White Hat Research and Policy Group

  In the last week or so, the growing threat of the coronavirus pandemic has touched the lives of everyone in Arizona and across the country in some way. From shortages at the grocery store to school cancellations to uncertainty about Arizona’s Presidential Preference Election, virtually no aspect of American life has gone untouched. This is a scary and uncertain time, and none of us knows the answer to what lies ahead of us, but one thing is clear: this national and worldwide crisis has underscored the need for progressive, broad-based solutions to the various problems facing our state, our country, and the world because there is no such thing as a single-issue problem. We are deeply interconnected and so are our problems. So our solutions need to be as well. When White Hat Research and Policy Group was founded, we identified six key areas which would be the focus of our research and policy solutions: Civic Engagement Criminal Justice Economic Development Education Human Resources Tec

Education has been the dominant issue in Arizona politics for the past several years and it looks to be so again this November. Supporters of the #RedForEd movement are currently collecting signatures for a new version of the  Invest in Ed ballot initiative  which failed to make the ballot in 2018 and which would raise taxes on high-income earners to fund public education. And then last week,  Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSAZ) , the group behind 2018’s successful defeat of Proposition 305, announced a new ballot initiative they are calling the  Save Our Schools Act . Save Our Schools Arizona, if you will remember, is the grassroots group that was formed in 2017 to fight the Arizona legislature’s expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) school voucher program. The group got the 2017 voucher expansion referred to the ballot in 2018, where it was resoundingly defeated by nearly two-thirds of Arizona voters. But this defeat has not deterred Republican legislators, many with ti