Peggy Judd, (R, LD-25): “We are spending more money (on public education) in Arizona than we need to.”

by David Safier

LD-25 Democrats, fire up your laptops and start your engines. Peggy Judd is quoted in the Nogales paper as saying we're spending more on public ed than we should in Arizona.

Judd told the reporter she wants to spend her time learning more about her district. Among her tasks:

She’s also working on creating a survey to send to all the schools and school districts in her district to find out their needs, and see how she can help – without just throwing more money at the schools.

“We are spending more money (on public education) in Arizona than we need to,” she said.

Spending too much on education?

We're dead last in the country in the amount we spend per student. We spend 58% of the national average.

But maybe that's because we're a low income state? Um, no. Based on our expenditures per $1,000 of personal income, we spend 67% of the national average.

Either way, we're the deadbeat dads of the country when it comes to educating our children.

But what matters is educational outcomes, right? Not the amount of money we "throw" (to quote the public education haters) at the schools.

OK, let's look at student achievement. On the NAEP, the only credible national test to compare achievement state to state, Arizona's fourth graders are 47th in reading and 44th in math. The eighth graders do only slightly better: 43rd in reading and 37th in math.

But maybe the low scores are because of all those low achieving brown children Russell Pearce and Al Melvin love to blame, along with their parents, for the state's woes.

Nope. Even when you take parents' income, education and ethnicity into account, our children score lower than similar children in other states.

One last thing: As bad as the numbers look, they're probably on the optimistic side. They come from 2007 and 2008. When the stats on 2009 and 2010 are published, they're bound to be lower in every category — except, of course, in being dead last in per student spending. When you're already 51st out of 51 (counting D.C.), you can't sink any lower.

It may or may not be fair to say Arizona Republicans hate children, but that's not really the issue. They vote like they hate children. When it comes to elections, you don't need to look into their hearts. Their voting records are all you need.

NOTE: The stats in this post come from two sources: a terrific 2009 report out of ASU, "Education Funding in Arizona: Constitutional Requirement and the Empirical Record" (Dennis Hoffman, Ph.D. and Tom R. Rex, MBA), and the national education stats compiled by the NEA.