Why Arizona teacher pay lags pace of funding

A recent report by the Goldwater Institute raises a riveting question: Given current funding, why aren’t teacher salaries in Arizona already significantly higher?

According to Matt Beienburg, the institute’s director of education policy, overall K-12 per-pupil funding, adjusted for inflation, has increased by 42% since 1980 in Arizona.

Yet, the average teacher salary, adjusted for inflation, just increased from $53,500 to $58,000 — a raise of a mere 8%.

If the average teacher salary had increased proportionately with overall funding, it would be around $76,000 today.

To ensure that the brickbats are properly directed, the rest of this analysis is my own. Beienburg should be spared.

Here is the truly bothersome part of teacher pay lagging so far behind overall funding: There has been enough money earmarked for teacher salary increases above base funding inflation to pay for a boost in that range.

In 2000, voters approved Proposition 301, a six-tenths of 1 percent sales tax dedicated to education funding. A set portion of the proceeds are earmarked for increases in teacher pay.

In addition, Gov. Doug Ducey proposed, and the Legislature passed, a plan to increase teacher pay by 20% over a period of years. The so-called 20 X 2020 plan has now been fully implemented.

Base funding for schools is adjusted each year for student growth and inflation. The Proposition 301 and 20 X 2020 money earmarked for teacher pay was supposed to be in addition to teacher salary increases from base funding.

Between the two programs, there is now more than $1 billion being generated annually specifically for teacher pay and intended to be supplemental to inflation increases from base funding.

There are roughly 50,000 classroom teachers in Arizona. So, that’s enough to fund salary increases of around $20,000 a teacher. That should have gotten average teacher pay in Arizona comfortably above $70,000 a year. Obviously, the state is nowhere near that mark.

Now, some of this has a non-sinister explanation. Pension and health insurance costs have risen during this period disproportionately to wages. If total compensation were considered rather than just salary, the gap between earmarked funding and what teachers got would close a bit.

But that far from explains the extent to which teachers have gotten shortchanged. There is clearly some substitution going on, despite statutory language intended to preclude it.

Districts and charter school operators are obviously using what is intended to be supplemental earmarked money to cover raises that otherwise would come from base funding, and using the base funding to pay for other things.

This is nothing that forensic accounting could prove. Money is fungible. It is impossible to establish the counterfactual: If the supplemental earmarked money didn’t exist, how much more would salaries have been increased from base funding?

That’s why earmarks, and the various anti-diversion statutory injunctions, aren’t much of an assurance about how the money really gets spent. A skepticism worth applying to the various Proposition 208 claims this election.

The larger question is why market pressure didn’t force districts and charter school operators to increase teacher salaries more than they were, given the large increases in overall funding?

Arizona is supposed to have a market-oriented K-12 education system, in which schools compete for students. And, to a considerable extent, we do.

In a competitive marketplace, there should be considerably more upward pressure on teacher salaries. Schools compete for students in part on academic achievement. Teachers are the key to academic achievement.

So, if anything, teacher pay should outpace overall funding. Teachers should be considered the most critical component for school success in a competitive marketplace and compensated accordingly.

This apparent market dysfunction should be a subject of considerable thought and study by advocates of a competitive education marketplace.

My suspicion is that the disconnect flows principally from the lack of an accountability and testing regimen that reveals and highlights differences in academic achievement.

Our accountability and testing regimens have been inconsistent over time. Right now, they are a muddle, a combination of a blizzard of quantita

tive and qualitative factors. They aren’t, and never have been, an understandable and useful comparison of academic achievement.

So, consumers – parents and students – rely on impressions and reputations. Which doesn’t really put the market pressure on schools to give priority to attracting and retaining a high-performing teaching staff, and economizing, if necessary, elsewhere.

Paradoxically, teachers generally oppose the kind of accountability and testing regimen that would create the upward market pressure on their pay. If they want to stop being shortchanged, regardless of whether Proposition 208 passes, they should rethink that.