With 100 days until the midterm elections, Republican gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs (R-AZ) is making education one of his campaign focuses, and he's pointing to Louisiana and Mississippi as models for what Arizona could achieve.
In a recent interview with KTAR, Biggs pushed back on the idea that spending more money on schools automatically leads to better outcomes.
He argued that the connection between funding levels and student achievement is weaker than many assume, citing what he described as a striking contrast between states.
"Educational attainment and funding has very little correlation with each other," Biggs said.
Biggs pointed to Louisiana and Mississippi, which he said have climbed from among the lowest-performing states to some of the highest in recent years, while noting that Massachusetts, which he said spends more than any other state, has seen its performance decline.
Biggs' Priorities
Now Biggs emphasizes that the focus should be on what happens inside the classroom rather than how much money flows into the system overall.
He additionally explained that currently only about 52 percent of education funding in Arizona actually reaches the classroom, with the remainder going toward administrative costs and other expenses, a figure he argued reflects misplaced priorities.
Thus, he credited the turnaround in Louisiana and Mississippi largely to curriculum changes, specifically the abandonment of Common Core standards in favor of phonics-based reading instruction and what he described as science-based math approaches.
He also spoke directly with officials from those states to understand how they achieved their results.
"We got rid of Common Core, and we went back to phonics. We went back to science-based math," Biggs said, paraphrasing what he was told. "And by doing that — and it's taken some time, Louisiana's taken almost 10 years to move way up — it changed the whole way children learn."
His broader argument is that education reform is less about dollars and more about focus, directing attention toward students, parents, and teachers, and removing what he characterized as distractions from core academic learning.
Biggs faces Democratic incumbent Governor Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) in November, with education shaping up as one of the key issues dividing the two candidates.
