So, are you expecting more from your Arizona schools?
You might have seen a recent television ad, or heard one on the radio, asking you to “join the movement to strengthen education in Arizona.” These ads are part of the first wave of what’s to be an extensive campaign from a new advocacy coalition that wants to put all children into formal classrooms from the age of toddlers well into young adulthood. That group, called Expect More Arizona, says it has commitments from nine sponsors of $100,000 each (that’s nearly $1 million!) to wage a public relations blitz with the goal of a better education system becoming the state’s top policy priority.
Several leaders of Expect More Arizona said squeezing more money out of taxpayers isn’t the coalition’s underlying mission when they met last week with Tribune writer Michelle Reese and me. At least initially, the coalition wants to convince the public that Arizona must lower high drop-out rates and everyone into the workforce with more education in their background.
“This is about raising the bar, about raising expectations for what our children should be learning and doing,” said Thomas Franz, president and CEO of Greater Phoenix Leadership.
Others at the meeting keep repeating this theme, including Paul Luna of the Helios Foundation and Sally Downey, superintendent of the East Valley Institute of Technology. They all said once Arizonans agree on the compelling needs to improve education, then various public bodies can launch into more concrete debates on how that should happen.
There’s one problem with this explanation — Arizonans already place a high value on education. As just one example of this, the latest Cronkite-Eight political poll indicates the only thing that Arizona residents seem to agree on when it comes to solving the state’s budget problems is don’t cut education funding anymore. Some 69 percent of those polled said this, while the next closest area was public safety spending, which only 10 percent wanted to protect at any cost.
What Arizonans don’t agree on is the best way to spend education funds to get the maximum results. A recent movement generally called school choice emphasizes giving parents and families the greatest possible flexibility in selecting a school for their children, with the idea that the best schools will attract students (and their funding sources such as state tax dollars) and schools of poorer quality will have to improve or go out of business. Most school choice advocates believe such strategies would lead to better allocation of education dollars and would ease the pressure for every-increasing budgets to try and spend our way to smarter students.
There are a number of groups who oppose this approach, in part because public schools aren’t shielded from private competition. And guess what? Several of those groups are leading sponsors of Expect More Arizona.
I don’t doubt the group’s motivations. The people involved sincerely believe they are working to improve education and make life better for all of us. But I’m going to be skeptical of their campaign until I hear some specific ideas about what they believe the state should be doing.
Here’s one of the TV ads that Expect More Arizona has created:
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