Gov. Ducey Lies About Raising Teacher Pay 20% By 2020 – It’s Now 2022 And Arizona Still Ranks 50th For Teacher Pay

Gov. Doug Ducey sold voters a bill of goods with his Prop. 123 in 2018, promising to raise teacher pay by 20% by the 2020-2021 school year, to end the Red For Ed teacher walkouts.

Just last month, Arizona has the lowest wages for teachers in the nation, report finds:

Teacher pay in Arizona can’t seem to catch up to the rest of the country, according to a new report.

It ranks the state 50th for median annual teacher pay, which is about $47,606 when adjusted for cost of living. Rhode Island ranks first, with nearly $76,877 in median pay for teachers.

Among metropolitan areas, Phoenix ranked No. 48 and Tucson ranked No. 50.

“We’re not surprised by it,” Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association, said. “You can move to any of the surrounding states and still get an increase in salary.”

He added that any educator in Arizona “will tell you that they are underpaid.”

The report was done by HireAHelper, a California-based company that connects people with local movers across the country. Rankings were based on wage and employment data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from May 2019.

A spokesman for Gov. Doug Ducey’s office pointed out the report doesn’t take into account the full 20% teacher pay raises that were part of the governor’s “20X2020 plan.”

He added funding for education and teacher salaries is “a top priority” for the governor.

Oh really?

Howard Fischer reports, Most Arizona schools failed to raise average teacher pay by pledged 20%:

Arizona schools have not lived up to the 2018 promise to increase teacher pay by 20% by the 2020-2021 school year.

A new report by the state Auditor General’s Office found statewide average salaries are up 16.5%, or $7,977 a year. Only 87 of the 205 school districts hit or exceeded the 20% figure.

The 20% pay raise was based on a promise made by Gov. Doug Ducey following weeks of protests and walkout threats by teachers after the governor’s initial budget proposed a 1% increase.

Auditor General Lindsey Perry said there are various possibilities about why actual spending fell short.

One, she said, is that the funds were distributed to districts based on the number of students and not how much money each district would need to increase its average pay by 20%.

Some districts may have received less money than needed to meet the goal, and others may have received more, the report said. There was no requirement that districts had to spend this money on teacher salaries, it added.

Closely related is what Perry called “changes in teacher population.’’

“For example, most districts that had a decrease in average teacher salary also had a decrease in average years of teacher experience,’’ she said. Put more simply, if districts replaced higher paid, experienced teachers with lower paid new teachers, the total average salary decreased.

The annual report also measures the percentage of each dollar given to schools that winds up in what is classified as instruction.

For the last full school year, that rose a bit, to 55.3%, up four-tenths of a point. That compares with 53.5% statewide when the percentage hit bottom in 2016.

But Perry noted the figure is still below the 57.7% it was when her agency started doing this annual report in 2001.

The instruction figure does not paint the whole picture of spending effectively going into the classroom, however.

Student support, consisting of counselors, audiologists, speech pathologists, nurses, social workers and attendance services, ate up another 9.1% of every dollar.

There was also 5.8% for instructional support, defined as librarians, teacher training, curriculum development and instruction-related technology services. That brought what Perry considers total classroom spending up to 70.2% versus 69.3% the prior year.

What’s left is 10.4% for administration, including superintendents, principals, business managers and other staff who do everything from accounting to payroll.

Schools also spent an average of 11.7% on building maintenance, equipment repair and the costs to heat and cool buildings.

There also was 4.0% for food service and 3.7% for the cost of operating the school bus fleet.

On that last point, Perry said the pandemic had some effect.

She said some districts continued to transport students, but with much lower ridership. Others did not transport any students at all but instead used bus routes to drop off meals and homework packets to students, she said.

The report also found that the average class size dropped from 18 to 17 students, a possible side effect of lower student attendance during the pandemic.

Overall, Perry said, the number of students in public schools dropped by about 50,000 or 6% from the prior year, “which is the largest year-to-year change in students attending since 2011.’’

That decline also affected what each school district collected, as state aid is based on attendance. But Perry said districts benefited from a large influx of COVID-relief dollars.

Perry said her auditors identified a number of inefficient practices that exist at some schools.

One of the largest is operating schools far below designed capacity and maintaining excess space. She also said some districts spent more than necessary on non-instructional staffing, either employing too many people or paying employees for hours not worked.

Chronic low pay for teachers is a major factor in Arizona’s chronic teacher shortage. Just last month, Survey highlights ongoing teacher shortage for Arizona schools:

An Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association’s annual survey shows at 6,347 positions needed to be filled for the 2021-22 year – further highlighting the ongoing teacher shortage that schools in Arizona face.

As of January, nearly 2,000 teacher positions remained vacant, and 944 teachers have resigned since the start of the school year, according to the survey of 143 school districts and charter schools.

“Today’s release of ASPAA’s survey results are startlingly, but not altogether surprising,” Morgan Dick, public information officer for the Arizona Department of Education, said in an email. “Arizona classrooms have faced a critical teacher shortage for years, and like many issues of inequities and underfunding, COVID-19 has impacted our educator workforce.”

Over the past six years, the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association has collected data from school districts and charter schools at the beginning and midpoint of the school year, with the results indicating a continuing shortage of teachers.

“The unfortunate news is that there’s no new news,” said Justin Wing, former president of the association. “The trend is pretty consistent. About 25% of teacher openings going into the year and in the middle of the year, remain unfilled.”

As of January, 31% of teacher positions in the surveyed districts remained vacant, the survey said, and 47.7% of teacher positions were filled by individuals who did not meet standard teacher requirements. Wing said Arizona has some of the largest class sizes in the nation and some of the lowest funding, which forces teachers to take on additional roles at their schools.

“They are the teachers, they are the counselors and they are the social workers,” he said. “Past couple of years during COVID, they are the safety and health officials for their classroom. They are wearing a lot of hats, where if funding was appropriate, we could provide more support to the teachers so they don’t have to wear as many hats.”

Wing attributed the shortage in teachers to low teacher pay and the decline in standard certified teachers, or those who went to college to obtain a degree in education. Wing also said that many schools use their pool of substitute teachers to fill in job vacancies, limiting the number of available substitutes for teacher absences. According to the survey, 671 vacancies in the surveyed schools were filled by long-term substitutes.

With 78.7% of teacher positions remaining vacant or being filled by individuals who do not meet the standard requirements, according to the survey, Dick said that solving the teacher shortage issue should be a priority.

“In light of this critical teacher shortage, state lawmakers and leaders must reprioritize efforts to ensure that every Arizona classroom has a highly qualified educator working with our students, and those teachers stay in the classroom,” Dick said.

EDUCATIONAL TERRORISTS

As teachers look on, Senator Ugenti-Rita points at them and calls them "terrorists" who held our children "hostage." Then votes to defund AZ schools of $1.2 billion dollars. pic.twitter.com/HQIlzVy8ng

— Arizona Senate Democrats (@AZSenateDems) February 22, 2022

Instead of recruiting highly qualified teachers with good pay and benefits to solve our chronic teacher shortage, Republican state legislators refer to teachers as educational “terrorists” and want to treat them as criminals over culture war bullshit like banning Critical Race Theory (not even taught in Arizona schools). See, House OKs anti-critical race theory bill banning ‘racially divisive’ curriculum, and House OKs anti-critical race theory bill banning ‘racially divisive’ curriculum. And engage in censorship and book banning. Bills to increase scrutiny of school library books, access to classrooms advance.

It’s amazing that anyone would want to be a teacher in Arizona. It just goes to show you their dedication and commitment to their profession, even when they are disrespected and treated badly by Republican legislators and unhinged members of the public.