We’re Number One! . . . In Lowest Per-Student School Spending (Part 2)

Man, the Star and the Citizen are really piling on Arizona’s educational system today! It’s a three-way smackdown – two editorials and an op ed: from the Star, Arizona must see that education system is in crisis; from the Citizen, Our Opinion: Arizona’s education systems flunk out; as well as a Citizen op ed, Arizona high schools graduate the unready.

Ouch!

The basic thrust of all three pieces is stated best in the Star editorial: “Arizona underinvests in education at every level. It is unacceptable. It is shortsighted. It is a tremendous disservice to our children.”

This ex-teacher and Tax-and-Spend Liberal couldn’t agree more, as you might have noticed if you read my first We’re Number One! . . . In Lowest Per-Student School Spending post.

The Star editorial states, “Our generation is poised to be the first in American history to hand less opportunity to the next generation.”

Here is a frightening list of statistics it cites:

• Arizona is 43rd among the states in the percentage of its high school graduates who go to college.
• Fewer than half of Arizona public high school graduates qualify to enroll in our public universities.
• Arizona ranks 49th in state and local per capita spending on K-12 education.
• Arizona ranks 35th in state and local spending per capita on higher education.
• Of 100 children in ninth grade, only 64 graduate from high school four years later; of those 64 only 18 enter a four-year college within a year and just nine earn a degree within four years.

I can’t verify each number in the list, but the figures are pretty dire even if they’re off by a few degrees of magnitude.

The Citizen editorial refers to “the pathetic funding our Legislature allocates for K-12 schooling, . . . for early childhood education and Arizona’s three state universities.”

The op ed in the Citizen has one heartbreaking line: “Children are born ready to learn.” Yes, that’s what young children do: learn. They soak up everything around them. They’re ravenous learning machines, ingesting sights, sounds and language, developing physical skills through imitation and endless trial and error. But too often, we kill their urge for “book learning” within their first few years of school.

I’m glad the papers are jumping on this soapbox so fervently, especially this year. Most state-funded institutions are asking for more money in their budgets, but really they’re praying they’ll stay even. Though I’d love to see a huge infusion of money into education, I’m not holding my breath. But let’s not let our schools slip even further behind by cutting their budgets.

But I want to add one qualification to the pointed, well-deserved criticisms in today’s papers, something that is too often forgotten.

Our entire educational system is not broken. Our worst schools are terrible, I couldn’t agree more. But our best K-12 schools are somewhere between reasonably successful and excellent. Students who are graduating from the better schools and going to college and getting degrees are being reasonably well served.

By all means, let’s improve our best schools so they better fit the educational needs of our students and our society. There’s plenty to do on that front.

But we need nothing short of an educational Marshall Plan to repair and rebuild the decrepit, crumbling bottom half of this country’s schools. (Unfortunately, in Arizona, that’s more like the bottom two-thirds.) And I’m not talking about the school buildings.

Let’s take separate looks at the schools that are doing a reasonable job of educating their students and those that are failures – disaggregate the data, to use the academic term. Only then will we be able to view the very different problems clearly and take the steps that need to be taken to improve things.