Phil Mason, founder of the Arizona Republican Assembly, has urged families to reassert parental authority by emphasizing discipline and respect rather than fostering friendships with their children. This statement was made in the Grand Canyon Times.
“We need to recognize that we have, over the last three or four generations, become less sturdy in how we deal with our children,” said Mason. “We’ve become compassionate, loving friends of our children instead of becoming parents of our children. Respect is the foundation of love and they respect you, then you have to hold them accountable and be the parent.”
According to Arizona policymakers, there is an increasing emphasis on parental authority and family values within K–12 education. Measures such as SB 1443 and the reaffirmation of Arizona’s Parents’ Bill of Rights aim to reserve educational and disciplinary control for parents. These debates, centered on moral instruction and parental oversight, reflect broader national conversations on school culture, as reported by the Arizona Legislature and Department of Education.
A 2023 report from the Pew Research Center found that 62% of American parents believe children today lack discipline, while 70% say respect for parental authority has declined. In Arizona, similar sentiments are reflected in local polling, which shows strong bipartisan agreement that parents should set behavioral standards at home and in schools.
A study published in 2022 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that children raised in authoritative households—where warmth is combined with firm boundaries—showed higher academic performance and emotional stability compared to those from permissive homes. Researchers linked accountability-based parenting to better self-regulation and social outcomes.
Mason serves as president of the Arizona Republican Assembly and has a background in GOP legislative and civic leadership, including prior service as research director for the Arizona Joint Legislative Audit Committee. He advocates for family-centered education policies and traditional parental roles in schools.
The Arizona Republican Assembly (AZRA), founded in 1993 as the state affiliate of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), promotes conservative values including parental rights, limited government, and moral education. The group operates local chapters across Arizona and engages in advocacy for family and education reform.
___________
FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
Leyla Gulen: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I’m your host, Layla Golan. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Phil Mason. Phil is a former legislative district chair. He was also Maricopa County’s executive director, the Arizona GOP operations director and founder of the Derm Coalition. Phil is also the founder and president of Arizona Republican Assembly and Research Director at the state legislature joint legislative.
Audit committee. Sir, you are very committed. I wanna welcome you to the program.
Phil Mason: Well, I’m committed because God gave me this ministry 48 years ago, so it was, I didn’t ask for it, but it’s one of those things that you have to go ahead and fulfill the, the, the requirement.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Sometimes these things are a calling, aren’t they?
They are. It is definitely a calling. Indeed, and we’ve been talking a lot about this topic. We’re gonna continue the topic of education in Arizona and eventually get to what’s happening in the legislature. But [00:01:00] first, Arizona students continue to score below the national average in reading and math.
What’s the biggest barrier, Phil, standing in the way of improving performance?
Phil Mason: The education system. We don’t have an education system now. We have a jobs program and a bureau bureaucracy that protects itself as opposed to focusing on the students We’ve never had a rally at, yet at the legislature in 25 years where the teachers and the administrators have come down and rallied.
To increase student proficiency. It’s always about rallying to get more money. It’s about making my, getting me more pay and then taking care of the school system as opposed to focusing on the needs of the student.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm. And we’ve seen only modest gains in test scores since the pandemic. What specific strategies are you putting in place to accelerate learning recovery or hoping to see [00:02:00] legislators put into place?
Well.
Phil Mason: We, we have a, we there, there are actually a, a, a fair amount of. Examples of what we can do to, to, to fix that. First of all, we should, we should check with Mississippi. Mississippi is the gold star of education in America right now. They, they’ve turned us around from being near the bottom to the, at the top with student proficiency.
They’ve turned, they’ve decided to focus on students instead of focusing on protecting the system. The other thing, I mean, there are some things that we, and I’ve had conversations with, for instance. The chair of the House education committee and with, and with my school superintendent here about doing something that I, there there’s history showing it works, which is have this, have the teacher follow the students through K six.
So every year the teacher gets 30 new kids, 20 new kids, 25 kids, whatever the number is, and the first [00:03:00] grading period is really spent in. Finding out who these kids are, finding out who their parents are, finding out which kid can do this, which child can do this, and the the whole first marking period is trying to find out, how do I teach this group that just.
I have a group now in front of me, how do I teach the group that I never met before, didn’t talk to before, have no experience with, not only with the child themselves, but with the parents of those children. So you’ve got basically four big, big marking periods every year. So a fourth of the learning experience is, is wasted every year by them just trying to find out who’s here.
Mm-hmm. And how do I. Get this child excited about learning or how do I get this child? I have to use a different technique for that one. So we’ve, we’ve recommended, and our organization has recommended have, the teacher gets a, basically a K eight teaching certificate. They’re, [00:04:00] they’re certified, able to teach K through eight.
It used to be that they would say, well, the curriculum changes, the teacher’s not up to date on a new curriculum. That is a, is a. Ghost story right now because curriculums across Arizona and most other states is, is given to the teacher by the computer subject, they’re, they’re all on their laptops. The curriculum is determined by what the school buys for the curriculum for that class.
The teacher doesn’t have to create a curriculum every year.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm.
Phil Mason: So. You don’t have that excuse. So if, if you have this, the teacher follow the students from K through, they’re, they’re, they’re qualified and certified to do that. Then the beginning of the next year, it’s the same kids. It’s the same group.
We can start from where we were. We know where each child was in June. We know what we need to do that in August. It’s a, it’s a two month break [00:05:00] anymore. Instead of three, which it used to be. Right. So you automatically, you, you, you already know because they were the same kids. Mm-hmm. So you can start the learning process from where you ended up.
I see. You also can set incentives. So if you, if the teacher has the same class, you can set up a system, and we’ve recommended this both to the legislature through Mr. GREs and the superintendent here in town. If the class increases its proficiency by one and a quarter years in a school year. Mm-hmm. And their test scores show they’ve advanced 1.25 years.
Give the teacher a $3,000 check. You help that class grow by 1.25 years in proficiency.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah.
Phil Mason: If you do that through six years, the teacher gets. [00:06:00] $18,000, the kids move up a grade and a half.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Phil Mason: That’s interesting. Yeah. And if you really are an excellent teacher, say, okay, if you increase that grade level by one and a half years per year, give ’em a $5,000 check.
Don’t put it in their regular check. Write a separate hard check and present it to them. Then put a deal up in the classroom. This teacher, yada, yada, yada. This class is an excellent class and they’ve, they’ve advanced by yada, yada, yada. Mm-hmm. Give them the positive feedback, give them the incentives. Atta boys and teachers will respond to both the tea, both the money and
Leyla Gulen: the good job.
Right. To, to incentivize our educators. And hopefully those checks you don’t have to pay taxes on.
Phil Mason: Exactly.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Well, [00:07:00] Arizona spends less per student than many states. Do you believe that those funding levels are directly tied to performance outcomes?
Phil Mason: Well, no. First of all, Arizona spends more than than most states.
When you compare the state economic level to. The amount of, amount, amount of money spent for the education. You can’t compare Arizona with the average income level of being 35, $40,000 of, of the workers up to 50. In, in, in places with New York City where it’s 150,000 or 200,000. The the dynamics are not the same, the costs are not the same, et cetera.
Actually. When you, when you add in all the other things that we do here in Arizona, we go from being near the bottom to being in the top third. Now, one of the things is, for instance, in [00:08:00] Arizona, we have the school facilities board. The school facilities board will build all schools necessary to maintain.
Proper amount of space per student, and that’s done at the state level. None of that comes out of the school district money. Mm-hmm. No other state does that. So all the brick and mortar stuff that that Arizona spends on that, none of that is counted when the school people find out how much money do we spend, they don’t count the school facilities board money as anything.
The second problem with that is many of the school boards. Because somebody on the school board or some friend of theirs or somebody that’s powerful in the, in the area has a piece of property they wanna sell. When the school facility board does it, they do a, a, an in-depth investigation and and research to say, where is the new growth going to go?
Where is the [00:09:00] best place to build a new school? That’s going to be appropriate to the growth area of the, of the school district, and we’re going to buy a piece of property there that’s going to be consistent with the growth that’s coming, and then we’re going to buy it. We’re going to build you a school building.
That meets the needs of the student, but it’s not gonna be on architect industry publication as the front photo cover of Look at this school district and the wonderful architectural work that’s done. Right. Okay. They build a school, they don’t build an architect project. Mm-hmm. So. Because of that many school districts, even though they could have the school built at no cost to the taxpayers in their district, they refuse to use the school facility board because they have a friend who has a piece of property and they wanna build a Taj Mahal with her name on the on, on the, on the building.
I see. Hmm.
Leyla Gulen: Now, we’ve [00:10:00] talked on the show in great length about empowerment, scholarship accounts, and school choice. Do you think that this is making a positive impact and does it go far enough? You had mentioned earlier about the incent teacher incentives, but is there anything else that you think could positively contribute to, to students’ wellbeing and, and academic success?
Well,
Phil Mason: ESAs are great. That we’re never going to get to the point to where it’s, the school system’s going to work effectively until we have true school choice. And that means across all economic levels of, of our society. It’s very nice for people who are generally more Republican, who live in Scottsdale, who send their kids to private school and complain about the fact that we have school choice.
Where people in Roosevelt School district or Phoenix Elementary School District, and it really gets into [00:11:00] a caste system almost that. Yeah, we we’re gonna, we’re gonna send our kids to private school, but we don’t wanna fund those people having the opportunity to send their kids to private school. And we’ve gotta, we gotta totally get rid of that thought process that our, our economy in the future is dependent upon preparing enough proficient students to be able to compete in the world global
Leyla Gulen: economy.
Phil Mason: Right.
Leyla Gulen: Right. And I know a lot of parents are asking how they can help support better student performance at home beyond what’s happening in the classroom. Have you been hearing anything from the parents and what their ideas are and their feelings?
Phil Mason: I, I haven’t heard a lot from parents. We, we do have a problem there, and it’s generational.
I mean, we, we, we need to recognize that we have, over the last three or four generations we have become. Less, [00:12:00] less, less sturdy in how we deal with our children. We, we’ve become compassionate, loving friends of our children instead of becoming parents of our children. Mm-hmm. We want our children to love us, and this is a discussion I had in my family 40 years ago now, is that your children will not love you unless they respect you.
Respect is the foundation of love and they respect you. They then you have to hold them accountable and be the parent. You can let them get away, un under the guise of compassion and love, but you’re harming them. And so we have, we’ve, the, our parents now that are in school, they are the people that were loved 30 years ago and not held accountable.
And so they have not had it modeled in front of them. What a parent’s really supposed to do. And so we’ve got a problem [00:13:00] not only with the children acting up, but we’ve got the the adults who say you can’t do anything about it, which right now we’re proving that’s not true by what’s happening in Washington, DC for example, and what’s having other places.
Children will model what’s expected of them and they want that.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Well, I wanna switch gears here. I wanna talk about Arizona lobbyist communications right off the bat. Yeah. What, what, what are your thoughts as far as how transparent the process is? Let’s just start there. I.
Phil Mason: Boy, that’s a tough one.
Lobbying. First of all, lobbyists are important. They’re, they’re, they’re, they’re a positive. They, they can be a positive impact on our society and on the legislative system. One of the biggest things that, that has caused more problems than anything within a legislative system is term limits. We talk about term limits.[00:14:00]
As if that’s the savior, because we have examples of people that have been in the system for 40 years and there are problems, and so the solution is, well, we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. The the problem is in the last two legislative sessions, right at the almost 50% of the legislators are brand new.
Each time. That means they don’t have any historical knowledge. They have no knowledge of how the system works. They have no knowledge of what a legislator does. They have no, they have no knowledge of what happened two years ago, four years ago, six years ago. Mm-hmm. And so the other problem is, and I’ve fought down there, been very adamant about it.
My friends don’t like it. They say, I’m, I’m for term limits, if you term limit staff. As long as we have bureaucrats who live in the system at the legislator for 30 or 40 years, and all the legislators that come in are brand new and don’t know anything. Well, that means the bureaucrats are running the place [00:15:00] that you don’t have the ability to vote them out.
Yeah. The, the, the best term limit we have is the ballot box. Mm-hmm. But you can’t ballot box the staff.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm.
Phil Mason: So let’s, unfortunately, lobby become. Too influential because there’s not enough depth of knowledge and experience of the legislators, and they rely on the lobbyists who have a lot of data and a lot of information is helpful, and they’re the only ones that have that information that the legislator can rely on as part of their, their research and biased information at
Leyla Gulen: that.
Phil Mason: And, and, and well, they, they, everybody has. A, a, a a dog in the fight. Everybody is, is and lobbyists are being paid to advocate certain things. Exactly. We’re different than the viewpoint. We’re advocating different, we’re we’re doing the same thing, except if we don’t get paid to do it. Mm-hmm. Right. That’s true.
Leyla Gulen: That’s true.
Phil Mason: Yeah. So I think that’s [00:16:00] the biggest thing. The lobbyists can be great, but we’ve gotta change the system as to how influential they can be and how knowledgeable our legislators should be.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Well, that was gonna be my next question. Should voters be concerned about the amount of private access lobbyists get compared to everyday citizens?
Phil Mason: Well, I actually, well there, here’s the difference that a everyday citizens do have access. It takes time and energy. It takes investment of, of, of time and whatever to do that. And most citizens either don’t want to or unable to whatever, to invest that time into the process. They just wanna complain about it afterwards.
Well obvious they’re down there every day. They’re paid to be down there every day. But I have access. I’m, I’m just a retired guy. I don’t have money, I don’t have resources. But I have access to legislators. I make a phone call, they [00:17:00] answer, they return the call. Mm-hmm. I will tell you what doesn’t work.
Emails don’t normally work. Phone calls and complaints don’t work. The staff take handles the call and says, you got 23 calls on this particular subject. Yeah. Or we got this many emails in. They don’t read ’em. The legislators are not. They don’t have time to read all that stuff, of course, and do those things that they’re required to do.
So emails and phone calls are not effective. Right? Two leather is, yeah. Well, and taking a day and going down to this and found payment, making appointment to see ’em, or, or can you call me? I, I don’t want to talk to a legislator personally. Yeah. It takes the personal touch and most people will not invest the time to make that happen.
Leyla Gulen: A lot of people can’t, everybody’s worked to death. You could have a a cause that’s near and dear to your heart, or a need that needs to be heard [00:18:00] and, and somehow figured out, but people just don’t have the luxury of time in many cases. Well, I I, I’m not going to accept that excuse. Well, what about the single mother?
What about the single mother that’s raising two kids and is working three jobs? I’ve got answer for you. Yeah, please, please.
Phil Mason: Yeah. Okay. So you have to take this into context with who I am and where, where I come from. I was born in nineteen forty four, six months before D-Day, okay? So that’s my mindset.
That’s how I grew up. Every, every single mother who works has a lunch hour. They can decide during my lunch hour, I’m going to take five minutes and make a phone call. I’m going to prioritize getting in touch with that legislator. E, everything in life
Leyla Gulen: is
Phil Mason: priorities.
Leyla Gulen: Well, no, I know, but you said phone calls don’t work.
Sometimes it takes that personal touch and you have to make the trip, so you can’t necessarily do that on a lunch [00:19:00] break, but,
Phil Mason: okay.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, yeah. You
Phil Mason: can make the call and say, this is my name and I need to speak with it. I’m a working mother, I’m a yada yada, and I’ve got some serious issues. I need to have their representative call me back.
I, I have a personal deal on this. Here’s my time schedule, please. Get this to him. Mm-hmm. And if you don’t do that, tell him to call me. Sure. I’ll, okay. Give him my number. Mm-hmm. I’ll get ahold of the legislature and say, this person really cares. You need to talk to ’em. They’re in your district. Yeah. There, there are ways to do it.
It’s unique, it’s different, but I think most of the things in our life are, are, are priorities. What is most important? If, if, if the kid’s gotta go to a doctor’s appointment, the mother takes the time off to go do that. And sometimes it, it requires something inconvenient. But if it’s about the future of your child and their, and their total future for the rest of their life, sometimes you’re gonna have to make that thing which is more [00:20:00] difficult for you, admittedly.
Mm-hmm. But I’m serious. If you have somebody that contacts you that says, Hey, I can’t reach this person. You call me. Mm-hmm. And you say, Phil, I got this person, I think I will get, I will make that happen.
Leyla Gulen: And just going back to the lobbyists for a moment, are there any rules on how often lobbyists can meet with lawmakers and are those rules being enforced?
Do you
Phil Mason: know? There no, there are no rules on that. Ah, there’s the rules of what they can and can’t do of what they, what they can offer and not offer. There’s ethics and those kind of things, but if a, and I know some legislators. Spend half their time with one or two lobbyists. Mm-hmm. They shouldn’t, but they do.
Yeah. But there’s, there, there’s no ’cause. How, how would you, how would you police that? Yeah. And, and if it’s a really critical thing for both the lo, the lobbyist and for the legislator about something that’s going to impact their legislative district, a rural district, [00:21:00] especially in our case, you wanna spend as much time as you need to to be able to, to create what you need to do to solve the problem of your community.
Sure, sure.
Leyla Gulen: Now you belong to a lot of organizations. What role does your, any one of your organizations play in policy?
Phil Mason: Well, the, the really, the one I’m doing right now is the Arizona Republican Assembly. That, that’s the one that I focus on. I, I was the founder Packer. I kind of folded that, put that away, and meshed it over into the Arizona Republican Assembly.
It’s a statewide organization, so we have. Chapters in Yuma. We have chapters in Boy Head City, we have Cassa Grande, whatever. So we we’re kind of a up and pacing, but that, that’s what we focus on. And, and the, the thing that’s been the most influential, the legislature is our scorecard. Mm-hmm.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm.
Phil Mason: Our legislative scorecard Yeah.
Is the most unique scorecard in America. And if, if there’s [00:22:00] no other like it.
Leyla Gulen: What were the findings in this latest scorecard for 2025?
Phil Mason: Well, it’s, some of it’s surprising. Some of it is what you would expect, but it’s how we do it that’s different. Every other scorecard out there creates a scorecard at the end of the year, tells people at the end of the year what bills their, their, their scoring, and then put out a scorecard in August or September.
Mm-hmm. It’s a gotcha game. It’s a. And they can pick and choose what bills they want to make sure the people they like have good or bad scores. People, they don’t like bad scores. I’m not gonna go into names, but there’s two or three of ’em around there looked as gold standard. And they consistently create the scorecard that will make their friends look good and their and their enemies look bad.
Okay. Yeah. We don’t do that. We, I have a committee of 12 people from around the state of my, of different chapters. Those 12 [00:23:00] people are volunteers and we look at all 1800 bills. Wow. We look at every one of ’em. We go through ’em, we read ’em. We give ’em a value as to whether or not they’re even worth scoring or not.
Of that 1800 bills, we then rate 250 bills. We don’t do 10 or 12 or 15, we do 250 bills. Wow. That sounds like a lot of work, Phil. It’s thousands of hours. It’s thousands of hours of volunteer work that, that are going through this, through the group of 12 each, each one gets a set of bills. They do it, they come back to the committee.
We have Zoom meetings every week and we talk about the ones that were scored that week and what, whether we wanna do ’em or not. We require a 75% agreement of the 12 people. For Bill to actually be put into the scorecard and to be counted with a, with a deal.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah.
Phil Mason: Then we hire a company, contract, a company, it’s a national company.
They do all [00:24:00] 50 legislatures in, in America plus Congress, and they do the background number stuff and they actually have an, they have contracted with each of these state legislatures. So every morning. Overnight, the legislature, legislative council sends to them all the votes that happened at the legislature the previous day.
Okay? Every vote, whether it’s a committee, whether it’s on the floor first, second or third week, whatever, any recorded vote comes into that system that they have, then that, that comes to me every morning between four and four 30 in the morning. Mm of every vote that happened the previous day. And we’ve already identified the, the bills that we wanna score and, and have given a value to it.
Leyla Gulen: Sorry to interrupt, but do you have maybe one or two on either side that you scored kind of on the opposite ends of the spectrum that you wanted to talk about? [00:25:00] Well, again, we don’t score them. They score them. Okay. We, we score
Phil Mason: the bills and then they vote and their vote. Is what gives them the score. I see.
Leyla Gulen: Okay. We
Phil Mason: don’t, we don’t look at them at all. We never look at the person. We look at the votes. I see. Okay.
Leyla Gulen: I
Phil Mason: see. So the, in the, in the Senate, the number one, the, the number one scorer is Senate President Warren Peterson. He had 98.7 rating on the 250 bills. As they went through the process and all the votes he took on them, he voted with how we scored it, how we rated the bill in 98.7% of the time, out of thousands of of votes, okay?
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. In the, in the Senate, in the house, Selena Bliss from Prescott was number one, and then we had four people tied for number two. Including the majority leader, Juan Wynn, who’s not the majority leader. Michael Carone is the majority [00:26:00] leader, and then Juan Wynn and two others who were tied at 96.1 of it.
Interesting. Yeah. On our score. Yeah. So the interesting thing is in the in, in the house, the lowest score of anybody in the house. Was 78.7 of Republicans and 79 point something for the second lowest. Everybody else was above 80.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm.
Phil Mason: These, these Democrats, everybody says, well, the Republicans and Democrats that say unit party, there’s no difference.
Our lowest score is 80 the highest. They only have two people in the legislature total, and the Democrats that are above 40. Okay. So the worst Republican is twice as good as the best Democrat. So the argument of there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats is a false argument. If you just look at the data.
Leyla Gulen: Uh huh. Okay. Uh, very [00:27:00] interesting. And people can read, I’m sorry. People can read the Arizona free news article, Arizona Republican Assembly releases final 2025 legislative Scorecard. So you can go there and you can kind of see how it’s been boiled down. And Phil, just to end on this note, what do you have coming down the pike?
What’s next for you as we start to round up 2025?
Phil Mason: Well, we’re, we’re right now trying to prepare for 2026 Uhhuh. Yeah, so trying, well, the difference between the Republican Assembly and the Republican Party is that the Republican party does not and should not be active players in primaries. Republican Assembly is extremely active in primaries.
We believe that our job is to make sure that conservatives are on the ballot in November. The party can’t do that. We focus that and we’re looking at members right now for next year and trying to make sure we have good candidates available. Also, we’re getting ready to gear up because guess what? In [00:28:00] November they start dropping bills for next legislative session.
Right? That’s right. We’re putting our people together and getting that, so we’re preparing for that. Yeah, and, and doing the candidate recruitment. There is a deal right now. Congress District seven, where there’s an election going on and we can win that race. Republicans can win that race if Republicans will go vote.
Mm-hmm.
Leyla Gulen: Mm-hmm.
Phil Mason: Very
Leyla Gulen: good. Well, Phil Mason, I wanna thank you so much for taking the time with us and for people who want more information on your work, they can go to your website, A ZR az.org. Phil, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. I
Phil Mason: appreciate
Leyla Gulen: it.
