“Hey look, everybody, a brand new education finance pony! And there’s money inside!”
Yeah, maybe, but I don’t think so. Prove me wrong. Please, prove me wrong. Show me lots and lots of new money for education. But what I see is a new education funding plan that moves around the existing money without a commitment to add a single new dollar. And the way the money moves will very likely hurt district schools with low income kids, and help charter schools.
Ducey’s Classrooms First Initiative Council published its long-awaited, long-delayed Final Report. The Council’s mission was to come up with ways to redo our state education financing system. It came up with 12 recommendations, none of which specifically says the schools need more money. Recommendation 10 says we should increase teacher salaries. How? Doesn’t say. Maybe new funding, maybe making cuts elsewhere, who knows? Number 11 says we need to create a funding priority for low income schools. With new money or existing funds? Again, doesn’t say. But the first nine recommendations are filled with all kinds of ideas about changing where education money comes from and how it’s spread around. Most of them were proposed years ago by Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona Superintendent of Education, former senior education policy advisor for John McCain during his 2008 presidential run and current top education advisor to Governor Ducey, albeit unofficially. She’s a friend of charter schools—when she was in the State Senate, she pushed through the original charter legislation—and a friend of vouchers—she got her charter bill through by threatening voucher legislation if she didn’t get her way. Then she went on to be the Arizona Superintendent of Education, where she initiated the wild-west-style approach to creating charters, the more the merrier, and letting them do pretty much whatever they want to do.
A story in the Star holds out hope for more education funding, but I’m not convinced. According to the article, Ducey said he’s figuring out a way to get more money. How? He’s had 210 days since Prop 123 passed and he promised a “next step” for school funding was coming. But now, after all that time, if he has a plan, he’s not saying what it is.
“We’re going to have an exciting education agenda this year,” the governor said. “And you’re going to hear about it in the State of the State” address.
A few days ago, Ducey lied at least three times about this year’s wonderful additions to education funding which weren’t really additions to education funding in his 2016: Year in Review. No doubt those lies will be repeated in his State of the State address, with new lies about new funding heaped on top without any real plans to move us out of the dollars-per-student cellar.
The article goes on to talk about the plans Heather Carter (R-Cave Creek) has to increase education funding by going to the voters. Sounds like a tax increase, most likely a sales tax increase. If you remember how that went last time, in 2012, Prop 204 proposed a one cent sales tax hike which would have put almost a billion dollars a year into education. The proposition was doing pretty well in the polls, and then came the huge money drop against it by the NO on Prop 204 Campaign in the last weeks of the campaign, and it went down to defeat. The chair of the NO on Prop 204 Campaign was then-State Treasurer Doug Ducey. Now that he’s governor, he’s promised no new state taxes, and tax cuts for his wealthy friends. I don’t see him getting on board for a new sales tax proposition, and I don’t see many Republican officials bucking Ducey and joining in.
Ducey & Co. would love to string us along with hopes of new money for education so we won’t make much noise until the budget is passed and it’s too late, but I wouldn’t count on it. Show us the money, Doug.
Inside those 12 recommendations from the Classrooms First Initiative Council are the foundation for a radical restructuring of the way we generate money for our schools and the way we spread it around. I’m betting Ducey’s “exciting education agenda this year” is all about implementing those suggestions. More on that in another post.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2016.
The answers are very simple David. Cut district spending and bloated pensions. Put the money in payroll and classroom needs. Get rid of 50% of the educrats that bloated the budget. We don’;t need them.
Why is it always “more money for education” will fix the broken system? I, for one, am tired of the same old whine, because it never works.
Bisbee boy, as long as they keep blaming failure on lack of money, they are free to fail, because they know they are not deserving of even more money to waste.
Plus it keeps them from blaming this on the Russians, until the left comes up with a platform that doesn’t p*ss of the taxpayers again.
Please keep us posted on this, David. While you’re at it, let us know if any new funding initiatives have built-in protections from school districts using infusions of funding that is desperately needed in the classrooms to pay their ignorant and underperforming Superintendents $500K a year of taxpayer money, pay out a slew of $10K per annum bonuses to overpaid central administrators while allowing millions in 301 funds meant for teacher bonuses to accumulate in the district’s bank accounts, save money by outsourcing substitute teacher labor so that tax dollars go into the pockets of a private management company instead of into the pockets of the people working hard to fill in the vacancies in low-SES, high -minority classrooms on the south and west sides. Et cetera, ad nauseam.
Your whole schtick is so — what shall I call it? “Consistently lame” and “reliably misleading” does it pretty nicely.
Not one mention in comments about kids, children, or the future of our community, state or nation, just more whining, political posturing and insults, as if the only solution to social problems is cutting funding more and more and more. There could be serious reckoning some day when we get overrun with uneducated violent slobs with no moral compasses or positive feelings about anyone else but themselves. Wait. That could be now. Even at Christmas time.
The comment about application of funds is not a comment coming from a “starve the beast” perspective.
The ideology of “all that’s needed to improve our schools is more funding” is reductive and plain flat factually false. Yes, Arizona schools need more funding. But they also need the kind of constructive oversight that states that actually value public education and take the need to GET IT RIGHT provide. In the absence of both sufficient funding and sufficient constructive oversight, you have districts like TUSD, which currently sadly underserves between 40,000 and 50,000 students in our region and has a substantial impact on the quality of our local communities. The limited funding this district DOES receive is not being properly applied to benefit students, and you will not solve the problems with malfeasance and incompetence in the district’s administration by handing these people more funds with no oversight and no reasonable constraints on what those funds can be used for.
Those who take the trouble to do their duty as citizens and observe what actually happens on the TUSD Board and in the district’s schools know that to hand TUSD admin more funds with no strings attached will not produce better schools for our students. It’s only those like Safier who deal in utopian theories and love to pontificate, propagandize and “spin” without doing the work necessary to understand the on-the-ground realities in Southern Arizona school districts who think that the only problems with our schools are with the dispensing of funds at the state level.
Safier’s commentary consistently hides or ignores the tough problems that have to be solved locally and by doing so misleads those who believe his overly simplified interpretation of the education scene in the state, pitching a policy agenda which anyone who knows our schools knows will NOT solve our problems.
If you had attended the last TUSD Board meeting you would have seen teachers standing in the back of the room with signs asking why millions of dollars of 301 funds that should be going to teacher performance pay have been stockpiled by the district and not paid to a teaching workforce so underpaid that this state has one of the worst teacher shortages in the nation. And TUSD has a teacher shortage worse than any other district in the region. Not a context in which this district should be sitting on funds that could help mitigate their serious problems with teacher recruitment and retention.
Wake up. Hand HT Sanchez more funding and he may elect to increase the rate he gets paid not to take his scores of allocated vacation days per year — he’s already banking more than $1,000 per day when he elects not to take more than 40 vacation days per year. He gets more money in exchange for not taking 40 days of vacation than many teachers get for annual salary. Shall we allow $1,500 per day for more than 60 vacation days per year? Will that improve the education being delivered to students who too often don’t have textbooks and don’t have certified teachers delivering instruction in their classrooms? No. It will not.
Perhaps, “Starve the Beast Politics Is Sickening,” you should grant that being ignorant of what’s actually going on in our schools is sickening and failing to admit who is responsible for misappropriating the limited funds available to educate our children is sickening. That’s about how it looks from the perspective of those who are well-informed about TUSD.
Many school systems are facing the same problem. In North Carolina the state gives back to the counties a portion of the state tax money to be used in education contingent upon the population number. Because there are so many starving RURAL schools, the state wanted to ‘Redistribute” the money according to need. It did not pass because more successful counties with higher property taxes did not want to have to raise their property taxes, yet again, to take up the shortfall from the state’s lower reimbursement.
One of my friends suggested that the Federal government become more involved in reimbursing more needy counties. In other words, using more income, corporate and business tax money to fund those schools. I believe the Federal Government has given up on education totally! They think it is unnecessary to educate the population because most of them will wind up being subsidized due to extremely low paying jobs. This is based on the new finding that 60% of the population is NOW dependent on 40% of the population for subsidy.
We have become a 3rd world, Welfare State country. What kind of educational system should you expect in a 3rd World, Welfare State country?
You’ll always have a shortage of funds when you decide to educate the kids of every illegal that walks across the border. Voters aren’t ever going to finance a school system that does that. They’ll vote at the ballot box and vote with their feet.
Just to say that some things just cost what they do: maintenance of schools, salaries, classroom supplies and so on. Starving the schools of these things because there are “too many administrators, bloated pensions (ASRS is a pension that teachers contribute to) and lack of oversight.” Popular talking points, but until I hear of an effort to take the line items, consider the real costs and apply them, I’m not at all in with the self praise of school funding, much less equalizing public vs charter. To me, if we were being frugal, the for profit schools would be on their own, not funded with public money. You fix things, not abandon them using scapegoats.
Then HT Sanchez should be cutting the fat to help the kids. Has he done that?
Want money for education? Then get rid of the stupid republicans voucher system that takes money from public schools and gives it to private schools, then get rid of all the illegal students that take up all the resources and dont pay any taxes, then get rid of all the after school activities and you will have plenty of money for education.
Az had no voucher program. Private schools are not getting education money, they get small amounts pervstudent from state taxes. But when you get rid of illegals you could close more schools. You are 1 for 3. Keep ugging away at it.