Full disclosure: I have already stated my support for David Garcia for governor on The Range. Today I sent in my ballot with the bubble filled in next to Garcia’s name.
Thursday, a post on Blog for Arizona by Larry Bodine sent minor shockwaves through the Democratic primary race for governor. Bodine wrote a scathing review of a book David Garcia wrote titled School Choice, which will be published September 28. According to Bodine, Garcia’s book is pro-school privatization and, in the words of the headline “a Blueprint to Dismantle Public Education.”
Bodine’s post was the first I heard of the book. I asked him if he would share his review copy with me, and he did gladly. I read the book — or to be completely honest, I read the beginning carefully, then skimmed the rest of the 196-page book attentively enough to understand its content.
Bodine’s depiction of the book is, in a word, wrong.
Of the people who have had a chance to read the book and comment on it in the media, I probably have the most experience reading education books. I have amassed a significant number of postgraduate units in the field, and I’ve continued reading education works, ranging from blog posts to articles to books, on a daily basis. Though I have expressed my support for Garcia, I also know how to read these kinds of texts for content and possible political leanings without letting my personal opinions interfere.
What Garcia has written is a book on the history of school choice beginning in colonial days and continuing through 2017. It is meant to be an objective overview of the subject, and it succeeds in that regard. If I had never heard of David Garcia and read this book, I wouldn’t know his personal opinions on the subject. Though it is written for general consumption, it would be a valuable book to assign in any college course on the history of education, from Education 101 through graduate school.
I’m not the only one to arrive at the conclusion that Bodine’s post is a distortion of the contents of Garcia’s book. Brahm Resnik, one of Arizona’s top journalists, came to a similar conclusion. So did Maria Polletta of the Arizona Republic. I’ll quote some of what they wrote at the end of the post.
Before I talk about what Garcia has written, it’s important to know the context of the book itself. It is being published as part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.” Garcia’s is one of 34 books on a variety of subjects written, the publishers say, “by leading thinkers” in their fields. The fact that Garcia was chosen to write the book is a credit to his academic standing. The fact is, one of his primary academic areas of interest is school choice. He has written on the topic before.
The MIT series makes clear its books are supposed to present an objective overview of their topics. The publishers state the books are meant to supply “foundational knowledge that informs a principled understanding of the world.” It contrasts that to “instant information gratification,” adding that we have plenty of access to “opinions, rationalizations, and superficial descriptions.” So the task before Garcia in writing this book was to provide “foundational knowledge,” not opinions. He succeeds at the task.
Garcia says something similar in his preface:
This book offers a broad and accessible discussion of school choice that is written for a general audience. I focus on the major issues and arguments typically encountered in the public discourse on school choice, that is, how school choice is discussed in media accounts and in education policy settings.
If the book wanted to appeal to a wider audience, it might include the subtitle, “Everything you always wanted to know about school choice but didn’t know who to ask.” I’ve looked reasonably deeply into the subject myself, so I can say Garcia covers it pretty thoroughly and in a readable manner. He includes some information I wasn’t aware of, something I always appreciate in a book. It will remain on my computer desktop as a one-stop reference on school choice.
“School choice” is a buzz phrase used by the privatization/”education reform” crowd as a stand-in for vouchers and, to a lesser extent, for charters. But its actual meaning extends further. As discussed in the book, magnet schools, which are intended to allow parents from across the district to “choose” those schools for their children, are examples of school choice. So is the Arizona law which says students can attend any public school in their district, and even schools outside the district if they have empty slots. That’s why students from Vail, Catalina Foothills and other school districts attend TUSD’s University High, and students inside the TUSD boundaries attend schools in neighboring districts.
That being said, the book focuses mainly on private schools (specifically private school vouchers), charter schools and district schools. Garcia looks at them from a number of angles and includes the major arguments for and against all three types of schools. Anyone who wants to say Garcia is pro-voucher can cherrypick passages where he paraphrases pro-voucher arguments. But someone else can just as easily portray him as anti-voucher by cherrypicking other passages where he paraphrases anti-voucher arguments. He does the same thing with school choice research. He attempts to cover the main conclusions derived from all the serious research on the topic without picking favorites. (FYI, he comes to the conclusion that the differences between the achievement of students in the three types of schools, as measured by standardized tests, is minimal, and varies depending on grade level, subject, and the year the research was done.)
Bodine’s blog post claims that voucher and charter school advocates can use Garcia’s book as a tip sheet on how to set up voucher programs, and how to make pro-voucher arguments. I suppose he’s right. People reading the book for ideas supporting school choice can find arguments in their favor. But it would be a tedious process. Why bother when there are far easier ways to find material in favor of vouchers and charter schools? Just go to the Goldwater Institute, which has written elaborate voucher recipes listing all the ingredients and how to put them together. So have any number of privatization/”education reform” organizations and think tanks whose work is readily available. For legislators looking to enact school privatization legislation, ALEC has already written it. Just add the name of your state to their cookie-cutter bills and present them during the next legislative session. Readers of Garcia’s book with an agenda would have to dig through all kinds of material which would be extraneous to what they were looking for, and read lots of counter arguments to their positions.
Writers and political campaigns go after candidates all the time. That’s the name of the game. But attacks on Garcia based a gross misrepresentation of the contents of his book is dirty politics pure and simple. Democrats should leave that to the Republicans. They’re already sharpening their knives for whoever wins the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
Comments on Garcia’s book by journalists: Brahm Resnik, one of Arizona’s premier journalists, wrote on twitter when he heard of blogger Larry Bodine’s post about the book: “I read the book. The blogger and the professor [David Gibbs, who is quoted in Bodine’s post] grossly distort the content. It’s not even a close call.”
In an Arizona Republic article, Maria Polletta looks at the claims in Bodine’s post. After quoting Bodine saying the book is a “blueprint to dismantle public education,” Polletta writes,
But a close examination of the 196-page “School Choice” reveals a text that reads more like an academic primer than a fervent defense of public-school alternatives — one that repeatedly takes pains to stress the author’s impartiality.
She quotes Garcia asserting that he was presenting the material “in the most comprehensive and unbiased manner that I can possibly accomplish.” She agrees with his assertion.
Nearly 100 percent of the text obtained and reviewed by The Arizona Republic supports those claims. Garcia spends several pages laying out a history of U.S. schooling options before outlining and analyzing the views of each option’s proponents and critics in detail.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2018.
David Garcia just lost a high level staff member over anti police comments. How long had this been known? What does Garcia say about it?
Gee, I wonder why someone who can’t summarize his thoughts on “school choice” in politically acceptable statements of faith like, “DOWN WITH THE PRIVATIZERS!!!” “CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE EVIL!!!” “SUPPORTERS OF VOUCHERS ARE THE DEVIL’S SPAWN!!!” might not want an academic book he penned on the subject published before an Arizona Democratic primary election in which he is running.
This latest Dem v. Dem controversy provides more good data on the current state of some of our local branches of the Democratic Party, modern secularized descendants of the self-righteous Puritans that they most certainly are, always itching to find someone to excommunicate or burn at the stake for heresy.
As for David Safier’s statement that some of the attacks on Garcia are “DIRTY POLITICS” pure and simple” and “Democrats should leave that to the Republicans,” no one who has been watching the local political scene (and reading this blog for any length of time) believes that DIRTY POLITICS is something that belongs to Republicans, no matter what David may assert in pieces like this:
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2018/08/02/when-democrats-turned-tail-and-kept-running
…but the question of what Garcias actual relationship is to each component of the so-called privatization agenda is an interesting one. He appears to be quite tight with some TUSD Board members. Where does he stand on their past involvement with a Superintendent who supported one of Lisa Graham Keegans attempts to reduce teacher credentialing requirements in public schools? Or with TUSDs current practice, which they seem to want to maintain (such fabulous cost savings!) of using long term subs to staff classrooms that should have certified teachers in them?
Still waiting for an answer to the question of how many TUSD classrooms have no contracted certified teacher for the 2018-2019 school year. Perhaps someone will manage to get that question asked and answered in a public gubernatorial candidate forum, in spite of the fact that some Democratic candidates seem to be very good at using their networks to shield themselves from just such questions. If the question DOES get asked, it should be followed up with a question about whether there are in fact ANY meaningful state-level standards for the management of Arizonas public school districts, and, if there are, how the candidates would propose, if they were elected, to see that they are implemented in districts like TUSD. We know what the Republican answer seems to be: there is nothing but local democratic control. If you cant elect good governance for yourselves, to hell with you and your children. We may use your elected representatives chronic mismanagement of a system serving tens of thousands of students in our anti-Democrat, anti-Southern Arizona campaign ads, but whether or not your children get an education is not our problem, unless of course you want to exit the public district system, in which case we bless your right to apply public funds in schools with even less meaningful oversight than Arizona public school districts have.
And what exactly is the Democratic answer? Dems definitely want MORE MONEY for public school districts, but how they propose to keep it from being fed into cronyism, administrative bloat, and waste never seems, strangely, to be quite clear. We just know that in order to satisfy their partys orthodox ANTI-PRIVATIZATION agenda, they have to sign off on the only anti-Republican initiative (besides MORE MONEY!) the Dems seem able to conjure: not meaningful reform of the institutions they favor, but cutting off access to some or all of the alternative educational systems the Republicans favor. And heaven help any Democratic candidate who doesnt show sufficient zeal for THAT holy crusade.
Perhaps someone should point out the rather obvious fact that the most effective anti-privatization initiative of all would be IMPROVING PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS, not outlawing the application of public funds in private ones. But no doubt, like actually answering questions about your record in public office and / or stating your plan for the efficient, responsible management of the public institutions that will be under your governance if you are elected, it is a thing that is just TOO HARD for some Dems to be expected to do.
Attorney/blogger Bob Lord re-posted your article in Blog for Arizona: https://blogforarizona.net/david-safier-fo…
David garcia is NOT another fred duval clone which we have to many of now!
To “How about more on public management & less on PRIVATIZATION?” Here’s a link to a story Hank Stephenson wrote in the Star which may answer your question about teacher vacancies. He’s a good reporter, so I’m taking him at his word, and I don’t have any more information on the topic than you do. https://tucson.com/news/local/despite-pay-…
I’m going to ask as a return favor that you not continue the teacher vacancy discussion on this comment stream. It’s at least two degrees of separation from the topic of my post. In “Comments” parlance, that’s called hijacking, where a commenter turns the discussion away from the original topic to something s/he wants to talk about. That being said, if you decide to write about it, that’s your choice. So long as it’s within normal comments bounds, I won’t remove it.
Interesting review. Makes me want to read the book. Im a new AZ resident. Ive worked in the school choice movement. I regret that the narrative in the media does not reflect the neutrality that supposedly characterizes Mr. Garcias book.
Thanks for the suggestion, David. I read Stephensons article on the teacher vacancy problem yesterday, but saw no reason to post a comment on it here in an unrelated stream. Since you mention it and offer the opportunity, though, I will say that from my point of view, it leaves many important questions unasked and unanswered and provides nothing resembling an apples to apples comparison of district to district (either in the dimension of the gravity of the problem or in the dimension of the quality or effectiveness of the techniques that are being used to address it in different settings).
The net effect seemed somewhat Orwellian, “words fall[ing] upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.” Not much help to voters who would like to understand clearly what they will be asked to vote on, including the governor’s race, in which it might, for example, be useful to understand who is and who is not presenting state level governance priorities that have any hope of solving the regions biggest educational problems (and who is and who is not strongly and directly linked to networks that seem to have a long history of being unable or unwilling to take the right steps to solve those problems).
(By the way, David, do you have any idea what happened to Alexis Huicochea? I thought she was being transferred to another department at the Star, but I have not been able to find any articles she has authored there since around the time that reporter you keep complimenting, Hank Stephenson, took over the Stars education reporting beat. You and others didnt always seem to like Ms. Huicocheas articles, but it must be admitted that she was pretty well informed about TUSDs business, attending (and live tweeting) every one of districts long and often depressing Board meetings.)
As far as I know, Huicochea is currently Stephenson’s boss, and is an editor at the Star. I too was sorry to see her leave, even if there were times when I thought she missed the point. But by the time HT came along, she was right on the (continual) stories of lying, corruption and dealing that he was involved in and….as “happenstance”? would have it, was soon out of the public eye. (Interestingly, in the context of this piece, Steve Farley was very much in the public eye during that time, speaking at Board meetings, always staunchly in favor of HTs work in that area)
To the earlier commenter, Mr. Mitchell–if you have worked in the school choice arena and studied it at all then you have read lots of books like the one Dr. Garcia has written. By that I don’t mean he is a poor writer, I mean that so-called objective academic pieces like this book (which I have also read), particularly on this subject, are not hard to find. Of course the problem is that the issue itself is not objective, and has many shady funders and work behind the scenes by millionaires and billionaires that completely tips the playing field. If you leave that stuff out, as Dr. Garcia does, in the interest of being “apolitical” and “objective” then a false equivalency is created that is indeed troubling. But thats standard fare for academia, and in no way constitutes an action plan or even an obvious endorsement of one side or the other. Its just the typical analysis of settlers and Indians, or cops and the unarmed people they kill, or Israelis and Palestinians as all having equal amounts of fire power and therefore being involved in a “war” instead of in an invasion of one side by the other, or a massacre, or some other less “neutral” word than war. At least thats how the book reads to this public education activist.The original blog on Blog for Arizona was a hit piece, pure and simple. If you can find a blueprint in it, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
Interesting. Guess the fact that “a war is being waged against public education,” which is the way that some activists frame it, justifies sniffing out and persecuting heretics unwilling to characterize what is happening in K-12 education in terms of simple villain-and-hero dramas. That is what seems to have happened with the review of David Garcia’s as yet unreleased monograph in Blog for Arizona, and it is not in any way a deviation from Standard Operating Procedure for the tribe, or at least large and influential local portions of it.
As for Farley’s previous behavior vis-a-vis TUSD, it is hard to read the real relationships between the gubernatorial candidates and the entrenched problems that need clean-up in our largest-local-standing embarrassment-to-the-party-that-Supports-Public-Schools. No Dem candidate has been able to speak clearly and publicly on the real issues, or fail to show public obeisance when called upon to do so, now or in the past, for fear of blow back. But the fact that Foster endorsed Garcia, the foregrounding of the importance of credentialing for educators in Farley’s public position statements on education, and the fact that it was Garcia, not Farley, who worked for GrahamKeegan seem to indicate that Farley is a step or two further from the HTSanchez-LisaGrahamKeegan school of thinking on how to solve problems in public districts.
It may well be the case that all of the Dems are so compromised that they leave no good alternative to R governance. If so, the responsibility belongs not only to the bad-guy millionaires and billionaires of the charter movement, but also to the character of the “Support Public Schools” Party in this region and its history of failures in governance and advocacy.