Keep your eye on this one

by David Safier

I just saw this Republic story:

Political committee for education registers with Secretary of State

A group of parents and education advocates eying continued funding for schools has registered as a political committee with the Arizona secretary of state.

The committee calls itself Quality Education and Jobs but has yet to submit any language spelling out what they want to ask voters in the November election.

The chair of the committee is Ann-Eve Pedersen. The treasurer is George Cunningham.

Here's the back story. Pedersen, who helped found the wonderful group, Arizona Education Network, spent a considerable amount of time working with conservative "education reform" leaders like Lisa Graham Keegan and Craig Barrett trying to hammer out a mutually agreeable way to guarantee education funding for Arizona. While Pedersen has kept quiet about the ongoing negotiations, Barrett went public, basically saying he's not moving an inch from his stand that we don't need to increase funding for our children's educations. All we need to do is give more money to charters and take money away from "failing schools."

To me, that spells "impass." And Pedersen forming a political committee along with Cunningham, Napolitano's former budget director, tells me we're about to see the launching of a well organized initiative campaign for a funding measure which will be equally beneficial to district and charter schools.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: That was fast. Here's a Howie Fischer article about the proposed initiative.

Pedersen told Capitol Media Services the group is not quite ready to roll out the measure, which is designed to generate about $1 billion a year for education. She said work was still underway to craft the final language in a way designed to convince voters that the higher taxes would be properly used and that there would be accountability to show that the funds were having results.

Time to act, though, is running out: Backers have only until June 17 to gather 172,809 valid signatures on petitions to put the issue on the November ballot.