Read stories from AzFBN about fighting food insecurity within Arizona’s Indigenous communities.

Today the Senate Education committee is hearing another bill that undermines the funding base of a still woefully underfunded public education system, and that will especially undermine the lowest income school districts. This drastic expansion of the ESA voucher program comes at a time when public schools have not been made whole after decades of defunding.

Arizona voters approved a ballot measure this week that will make the state’s tax code more equitable while raising hundreds of millions of dollars in badly needed revenue for schools. Two other sound, high-profile ballot measures — in Illinois and California — either failed or remain too close to call, but the Arizona victory joins New Jersey’s new “millionaires’ tax” as an example of equitable, antiracist fiscal policy that other states should follow.

The coronavirus has caused severe budget problems for American higher education. But many colleges’ financial troubles are much larger than the virus. They have been building for years and stem, above all, from a breakdown in this country’s hodgepodge system of paying for higher education.