Hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen, I’m about to say something positive about the way Arizona funds education. We’re number 15 in the nation in spending equalization across school districts. That means the difference between the highest and lowest spending districts is less than it is in 36 states. That’s good news.
Now, here’s the bad news you knew was coming. Our new results-based funding law is designed to reverse the state’s equalization gains, increasing the funding differences between districts, mainly by giving big chunks of extra money to schools in high rent districts.
Here’s the history. Before 1980, Arizona, like most states, gave each school district a minimum level of funding, and the rest came from local property taxes. If one district brought in lots of property tax money for education, its schools were well funded. If another district brought in less in property taxes, its schools were poorly funded. Naturally, that meant wealthy districts tended to have significantly better funded schools than poorer districts, though not always because they taxed themselves at a higher rate. A district with lots of expensive homes could bring in more money for schools with a lower dollars-per-thousand property tax rate than a district with lower value homes and a higher tax rate. Million dollar homes generate more in property tax funds than $100,000 homes, even if the high priced district has a lower tax rate. The best discussion of this subject is Jonathan Kozol’s classic 1991 book, Savage Inequalities.
When a successful lawsuit in California in 1980 challenged the state’s inequitable funding system and won, Arizona saw the writing on the wall and passed legislation to create an “equalizing” formula for its schools. The state became responsible for the funding, which meant property tax money dedicated to schools was doled out based on a complex per-student formula which took a number of factors into account to decide how much money would go to the education of each student. That’s the system we have today. It’s far from perfect, but it puts us at number 15 in the nation in funding equity.
Typically Arizona irony note: A Republican-majority state government put the 1980 equalization formula into place, so you wouldn’t expect an increase in the total amount of education funding, but at least they’d keep the total spending constant, right? Wrong. They equalized education spending down. Before equalization, Arizona was at 87 percent of the national average in per student spending. After the change, it dropped to 81 percent. Our Republican elected officials have continued the pattern year after year, consistently lowering what we spend on our students compared to the rest of the country.
Our funding equalization system still has its inequities. Individual districts have ways to get more money for their schools than other districts. They can vote in local budget overrides. Taxpayers can give them more money through public school tuition tax credits. They can set up foundations which raise extra cash. All those ways to increase funding favor wealthy districts, of course. But even factoring in those kinds of disparities, Arizona ranks high in its school funding equity.
This year, the legislature and the governor found a way to violate the spirit of the 1980 decision to equalize school funding at the state level. It added $37.6 million for what it calls results-based funding, but the clear purpose of the new money is to give extra dollars to schools serving the state’s most economically advantaged children. The equalization law is still intact, but Republicans have figured out how to circumvent it and slip some extra cash to favored schools.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2017.
It’s not like public school teachers are going to riot:
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/05/classroom_fight_between_georgi.html
Don’t try this at home, these are professionals.
You forgot to mention, David Safier, that individual schools within districts — not just districts as a whole — have ways to supplement and skew the supposedly “equitable” distribution of funds to public schools.
Within TUSD, for example, you could use your internet research skills to compare the amount of tax credits accrued by University High School or Sam Hughes or Fruchthendler, for example, with the amounts accrued by the schools in TUSD that lost their magnet status under the Sanchez administration. You might want to make some inquiries, too, about how much these tax-credit-enriched TUSD schools raised privately on top of the inequitably distributed publicly funded tax credits they accrued. Here’s one very odd example: the previous TUSD Superintendent, Sanchez, gave UHS a $10K private donation and, as though that wasn’t enough inequitable favor for him to bestow on an individual school within the district he administered, made sure they were the first school in the district to receive new band uniforms paid for by some district-internal funding source he had available. This to the school that in recent years has had more public school tax credits designated to it than any other school in the district. UHS also has its own private Foundation, though last time I checked they didn’t amount to much. Are they waiting until UHS gets its separate site, perhaps, before they’ll call on their network to donate larger amounts?
Lots of talk about equity from certain folks when it serves them to talk about it. But start looking at the various funding quirks and exceptions-to-the-rules associated with the supposedly “equitable” public schools that just happen to be utilized by the players in the local Democratic party, and the story gets “curiouser and curiouser,” as Alice would say.
But David Safier’s concerns with funding “equity” and other sorts of equity always seem to stop somewhat short of turning over rocks in his own political garden and looking at what’s wriggling underneath. If it didn’t, he might have devoted some reporting to the Fruchthendler-Sabino plan twice put forward by the TUSD Board majority and Superintendent he supported 2013-2016 and twice denied by the authorities in the desegregation case. This district keeps creating and reinforcing inequitable conditions within itself, but when families want to use vouchers, tax credits, or ESAs to exit some of the not-on-the-A-list-of-influence schools in the district like Utterback, for example, this is called, “Welfare for the rich.”
“Welfare for the rich,” indeed. If the shoe fits, the constituents in certain public schools should start to wear it.