PHOENIX (By  John M. Broder, NYTimes) February 3, 2006 — Arizona's Democratic governor and its Republican-controlled Legislature are locked in an election-year stalemate over the teaching of English and how much to pay for it.

On the surface, the debate is straightforward: how to help the state's 154,000 public-school children whose native language is other than English — in almost all cases it is Spanish — catch up with their peers, as required by a federal court order.

But below the surface is the matter that underlies most political debates in Arizona: illegal immigration, expected to be the marquee issue in the November elections. While school officials estimate that as many as 75 percent of the state's non-English-speaking students are American-born citizens, most of their parents are immigrants, many in this country illegally.

"There is a significant anti-immigrant animus propelling a lot of the sentiment in the Legislature right now," Gov. Janet Napolitano said in an interview. "They are angry about the taxpayer dollars that are being used to educate illegal immigrants or the children of illegal immigrants."

Representative Stephen Tully, the majority leader of the Arizona House, denied anti-immigrant sentiment.

"Certainly a lot of these kids are in the country illegally, or their parents are, but that's not the issue," Mr. Tully said. "They're here, and we need them to learn English."

The problem instead, he said, is that the governor's proposal lacks any incentive for the schools to complete the task quickly, since they would be financed on a per-pupil basis rather than by a block grant.

To meet the requirements of the court order, Ms. Napolitano has proposed spending $45 million a year to expand English-language instruction in Arizona's public schools. Beginning Wednesday, the state is being assessed a fine of at least $500,000 a day until it complies with that order, and the governor, seeking a kind of down payment on her plan, has asked the court to direct the proceeds of the fine to English-language immersion programs for schoolchildren.

Mr. Tully and other Republican lawmakers suggest that the governor is using the court order as an excuse to throw money at a problem that can be solved more cheaply; they have proposed $14 million. Some Republicans also contend that her proposal would shortchange non-immigrant Arizonans and encourage immigrants to cross the border illegally to take advantage of the state's public services.

As part of their negotiating strategy on the legislation, Republicans have attached riders that would create tax credits for corporations that contribute to private and parochial schools, a way of subsidizing private-school choice for parents who do not want to send their children to public schools. The governor has vetoed the measures three times, saying the tax credits would be excessive. Her staff has calculated their cost at $50 million a year, though the Republicans say it would be much less. Ms. Napolitano has proposed a much smaller program of tax credits that would expire in five years.

Political analysts say the fight is also an effort by Republicans to scuff up the popular Democratic governor at the onset of the election year. Ms. Napolitano, who is up for re-election in November and has all but formally declared her candidacy, is soaring in the polls, and the Republicans have yet to find a credible candidate to challenge her.

"This whole education fight is clearly a proxy for the immigration debate," said Bruce Merrill, a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. "A lot of people here feel if you don't build it, they won't come."

That was the idea behind two ballot measures approved by Arizona voters. One, Proposition 203, which passed in 2000, essentially outlaws bilingual education in public schools. It requires classes to be taught in English only, forcing schools to provide remedial help for non-English speakers.

The other, Proposition 200, approved in 2004, denied some benefits to illegal immigrants, though the courts have blocked parts of it.

The current financing dispute dates from 1992, when the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest sued on behalf of 100,000 non-English-speaking children who were receiving no language help in the schools and were lagging in achievement as a result. In early 2000, a court ruled for the plaintiffs and ordered the state to come up with a realistic estimate of the costs and to provide an adequate sum for English-language programs.

The Legislature deadlocked on both the study and the financing, and last year a federal district judge in Tucson, Raner C. Collins, ordered the state to enact a workable English Language Learners program, or E.L.L., if it was to avoid fines beginning at $500,000 a day and escalating to $2 million a day.

Governor Napolitano convened a special session for the Legislature to take up the measure in January, but she and the lawmakers reached an impasse over the amount to be spent and the corporate tax credits.

The governor said the issue was not money — the state is running a $1 billion surplus — but rather bad blood between her and the Legislature and a frustration with the federal government's failure to enforce the nation's immigration laws. Arizonans, she said, are tired of bearing the cost of what many consider unchecked illegal immigration.

"But my question is, What do you do with the children who are already here?" she said. "You can't take a failed federal immigration policy out on the children. They are just pawns in this."

Mr. Tully, the House majority leader, said the impasse had been building since the governor vetoed Republican bills intended to address the issue last May, legislation for which, he said, she had signaled support. "There's just not a lot of trust there," he said.

Tim Hogan, executive director of the group that brought the 1992 lawsuit, said that while politicians brawled, schoolchildren were being left behind. He said that tens of thousands of non-English-speaking students had entered Arizona schools since the suit was filed and that dropout rates were rising because many of those children did not have a command of English.

"The issue for me is simple," Mr. Hogan said. "Are you going to educate them in compliance with the law or just kick them to the curb?"