The crime against children in Arizona

As far as I can tell, the Arizona Republic devoted a mere four paragraphs to the latest evidence of the state’s dismal school system. Here they are:

Arizona spends less on educating its kids than almost any state in the
union, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released Wednesday.

In 2006, the state spent $6,472 per student, or $2,666 less than the
national average. Only Idaho and Utah spent less. The report has ranked
Arizona second or third from the bottom in per-student spending dating
to 2000.

The state Legislature caps the amount of money schools can receive from
the general fund and in property taxes, said Chuck Essigs of the
Arizona Association of School Business Officials. That formula is more
restrictive than the majority of states’, he said.

Arizona also ranks in the bottom three when tallying money spent on
instruction, including teacher pay and benefits. Administrative costs
can’t be blamed for eating up the money, either. Arizona ranked second
from the bottom on money spent on administration of individual schools.

So that’s that. We can go back to the ever-desperate "everything’s fine!" Of course, it’s not.

Arizona has been underfunding its schools for decades, creating an ever deeper hole that can’t even be stabilized. Yes, illegal immigration has hurt — but Arizona’s addiction to cheap illegal labor, especially to keep its major industry, house building, going, is a big culprit. Yet dig deeper in the data and spend time on the ground, and it’s obvious that inadequate school funding has hurt all ethnicities.

It doesn’t really matter that there are a few good school districts for the better-off. Third World countries have some good schools for the elite, as well as "gated communities." It is the public schooling available to the majority of the population that will determine a state’s future. Somebody will attend your worst-performing school — not a "kid," but a child, unique and loved by God, full of potential to help or hurt America and the world. Who can defend the short-changing of that child?

Some may point to Utah, which spends less. But Utah is a homogeneous state with the social cohesion brought and enforced by the Mormon Church. Arizona is a diverse and heavily urbanized state. Some may even still scream for "school choice." But Arizona’s large cohort of charter schools has been a disaster, pulling tax dollars from the public schools to finance what are often shady business ventures and "schools" that often underperform poor public schools. Some will say funding doesn’t matter — look at how much Chicago spends and still struggles. But Arizona is not Chicago. Tell this to the teachers who must buy supplies out of their own pockets. By any objective measure, Arizona’s experiment with starving public education and setting up charter schools like fly-by-night mortgage offices has been a catastrophic failure.

This failure plays itself out in the state’s below-average personal income, in metro Phoenix’s poor economic performance compared to other large metro areas, in the state’s inability to attract the capital and talent needed to make it competitive in something other than building subdivisions and tourism. The abysmal educational situation for the children of immigrants is setting up an explosive future.

It makes one wonder if all this is deliberate. Cui bono? A majority of the existing Arizona business community that wants cheap, docile workers. The right-wing politicians who want a voters unburdened by "a liberal education." The "charter school movement" hucksters who profit off tax dollars that should go to public education. The crackpot intelligensia that can gin up its base against "government schools." All the people who moved there for low taxes and to be left alone. It harkens back to frontier days, when the mine owners and ranchers saw no good from a state university. Unfortunately, Arizona’s new frontier is a world economy where poor education is a life sentence of lower living standards.

Four paragraphs. Newspapers don’t crusade anymore, and that’s one reason they are dying from dullness and predictability. I’d love to see daily stories identifying the legislators who cheat Arizona’s children of their future; investigative stories on the failure of charter schools, the bad actors who have made a killing through them and their political sugar-daddies; and fiery Gene Pulliamesque editorials demanding that the bums be thrown out.

The news is especially poignant coming at a time when Coronado High School in Scottsdale is dedicating a new auditorium named after Eugene Hanson. I graduated from Coronado in its glory days and was the beneficiary of the superb fine arts department that Hanson built, as well as other excellent programs, especially in English. I was just a poor kid. But Coronado was one of the best high schools in the nation. It saved my life. This was another Arizona and another America, when we still hewed to the notion that an educated citizenry was essential to the survival of the republic, that we were, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, inescapably caught in a web of mutuality.

Now the district has torn down its distinctive, architecturally worthy campus and replaced it with the lookalike prison architecture of all new Arizona schools. The fine arts department is a shell of its former glory. CHS is considered a struggling inner-city school. But Hanson’s memory, and the work of all the hero-teachers there, should remind us what is possible.

Everything is not fine. The rapidly changing world will not leave Arizona alone. The malpractice of the Legislature and other leaders against the students of Arizona is a crime and a scandal.