Voting For The Pendulum to Swing

Once again, today’s blog is inspired by a recent “Have You Heard” podcast, entitled “The Rich and the Rest,” which explores the gigantic disconnect between the public education priorities of most voters and the favored policies of the very wealthy. Guess which group has more luck getting their priorities passed? We are going to look at how such policies are affecting the current election season in Arizona, where the pendulum seems poised to swing back towards public school friendly policies, and whether Florida could expect a similar swing any time soon.

If you are not a regular listener of “Have You Heard,” you should be.

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A recent report, entitled “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” examined the attitudes of the rich and super rich in comparison with the attitudes of the general public. The study surveyed the political views and activities of the top 1 percent or so of US wealth-holders and suggested “that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policies in the United States appear to deviate from what the majority of US citizens wants the government to do.”

When examining attitudes towards public education, there were some significant gaps. When asked whether the federal government should spend “whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools,” 87% of the general public favored such spending, while only 35% of the wealthy responded in favor. The public was strongly in favor of fully funding public schools, but the wealthy… not so much. 

Have You Heard co-hosts, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, traveled (virtually) to Arizona where voters this fall will vote on on Proposition 208, which would increase the tax on incomes exceeding $250,000 and use that revenue to raise the salaries of teachers and support staff, improve teacher mentoring and retention and support other public education programs.

Supporters of Proposition 208 say “Arizona’s classroom crisis has been driven by out-of-state special interests who have decimated our public schools.” After decades of systematic defunding and the draining of taxpayer dollars to private schools, Arizona’s local public schools are in crisis: 

• AZ teachers rank 49th in median pay
  
• Highest teacher turnover in the US
  
• 1700 classrooms without a permanent teacher
  
• Per-student funding is 46th in the US

Arizona’s Republican Governor, Doug Ducey, and his Republican legislative colleagues, who have relentlessly pushed for voucher expansion, oppose the Proposition 208 but, as Berkshire discovered, ordinary voters are in surprising agreement when it comes to supporting increased funding of their public schools:

“… Prop 208 as it’s known is crushing it in the polls. According to a recent survey 66% of registered voters say they’ll be voting for it, including 53% of Republicans, including 39% who ID themselves as conservative.

Jennifer Berkshire – https://haveyouheardblog.com/the-rich-and-the-rest/

Dawn Penich-Thacker, whose non-partisan advocacy group (Save Our Schools Arizona) supports the proposition, believes people love public schools and that support for public education crosses party lines :

They went to public schools, they choose to put their own children in public schools. And at the end of the day, there’s only one answer when you ask them, should we have strong schools? Should we invest in today’s children? Regular people say yes. And I think that the ethos that is leading to such high support for education funding, even with all of the partisan attacks and rhetoric, regular people love schools, they love teachers, they know their importance and that’s, what’s rising to the top, which is really heartwarming for someone who, you know, gives up every free moment for this kind of work.

Dawn Penich-Thacker – https://haveyouheardblog.com/the-rich-and-the-rest/

She goes on to describe her own father, a “party line, Republican voter” and ardent supporter of President Trump, who will also be voting yes on Prop 208 because “at the end of the day, he feels like… investing in education is… just bigger than politics. It’s bigger than Fox news. It’s just the moral thing to do. And that’s what carries him to, you know, supporting education funding in a year like 2020.”

Penich-Thacker says despite all of the money and influence lined up behind school choice in Arizona, the commitment of voters to public education is strong even across party lines and, despite the political rhetoric from think tanks and lobbyists “people are able to somehow separate out what they know to be true of the importance of public schools from some of the really political ideology they may hold in all other areas of life.”

Kari Hull, an outreach coordinator for Save Our Schools, described how even voters in Republican dominated neighborhoods, are outraged about the defunding of their public schools and many voters believe support for public education should not be a partisan issue. Yet, they have continued to vote for these hometown friendly lawmakers who claim to support public schools but, when they get to the state legislature, vote against them.

Our public schools should not be impacted by whether there’s Democrats or Republicans elected to office. You know, they’re just public schools. I mean, I always thought, you know, just like hospitals or police or firemen, you know, and when, when you hear that these public programs and services are going to be privatized, that just doesn’t, that does not sound good at all. Because when your public neighborhood district schools close, a lot of people don’t have access. They don’t have transportation for the private or the charter schools. They talk about the voucher system providing school choice. It’s literally the opposite of that. If that were to get fully, like if that were to happen and our voucher system took over our public schools, our neighborhood schools would close. So then what choice do you have?

Kari Hull – https://haveyouheardblog.com/the-rich-and-the-rest/

Penich-Thacker says many Arizonans are are awakening to concerns regarding the defunding and potential dismantling of their public schools and are realizing the importance of voting for individuals who are willing to fight for their schools. She feels voters are beginning to awaken to the threat of privatization and says, “there’s a lot of momentum around candidates in particular who use supporting public education as a major talking point, because folks, all, everyone wants to see it get done.”

One such candidate is Eric Kurland, a teacher running for the Arizona House District 23. He said, “We’ve been under the thumb of one party rule in Arizona for so long. We’ve swung so far out of normalcy at the national level that we’re going to swing back. Now, I think that this is the moment that everybody here has been waiting for, if it’s not going to happen now, when will it happen?”

Florida, this sounds very familiar… 20 years of single party rule… defunded public schools, low teacher pay and critical teacher shortages… legislators campaigning on questionable claims of “record education spending” while diverting funds to ever expanding voucher programs… tremendous cross-partisan community support for public education while the majority party systematically defunds and dismantles public education, hiding behind the rhetoric of “school choice.”

Like Florida, Arizona is a trifecta state. A trifecta exists when one party holds the governorship, a majority in the state Senate, and a majority in the state House. According to Ballotpedia, there are currently are currently 36 trifectas: 21 Republican trifectas and 15 Democratic trifectas. Florida has been a trifecta state for two decades, since Jeb Bush took office in 1999. In the upcoming election, Ballotpedia calls 8 of the Democratic trifectas somewhat or moderately vulnerable and 8 of the Republican trifectas somewhat to highly vulnerable. Both Florida and Arizona fall in the “vulnerable” category. At the moment, Ballotpedia considers Florida a “highly vulnerable trifecta.”

In 2018, Florida’s Democrats came within 32,500 votes of breaking up the trifecta by flipping the Governor. Alas, Governor DeSantis won with just 49.6% of the vote. Flipping the Senate this November is within reach and, if the Senate flipped, would have immediate impact by removing pro-privatization advocates like Manny Diaz Jr from leadership roles on education committees and giving public schools a reprieve from the current privatization onslaught.

Florida’s Republicans know this and are pouring money into select Senate races. Between April and August alone, incoming Senate President Wilton Simpson’s PAC, “Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee,” spent over $4 million targeting vulnerable/flippable Senate races. If you live in a flippable Senate district (and I do), your mailbox has been flooded with campaign literature denouncing the Democratic Senate candidates as “liberal extremists” while celebrating the Republican candidates who “support school choice policies that empower parents to make decisions about their children’s education.” Don’t let your Republican candidate convince you that voting for this session’s Teacher Pay bill (HB641, which passed both chambers unanimously) makes them a pro-public education candidate; it was the House Democrats who were instrumental in improving the bill and retaining local control of teacher salaries.

At this point, Florida’s GOP is all-in on School Choice and flipping the Florida Senate blue is the best chance Floridians have for breaking up the trifecta that has plagued our public schools for 20 years. The time is now. Vote smart. Be a #FLPublicEdVoter.