May 12, 2021
By Matt Beienburg
In 2018, Arizona state lawmakers approved the “20×2020” plan to send hundreds of millions of new dollars to public school districts so they could raise average teacher salaries by 20%. But data revealed in a new Goldwater Institute report suggests that most of that money never made it—at least, not to teachers.
As shown in this new Goldwater report, The Truth about Teacher Pay in Arizona: How Arizona School Districts Have Held Back Teacher Salaries, Blamed Lawmakers, and Continually Captured Public Sympathy, school districts used the majority of the new 20×2020 funds simply to replace, rather than add to, existing buckets of state money for teachers (and vice versa). The result: During the 2019-2020 school year alone, teachers received at least $170 million less from their school districts in salary increases than Arizona taxpayers provided for.
How could this be? After all, school districts reported average salary increases of 13.3% through the 2019-2020 school year, just shy of their 15% interim target. Goldwater’s new report shows, however, that most of this increase was already paid for by other automatic state funding increases intended to support teacher pay, which 20×2020 was designed to complement, not replace.
As shown in the report:
As previously reported by the Arizona Tax Research Association, state lawmakers’ 20×2020 plan contained enough new funding for Arizona public schools to increase average teacher salaries to the 26th highest in the nation (16th highest when adjusted for the cost of living). Since that time, however, education activists have insisted that Arizona teacher pay remains at the bottom of the barrel, dismissing the hundreds of millions of dollars of additional taxpayer investments as “nothing.”
While these claims have continued to recycle badly outdated figures from the pre-20×2020 period, they may indeed reveal a deeper, more problematic pattern—a seemingly endless cycle in which a) district and union leaders warn of low teacher salaries, b) state lawmakers and/or voters agree to provide massive funding to boost those salaries, and c) the money is ultimately used to instead increase spending in virtually every category except teacher salaries.
State lawmakers—and their constituents—may wish to rethink their participation in this cycle, and they can start by reading more in Goldwater’s new report here.
Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy and the Director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy at the Goldwater Institute. He is the author of the new Goldwater report The Truth about Teacher Pay in Arizona: How Arizona School Districts Have Held Back Teacher Salaries, Blamed Lawmakers, and Continually Captured Public Sympathy.
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