glenn hamer

AZ Chamber Prez says AZ Teachers are “Crybabies”

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Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com.

Glenn Hamer, President of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, said, “It’s amazing to me that the teachers unions are out there like a bunch of crybabies screaming about the difficult of getting additional pay to teachers.” His comment was in response to why teachers union should support reforms to the initiative process.

There are so many things wrong with this comment, I don’t even know where to start. First of all, I’m told that Hamer makes about six times the amount the average Arizona teacher makes. After all, Arizona’s teachers are the 47th lowest paid in the nation with the average teacher pay falling nationally 1.6 percent over the past decade, but 7.6 percent in Arizona. The low pay is a big part of the reason 53 percent of Arizona teacher positions were either vacant or filled by uncertified personnel in January 2017. And oh by the way, teacher colleges enrollment is down and 25 percent of AZ teachers will be eligible for retirement by 2020, further exacerbating the problem.

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Strange way for the head of the AZ Chamber to act

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

Glenn Hamer
Glenn Hamer: “You know, [business considering locating in AZ], you have a pretty face but would be cuter if you’d lose a few pounds!.”

It has long been my understanding that business leaders care deeply about education. They want skilled workers and the quality of school systems is a major factor in decisions about where they will locate new plants and corporate headquarters, so the conventional wisdom goes. But this must not be true for some of them, because this Saturday AZ Republic oped by Glenn Hamer, President of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, was strangely querulous and snide in response to a report that Phoenix was turned down by at least one company due to Arizona’s poor reputation in education.

A recent report that two companies passed over the Phoenix area for relocation is raising big questions about our state’s economic development strategy and our education system.

What can we do better to land top employers? Is our K-12 system up to snuff to attract the most demanding firms? Do we have enough quality schools?

The central question we should be asking, however, is whether these companies had access to Google. A simple search would have revealed that Arizona is an excellent place to invest and grow for a number of reasons, including our educational system.

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Impressive response by Arizona Business Leaders™ to the terrible budget

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Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

scott walker az chamber of commercePhoto: AZ Chamber of Commerce and Industry announcement

By “impressive”, of course, I mean “pathetic”. The GOP led AZ Legislature dropped a turd of a budget in the middle of Friday night/Saturday morning that guts (among other things) university and community college funding and – because this is the cruelest session toward poor people that I’ve seen since I moved here in 1997 – cuts millions in Medicaid assistance, limits Temporary Assistance to Needy Families to an arbitrary lifetime cap of one year, and fails to fund child abuse and neglect prevention.

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The “Managerial Republican” is mostly a fantasy

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I will say that Ronald Brownstein’s recent column in the National Journal is a bit better than what we’ve been getting lately from the hordes of DC pundits attempting to analyze Arizona. In particular, I liked this bit at the end:

After Arizona’s tax revenues plummeted with the housing market collapse, Brewer backed a temporary 1-cent sales-tax increase to limit spending cuts. But even so, since 2008, the GOP majority’s commitment to squeezing government has produced the nation’s third-largest reduction in per-student K-12 spending; the largest percentage reduction in per-student support for public higher education; and the biggest public tuition hikes. No other choices capture as starkly the contrasting priorities of a ruling GOP coalition that still receives almost all of its votes from whites (many older, rural, and exurban) and a minority population that now represents the clear majority of students in Arizona’s public schools.

It’s refreshing to see a conservative admit outright that Arizona Republicans have slashed public education funding (instead of doing the Goldwater Institute song and dance about how the schools are really funded quite generously if you look at all these charts and squint) and that the cuts are ideological and not fiscal in purpose.

Brownstein’s main thesis is that Arizona’s politics operate along fault lines of age and race, with the older whites voting overwhelmingly GOP and the Democratic base being younger and browner. I take no issue with that assessment. What I do dispute is this:

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