opinion

Roberts: Arizona teacher strike is Gov. Ducey's nightmare

This, for Gov. Doug Ducey, is the nightmare scenario.

Thousands of teachers voting to go on strike next Thursday because they just don’t trust this governor.

They don’t believe his sudden, desperate proposal to boost their pay 20 percent by 2020 is real.

They don’t believe it’s anything more than an election-year ploy built on wishful thinking rather than a real source of funding that teachers can rely on in future years.

And so 78 percent of those voting have spoken: strike.

Teachers don't trust Ducey

Ducey didn’t create the crisis in Arizona’s public schools.

But in the first three years and three months of his four-year term, he didn’t do anything to fix it.

Didn’t recognize that while he and his pals were focused on ways to boost private schools, the public schools – the ones attended by 95 percent of Arizona’s children – were suffering.

When teachers started bolting to any one of our neighboring states that offer better pay, Ducey’s answer was to offer a 1 percent bonus and to allow people with no formal training to fill our classrooms. And even then, the shortfall forced schools to cram kids into larger classrooms.

When the head of Ducey’s Classrooms First Initiative Council concluded that the only way to get more money into the classroom was to raise the sales tax by a penny, Ducey’s response was to ignore him.

And to reiterate his campaign vow to cut taxes every year.

Here's the problem for Ducey

Oh, Ducey did bring us Prop. 123, giving schools 70 percent of what a judge said they were owed in inflation funding – by pulling the money from their own trust fund. But that didn’t do anything to restore cuts made a decade ago.

And Ducey did, in his budget this year, propose an additional $100 million in “district additional assistance” funds to “restore long-standing cuts from the recession made before many of us were here.”

But he cut $113 million from that same fund in 2016.

Now teachers are seeing red and they are wearing red .

I had hoped they wouldn't strike, pointing out that it would be difficult to explain to the public why they would walk out when Ducey has promised an eventual 20 percent pay raise. I had hoped teachers instead would take their case to voters this fall, explainng that our leaders' love of tax cuts have led us to this place, where we have no choice but to raise the sales tax (again) if we are to properly fund our schools.

The teachers ignored me (shocking, I know). Now they are prepared to do battle and it's likely to get ugly, assuming they walk out in big numbers and for an extended period of time.

But here’s the problem for Ducey.

Teachers aren't buying the spin

The teachers – and a fair number of the people who support them -- aren’t buying the spin this time.

They didn’t buy the recent $1 million ad blitz touting the wonders of public schools since Ducey became governor – the ads paid for by the newly formed Arizona Education Project (read: the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Arizona Public Service.)

They aren’t going to buy the inevitable ads expected in the coming week about “#20by2020” – ads reportedly to be brought to you by Republican Governor’s Association (including, presumably APS, which donated $100,000 to the RGA last fall).

#20by2020, as Team Ducey is calling it, may make for a trendy hashtag, but here is what teachers know.

Students are getting shorted

Funding to operate Arizona’s schools is still $950 million below where it was in 2008, when inflation is taken into account.

The state is investing $924 less on a child’s education today than it spent a decade ago.

And that doesn’t count the billions in capital funding the state isn’t providing to build and maintain schools, despite a state law that says it must.

The result is 25-year-old biology books and roofs that leak. The result is rodents running amok and schools unable to afford toilet paper.

The result is a set of poorly paid, red-shirted teachers who have grown tired of being ignored and now they are shouting, Can you hear us now?

This, in an election year when education will be a top issue.

I imagine Gov. Ducey, breathing into a paper bag.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.

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