School finance was already fluid, nuanced, confusing as hell and not exactly the sexiest topic in the world to discuss.
Prop 320 is compounding the confusion.
On the surface, the measure would simply require certain school districts to spend at least 60% of their budgets on classroom instruction. Direct instruction is, on average, far less than 60% of Arizona public school budgets, per the Arizona Auditor General.
The stated purpose of the measure, according to Republican lawmakers, is to boost pay for teachers.
Simple, right?
Not really. Instead of a thoughtful piece of legislation to address a specific concern, Prop 320 reads more like the result of GOP lawmakers asking themselves, “How can we mess with those darn government schools this year?”
Now, school administrators are frantically trying to predict the fallout if voters approve the measure in November.
We spoke with a ton of people in Arizona’s public school world. None of them know how lawmakers ended up with the 60% requirement or why charter schools were exempted.
They also don’t know why the word “teacher” isn’t in a ballot measure claiming to help teachers or what teachers are going to do if districts have to fire support staff like counselors and bus driver, who would probably get axed if Prop 320 passes.
They don’t know why the measure is even A Thing.
Phew.
Prop 320 is a lot, so let’s start at the beginning.
Republican lawmakers have chipped away at public school districts for years, most notably by encouraging a vast charter school system and spending $1.15 billion on school vouchers this year alone.
But how did Prop 320 even get on the ballot? With relatively little effort, compared to the Protect Education Act’s massive campaign to get hundreds of thousands of signatures from voters. (That measure made headlines as public school supporters attempted to install guardrails on the school voucher system. A judge nuked that effort this summer.)
Instead of a groundswell of public support, Prop 320 was conjured up by Republican lawmakers wanting to hamstring public education, knowing Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs would veto it if they wrote it into a bill. As they’ve done numerous times since Hobbs was elected, they bypassed the governor and went straight to the voters with ballot measures.
Prop 320 is clearly a gambit to confuse voters, even those who support public education, Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said.
“They’re leveraging people’s love of education and educators by saying this will guarantee raises for teachers. There’s nowhere in the proposition that does that,” she said.
That’s the big picture. The fine mechanics are frustratingly complicated.
How we got here
Maybe a dartboard was involved, but in all likelihood, the 60% number was just the next round number after 50%.
We asked the measure’s backers about 60%’s mystique. No response.
As for the legislative debate over the bills that ended up becoming Prop 320, the discussion consisted mostly of Democratic lawmakers asking what the heck was going on and Republicans pointing at shiny things.
Here’s a sample:
At a hearing this spring, Democratic Sen. Mitzi Epstein pushed Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, one of the architects of Prop 320, to explain why charter schools would be exempt from the requirements.
Epstein: “Charter schools spend an enormous percentage of their funding on administration …”
Hoffman interjects: “This is not material to this measure.”
Epstein brings it up again.
Hoffman: “Charter schools are a market-based education solution, meaning parents go to charter schools if those charter schools are delivering the things that they want. Government-run schools are a direct subset of this Legislature and our state government.”
The needle Hoffman was trying to thread is that although charter schools are funded by the state government and are technically public schools, the state government doesn’t run them, so they don’t count.
As for teacher pay, Republican Rep. Matt Gress, another Prop 320 architect, told the Republic, “we’re going to see higher teacher wages and we’re going to see more resources for the classroom.”
Despite Prop 320’s billing and the rah-rah-sis-boom-bahs from its cheer squad, there is no mention of teacher salaries — or teachers, even — in the text of the ballot measure or the legislation it spawned from.
The words voters will read on their ballots go like this:
“A ‘yes’ vote shall have the effect of requiring school districts with 7,500 or more students in any county or that operate in a county with 500,000 or more people to spend at least 60% of their operational spending on direct instructional expenses.”
The measure then states the Auditor General will define “operational spending” and “direct instructional expenses.” (We’ll get back to that unexpected source of confusion later.)
If districts don’t comply, they face severe consequences. They’ll lose 25% of their Classroom Site Fund money the first year, then 50% the next, and so on until it’s gone. But the state superintendent of public instruction can grant limited waivers.
Which brings up another big item on the November ballot: Who will be elected the next superintendent of public instruction? A Democrat like Teresa Leyba Ruiz might be generous with those waivers, while Republican Kimberly Yee would probably be a lot stingier.
In the meantime, local officials like Pima County School Superintendent Dustin Williams are left, once again, worrying about what fresh hell the Legislature is sending their way.
“You’re already trying to force an equation or an algorithm on a very diffused, low-quality financial system,” Williams told us, referring to Arizona’s public education funding formula. “It shows how out of touch some of our legislators are when it comes to educational funding and the processes of how it works.”
So, how does it work?
Here are the basics.
As the language of the measure states, Prop 320 would apply to public school districts with 7,500 or more students, or located in a county with at least 500,000 people.
Based solely on the 7,500-student threshold, at least 40 public school districts could be impacted by Prop 320, should it pass.
Small districts in big counties like Maricopa, Pima and Pinal will have to meet the 60% requirement, too, even though Hoffman said during a Senate hearing that “the intention was that those really small school districts would not bear the same burden.”
The Pinal County situation is particularly interesting. If you go by the Census Bureau’s annual population estimates, the county’s population is above 500,000. But the decennial census puts it under that threshold.
Many leaders of those small schools are concerned, said Arizona School Administrators Executive Director Paul Tighe.
“A small single-school district who happens to be in one of those three counties said, ’Look, if we have a teacher retire that’s on the high end of the salary schedule and we replace them with a brand new teacher (at a starting salary),’” it could put them out of compliance, he said.
Here’s a fun school finance experiment: What would happen if the Queen Creek Unified School District, which is within Hoffman’s district, didn’t comply?
Queen Creek USD spent just under 56% of its budget on instructional expenses, per the Auditor General’s Office, in 2024.
If Prop 320 had been law back in 2024, Queen Creek USD could have lost $4.5 million from its $17.8 million in classroom site funds the following year.
Under Prop 320, the cuts would pause if the district increased their direct instruction budget by a half a percentage point the following year.
Instructional expenses … site funds … population vs. enrollment ….
It’s a lot — and one problem raised by the Legislative Council: Will voters understand the terminology? In the end, the council decided not to include definitions in the ballot measure.
But those definitions are the key to the whole thing.
And by omitting them, Hoffman and Co. may end up handing control of the state’s public education spending to the Deep State.
They don’t call the shots
Republican lawmakers drafted Prop 320 to follow the auditor general’s definition of “direct instructional expenses” and “operational spending.”
But the thing is, the auditor gets its definitions of those terms from a higher power: the feds’ National Center for Education Statistics.
Scott Swagerty, school audits director for the state auditor’s office, told us they have used NCES’s definition since the auditor began monitoring school spending in 2001.
“If voters pass Prop 320, we will monitor schools’ compliance with the proposition’s requirements using NCES’s definition of instructional spending,” he said. “We don’t get involved in making policy.”
The NCES breaks down classroom spending into three categories: instruction, student support and instruction support.
The Arizona School Boards Association makes a point of highlighting the difference between “classroom spending” and “instruction” spending.
Prop 320 focuses on instruction, which the NCES defines as spending for “activities directly associated with the interaction between teachers and students.”
These include teacher salaries and benefits, supplies, extracurriculars and purchased instructional services.
Support staff, including secretaries, social workers and SROs, are not considered classroom spending, per Tighe, from the administrator’s association.
That means they could be subject to cuts.
Lots to lose
Like everybody else we talked to, Tucson Unified School District CFO Ricky Hernandez said district officials “have no idea how the 60% number came about.”
Nonetheless, TUSD would have to deal with that requirement, which would mean “we would have to siphon monies (from other areas) because they’re not going to increase our budget,” Hernandez said.
Hoffman advised Senate colleagues that administrative fat should go on the chopping block first. Hernandez said while that sounds great, it isn’t feasible.
The district can’t simply start slashing administrative positions, Hernandez said. TUSD is already cut to the bone — the state auditor designated the district as “highest financial risk” earlier this year.
“The big gimmick has always been — and will probably always be — that we spend too much on administrative spending,” Hernandez said. “We’ve got a principal at each of our 88 schools. They’ve got assistant principals in some cases. They all have office managers that are expected to be at every campus.”
The claim that Prop 320 would help teachers? Garcia said it would actually make teachers’ lives far more difficult.
Multiple sources quoted in this story — including Garcia — told us that teachers would likely have to take on more responsibilities, with no guarantee of higher salaries (despite Prop 320’s billing).
Cuts will then ripple into the schools’ communities, Garcia explained.
“Most of those positions are our students’ parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles,” she said. “How does that help the economy by saying we’re only going to potentially find ways to give certain people raises, but then get rid of other positions?”
Those are some major implications from a ballot measure still begging many, many questions.