School spending up 44% since ’08

Yet state struggling to move needle per student

For years, Republicans have argued they get no credit for the money they’ve added to Arizona’s public school system.

The complaints sharpened this year, when some lawmakers balked at raising the spending cap for schools. A rejection would have forced dramatic cuts in the final months of the school year.

And the focus on funding continues at the Capitol, with 11th-hour legislation to rework the state’s school funding formula, which would reduce state support to at least 121 school districts, while putting $215 million more into public schools, according to the legislative budget office. Another proposal, in the early stages, would add as much as $900 million more to the K-12 budget.

GOP lawmakers may not be in the mood for a significant increase.

“It’s never enough, never enough,” Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, said earlier this year, as the deadline for a decision on the spending cap neared. Ultimately, most Republicans, including Borrelli, voted with Democrats to lift the cap – but not without airing grievances.

Borrelli reeled off numbers that showed the education budget for classroom operations recovered to its pre-recession level of $5.2 billion, and then some.

Indeed, figures show an impressive increase in state funding: up 44% since 2008, the last year before the Great Recession forced steep cuts in school funding. That translates to an estimated $7.5 billion in state general fund money for K-12 operations this year, according to data from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee.

But looked at another way, the numbers don’t dazzle.

Today, the state spends an average of $5,710 per student, compared to the $5,442 that was spent 14 years ago. That’s a 5% increase over the past decade and a half.

And that’s where any agreement

Sen. David Livingston, R-Peoria, brushes aside national comparisons ... saying the best gauge of how Arizona schools are faring is found in its staffers and the people the schools serve. “The measurement is when parents, teachers and kids are happy. That’s the indicator.”

over how best to characterize state spending on schools splits along partisan lines: The top-line numbers look good, as Republicans note, but per-pupil funding has barely budged when inflation and student enrollment growth are factored in — as Democrats are quick to remind.

Here’s another data point: the state’s investment in public schools on a perpupil basis was only 66% of the national average based on 2019 figures, the latest data available, according to education consultant Anabel Aportela. Since 1992, the gap between Arizona’s spending and the national average has widened: it was 88% of the national average in 1992, she said.

Bottom line: While Arizona has increased education spending, it has not kept up with other states.

With the abolition of Proposition 208, a tax hike on the wealthy intended to fund education, as well as legislative plans to pass an even-deeper tax cut than last year’s $1 billion reduction, prospects for a big jump in education funding are dim.

Sen. Paul Boyer, chairman of the Senate Education Committee and a former charter school teacher, is pitching the idea of a “grand bargain.” It would direct as much as $900 million of the state’s surplus into K-12, in exchange for approval of vouchers for children from low-income families, and still leave room for a sizeable income tax cut.

Gov. Doug Ducey’s budget plan had modest proposals, such as $128 million to reward high-performing schools and help those with poor test scores, and $20 million to expand a transportation pilot program for schools.

Why it’s ‘never enough’

Christine Marsh, a former Arizona teacher of the year and now a state senator, acknowledged the overall funding increases.

“I appreciate the additional funding,” said Marsh, a Phoenix Democrat who won election in 2020 largely on her support for public education. “But the truth is, we’re at the bottom of the rankings on important measures like class size and teacher pay. We have a long, long way to go. Our teachers and students feel it.”

There’s no doubt the funding numbers are higher, said Chuck Essigs, director of governmental relations for the Arizona Association of School Budget Officers. But the distribution is uneven, fueled by declining enrollment in many district-run schools and the growth of public charter schools.

School districts with declining enrollment lose the state aid that is allotted on a per pupil basis, Essigs said.

Meanwhile, charter schools, which have seen overall enrollment gains, get 100% of their funding from the state since they can’t levy property taxes. That means as charters grow, and district schools lose enrollment, the benefit of increased state funding tilts heavily toward charter schools, Essigs said.

If the numbers aren’t persuasive, just step into a classroom, said Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association, a teacher union.

Teachers continue to quit, deepening the state’s teacher shortage, despite state funding that boosted average teacher pay by 20%. Earlier this year, the state Board of Education doubled the length of time a temporary teacher could work in Arizona classrooms, to two years. Temporary teachers only need a high school diploma and don’t require any formal teacher training.

Thomas said he couldn’t think of any school that was fully staffed at the start of the school year, meaning teachers were instructing in the discipline they trained in. Instead, the math teacher may actually be trained as an English teacher, as schools scramble to fill staffing gaps.

Although the current debate revolves mainly around classroom spending, several school districts are suing the state for inadequate funding for buildings, maintenance, buses and other physical infrastructure costs. That suit, filed in 2017, is ongoing in Maricopa County Superior Court.

Would a bigger pie help?

Boyer echoes the frustration of his GOP colleagues when presented with the numbers.

“What percentage of the pie is enough?” said Boyer, R-Glendale. The K-12 budget consumes half of the state’s general fund, he said, and the state has other needs in addition to schools.

The constant complaints are a sign the state may need a bigger pie, he acknowledged, or at least a focus on the areas that need the most attention, such as increasing staff at Arizona’s prisons and boosting the highway patrol.

Sen. David Livingston, R-Peoria, brushes aside national comparisons, which have consistently showed Arizona in the basement on funding per student. It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, given the different ways states fund their school systems, he said.

The best gauge of how Arizona schools are faring is found in its staffers and the people the schools serve, he said.

“The measurement is when parents, teachers and kids are happy,” he said. “That’s the indicator.”

As a lawmaker, Livingston isn’t doing a happy dance just yet.

“We’re not meeting the standards we’ve set,” he said. Higher expectations would help, he added.

Sen. Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, voted against raising the school spending cap. He said he’d heard from constituents that the schools get enough funding.

After reviewing the funding growth in recent years, he agrees, although he said more needs to be done to retain teachers.

“We definitely need to focus on the teacher shortage,” Petersen said, adding Arizona needs to make salaries competitive to attract good candidates. “But we have other shortages. The (job) market is shifting right now and that has to settle.”

Asked what’s the ideal number for a competitive teacher pay scale, he shrugged.

“We’re never done,” he said.

Voters deserve credit, too

The notion that Republicans are antipublic education makes many GOP lawmakers bristle.

“Every year, we’ve voted for more funding for K-12,” said Boyer, who is entertaining the idea of a “grand bargain” on school finance that would increase funding to public schools while making vouchers available to students from low-income families.

K-12 funding has grown every year since 2012, budget records show. Those increases have come almost entirely due to Republican votes, Boyer noted. Democrats, who are in the minority, regularly vote against the state education budget, arguing for more spending.

Lawmakers are responsible for those annual increases. But voters are, too.

In May 2015, Arizona voters narrowly approved Proposition 123, which tapped a greater share of state trust land proceeds for education. Newly elected Gov. Ducey championed the ballot measure and sold it as a way to increase K-12 budgets for 10 years without raising taxes. Critics called it short sighted, arguing it would reduce the long-term gains of the trust fund, harming future students.

But, thanks to voter approval, Proposition 123 funneled millions more dollars into schools than would have happened otherwise.

For example, basic state aid, which comes from general tax revenue, increased 51%, since Ducey took office, legislative budget numbers show. But Proposition 123 unleashed a surge of school funding, increasing the land trust’s contribution through 2022 by 566%.

That contributed to bigger strides in financing in recent years. Average perpupil funding since Ducey took office, for example, grew 33%.

Sustainable funding needed

Those additional dollars are not a permanent fix. Proposition 123 expires in 2025, creating a financial cliff for schools that the next governor and future lawmakers will have to solve. Whether anyone will back an effort to renew it is unclear.

Nor are there any long-term, sustainable funding sources on the horizon, now that the courts have ruled Proposition 208 and its funding plan unconstitutional. The measure was projected to raise as much as $1 billion a year for teacher salaries and other classroom needs.

There’s one obvious funding source, said Rebecca Gau, executive director of Stand for Children, one of the groups which promoted Proposition 208: the state’s general fund surplus.

“It’s called the $1 billion structural surplus we have,” Gau said. Some of that money would add up to a sizeable boost for schools and end the fight at the ballot for school funding, she said.