It’s heartening to see the turnout and protests at congressional town halls. The public and the press must also hold state and local officials responsible when they say and do stupid shit, which, in Arizona, is often.
Last week the local paper in Payson, population about 15,000, weighed in on an education measure that Gov. Ducey recently signed. This POS will raise the ceiling on the number of education vouchers the state can issue. There’s no new money for these “Empowerment Scholarship Accounts,” so the $4,500 per student comes out of the already paltry public school budget. The program was created for special needs students, then it expanded to serve the poor and now it’s open to everyone. You can guess who’s behind the expansion—the state’s powerful for-profit school juggernaut, which sees a lot more customers with nearly $5,000 in hand.
The voucher pinheads say the system benefits the poor, allowing parents to remove children from struggling schools and send them to better districts. It’s not working out that way, not by a long shot. Most of the money is being used by families in affluent areas, where the schools are good, to send their kids out of district to pricey private schools. See a pattern? Nearly every major education package these bozos at the legislature pass benefits for-profit and religious schools, along with their dark money backers, who give liberally to the Republicans in charge of framing education policy:
The top spender: the American Federation for Children, a dark-money group that is pushing to have ever larger amounts of public money diverted to pay for private school tuition or given to parents in the form of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, to use as they see fit to educate their children.
Last week, when Gov. Ducey signed the bill that raided the public school budget—again—in order to steer more money to vouchers, he said he “really sees value in expanding school choice,” although Arizona’s well-documented history shows that this “value” is mostly corporate, not public. The people who push school choice rank Arizona #1 in the nation because of the political support for charters, at the same time the state is near the bottom in nearly every educational measurement. So where is the “value” in expanding a failing system even more?
Before Ducey signed the bill, however, the senator representing Payson, Sylvia Allen, and the two representatives from the same sprawling north central region, Bob Thorpe and Brenda Barton, voted in favor of more vouchers when there is no way this bill benefits the citizens in that district.
The Payson Roundup, whose Facebook page calls it “a typical small town newspaper with limited circulation and limited income,” let the three elected officials have it in a blistering editorial called “The Enemies of Public Education.” Bravo! The authors certainly know that no state has cut school funding more than Arizona over the last decade, and they also know we’re trying hard to reach the lowest per pupil funding in the nation. Now the legislators representing their community want to hammer public schools even more?!
Payson is a pleasant mountain community that’s a summer getaway for many Phoenicians. There’s one high school that almost everyone knows (Friday night football), so the effects of budget cuts can’t be hidden: teachers leave, buildings decay, programs are eliminated. Now Sylvia Allen, whose “Earth is 6,000 years old” statement went well beyond the senate chambers, wants to gut local schools even more. As do Representatives Thorpe and Barton. The Payson Roundup rightfully calls them “abusers of education.” Boom!
So they all three voted for vouchers—which will probably do even more damage to public schools in Arizona than our indifferent Legislature has done to this point by ensuring we have among worst-funded schools in the nation...
Our already shamefully underfunded public schools will grow more segregated as they bleed money and students. The richest, most pro-active families will move their children to private schools and our educational system will increasingly serve to harden class boundaries, rather than providing equal opportunity to all our children.
That powerful blast, which ends by reminding readers there’s an election coming, is even more impressive when you consider Payson is a conservative town in Arizona’s White Mountains, a county that went 64-32 for Trump: NRA Land, anti-Washington. Heck, Rep. Thorpe is chair of the House Federalism Committee. Yeah, we have that. Lots of vacation homes and churches in the White Mountains, heavily Mormon. Sen. Allen, a realtor and Mormon, has represented the district for nearly a decade but she’s vulnerable, nearly losing her last election, while she continues to blabber theocratic nonsense like maybe we should have mandatory church attendance.
Almost every poll in Arizona shows that education is a major priority; specifically, voters believe the state should do and spend more. So, Republicans, especially the Trump-loving goobers in rural areas, keep voting to steal money from the public schools, keep shutting down women’s clinics, keep eliminating health care and Meals on Wheels, and you’ll see more editorials like the one in Payson, until you’re not there to write about anymore.