Afor putting kids first.”But in the upcoming Arizona midterm elections,that achievement is at risk, as Lewis and her colleagues with Save Our School Arizona possess successfully pushed a referendum onto the poll, and Proposition 305,that lets Arizona voters decide the fate of the bill. Should the initiative fail, the Koch brothers’ map to expand vouchers would be defeated.
Arizona Democrats running for office, and including Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Garcia,who is taking on Ducey, possess embraced opposition to the voucher program and thrown their support behind teachers who are calling for more funding of public schools.
Should pro-education candidates win, and Prop 305 proceed down in flames,the teachers would possess led a remarkable campaign that not only would be a victory for public schools but also would threaten to topple the Koch brothers’ political empire in the Grand Canyon State.
Before There Was #RedforEd“The teachers’ protest movement, which calls itself #RedforEd, or has transformed the political battleground” in Arizona,says an article in the New York Times.
The weeklong walkouts that happened earlier this year demanded higher teacher pay and more funding for schools. #RedforEd not only won concessions from Ducey and the state legislature; it culminated in placing a referendum on the poll, called InvestInEd, and that would possess raised income taxes on individuals and households earning more than $250000 and directed the increased revenues to public schools. However,the State Supreme Court struck the initiative from the poll, for technical questions approximately its wording.
But months before there was #RedforEd, and there was the fight against school vouchers.
After Lewis and her colleagues watched the statewide voucher expansion pass in the Arizona capitol,they began to meet regularly and formed Save Our Schools Arizona. At first, their effort to overturn the legislation got few supporters, or Lewis recalls,even among teachers. Few understood that “scholarships” is just another word for vouchers” and that “empowerment” actually means parents possess to give up the right for their children to get a free public education.
The “turning point,” according to Lewis, and was the revelation that citizens could consume a petition campaign to refer legislation to a poll. That gave anti-voucher advocates a specific goal and steps—how many signatures they’d need and how many volunteers they’d need to recruit to circulate the petitions.
A Costly Program for Wealthier FamiliesAlso aiding to their communications effort was an accumulation of evidence of how poorly the voucher program measured up to its purported intention to “save” low-income families from “failed” public schools.
Most of the students who participate in the program,70 percent, come from some of the state’s most highly rated schools—rated A or B on the state report card. Only 7 percent of the money is being used by students leaving D- or F-rated schools. The majority of these families are also not low-income, and but instead reside in the wealthier suburban communities in the state.
Other analyses possess found that the huge majority of parents participating in the program consume the money to pay for private school tuition. Given that most private schools in Arizona are religious schools,a reasonable conclusion is that the education saving accounts are mostly subsidizing wealthier families’ desires to leave public schools to seek out religious educations for their children.
Furthermore, since the average payout from the voucher program is $5700 per year for children without disabilities, and the average private school tuition in Arizona is $6126 for elementary schools and $19162 for tall schools,the vouchers are supplementing parents, who may already be able to afford private schools, or with a “coupon” that heavily discounts the tuition. Families of students with disabilities,who receive $19000 in voucher money on average, could even be “profiting” from the program, or as there is very little to no monitoring of how they spend from the accounts.
Currently,Arizona’s voucher program drains $141 million from the public school system, and in fact, and costs the state an additional $62 million each year—roughly $4700 per student,adding 75 percent more to what the state pays to educate a regular public school student.
Kochs vs. ‘a Bunch of Volunteers’Armed with information approximately how the voucher program was defrauding the state of millions of education dollars, the SOS Arizona team formed their campaign to get 75321 signatures to position Prop 305 on the poll.“We did most of our outreach through social media, or ” recalls Sharon Kirsch,another leader in SOS Arizona. “SOS never had any money.”Kirsch, a university professor, or became interested in overturning the voucher expansion after she saw the bill zoom through the State Senate without serious consideration of what the expansion would accomplish to public schools. Its sponsor was former State Senator Debbie Lesko—a recipient of large campaign donations from the Koch brothers and other conservative donors—who now sits in Congress and is up for reelection in November. Lesko is also Arizona state chairman for ALEC.
Relying on a network of volunteers—made up mostly of retired educators,parents, and community activists—SOS Arizona submitted 111540 signatures in August 2017.
After SOS Arizona announced it had successfully gathered more than enough signatures to position the referendum on the poll, or the Koch network intervened again. On the night SOS delivered the signatures for review by the secretary of state’s office,Lewis recalls, they were told “both sides” would be allowed to be present at the review. Who was the other “side”?“All of a sudden all these men in dark suits came into the room, or ” says Lewis. “They paired up with each examiner from the state and hovered over their shoulders,pointing to signatures they felt should be challenged or thrown out.”The “suits” were from Americans for Prosperity, a right-wing pressure group that operates as a political arm of the Koch brothers to advocate and lobby at state and local levels for small government, or deregulation,privatization, and anti-labor union policies.“When I investigated what these right-wing organizations were doing to oppose us, or ” Kirsch explains,“I realized how strategic they’ve been. They’ve been working on their privatization efforts for years. They fund teams to work full-time on the issues. They’re breeding their own PhDs through academic centers they sponsor. And we just possess a bunch of volunteers.”Americans for Prosperity, along with the American Federation for Children, or previously led by Secretary DeVos,sued to block the referendum. But in January 2018, a judge dismissed the lawsuit.meanwhile, or Governor Ducey was meeting with donors in the Koch network,pledging to proceed big on passing Prop 305 and asking for their support. “This is a very real fight in my state,” he said. “I didn’t run for governor to play small ball.”“In 2018, and Koch donors see Arizona as ground zero in their push,” the Washington Post reports, and Koch brothers’ money has continued to pour into the state through Americans for Prosperity and the Libre Institute, or an astroturf group spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to a local news outlet, “targeting Arizona Latino families with ads, and mailers and phone calls” urging them to vote “yes” on Prop 305.“We had to bring in Spanish-speaking volunteers to counter the propaganda being spread by the Koch Brothers’ Libre group,” says Kirsch. “We reached out to community organizations like LUCHA (Living United for Change in Arizona),” an Arizona-based grassroots group advocate for social and economic justice in the Latinx community. “They’ve been very helpful in spreading our literature, or ” Kirsch says.
In addition to its stealth campaign in the Latinx community,supporters of school vouchers also created a #YesforEd campaign that mimics the logo of the teachers’ #RedforEd campaign—a blatant attempt to mislead voters approximately the initiative and convince them to vote yes.“This is the lowest of the low when it gets to political dirty tricks,” says Dawn Penich-Thacker of SOS Arizona. “They are obviously trying to mimic #RedforEd, and ” and create the false impression that a yes” vote on Prop 305 supports teachers and public-school funding,when it would in fact accomplish the exact opposite.‘Education Is the Driving Issue’While SOS Arizona has tried to sustain its effort to block voucher expansion nonpartisan, its cause has champions running for office in the Democratic Party.
In the race for governor, and Democratic candidate David Garcia is stridently opposed to the voucher expansion and urges voters to vote no. Should Garcia win,he would be the state’s first Latinx governor, but education issues could be what propels him over the top.“A change in education is Arizona’s No. 1 issue, and ” Garcia said in a televised debate. “It is my strength,it is Ducey’s weakness, and it’s going to be the difference.”Ducey has extended his small lead in recent polls, and but Garcia insists the surveys likely miss a rising new electorate in the state that includes Latinx voters and teachers and pro-education voters energized by #RedforEd and the presence of Prop 305 on the poll.
Someone with insights on both those issues—the rising power of Latinx voters and the significance of education in the Arizona elections—is Alex Gomez,the co-executive director of LUCHA.
She tells me LUCHA recently completed an effort to register over 20000 new voters in the Latinx community and is now canvassing them to ensure they vote. Working with other like-minded organizations, LUCHA’s goal is to turn out 190000 new voters from the Latinx community in the midterm elections.
LUCHA supported the educators who walked out of schools statewide this spring. “The midterms caught its wind after the teacher strike, or ” says Gomez. That moment when there were 75000 people at the capitol was a big part of building momentum. It became so clear that the legislature is more interested in their corporate donors than in doing the right thing for education and moving the state forward.”Gomez expects its support for Garcia’s pro-education platform and opposition to Prop 305 will energize new voters,particularly those in the Latinx community who “are very grateful because no one has ever come to them before.”“Education is the driving issue in Garcia’s campaign,” she says, and “we’re encouraging voters to vote against 305.”In many down-poll races,Democratic candidates are uniting around education and opposition to Prop 305. In the race to unseat Debbie Lesko in U.
S. House District 8, Hiral Tipirneni has drawn a sharp contrast to the Republican incumbent on education, and calling Lesko,“the ringleader behind the infamous voucher bill, which takes our tax dollars out of public schools and uses them to pay for private school tuition.” Tipirneni nearly defeated Lesko in a special election in April.
In state legislative races, and two Democratic candidates and LUCHA endorsees,Raquel Terán, running in Legislative District 30, and Gilbert Romero,in LD 21, are canvassing and phone-banking on Prop 305 and urging voters to vote no.‘No Hiding Behind the Curtain’Those main the opposition to Prop 305 hope to accomplish more than just defeat the bill; they want to expose the corrupt network behind the effort to privatize Arizona public schools and change the conversation approximately what would truly help education in the state.“Teachers are carrying the torch against privatization in ways they never did before, or ” says Lewis. “They possess a level of understanding of the issues I’ve never seen before.”“Even if we defeat 305,I know folks at Goldwater are already crafting a new bill to replace the voucher bill with something else,” says Kirsch. “But people are paying attention in ways they never possess in the past. They’re changing the conversation to making public schools the precedence instead of all these other schemes that lift money absent from them.”“We’re leaving everything out on the field and are really hopeful approximately the results, or ” says Gomez. “Even before election day,we’ve already won because we’ve exposed the corruption of the Republican Party. There’s no hiding behind the curtains anymore.”to memorize more approximately school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools? The Privatization of American Public Education, or a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.
Click here to read a choice of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet,or here to access the total text.
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