The Daily Agenda: Baby steps backwards
We look backward and forward ... #EndTheChaos is her rallying cry ... And Twitter is trash.
For years, Republicans baby-stepped their way into making more students eligible for Arizona’s school choice vouchers. First, it was students with disabilities. Then, lawmakers started adding other categories, like foster kids, students of military families and kids attending “D or F grade” schools.
During his second year in office, Gov. Doug Ducey scored the biggest victory for school choice in a generation — he signed a universal voucher law allowing all of Arizona’s 1.1 million students to pay for a private school with taxpayer dollars. But the victory was short-lived. Public education advocates collected more than 110,000 signatures from Arizona voters to put the law up for a vote of the people, and the people rejected it by a two-to-one margin. It took the school choice movement years to recover.
But Ducey never gave up. During his final year in office, he signed a new bill to once again make the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program available to any student in the state.
It became the first universal school voucher program in the nation.
Then came Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, who delivered a budget proposal calling for an end to the voucher program.
Republican lawmakers laughed at the thought of culling the program.
But within months, the costs of the program spiked far beyond expectations, mostly because it was largely private school kids who started getting vouchers, not public school kids switching. Around 75% of new ESA applicants were private school kids or had otherwise never attended a public school before, undercutting the premise the vouchers would give a leg-up to students in struggling public schools. Current numbers suggest that number is now closer to half.
The initial $65 million price tag for the vouchers in the 2024 fiscal year ballooned to $900 million. Lawmakers approved a budget with an extra $425 million to cover voucher costs, and next year’s legislative session will have to find an answer to the deficit.
Democrats didn’t get any traction in their attempts to cut funding from, cap or scale back the voucher program this year.
But with the exploding costs of ESAs and the state’s budget crunch, Democrats are once again hopeful that after the giant leap forward for vouchers, Republicans may be willing to consider some baby steps backward — through additional oversight, regulation or some kind of limits or cap on the program.
While repealing the universal program is still a Democratic pipe dream, Republicans may be amenable to taking a baby step toward oversight by at least collecting more data about who’s using the vouchers. But don’t hold your breath — an ad hoc legislative committee adjourned in November without any of the eight committee members offering suggestions on the program, despite that being its express purpose.
Keep an eye on in 2024…
Politicians are once again attempting to increase teacher pay and retention next year — though Republicans and Democrats have very different ideas of how to do that.
Republican lawmakers want voters to back their plan to use the state land trust to boost average teacher pay to more than $60,000 annually (or about $44,000 for first-year teachers) by drawing more money out of the land trust. That idea won’t need the governor’s signature, but will require legislative approval and a vote of the people in November 2024.
Meanwhile, Hobbs’ educator retention task force also recently released a slate of recommendations that will likely make their way into the 2024 legislative session. Chief among those proposals is raising teacher and support staff pay, and beefing up the perks of the job, like decreasing health care costs, and increasing paid family leave time. Some of the proposals can be achieved through executive or administrative order, rather than the Legislature.
#EndTheChaos: Gov. Katie Hobbs wore her most olive green bomber jacket during her brief visit to see Lukeville’s shuttered port of entry on Saturday. She urged the federal government to “end the chaos” at the border and promised to stand up to unnamed “politicians on either side” and push them to get tough on the border. And she sent President Joe Biden an angry letter urging him to activate (and pay for) the National Guard at the border crossing, along with an oddly specific invoice for $512,529,333, a number she didn’t explain other than it’s the state’s cost for border security. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Jack Healy is reporting from the ground in Lukeville, noting the area is facing two types of crises.
“It has created a split-screen crisis — a humanitarian emergency at the border, where hundreds of migrants are burning cactuses and trash to keep warm at night, and an economic disaster for people in rural southern Arizona whose lives and livelihoods depend on the now-shuttered border crossing,” the Times writes.
Multitasking: The Biden administration is shelling out almost $6 million to put solar panels over canals on the Gila River Indian Community, KTAR’s Damon Allred writes. Officials have long talked about covering the valley’s canals with solar panels to harness the sunshine and keep evaporation to a minimum. The project is part of Biden’s “Investing in America Agenda.”
Clearly, we only included that last line to set up today’s pitch: How about the Investing in Arizona Agenda?
Amtrak Greg: Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton is touting a $500,000 appropriation to continue to study a potential Amtrak line through Phoenix, the largest major city in the U.S. without train access, the Republic’s Laura Gersony reports. Politicians have been studying the idea of bringing a train line to the Valley for a long time.
We were betting on the Shaman: Donald Trump endorsed failed Attorney General candidate and election denier Abe Hamadeh in the GOP primary to replace Debbie Lesko in Arizona’s Congressional District 8, choosing Hamadeh over other candidates, including disgraced former Congressman Trent Franks, Blake Masters, who Trump endorsed in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate last year, and the QAnon Shaman, who is running as a Libertarian.
We’ve got all the battles: The Wall Street Journal declares Arizona “the next abortion battleground,” noting the state Supreme Court is poised to take up the case over whether the procedure is fully illegal or just heavily restricted and regulated. Pro-choice forces are working to put a constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot, and that’ll have ramifications up and down the ballot, the Journal notes.
Hazardous working conditions: Yet another director of the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health is out, making him the second person to leave the post under Hobbs. Mark Norton was promoted to director just three months ago, ABC15’s Anne Ryman reports. The station has been watchdogging the agency all year after its federal counterpart threatened to take over the Arizona agency in 2022 for routinely doing a bad job of protecting worker safety.
Today’s a “laughing as a defense tactic” kind of day since we don’t actually have a banner that says “The world is going to hell.”
Yes, we’re talking about Alex Jones’ re-platforming on Twitter, where he joins other formerly banned conspiracy profiteers like Mark Finchem and Jake Hoffman.
And if you want to get really outraged, check out this Twitter Space interview Jones did with Elon Musk, who warned Jones that “the whole sandy hook thing” — where Jones denied it ever happened and fomented his audience’s delusions until they harassed the parents so mercilessly that they sued Jones for more than $1 billion and won — “is not cool at all.”
Jones explained that basically, he’s not that smart and he just repeated other things people said, and that he now believes the parents who say their “children died and all that.”
Good enough for Elon!
Anyway, follow us on anything but Twitter!
Greg Stanton--not Mark. Amtrak--not Amtrack. Geez, people.
Who’s Mark Stanton?