The Arizona Free Enterprise Club (AFEC) analyzed the success of the Red4ED movement in Arizona since it launched a little over four years ago, and concluded that after spending over $30 million, the movement not only failed to accomplish anything, but failed to stop historic tax cuts. Red4Ed’s two initiatives and a referendum were struck down by courts as “legally flawed,” resulting in AFEC labeling its efforts “the largest, most expensive failure in Arizona political history.”
Pam Kirby, the executive director for the Arizona Republican Party, who has extensive experience in education policy and served on the board of the Scottsdale Unified School Board for eight years, told The Arizona Sun Times, “In November, Arizona voters have an opportunity to push back against teacher unions and socialist movements like Red4ED, Critical Race Theory and Social Emotional Learning. School Board races are critical to the future of our children and our country. Democrats and ‘go along to get along’ school board members got us into this mess. We need courageous conservative leadership leading our schools now more than ever.”
Arizona Educators United launched Red4Ed in 2018 ostensibly to increase teachers’ salaries and funding for K-12 education. People and teachers showed up all over, at the state capitol and at events and protests, wearing red shirts and carrying red signs. But AFEC said “the movement was quickly hijacked by the teachers’ unions and other out-of-state special interest groups.” It soon turned into “a singular quest to double the state income tax through a ballot initiative.”
AFEC said Red4ED’s first failure, despite a $2 million donation from the National Teachers Union, was “Invest in Ed version one,” an initiative named Prop. 207 that would have doubled Arizona’s income tax. The Arizona Chamber of Commerce sued the group, and the Arizona Supreme Court agreed, saying that the description “did not accurately represent the increased tax burden on the affected classes of taxpayers,” which “creates a significant danger of confusion or unfairness.” The court said the description “fails to mention that the measure modifies the inflation indexing of income tax rates that was adopted in 2015, thus exposing most taxpayers to tax increases.” The average Arizonan would have seen a tax increase, not just the wealthy.
The second failure, “Invest in Ed version 2.0,” spent $23 million to put a similar initiative, Prop. 208 on the ballot, which barely passed with 51 percent of the vote. Prop. 208 hiked the income tax on higher earners from 4.50 percent to 8 percent, changing the state’s ranking from the 13th-lowest income tax for high earners (including states with no income tax) to the ninth-highest. Ostensibly for “teacher salaries and schools,” only 13 percent of it was designated for actual teachers’ salaries.
Prop. 208 came shortly after the state agreed in 2020 to pay a billion dollars a year for a 20 percent teacher pay increase and other funding increases. Spending on schools in Arizona is at an all-time high, and Arizona’s teacher salaries are the 16th-highest in the country when adjusted for cost of living. AFEC and The Goldwater Institute sued Prop. 208, and the Arizona Supreme Court agreed, ruling that it evaded the limits on state constitutional tax and spending limits.
Matthew Ladner, director of the Arizona Center for Educational Opportunity, a researcher with the Arizona Charter Schools Association, and former vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute, penned an op-ed in 2019 that described how activists use teachers’ low salaries as a carrot to convince government to provide more funding, but then use the funding for something else in education instead. He highlighted the situation in an Arizona school district where the voters passed an override to increase teachers’ salaries, but a teacher later posted her paystub online showing she only received an annual increase of $131.25. The district had millions in its fund, however. “One cannot discern what the district plans to do with these balance funds from the report but thus far it does not seem to involve improving teacher pay,” he said.
Ladner warned, “Taxpayers are sometimes blamed for the state of low teacher pay in Arizona, but much of the blame lies elsewhere. … The state has committed major new resources to improve teacher pay, but it will take more than state action to ensure our resources make it to the classroom.”
The third failure involved Red4ED’s attempt to reverse Arizona’s historic tax cuts, which were passed into law last year. The organization spent $5 million to get a referendum on the ballot to block the tax cuts. AFEC sued Red4ED and won at the Arizona Supreme Court, which agreed that the tax cuts could not be referred to the ballot since the “support and maintenance” clause in the state constitution prohibits such referrals.
Despite Red4ED’s contention that Arizona’s K-12 education needs more money to improve, Arizona’s schools are ranked No. 1 in the country for academic progress, according to the Stanford Educational Opportunity Project.
Purple for Parents was formed to push back against Red4ED. In 2019, the new parent group defeated an effort by Red4ED to introduce new sex education standards for public K-12 schools in Arizona. Due to a “barrage of parent criticism,” Red4ED was thwarted in its effort to strip out language from the rules on sex ed banning the teaching of “abnormal, deviate or unusual sexual acts and practices.”
Dusti Martin, one of the mothers who first spoke up against Red4ED, told the Sun Times, “As a former public charter school teacher, I chose to start my kids education at a private Christian school. And that says about all you need to know about my confidence in public education — especially when I live in a high performing district.”
She said the final straw was a Red4ED activist at the public school her children previously attended “encoding the leftist B.S. into required curricula, standards that parents can no longer opt their children out of, and the continued nonsense of teachers collectively looking for ways to not be in the classroom and continually railing against parents throughout the so-called pandemic.” Martin was told her children would be subjected to discipline, including up to expulsion, for “having to be reminded repeatedly to wear a mask properly.”
There is little to no presence left of Red4ED in Arizona.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
