These state education funding numbers bear repeating, again and again and again, lest we forget that funding for K-12 schools and universities in Arizona plummeted after 2009. Two stories in Friday’s Star—both by Howard Fischer, one including the Star‘s Yoohyun Jung—remind us of that important fact. Lest we forget.
[Unsolicited MSM plug: Support your local mainstream media. If you can afford it, buy a subscription to the Star. No other news outlet in Tucson provides so much information about what’s happening at the local, state and national levels. Read it critically, of course, don’t accept everything at face value, but if you want to know what’s going on, it’s essential reading. We need a thriving print media sector now more than ever (cough, Trump, cough). End of plug.]
The first story is about National School Choice Week, a faux-holiday I choose not to celebrate. The article includes a chart showing state funding for K-12 education over the past ten years. The numbers, by the way, aren’t adjusted for inflation.
State funding of K-12 education on per-student basis:
Year — amount
2007-08 — $4,949
2008-09 — $4,427
2009-10 — $4,216
2010-11 — $3,894
2011-12 — $3,816
2012-13 — $3,861
2013-14 — $4,108
2014-15 — $4,169
2015-16 — $4,459
2016-17 — $4,529
We cut the largest percentage of our already-low per-student funding in the nation during the recession, and now we’re still $400 per student below where we were ten years ago. That amounts to a $400 million yearly cut before adjusting for inflation. (The numbers above, by the way, aren’t the total amount Arizona spends per student. That’s the amount the state contributes to the total, which is around $7,200, 49th in the nation.)
The other story is about a bill to control our university’s “out of control” spending by taking power away from the Arizona Board of Regents. The article points out that the state has cut its university funding in half over the past ten years. In terms of per-student support, it comes close to being a third of what it was a decade ago after adjusting for inflation.
Figures prepared by legislative budget staffers put state aid to the university system at close to $1.1 billion in the 2007-2008 school year. By last school year, the number had dropped to $648 million.
There was a small increase this year, to $681.5 million. But some of that is one-time funding that universities cannot count on going forward.
Looking at it another way, the state’s per-student support in 2007-2008 was $9,648. This year it is $4,098. And if inflation is factored in, the number is closer to $3,500.
An article in the Arizona Capitol Times hammers the number home.
Arizona universities have been the target of incessant budget cuts over the past few years. The reductions were among the steepest in the nation from 2008-2015. The Grand Canyon State fell to 49th among states, with the second worst state university funding per capita, according to Politifact Arizona.
If Governor Ducey wants to claim the mantle of education advocate, his first promise should be, “We will restore funding to 2008 levels,” then he can move on from there. Anything less just keeps his face posted on Arizona’s Education Wall of Shame.
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2017.
But what is the honest number when you add federal money, federal grants, state tax credit contributions and corporate donations? How many others have I missed?
Obviously there had to be pay cuts. Show all of us the teacher and principal salaries from 2007-2017.
You’re targeting the wrong group, commenter #2. Try looking at admin salaries and the ratio of top admin salary to average instructional faculty salary. For the university, look at compensation rates, job security, and benefits for adjuncts, an exploited labor pool underwriting / subsidizing the operational budget and distorting the actual cost of running a major university.
Now look at trends in tuition rates and student debt rates over the same period Safier examines for state funding. There you’ll find another exploited group: students and their families. Did the work-for-a-living middle class take fewer hits than the state government in the recession of 2008? Then why are they being forced to carry the burden and compensate for the damage in the form of outrageous costs to educate their children and / or the students are bearing the cost themselves by turning themselves into 30-year indentured servants in order to get their college and professional degrees?
For your further edification, examine trends in in-state vs. out-of-state tuition and trends in in-state vs. out-of-state admission rates. Are the public universities in Arizona dealing with their sadly reduced budgets by admitting less qualified out-of-state residents (who pay higher tuition) over more qualified in-state residents (who pay lower tuition), as some campuses in the University of California system were caught doing?
Now look at the luxury dorms — both privately owned and university owned — that have gone up around the University of Arizona. Many of them look more like resorts or yuppie apartment complexes than the sort of low-frills, ascetic student housing even the best universities provided a generation ago.
What’s going on here? In just about every dimension, narrowing of opportunity for middle and low SES cohorts and expansion of opportunity (and luxury) for high SES cohorts. And this is in PUBLIC higher ed. You don’t want to look at what’s going on in private higher ed, where the expense of attending the best institutions is more than $60K per year and they’ve pretty much eliminated “merit aid” and defined “need-based aid” in such a way that it cuts most of the middle class out of the deal — or at least those unwilling to take on a second mortgage when they’re in their late 40s or early 50s to educate their kids.
Welcome to “America,” or should I write “Amerika” with a nod to Kafka?
You ate defining the industrial education complex. Don’t you dare try to stop them.
No, it’s not the “industrial education complex.” It’s a public university system that is not receiving the citizen attention and citizen advocacy it needs to keep it on track and keep it serving the PUBLIC.
Turns out democratic institutions need the demos (people) to play the role they are supposed to play. When the people are MIA and too lazy to keep politicians and the elites who fund the politicians’ campaigns from distorting “public” institutions into something that suits their own purposes, things go wrong.
What a surprise.
The vacuum left by parents disengaging allowed the edication complex to grow into power.
Maybe we all should think seriously about making “America Great Again?”
Like going back to the 60’s when I earned a B.A from Pennsylvania’s Clarion State College and an M.A. from the University of Connecticut while working part-time jobs.
Ah, for the good old days, when both states highly valued the importance of post-secondary education by properly funding their state colleges and universities.
Such days are long gone, sadly.
They have done extensive studies of our college and universities system. The major study, following a large sample of students as they move through the system, found that the typical student showed no cognitive gains from the first two years of college.
This would imply that our university system is just an incredibly expensive filter or classification system – creating no value for society, at least not measurable through the value added for the average student.
@jhuppenthal That is beyond brilliant! Armed with the knowledge that these students then become radicalized in the final two years, we need to cut federal funding upon completion of their sophomore year and celebrate graduation.
At 21 they could get a job and begin to replace the Social Security funds that were stolen from older workers.