened during the last three years in TUSD with the 301 money that was supposed to be dispensed in teacher bonuses? Do your homework and then come back and comment, trying, perhaps, to be even-handed and honest, for the first time in your commenting career, about what’s going on in Arizona, which includes a lot more than the story you constantly repeat, “Right-wing politicians are self-interested.”
Yeah, we know. But you forgot the rest of it. Unfortunately, they don’t have a monopoly on malfeasance.
Politicians, educators, economists and pundits alike can navel gaze and pontificate all day and night but the reality is:
1. Arizona has grossly underfunded education.
2. This issue is, pure and simple, a lack of resources at the State level because of 25 years worth of unsustainable and irresponsible tax cuts.
3. The only way out of this is to raise revenue, that means tax increases and the elimination of tax credits but these are not possible in the current political climate.
THERE I SAID IT: WE HAVE TO RAISE TAXES!!!
I thought you guys were big on bake sales.
The latest numbers are from 2014.
Education accounted for 35.2 percent of state expenditures in fiscal year 2015, while 31 percent went to Medicaid.
Did the ACA require AZ to spend even more on Medicaid?
Thanks for the made-to-order Pima County Democratic Party (PCDP) comment, Michael S. Ellegood. You’ve definitely been drinking the PCDP Kool-Aid and have the PCDP schtick down. The FORM of your content was good, and with a few slight edits to the CONTENT, there might be some validity to it. Check it out:
Politicians, educators, economists, and pundits alike can navel gaze and pontificate all day and night but the reality is:
1. Arizona has been grossly negligent in its oversight of education: there is no effective regulatory mechanism ensuring quality of educational services or financial transparency and no reliable means for protecting the public from abuse in public district schools, charter schools, or in publicly subsidized private schools.
2. The issue is, pure and simple, an abuse of power by self-interested politicians and administrators because of 25 years of neglect of the regulatory and enforcement mechanisms required to keep public institutions from falling into patterns of dysfunction and abuse.
3. The only way out of this is to recruit and elect politicians who will exercise responsible public governance, BOTH funding and OVERSEEING public institutions in ways that ensure the public’s needs are met.
THERE I SAID IT: THROWING MORE MONEY AT A MALFEASANT MONSTER LIKE TUSD WILL NOT DO A DAMN BIT OF GOOD IN IMPROVING TEACHERS’ SALARIES OR DELIVERING BETTER SERVICES TO STUDENTS UNLESS THE STATE CAN PROVIDE OVERSIGHT OR ATTACH CONDITIONS TO THE FUNDING TO ENSURE THE MONEY IS PROPERLY APPLIED, AND THE STATE HAS NOT THE SLIGHTEST INTENTION OF DOING THAT.
Wake up, Michael S. Ellegood: it’s all there in recordings and minutes of TUSD Board meetings and in the various docs from the desegregation case available on the district’s website. Those who believe the PCDP fairy tale about how to fix the problems in our school are ignorant and lazy. They simply haven’t done the work that can easily be done to see what the reality, as opposed to the fantasy , actually is. States that fund education at higher levels also oversee the application of those funds more responsibly. We don’t have the mechanisms in place to do that, and throwing more money at TUSD without setting up better oversight mechanisms will simply line the pockets of Sanchez and his central-admin flunkies and the pockets of the various cronies in THE MACHINE. It will not make any constructive difference for students.
So are you saying that the Pima County democratic Party runs TUSD? That explains all the indoctrination, but wouldn’t it fall under the non establishment clause of the USC?
It is an obvious conflict of interest and an afront to parents looking for a good education.
Again: TUSD is not at all like most AZ school districts. To always equate TUSD as representative is wrong-headed and, usually for some reason, vindictive for some personal reason the rest of us do not know much about. Reports on national ratings seem reasonable to me when they state that AZ teachers are underpaid even before you throw in all the prep and training and time and money spent on college level classes, internships, etc. Nevertheless, many commenters here want to just bash a single entity while simultaneously sounding jealous of that great starting teacher salary.
Again: TUSD is the largest public school district in Southern Arizona. It is the second largest school district in the state. It serves close to 50,000 students, more than any other district in the region, and approximately 1/3 of all of the students enrolled in public district schools in Pima County. When you are talking about increasing funding for public district schools across the board and putting no stipulations on how that money can be used, in Pima county that means one of every three of those dollars will go into a district which has a poor track record in student achievement and an even poorer track record in using the funds available to it to benefit students and teachers rather than to benefit central administrators and the political machine surrounding PCDP-affiliated TUSD Board members. There have been many credible reports in the mainstream media and in alternative media outlets of mis-use of bidding and hiring practices within the district, and during the last Board campaign there was a clear case of improper relationships (political donations) to PCDP-affiliated Board candidates from the family of a marketing executive whose firm had been awarded, on their votes, a $21 million contract to manage the district’s improperly outsourced labor.
TUSD has a recent track record of pitching a bad funding deal (Prop 123) to the electorate with a specific, clear promise that the funds would be used to improve teacher salaries. The funds were not used that way, in spite of the disingenuous and unconvincing “spin” David Safier put on the matter in his various “damage control” blogs and interviews. There has been a well documented and widely reported practice of stockpiling 301 funds, which should have gone to teacher bonuses, in district bank accounts, creating a financial buffer at the expense of teachers, while the Superintendent in the district takes home as much as $500K per annum of the district’s funds and throws around $10K annual bonuses to members of his central admin “cabinet.”
Some of the comments about TUSD in these streams seem ideologically driven, coming from the anti-“government schools” camp, but many of the comments on Safier’s blog about TUSD’s mis-use of funds are recognizable, to those of us who follow the district’s affairs closely, as an accurate representation of what has been happening in the district under the Sanchez administration. The facts:
1) that a large percentage of any across-the-board increase in education funding will go to this district 2) that this district has a lousy track record applying funds in ways that benefit students and teachers
are relevant to discussions of public policy and the funding of public education. Commenters who want to kick these facts to the curb and dismiss them as “vindictive for some personal reason the rest of us do not know much about” are simply ignorant of what has been going on in one of our largest and most important public institutions in Southern Arizona, and irresponsible citizens. They are unwisely willing to flush our Arizona tax dollars — which most of us recognize have been and will continue to be in insufficient supply — down the toilet of a malfeasant institution which neither our local citizens nor our state level government / “Department of Education” has the will to oversee responsibly so that constituents and students can be protected from abuse.
Sad, but true. You can deny the reality and dismiss it as much as you like. In doing so you brand yourself as an ignorant ideologue, wishing to dwell in a fantasy land while the real future of tens of thousands of students are damaged by a grossly malfeasant public institution. The genuine supporters of public schools and public institutions do their homework, speak up honestly about what is going on, and ask for better. They know that problems in public institutions cannot be solved by throwing money at administrators who have a shockingly poor record using the funds appropriately.
Get rid of Sanchez and bring in a Superintendent, through a properly transparent public process, that actually has the credentials and experience to manage this troubled district honestly and efficiently. Or, attach conditions to blanket funding increases that will effectively prevent Sanchez and his cronies from flushing more of our tax dollars that should educate students down their crony-ism toilet. But don’t expect that increasing funds without taking one or the other of those two pragmatic, reasonable steps will help students and teachers. It won’t.