Funding for new school standards in question

PHOENIX — Arizona schools are being forced to implement new standards for English and math this year while still waiting for financial help from the state officials who are promoting them.

Timothy Ogle, executive director of the Arizona School Boards Association, said Wednesday that school districts are being forced to trim expenses in some areas to meet the new mandates of the Common Core standards. He said while some districts can move around some teacher training money, others do not have staff development dollars.

“They have to cut and paste out of other parts of the budget in order to make this work,'' he said.

But training dollars are only a piece of the picture.

Ildi Laczko-Kerr, director of the Arizona Charter School Association, said schools are going to need new textbooks that conform to the new standards.

And then there's the fact that the testing will no longer be with pencil and paper but instead online. Even Sen. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, said that presents two problems that will take money to resolve.

First, there isn't sufficient online “broadband'' capacity to deal with thousands of children taking tests at the same time. And he said some schools just don't have the necessary computers.

“About half of our districts are not equipped to do that today,'' Ogle said.

Matthew Benson, press aide to Gov. Jan Brewer, said the state has a $25 million federal “Race to the Top'' grant that can be used for things like reimbursing schools for the costs of sending teachers to training sessions. So far, though, none of that money has been given out.

As to the bigger picture of additional costs, Brewer herself said voters should rely on her to do the right thing.

“My record will stand,'' the governor said following a news conference Wednesday to promote the new standards.

“I have fought hard and long for education,'' Brewer said. “And I will continue to do so.''

But Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, said that has not translated to the dollars that schools need. Even in cases where Brewer has asked for more, the Republican-controlled Legislature cut her request.

Morrill said that in just the past five years, the Legislature has withheld a total of $670 million in what is supposed to be automatic funding for “soft capital.'' That includes funding for things like computers and books.

And he pointed out that lawmakers have not even funded the inflation adjustment for the past two years.

While Brewer said she's willing to fight for more money, state School Superintendent John Huppenthal refused to make a similar commitment. In fact, he said the fact that 14,000 teachers already have been trained — at local school district expense — shows that the state need not provide more cash.

“So we're already doing a lot within the current resource constraints,'' he said. “That's the challenge that we have.''

And Huppenthal said living with less is just a fact of life.

“I grew up in a household where the food ran out on Sunday and shopping day was Wednesday,'' he said. “To me, operating in a scarce resource environment is second nature.''

The idea behind the Common Core Standards is to align what Arizona requires students to learn in English and math with what is being taught across the country.

At the very least, that will mean that the achievement levels of Arizona students can be directly compared with other states.