“Let’s move here honey and get jobs in education. I’m sure this beautiful landscape is made of great people who support and value education.”
Oh, boy, those poor kids. Right now I’m thinking of my favorite classic horror movies and every naïve character who decides it would be a good idea to go into that dark basement or bedroom or that little forest patch in the backyard. Everyone in the audience is yelling, “Don’t do it, dude. Don’t go there.”
Right now Arizona is that horror flick and our teachers are those people who have to head into the dark basement of education every day. Well, Arizona has been in this cinematic scenario for a long time. But right now, we’re a bit shell-shocked with Gov. Flim Flam expanding scholarship accounts … vouchers. Forget public schools now that you can ask the state for a voucher up to $5,600 and send your kids to any school you want.
What are the majority Republicans who supported this nightmare going to get for giving their vote to Flim Flam’s ongoing strategy to dismantle public education in this state?
So now what? Please don’t tell me you’re just going to sit at home and feel bad for your kid’s teachers. I hope you’re looking them in the eye telling them you’re going to do something about it.
If not, if you just want to keep things the way they are and have been for a long time (what the hell are you drinking?), then join us for the next best thing: let’s get those signs up at our state borders. After all, we don’t want young, educated people moving to Arizona thinking this is a state that cares about its children, their education, our economic progress and, oh yeah, their teachers.
— Mari Herreras,
mari@tucsonlocalmedia.com
(Correction: The Editor’s Note originally referenced that one Democrat voted in favor of the expanded vouchers. That was incorrect. A change as we headed to press was left off that a handful of Democrats were absent for the vote. However, it’s important to note that even in their absence, Gov. Flim Flam was able to strong arm enough Republicans to make it happen. We apologize for the error. Get voting.)
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2017.
Do you children ever quit whining? It’s not how much money we give education, it’s how poorly education spends it. Nothing will change until TUSD does. Thank God for that.
At least there’s one golden highlight: If I move within the TUSD area, I’ll be able to use this voucher program.
Thanks for encouraging us to talk to our kids’ teachers, Ms. Herrerras. My kid’s teachers teach in a Catholic school, so I’ll be able to tell them the budget cuts and frozen salaries and worries about losing enrollment to charters they’ve experienced during the last several years may be over, now that the state has further scaled back its economic discrimination against schools affiliated with one of the religions this country’s Constitution guarantees its citizens the right to exercise. Hallelujah.
(The Catholic school teachers I know make less than public school teachers, even in Arizona, where public school teacher salaries are shockingly low. They have been willing to make an economic sacrifice to teach in an environment where the community is focused on values they believe in. They know that their sacrifice helps the schools keep tuition affordable for families, and they care about the wellbeing of the community as a whole and the families of their students, many of whom are living on very tight budgets. The students graduating from the Catholic schools I know are better prepared academically and in terms of civic values / volunteerism than the kids graduating from the public schools with which I have direct experience. I am able to make a direct, 1:1 comparison, having taught in Arizona public schools and in Arizona Catholic schools and having been a parent in both systems as well.)
Why shouldn’t the state pony up and support the hard work of teachers in Catholic schools, who prepare students well for lives of service in the professions and in the broader community? Without vouchers, the state saves over $5K per year for every student enrolled in a Catholic school. That money belongs in the pockets of the parents paying tuition and the teachers working sacrificially at unacceptably low salaries. Not in the pockets of corporations which receive tax breaks as the real cost of educating the next generation is falsely suppressed when the government refuses to pay for education taking place in certain contexts.
We hear a lot about “discrimination” in the U.S. Strange that some of us still can’t recognize a genuine case of it when we see it.
The commentary above lacks true human love.
I’ve learned a lot during the last few years from reading the comment streams on Safier’s blog and on selected other pieces in the Weekly. I appreciate those who take the time to explain their reasoning and how they look at things, especially when I disagree with them politically. It helps me understand the diversity of opinions in local politics and what beliefs (and sometimes fears) certain policy preferences are based on.
The commenter above seems to comment frequently and has a very distinct style, but I’ve never been able to get a clear view of what he or she believes, beyond that the appropriate way to respond to anyone who questions any point of liberal orthodoxy is to use insults and assertions not backed up by any valid arguments or evidence. One trope is, while insulting another commenter, to assert that the commenter being insulted lacks love and / or compassion. The hypocrisy doesn’t seem to register.
Interesting. Puts a new, ironic spin in the term “liberal,” doesn’t it? As does the Weekly’s pervasive failure to delete comments that involve insults and name-calling, in direct violation of their own clearly stated “Comments Policy.” Kind of like when TUSD reps say the district puts the wellbeing of the kids and teachers first. It doesn’t take a whole lot of observation to recognize the betrayals and inconsistencies.
TUSD is really rather unique. It is not representative of any other school district in the state. It should not be held up to define and defeat the morale and the professionalism of hardworking people in all the other school districts in the state.
No, TUSD is not unique. There are other public school districts locally and nationally that have some of the same problems:
Sunnyside
http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/gassen/sarah-garrecht-gassen-getting-paid-to-go-away-sunnyside-style/article_f935df59-f1ce-5d54-907a-c1668cc318d0.html
Newark
https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Whos-Charge-Americas-Schools/dp/0547840055/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1493405853&sr=8-2&keywords=the+prize
It remains to be seen how well Amphi will do with Jaeger at the helm, but many who know TUSD did not find the fact that he and another TUSD veteran (Abel Morado) were finalists for the same superintendent job at Amphi confidence inspiring:
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/two-tucson-unified-school-district-administrators-finalists-to-be-amphitheater/article_98318d99-f7ea-512f-86c5-04d3df85d86e.html
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/amphi-picks-todd-jaeger-tusd-s-general-counsel-to-lead/article_13cc5500-01c3-5a36-a67b-6426ae830f5f.html
There are some high functioning public school districts. Flowing Wells is often mentioned as one. No one doubts that public districts can, in some circumstances, provide good services. But not all of them do, and reforming troubled school districts is not something anyone locally or nationally has found a good way to do. Interventions of various kinds are attempted, and these institutions tend to limp along, many times getting worse rather than better under state control or mayoral oversight.
Applying tax dollars in support of students’ enrollment in private schools would seem to many of us to be a much better investment in the future of the students in question and in the future of the communities where these students will work and live than applying those same tax dollars in more than one of our local public school districts. Why should the state subsidize the cost of students attending troubled, low functioning schools that don’t meet their academic needs, but not high functioning schools where students’ needs will be better met? That’s a question voucher opponents should take time to answer, honestly considering the state of some of the schools in the public district system. I’ve yet to see a voucher opponent successfully doing it.
Care to give it a try, “False Equivalence, Again”?
Yes. You are picking cherries on a forklift. It may be true that urban districts suffer the consequences of too many low SES students, with all accompanying problems, but to lump all school districts across the country as a national disgrace is still unfair. Mismanagement comes with unwieldy size and unfortunate politics. Locally, you can look at Vail and Benson to find good management of resources, high teacher morale and solid performance as measured with both student success and test scores. Yet, the immediate referring to TUSD over and over as an immediately realistic paradigm for all may be a mantra here, but it is nevertheless still a shallow, knee jerk shibboleth. Vouchers will satisfy a tea-party level political position (and may even secretly line your own pockets with public money), but vouchers will not elevate the opportunities of most kids, they will not improve a huge majority of schools that will continue to (try to) function, and they will in no way ensure a prosperous future for the nation as a whole.
The comment to which you are responding does not lump all public school districts across the country into one category. It says some are high functioning and others are low functioning. That is a fact that would be acknowledged by most sane education analysts. It says that in light of the fact that no good solutions have been found to addressing the problems in low functioning, troubled urban districts like TUSD (another broadly acknowledged reality) it falls to voucher opponents to explain why it is inappropriate to allow under-served constituents to apply the tax funds available to support their K-12 educations in higher functioning alternative schools. Your comment did not provide that explanation.
When you have a feasible, implementable solution to the serious teaching and learning problems that occur in districts like TUSD (e.g. too many classrooms manned by rotating casts of outsourced, under-qualified, and underpaid subs; grossly inflated admin salaries and bonuses occurring inappropriately at the same time as grossly insufficient teacher salaries and bonuses; ongoing problems with implementing desegregation orders to properly achieve “unitary status”, etc. ad nauseam) let us know. Until then, many of us will continue to believe that getting as many people transferred to higher functioning institutions as possible is the best damage-control solution that can be provided. It’s not the ideal way to manage a universal K-12 education system, but in Arizona we are not living in the Panglossian “best of all possible worlds,” and the solutions offered have to fit the real conditions in the institutions in question and produce genuine benefit in the lives of constituents. That doesn’t seem to be accomplished by the theoretical-utopian-we’ll-keep-selling-fares-on-the-Titanic-even-though-it’s-sinking-maybe-we’ll-be-able-to-plug-those-holes-if-we-can-just-recruit-more-fares schemes favored by some.