Arizona Education Movin' on up

[Valley Native]

Throwing more money into the system for the purpose of slightly improving our national rankings makes absolutely no sense. You can spend all the taxpayer money in the world on public schools, but that doesn't guarantee better educational quality ... nor does it guarantee the kids who attend public schools will become successful, productive adults in the real world.

Most of all: as long as there are lazy parents who plunk their children in public schools and use them as free daycare (as many of them do unfortunately), you're not going to achieve higher standards. Too many breeders have a self entitlement attitude, and they pass this same attitude onto their kids. If we did the right thing by privatizing education & made parents pay directly out of their own pockets for their own offspring, I can guarantee there would be more parental involvement.

[Thomasaz]

Originally Posted by Hal Roach

For every Amazon failure, there have been plenty of others moving in. I suppose Tesla went to Nevada for the great schools? And Toyota moved to Texas? Has a lot more to do with regulation and taxation. It has been well documented that Amazon is one of the worst tech companies to work for.

I think the Tesla and Toyota examples are a bit misleading. Tesla isn't opening up a headquarter. It's a factory that requires a lot of cheap land. They were able to get that plus tax incentives and what not from Nevada. They could care less about education. They don't need people with computer or mechanical engineering degrees, except for the few engineer types they have present at the factory. I'm guessing most of the R&D will continue to be done at their headquarters in California.

The Toyota plant is being built just north of Dallas, which is a prominent city. There are four major cities in that area (Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio). You have several universities within that region (e.g. Baylor, UofT-Austin). Now of course Toyota move to Texas to save money. Again, cheaper land and lower regulations and taxes for a company like that. But the region does have a pipeline of educated graduates coming out of the college system over there, which is a lot more than Phoenix can say. There are only three major universities here (4 if you count GCU now).

Amazon has a lot more pull than those two cases. They can go anywhere they want to. Phoenix failed to get them because Phoenix isn't appealing on many levels. Only one major university (ASU) in the area and that doesn't really provide much employee outreach. It's also unappealing to the types who would want to work at Amazon (regardless of how terrible it is as a company).

Now, the original poster about Amazon got this whole thing wrong because we're talking about the public school system here in Arizona (K-12) not college. Amazon most likely could care less about how K-12 students do in Arizona. Although, one could argue that does factor into a state's reputation and thereby affects what kind of major corporate players are willing to come to Arizona. And I don't mean a company that will build a large factory and keep its A-team in California or Texas. I'm talking about a large company setting up one of its HQs here in Phoenix.

[deanpegal]

I'm glad Arizona education is moving up as well as for India but I think India needs more improvements in other fields too like better infrastructure, sanitation and etc.