An Arizona Teacher left this comment:
“I teach in an AZ public school–title 1 school. The poverty in this school is astonishing. This is my first year teaching in AZ after moving here from another state. I taught almost 20 years in a public school that was also a Title 1 school before moving to AZ. I have a lot of experience teaching in poverty schools. I have never seen anything as dysfunctional and as underfunded as the school I teach in currently. The whole district is in dire straits as it is funneling money away from public schools into charters. The lack of resources in this school is stupefying and confounding. It seems that the people in AZ are automatons and that this “cheating” of public schools is the new-normal. It’s not that people don’t care about education, its just that most people who can leave the poverty schools behind do so without realizing the impact they have. And to be honest, if I had children I don’t know if I would want them to attend one of these public schools. The discipline problems and lack of support for teachers is driving parents and teachers away. Buildings are falling apart. Just today part of the roof caved in at the school library. And then the corruption in the state legislature is driving the drain of resources.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Blame it on the republicans not the democrats and blame it on betsy devos. To read this site daily is just like having to read a story of destruction on a daily basis until there were none
yes
This is disgraceful that public schools are being undermined and defunded in such a reckless way. The representatives are clearly not representing the interests of the students. The people of Arizona should vote out the political hacks that are destroying public schools. Just because students are poor should not mean these young people deserve less when the reality is they need more due to the impact of poverty.
Arizona ranks 48th in the nation for public education, but in the echo chamber world of ed reform they’re Number One:
“Arizona
Ranked 1st out of 50 states and the District of Columbia”
Which tells you how much they value children in public schools- not a lot.
“The state’s grade is based on six factors: state academic standards, charter schools, homeschool regulation burden, private school choice, teacher quality, and digital learning. Because the Education and Workforce Task Force at ALEC focuses the most on private school choice and charter schools, those factors were given double weight in the calculation over overall rank and grade. The weighted grades were converted into a GPA average and an individual rank.”
They literally give 2X the weight to charters and vouchers- they go out of their way to let public school students and families know they are not a priority and none of the politicians plans to lift a finger on their behalf.
Can you blame parents for “fleeing” public schools in these states? Their children are treated like second class citizens. They’re being given no “choice” at all. They can stay in the public schools that Arizona politicians have abandoned, or they can transfer to the (preferred) private and charter schools.
ALEC ranks Arizona first, as did Michele Rhee when she had a ranking system.
To anyone who is not a rightwing ideologue, Arizona has a failed education System
Do any of the Best and Brightest in ed reform ask how Arizona could be nearly dead last in the country for public education, yet be number one on the list of states that have adopted the entire ed reform privatization agenda?
Shouldn’t that concern them? Here’s a state that swallowed their whole agenda without question and yet they’re on the bottom. When, exactly, does the privatization miracle occur?
The poster child for privatization isn’t looking so good. Better hire more lobbyists.
Arizona is in a tight battle for worst performing state with “Reform” state Louisiana.
It’s almost as if charter schools were developed as “loss leaders” to undercut those “mom and pop” public schools by subsidizing offering something for a low price until the mom and pop stores go bankrupt.
oh, that’s right — they were. Which is why right wing billionaires who support policies to undermine poor families are more than happy to donate to and subsidize a charter for those very families whose food stamps and medical care they have cut, since the bottom line is driving public schools out of business.
Just when I think I had a bad day, I look on Diane’s blog and hear from a teacher who has it, like, 1000 times worse.
There’s a lot of great writing on this site. But it’s posts like this one that especially stick in my mind. Some teacher, somewhere out there, just keeps going into the classroom, day after day, trying to dig his or her way through this heap of criminal dysfunction called education “reform” -hoping to reach the kids who need our help.
Thanks for your service, Arizona teacher. And, I mean service, in the same way we thank members of the military.
Because you really are defending our country.