As I've been saying for years now, one of the major goals of the GOP is to get rid of public education as we know it and replace it with for-profit charter and private schools as well as publicly-funded religious education. Public schools as we know them will be eliminated, replaced with the promise of "top quality schools" that of course will have limited numbers of students, leaving everyone else out in the cold with no promise of even being able to attain education.
It's why Republicans want to force parents to pay for schools directly with charter school schemes that have failed only due to scope, and those who can't afford schools will find that work ages have been lowered so that kids can still be sent to do the jobs that nobody else wants to do for less than minimum wage.
And the newest testing ground for this total workhouse replacement mess? The state of Arizona under Gov. Doug Ducey.
As Gov. Doug Ducey signed Arizona’s universal school voucher expansion into law Thursday, public education advocates geared up for a petition drive to block the effort, promising once again to use a public referendum to halt universal access to the Empowerment Scholarship Account program.
The program is now the largest school voucher program in the country. It changes the very nature of how families in Arizona can spend public education dollars by opening up the option for all students to spend a portion of tax funding initially allocated to public education at private schools.
Ducey, who will complete his term as governor in January, celebrated the law.
"This is a monumental moment for all of Arizona’s students. Our kids will no longer be locked in under-performing schools," he said in a statement Thursday. “With this legislation, Arizona cements itself as the top state for school choice and as the first state in the nation to offer all families the option to choose the school setting that works best for them."
Public education advocates called it a disaster for Arizona schools.
“Arizona voters will be eager to reject HB 2853 (Universal ESA Voucher Expansion) once and for all on the November 2024 ballot, sending a clear message to national privatizers that Arizona voters overwhelmingly support public schools and want our lawmakers to prioritize them,” said Beth Lewis, Save Our Schools Arizona director.
She said the group would start printing petitions the moment the bill went into law and distribute them among volunteers across the state already doing voter outreach work.
“Arizona voters are fed up with majority lawmakers who are prioritizing their wealthy donors and greedy special interests over the Arizona students, parents, and citizens they are supposed to represent."
The tug of war between laws passed by Arizona’s school choice-minded state leaders and public education groups like Save Our Schools Arizona is far from new, but there is no promised outcome.
If Save Our Schools Arizona and its supporters can secure 118,823 valid signatures before September 24, the voucher expansion will be placed on hold until November 2024, when voters get a chance to weigh in.
A similar voucher expansion was successfully stopped through a public referendum in 2018.
But the most recent voucher expansion, as well as court rulings like the one that killed Proposition 208, the voter-approved tax increase for education, show how those efforts can be curtailed. The Legislature could also repeal the voucher law next year and replace it with a similar bill, thus nullifying the referendum effort.
The problem, as with so many other Republican-created disasters that we're dealing with now. is supply.
There are only X number of seats in the top-performing schools. Those will go to those already paying to live close to top-performing local schools. Everyone else gets their second, or third, or fourth, or...their last choice. It's reverse busing.
And this is all going to require lots of non-union teachers, you see.
The education requirement for teachers in Arizona has changed. Under legislation Gov. Doug Ducey signed earlier this week, a person only needs to be enrolled to get their college degree to begin teaching in public schools. It’s a big change, and it’s been met with mixed reactions.
Jens Larson said there was a teacher shortage back when he joined the profession in 2000. “I was hired as an emergency certified teacher. I had a degree but I didn’t have the teacher credentials that were needed,” Larson said.
For 14 years, he worked at the Phoenix Union High School District. He said the low pay, lack of respect, and resources led him to leave. Since leaving, he started Phoenix Youth Circus Arts Program and continues to work with children. “I have more fun teaching circus than I do teaching geometry, I have to admit that,” he said.
But this new change, SB 1159, he said, was a stretch. “The situation will be even worse if you’re dealing with either younger people or even less well-educated people,” Larson said.
“It could work, obviously there’s no one size fits all plan,” said Christopher Ramsey, a Phoenix teacher. Ramsey also benefitted from the teacher shortage years back. “I’m a teacher, and I taught for two years while doing an accelerated master’s program, so I didn’t have my teacher’s degree,” he added. He said if you have the right person, it could work.
The Arizona Educators Association, or AEA, fought this legislation. “You have to have some experience. It’s going to allow people to do on the job training, and that’s where it’s scary,” Marisol Garcia, the President of the AEA, said.
Charter schools are going to hire all sorts of "teachers" under this plan, but what they won't be is unionized. Arizona's public education system is going to collapse spectacularly in the next few years, and it's only a matter of time before red states follow suit with this awful scheme.
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