Arizona Capitol Times Your Inside Source for Arizona Government, Politics and Business

As a retired public school educator with more than 31 years devoted to serving thousands of Arizona’s students and their families, I am concerned that the public has been given some misinformation about public pensions.

With considerable discussion about Arizona’s education funding, along with high school and college graduation rates, shouldn’t we do all we can to improve our state of education instead of making it much worse by legalizing marijuana?

In preparation for our recent agricultural water summit, the undersigned commissioned a poll to separate fact from fiction. Sound policy requires conversation and cooperation, but should be preceded by solid data.

Irony,” says literary critic Harold Bloom, “demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another.”

The current proposal to get more money to schools is quite simply, terrible. A manufactured crisis to make sure there is plenty of room for tax cuts this upcoming session.

Some participants in these funding discussions express a lot of fear and anxiety about efforts to enhance equity and school choice in our school finance system. A brief walk though time might help to alleviate such concerns.

At one time or another, we’ve all had to pinch pennies to make ends meet. But for some households – too many of them minority households – access to credit when times are particularly tight can mean the difference between putting food on their table and watching their family go hungry.

From a local, economic-development standpoint, Arizona’s health care sector has all the right ingredients: high-wage jobs, a highly educated workforce and a growing impact on the state’s economy.

The for-profit prisons have become very prolific lobbyists, shoveling more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying. GEO Group alone reported $650,000 in federal lobbying expenses in 2014. In addition, they spent over $5.7 million on state and local political contributions between 2003 and 2014, according to data compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Over the past year, growing media and policy has focused on Arizona's “teacher shortage.” Contrary to popular perception, Arizona does not have a shortage of teachers – at least not by the numbers. Our state has approximately 75,000 people holding active teacher certifications, but only 61,000 are choosing to remain in the teaching profession, according to an Arizona Department of Education Teacher Retention report issued earlier this year.