Arizona’s education system has looked a lot like the for-profit nightmare Betsy DeVos has in mind for the rest of the nation long before Donald Trump heard of her. The state is charter school central, a less-than-successful experiment that goes back to the ‘90s. It’s produced some good charters and satisfied parents, but at the expense of a strong public system, which has been hammered. The chamber of commerce bungholes who promote school choice rank Arizona #1 in the USA—not because most important educational measurements are good, but because the political climate is so favorable to charters and religious schools. And profit.
It’s getting crappier, despite what Gov. Ducey and the GOP choir at the legislature say. Over the past decade, no state has cut public education more than Arizona, to the point prison spending has surpassed the Ed budget. Teacher pay is the lowest in the nation, and the teacher-student ratio is among the country’s worse. Even Republican education head Diane Douglas wants more money. But this session, rather than give schools what they need, the legislature and governor passed an enhanced voucher program that will take money from struggling schools so parents in wealthier districts can send their children to out-of-district private institutions.
Superintendents and education associations regularly point out that the state can’t keep good teachers because the pay is so shitty, with thousands of unfilled jobs this year. There’s lots of talk about new revenue streams for higher school budgets, like Prop 123, but the outcomes have been less than sponge worthy, and the state still finds itself near the barrel’s bottom.
Rather than increase the state appropriation to something just approaching national norms, so districts can address the teacher shortage by raising salaries, GOP lugs just pushed through a new law, without one D vote, that will significantly lower the standards for certification, allowing work experience to substitute for training. Hey, let’s make teacher certification as lax as our gun laws! What could go wrong?
Democrat Sen. Steve Farley said the bill will lower teacher standards and dodge the underlying problems regarding the state's low funding of schools and low teacher wages that he and teachers say are driving them out of classrooms and causing the teacher shortage.
So this week, during a hearing on education, the House Majority Leader, Republican John Allen, who online appears to be a real-life human being, said this when he was reminded that many teachers in Arizona work a second job just to get by:
“They’re making it out that anyone who has a second job is struggling. That’s not why many people take a second job. They want to increase their lifestyles. They want to improve themselves. They want to buy a boat.”
And here I thought my teacher friends were grading papers, working a second job or taking required graduate-school classes when they said they were busy, but all this time they were partying on their boat! They had “increase[d] their lifestyles,” whatever the heck that means, but I guess it involves a boat full of “improved” people. Some officials and educators replied to Rep. Allen’s boner:
Thank you, Sally Datria, and the other hard-working professionals who teach and care for our children in spite of the bullshit this legislature keeps dumping on you. If Rep. Allen thinks it’s a nine-month job with summers off, so he can get a second job and play on his boat, he should try it. On second thought, no, don’t. Think of the children!