In the year 2000, Arizona voters said that education was important the sustainability of Arizona’s economy and society. They voted in Prop 301 which promised to keep teacher salaries competitive by providing cost of living increases and performance pay, among other things. The state legislature has failed to exact the will of the voters and has instead acted on “their will.”
A lawsuit was filed to restore the missing funding for education and the state’s response was to propose Prop 123, which would borrow money from the land trust. This was spun as a way to “pump money into education,” but in fact would settle the bill for $0.07 on the dollar owed to the state’s voters, in order to fulfill Prop 301. The ruse worked and the proposition passed … but was ultimately determined illegal by a federal judge.
Now we find ourselves with a teacher shortage, one that threatens to be a true crisis. The short version of the story is that teachers are making less take-home today than they were 5 years ago. Adjusting for inflation, teachers made substantially more a decade ago, and more than that a decade before that! Below is a short video that lays out the situation today:
The first link is a nonprofit that I have started, which is why content here on The Bearded Math Man has slowed. (We are pretty well up and running, and I have a big project ahead for BMM).
Arizona’s Working Poor
