USAF / Saphfire Cook
Second-graders at Craycroft Elementary School, Tucson, Arizona.
News wires were buzzing last week with the latest development in Arizona’s teacher crisis. On April 19, over 45,000 of the state’s teachers and school support staff voted to go on strike, despite winning the promise of a significant pay raise from Republican Governor Doug Ducey. Some 57,000 educators voted overall, with 78 percent endorsing the call to walkout in protest.
The walkout is scheduled to take place on Thursday, April 26. It will be a wildcat strike, just like those in recent weeks in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky. Arizona has long been a right-to-work state, offering few job protections for workers and ensuring that teachers, even though they are part of a statewide union, have no legal right to strike.
These are harrowing times for public school teachers and students in Arizona. The twenty percent pay increase proposed by Governor Ducey struck many educators as a bitter pill rather than a remedy, because Ducey never mentioned or seemed to include school support staff in his plans. Meredith Scheerer, a Phoenix-area student support worker, acknowledged in a recent television interview that she and her non-licensed colleagues apparently “don’t count,” since their pay is so low that Scheerer says she could earn more money by getting a job at Starbucks.
But pay is just one part of Arizona’s “education crisis.” The state has become something of an experimental playground for an untethered, unregulated form of education privatization. I interviewed Arizona teachers over the last ten days, and got a sense of just what the experiment looks like up close.
Curtis Aylward, a Phoenix area high school teacher for twenty-seven years, insists that charter school scandals are part of what’s driving Arizona’s current crisis. Aylward says he has kept an eye on the state’s education budget for years and jumped at the chance to become part of the newly formed grassroots group, Arizona Educators United. This group has led the charge to organize teachers and school staff, and is the driving force behind the walkout vote.
Aylward laments what he says are streams of public education dollars being diverted away from local school districts. “Boy,” Aylward tells me, “if you want to understand the charter school scam in Arizona, check out Jim Hall’s work.” Hall is a retired Arizona school administrator who runs the website, Arizonans for Charter School Accountability, where he bird-dogs charter school abuses and discrepancies in the state.
“Does your boss value teachers and kids, or management fees and real estate?”
On the front page of Hall’s website today is a call for charter school teachers to join the pending strike, based on a pointed question: “Does your boss value teachers and kids, or management fees and real estate?”
Arizona was an early adopter of charter schools, and recent data shows that 17 percent of all school age kids in the state attend these privately run, publicly funded schools. While some states tightly regulate charters and block for-profit entities from managing schools, Arizona has adopted a truly wild west approach. The state’s burgeoning charter sector scored $1 billion in public funds in 2016, and in an environment that a moderate Arizona think tank describes as enabling “financial abuses.”
These abuses include allowing charter schools to contract for services with for-profit entities run by family members, for example, and handing out no-bid contracts—which Arizona state law bans for traditional public schools. Teachers working in Arizona’s charter schools also make less than those working in public school districts, and they are at-will employees that can be fired at any time without due process rights. Meanwhile, the above mentioned report found, many charter school administrators pull in larger salaries than their public school counterparts.
Beyond charter schools, though, lurks an even shadier slice of the state’s school choice market: so-called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. In 2017, Governor Ducey expanded the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program, which allows students to apply public school dollars to private schools of their choice, including religious schools. A local news story noted that detractors of the program view it as an effort to ‘dismantle’ public education,” since it drains money out of public schools and into private ones.
The state’s bottomless school choice plans have also led to a more segregated school system. The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found, for example, that charter schools are becoming more populated with white and Asian students, while Latinx students are “over-represented” in traditional district schools. Other researchers have also pointed out that as Arizona’s population has grown less white, its schools have become even more racially and economically isolated.
This means low-income students, who are also often students of color, are increasingly clustered in what Arizona teachers call “Title schools.” These are public schools where the majority of students qualify for federal Title dollars, based on government income guidelines. In these schools, staffed by teachers like Curtis Aylward and Noah Karvelis, another leader of the upstart Arizona Educators United group, students do their best with inadequate resources.
These schools face dwindling funding, increased class sizes, and a marginalized parent group that is unable, often, to fundraise its way out of this situation.
“We have some very highly rated charter schools that cherry pick kids out of the upper echelons,” Aylward argues, citing a frequent complaint lodged against charter schools in Arizona and elsewhere. But what bothers him most is the fate of the kids he works with, as a science and math teacher in a high poverty high school. When we spoke, he was just rolling into his driveway at 5:50 p.m., after a full day of teaching and coaching.
“Are there kids I didn’t go the extra yard for because I didn’t have the emotional energy to do it?”
After twenty-seven years on the job, Aylward still has to take on extra work—including teaching an online class—just to make ends meet.
“It makes me sad,” he admits. “It makes me wonder if there are kids I didn’t go the extra yard for because I didn’t have the emotional energy to do it.” As we talked, he peered into his front window and caught sight of a former student of his. After she graduated from high school, due to family circumstances, she had nowhere to go. Aylward and his wife took her in.
She is now taking her graduate exams to get into medical school, he said, noting that it is this devotion to students that has, in large part, propelled him to join the upcoming walkout. “People who have never been involved in any organization are stepping up and becoming active about informing people of the status of education in Arizona. I see it as a responsibility to my kids’ kids, you know?”
Sarah Lahm is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in The Progressive, In These Times, and other local and national outlets.