Fool’s Gold Redux: phony per student numbers

by David Safier

Sigh. We've been down this road so many times before — the Goldwater Institute making a fool of itself with its purposeful misstatements about Arizona's per student spending numbers. And yet, if the media accepts the numbers and parrots them, and if Republican legislators like Al Melvin continue to quote them, the ridiculous numbers will stick, and a carefully constructed half truth/half lie will become a falsely established truth in people's minds.

Here's the antidote. Read what Matthew Ladner wrote in his G.I. Daily Email. Then read this. See which makes more sense.

First, let me show Ladner once again demonstrating that he will use cooked numbers to make his point, knowing full well he's misusing the numbers while he stops just short of lying. From the Daily Email:

As Arizona's Joint Legislative Budget Committee documents public school spending increased from $6,497 per student in the 2000 to $9,698 in 2009. Even after taking inflation into account, this amounted to more than a 20 percent increase in per student funding.

If you're trying to be a fair broker, you don't compare raw numbers that aren't adjusted for inflation, period. They mean nothing. The only reason to cite them is for sensationalistic effect. But Ladner has no desire to be a fair broker. He's going for effect.

Can he easily find the per student numbers adjusted for inflation? Yes, because they're on the same document, directly below the raw numbers. Those are the only ones he should be using if his intent is to make a reasonable comparison.

So let me reconstruct Ladner's quote, taking out the most obvious deception. The words and numbers in italics are my additions.

As Arizona's Joint Legislative Budget Committee documents public school spending increased from $6,497 per student in the 2000 to $9,698 $7,809 in 2009 in inflated adjusted numbers. Even after taking inflation into account, this This amounted to more than a 20 percent increase in per student funding.

OK. So now we see the increase was about $1,300 per student in inflation-adjusted numbers, or about a 20% increase.

Fair enough? Not quite. Because if you look at the inflation-adjusted per pupil spending for all the years 2000 to 2009, you'll see 2000 is the lowest. After that, the numbers bounce around. 2009 is not the highest. 2003, 2007 and 2008 are all higher.

Just so I can't be accused of cherry picking, here are the inflation-adjusted per student spending numbers for all the years on the sheet:

2000: $6,497. 2001: $6,970. 2002: $7,399. 2003: $7,895. 2004: $7,645. 2005: $7,668. 2006: $7,784. 2007: $8,022. 2008: $7,871. 2009: $7,809.

So, the spending in 2000 was low compared to all the years since. Does that mean that the years preceding 2000 were equally low or lower?

Not according to the Arizona Education Network, which spent some time debunking Ladner's latest numbers.

While Arizona’s overall spending on education has increased during that same time period, it has not kept up with the growth in our population.  The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) reported recently that Arizona actually spent more per K-12 student in 1986 than we did in 2006. This bears repeating:  Arizona actually spent $61 less per student than we did 20 years prior…and those latest figures were released before the most recent spending cuts.

ALEC, by the way, is a politically conservative organization, so AEN can't be accused of going with some lefty source. I haven't checked the numbers myself, but I've never known AEN to get a number wrong. I'll assume they're correct unless someone shows me different. I know for sure that Arizona's ranking in per pupil spending has fallen precipitously over the past few decades, so AEN's point is absolutely accurate.

That means Ladner's general assertion, that we keep spending more and more money per student as the years go by, is simply false.

Now let's forget about the comparisons and just look at the raw number Ladner cites for 2009, $9,698. The only people in the known universe who consider that to be a figure worth citing are G.I. and its loyal minions. Everyone else uses a figure closer to $7,500. That includes Tom Horne, who says the $9,698 number is simply ridiculous. And it includes the politically conservative ALEC. And it includes the NEA. All of them agree that Arizona's per pupil spending is in the $7,500 ballpark, which makes it either the lowest or the second lowest in the nation.

The reason no one else uses that $9,698 figure is because it includes about $2,000 in funds used to build new schools. The only reason Arizona had to build new schools was because of our population explosion. When you get more students who need to go to school, you need new schools, it's that simple. A state that's losing students doesn't build new schools, it shutters old ones. So organizations that compare per student spending remove the building costs from state education expenditures so population fluctuations don't skew the comparisons.

The Goldwater Institute is nothing more than a propaganda machine when that suits its purposes. And when it comes to traditional, school-district based education, it suits G.I's purposes to radically overstate the overall spending per student. G.I. wants to see privatization in the form of vouchers for private schools and a rapid growth in charter schools, so it knocks traditional public schooling whenever and wherever it can.

Intellectual honesty is not the accepted policy of the Goldwater Institute. No one should ever accept a "fact" or a "figure" put out by G.I. unless it has been fact-checked by experts who aren't driven by the same conservative/libertarian ideology.