Education is a hot potato right now in AZ. This press release came our way from the legislative leadership.  

A prior post regarding Antenori’s Op-Ed denial by the Az Star pointed out that;

Raise taxes you say and and cut less? Here’s an interesting fact I heard from another State legislator; it took Arizona 100 years to grow it’s budget to $6 billion. It took Napolitano only 4 years to grow it to $10.3 billion. Do you think we over spent a bit? 

 Google, Education Spending Arizona, and you’ll find a bunch of sources for yourself. Look at the issue and do some homework, then make up your own mind.

Why it is INACCURATE to say Arizona ranks 49^th in Education:

§         This is just ONE statistic, based solely on a “per pupil” spending calculation

§         The “per pupil” spending calculation does not take into account the following:

                     i.      uniformity as to what funding categories go into the calculation from state-to-state (for example, Arizona has consistently ranked at the top for capital expenditures per pupil, but none of those dollars are factored into Arizona’s per pupil calculations)

                   ii.      actual dollars spent in the classroom from district-to-district or state-to-state

                  iii.      cost of living adjustments

                 iv.      voter-established constitutional requirements/limitations for education funding

                   v.      estimates and redundancies in student counts

                 vi.      calculation variances that occur because of rapid growth issues faced by states like Arizona, versus states experiencing little, no or negative growth

§         It makes absolutely no sense for public policy to be driven by one isolated apples-to-oranges statistic, which looks at education spending in a vacuum

§         There are better gauges to education ranking that are outcome-based indicators, such as student achievement, test scores, etc.

§         The per-pupil expenditure is really a reflection of class size, excluding the idea of efficiency

§         A general state analysis by ALEC, as well as one by the RAND Corporation of California’s massive (and expensive) effort to reduce class sizes, has found no correlation between class sizes and test scores.

¹ JLBC: Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee; ALEC: American Legislative Exchange Council; NEA: National Education Association; BEA: Bureau of Economic Analysis; NSF: National Science Foundation; ATRA: Arizona Tax Research Association.

² “Instructional staff” includes teachers, as well as principals, supervisors of instruction, guidance personnel, etc.  It does NOT include administrative staff.