By Erik Twist |
In a previous op-ed, I argued that Arizona’s district school system is no longer failing quietly or at the margins; it is failing in concrete, measurable ways that any citizen can see. Districts are sitting atop tens of millions of square feet of unused facilities, fleets of underutilized buses, and continued academic declines, even as families vote with their feet for charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. I suggested that this mismatch between assets and enrollment is not primarily a failure of effort by teachers or even of management by principals and superintendents. It is, rather, a structural failure—a failure of the political governance model that was built for a different age and has now grown badly out of step with a landscape defined by choice and specialization.
That first piece only sketched the deeper questions. If Arizona’s district schools are governed by locally elected boards precisely so that they can respond to the public interest, why do they so consistently struggle to respond to the public itself? Why do boards that are supposed to safeguard public funds preside over billions of dollars in underutilized assets? Why does a structure designed to protect the common good now preside over persistent scandal, fiscal mismanagement, declining enrollment, and widespread frustration among teachers, administrators, and parents alike? To answer those questions, we must look beyond current headlines and follow the longer arc of how we came to equate “public” with “politically governed” in the first place.
A Short History
The political governance model that structures Arizona’s districts did not descend from heaven fully formed. It emerged in the early twentieth century as a particular way—one way—of securing community oversight of local schools. The assumption was simple: if citizens chose board members at the ballot box, then “the public interest” would be represented in school decisions. Over time, that prudential, albeit contingent, arrangement hardened into dogma. Political representation came to be treated not only as a means of protection, but as the necessary and exclusive guardian of the public good, public funds, and the formation of the next generation. To question the structure itself began to sound, in some ears, like questioning public education altogether.
Yet a careful look at both history and experience suggests that this is far too narrow a view. Arizonans know as well as anybody we must distinguish between the health of a society and the reach of the state. Our southwestern culture has long insisted that families, churches, associations, and voluntary institutions represent the public and serve the common good, often more effectively than formal political bodies. We know that political power is not the sole guardian of the public interest; it is one instrument among many and must be judged by its fruits. Therefore, we also know that if a particular form of political governance routinely frustrates educational excellence, wastes public resources, and subjects schools to the whiplash of partisan cycles, it is not sacrilege to reconsider it. It is an act of enlightened stewardship.
Arizona did not begin with today’s sprawling unified districts and five-member boards. In the territorial period, the basic unit of public education was the local school district, often consisting of a single schoolhouse serving one community. Territorial law in the late 1860s and 1870s required each district to elect a small board of three trustees, who oversaw the teacher, maintained the building, levied modest local taxes when necessary, and kept a simple census of school-age children. Early political governance of schools in Arizona was rudimentary and intensely local. The trustees were neighbors, the school was usually the only option for miles, and the questions before the board were concrete: hire a teacher, repair the roof, stretch a short budget a little further. And parents were close and connected to every operation of the school.
With statehood in 1912, the picture began to change. The Arizona Constitution established a State Board of Education and charged the new state with maintaining a system of common schools, while statutory law gradually formalized local districts as political subdivisions of the state. Over time, those simple boards of trustees evolved into today’s “governing boards,” recognized in Title 15 of the Arizona Revised Statutes as the governing body of each school district, typically consisting of three or five members serving staggered four-year terms and elected on the regular general-election ballot. What began as lay oversight of a single schoolhouse was thus absorbed into the broader machinery of state and county elections and invested with a much wider portfolio of powers.
Through the middle of the twentieth century, Arizona followed the national trend toward consolidation and unification. Numerous small districts were merged into larger common and unified districts, each with a single governing board responsible for K–8 and high school operations across multiple schools and neighborhoods. State law now gives these boards dozens of specific powers and duties—from hiring and evaluating the superintendent to adopting curricula and policies, issuing bonds, and managing the district’s substantial real estate portfolio. In effect, and by necessity, school boards shifted from being small committees of trustees to quasi-legislative bodies whose decisions shape complex organizations serving tens of thousands of students and stewarding hundreds of millions of public dollars. With this growth, parents became more like mere bystanders.
Political = Public?
From a legal standpoint, Arizona’s embrace of political representation as the default mode for “real” public education is baked into its constitutional and statutory architecture. Article XI of the Arizona Constitution charges the Legislature with creating a “general and uniform public school system” and vests the “general conduct and supervision” of that system in a State Board of Education, a state superintendent, county school superintendents, and locally established governing boards. District governing boards are thus conceived, from the outset, as political bodies—public offices filled by election, exercising delegated authority from the state to manage schools, steward funds, and set policy. Over the twentieth century, this framework was reinforced as boards took on larger consolidated districts, wider fiscal responsibilities, and explicit policy-making roles. In practice, “the public school system” came to mean the system supervised by these constitutionally recognized, electorally chosen officials.
Culturally and politically, this legal design was then wrapped in a powerful democratic narrative. State and national advocacy groups routinely describe elected school boards and district schools as the “cornerstone of democracy” and the essential vehicle for citizen oversight of government. In Arizona, governing-board candidates and education associations explicitly frame district schools—not charters—as the institution that embodies this democratic ideal and warn that parental-choice policies “attack public education” and threaten that cornerstone role. The result is that, in both rhetoric and policy debates, “public education” is habitually equated with electorally governed districts, while other public schooling arrangements (charters, open enrollment, and yes ESAs) are treated as exceptions or threats. Political representation by board election is no longer presented as one prudential way to secure the public interest; it is treated as the litmus test for whether a school is truly public at all.
The Results
Measured against its own stated aims, Arizona’s district governance model is not delivering. Start with the most basic metric of public confidence: whether families actually use the system they are taxed to support. Since 2011, district school enrollment in Arizona has fallen about 8 percent while charter enrollment has grown 87 percent; nearly all net growth in public-school enrollment over the past decade has come from charters, not districts. A recent analysis estimates that roughly 27 percent of Arizona’s 5- to 17-year-olds now do not attend a district school, and that close to 40 percent of incoming kindergarteners bypass their assigned district campus for charter, private, or home- and micro-school options. In other words, under the very governance structure meant to embody the “public interest,” a steadily shrinking share of the public is choosing the product offered—even before one considers the additional 7 percent (and growing) of students now educated via ESAs outside the district and charter systems altogether.
The picture is no more reassuring on fiscal stewardship. Arizona’s Auditor General recently warned that dozens of districts are on the verge of serious financial distress, and state financial investigators fielded 102 fraud-related allegations involving school districts and other public entities in 2024 alone. In the Isaac Elementary School District, mismanagement and budget overruns became so severe that the district could not meet payroll, prompting the State Board of Education to place it into formal receivership and triggering investigations by the Auditor General and Attorney General. The Nadaburg Unified School District has likewise drawn public accusations of “gross financial mismanagement” from the state treasurer, who urged an audit and potential receivership. All of this is happening in a system that, even as enrollment declines, continues to accumulate physical plant and capital costs: between 2019 and 2024, district enrollment fell 5 percent while gross square footage rose 3 percent, capital spending rose 67 percent, and square feet per student rose 9 percent, leaving districts operating at roughly two-thirds of their capacity while charter schools operate at about 95 percent. A governance model that presides over shrinking usage, growing fixed costs, and periodic fiscal crisis is, at a minimum, not obviously safeguarding public funds.
Nor is the system maintaining the confidence of its own professionals. A 2024 study from Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute found “deep dissatisfaction” among K–12 educators statewide, with nearly two-thirds reporting that they have considered leaving the profession. Separate reporting notes that more than half of Arizona’s public-school teachers say they may leave within two years if working conditions do not improve. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s most recent survey shows the teacher shortage remains at a “catastrophic” level: since July 2025, more than 1,000 teachers have quit, over 4,000 positions are being filled by long-term substitutes or other stopgaps, and nearly 1,400 positions are entirely vacant. These are not merely human-resource headaches; they are evidence that the governance structure is failing at the elementary work of sustaining a stable, dignified professional environment for the adults on whom student learning depends.
Finally, academic results under this model are stubbornly mediocre. On Arizona’s 2024 statewide assessments, close to 60 percent of students were not proficient in English Language Arts and 67 percent weren’t proficient in math, essentially unchanged from the prior year despite significant pandemic recovery spending. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s eighth-grade math score in 2022 was lower than in 2019 and not significantly different from its score in 2000; barely 18 percent of students reached “proficient,” and the share below “basic” was alarmingly high. Reading scores for fourth and eighth graders declined again in 2024, with only about a quarter of students proficient. After more than a century of elected-board oversight, the system is educating barely one in three students to grade-level standards in core subjects.
Taken together, these facts are not the story of a governance model quietly doing its job in a difficult environment. They are the record of a structure that has failed to retain families, failed to steward assets, failed to sustain its workforce, and failed to secure strong academic outcomes—even as alternative, non-political public models have expanded alongside it.
Beyond the Political Governance Model
The political cycle all but guarantees that Arizona’s district schools cannot build the kind of stable, long-horizon strategy that genuine educational excellence requires. Board elections, party primaries, and shifting legislative coalitions continually reset priorities, rewarding short term gestures that energize a partisan base rather than quiet, steady investment in students, families, and faculty. The incentives are clear: politicians and would-be board members gain more by fighting over the latest cultural controversy or signaling loyalty to party talking points than by aligning curriculum, staffing, facilities, and budgeting to a coherent, decades-long vision for student formation. In this environment, strategic plans are drafted to placate interest groups, messaging is crafted to survive the next news cycle, and superintendents are hired and fired according to political winds rather than educational competence. The result is a political strategic governance model, in which schools are treated as stages for ideological contest, rather than an educational governance model, in which decisions are anchored to evidence about what helps children learn, what sustains excellent teachers, and what builds strong, enduring school communities.
It is therefore time, not out of hostility to public education but out of love for it, that we rethink the political governance model that currently defines Arizona’s district schools. The interests of students, families, faculty, and staff are too precious to be chained to a structure that persistently frustrates their flourishing. If public education is truly a public good, then it must be governed in a way that safeguards that good by honoring scarce resources, attracting and retaining excellent educators, and treating children as persons to be formed rather than as data points in a political contest. Structures exist for the sake of these ends, not the other way around. To ask whether elected boards and partisan incentives remain the best guardians of our schools is not an act of heresy; it is an act of stewardship and, in a self-governing republic, a moral duty. A people that refuses to examine its institutions when they fail to serve their purpose is not defending the common good. It is neglecting it.
Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. He served as President of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022.
