I wrote a long post yesterday saying, basically, that Ducey and other Republican political leaders will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into increasing funding for education. Vocal public support for education and outcries against budget cuts are the reasons we haven’t had more education cuts in the last two state budgets, and it’s the primary reason Ducey proposed Prop 123 instead of simply ignoring the court ruling that the state replace the money it illegally stole from the schools.
As a group, conservatives want to cut funding of public education, in Arizona and around the country. Here are two representative examples of that line of thinking. One is a paper from Matthew Ladner who used to be the Goldwater Institute’s education guy and was hugely influential in formulating Arizona education legislation, including our Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on steroids. Though he’s moved on to Bush’s education organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education, his influence here continues. Ladner was one of three people who formed Ducey’s education transition team when he became governor.
The other example is John Huppenthal, our Superintendent of Public Instruction before Diane Douglas, in a comment he wrote on one of my posts last week.
In 2015, Ladner created one of the research pieces he cranks out at regular intervals. He wrote it in his capacity as Senior Advisor for Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, which is one of many well funded “education reform”/privatization groups, and as a Senior Fellow for the libertarian Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, named after its founder and early proponent of vouchers, Milton Friedman.
Ladner’s basic thesis is, we need to spend less money on education and get better results. “We cannot sustain the current level of [education] spending,” he writes. Instead, we have to create “a virtuous cycle of climbing [educational] outcomes and declining costs.” His solution is to funnel more students into charter schools, which he says are cheaper and have better outcomes than school districts, assertions that are questionable at best, and into vouchers for private schools. Our current public schools are the problem, according to Ladner, and “school choice” is the magic pony that will allow us to do more with less.
John Huppenthal would probably be sitting in the Superintendent seat Diane Douglas currently occupies if he wasn’t caught as a compulsive blog commenter who made outrageous statements using the aliases Falcon 9 and Thucydides. John is back commenting again but using his own name this time, both here and on Blog for Arizona, where the sharp eyes of blogger Bob Lord made the connection between Huppenthal and the frequent, often manic, often bigoted Falcon 9 and Thucydides comments. I can’t say for certain the recent comments on my posts are actually from Huppenthal, but I’m reasonably certain it’s him. The mix of rapid-fire data and half-baked conclusions which are his trademark would be hard for anyone else to replicate.
Huppenthal left a comment on my recent minimalistic post, Ducey ‘Next Step’ Watch: Day 12 (entire text: “Nothing. But. Crickets.”). His concluding paragraph begins,
Obviously, education cultural elements which do not work are being reinforced by money. Perhaps defunding and even greater frugality is the route to success.
Now that he’s out of office, Huppenthal can say what he never would have uttered out loud when he was Ed Supe. He’s speaking for many of our conservative elected officials who believe the same thing but use doublespeak and dog whistles to avoid saying that they want to defund and dismantle our system of public instructions in favor of private schools and privately run charters.
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2016.
Speaking of double talk and dog whistles.
Spending is up actually, but a rational approach is to curtail the rate of increase in spending. Looking at Pima County (TUSD) ask how many parents vote with their feet as they enroll their kids in non-TUSD higher preforming schools as TUSD do not improve in the face of ever increasing property taxes and about $25+ million spent on illegal alien kids not born in the US nor without a single US born parent. No accountability is accepted by Safier and his ilk expect more money to be paid by every taxpayer. Note that teacher pay comparisons with other western states are meaningless as the cost of living in AZ for now is much lower than those comparative banana Republics.
Nice try Safier, but some rationality needs to be injected into this nearly bankrupt nation with no end in sight to tax more, spend more on entitled “victim”s.
I am not asking to cut future spending. I am asking for accountability WITH results. But until we get those two things the beast will be starved. What is so difficult about complying?
Administration must be downsized. Just like what is going to happen to Washington when Trump is elected. It will be their turn to look for work. Good luck.
Remember way back in grade school when you elected class presidents, vice presidents and treasurers? It was, of course, a popularity contest because that is how our minds worked – as children. The idea that elected representatives owed anything to those who voted for them was likewise childish. Unfortunately, since the 1980s, our political system has reverted to that elementary school model and any vote received is perceived as a “mandate” to do whatever the hell they want to do in the minds of today’s American politician. The attitude now is if you don’t like the way I do things you should not have voted for me – never mind that I lied, cheated and said and did whatever I had to do to get elected in the first place – I won so suck it! And that is why only those politicians who are bought and paid for by special interests can be counted on doing what is in the best interest of those special interests. It is a pay to play system people and if you don’t believe me just ask Citizens United.
“When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.” Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965)
TUSD just spent $1 million on 2 express buses to bus kids from the east side to Hispanic schools on the south side for diversity.
Must have plenty of money.
David,
When I was a fifth grader, the teacher taught me the scientific method, which includes the null hypothesis. You are saying that to even entertain the null hypothesis in education is taboo. Social policy in an area of massive failure like education should have an incredibly dynamic discussion that should be based around scientific observation, not business as usual. Too much is at stake.
Why has money not made a difference in education? Why did Arizona Blacks students rise to number one in the nation in 8th grade math scores last year when we have reduced operation spending by over $400 million per year over the last four years? Why were our combined math and reading gains the highest in the nation from 2011 4th grade to 2015 8th grade? Why doesn’t New York City outscore us when they outspend us by over $15 billion per year with the same number of students? Why did the nation crater in the last four years with test scores going down in math and not improving in reading?
Why do Arizona Black students, White and Hispanic students outscore Wisconsin Black, White and Hispanic students?
Education culture isn’t even asking the questions, much less dealing with the complexity of the answers involved.
There is not time more important for having this discussion than now with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into education. Will the money help? Or, will it hurt? That is the question. More importantly, what can school districts do to ensure that the money helps?
And, by the way, I voted for prop 123. My local district has improved its quality ratings every year for the last 18 years, by a small but significant amount each year. Just yesterday, I compared their quality data with a list of “The 20 Best School Districts in America.” My school district was better than every one of them.
I voted for them, not Tucson Unified which is losing over 500 students a year, year after year, to schools spending over a third less per student. You were one of the people demanding that Tucson Unified by entitled to keep on spending the same amount even as their student population shrinks, even to zero. No wonder they don’t care about students, they don’t have to care.
I have studied the characteristics of high performance organizations my entire adult life. My local district has those characteristics. Few others, district or charter, do.
John Huppenthal
What is so frustrating to me is the thought that the main expense of education is administration. If they visited a public school, they would see real work being done by teachers and students. Digging a little deeper, they would see the effects of poverty: poor maintenance of schools, lack of supplies, including class copies of literature, handouts and so on. We should honor and support the people who are there every day – they have college degrees in education, practical experience and they care. They are not out to defraud the taxpayer and second guessing their efforts is futile.
The maintenance of the schools was eliminated by the fraud and over payment of salaries and benefits to the administrators. The janitors took it on the chin for them.
In the end big education has made the teacher the target. Shame on them. Exactly the same as big government.
Most of these comments are so boilerplate. Are we sure they’re done by real people. Surely, most have not been in the impoverished classrooms of Arizoana’s schools where teachers bear the brunt of funding by using their own pitiful salaries to buy the basics–pens, pencils, markers, Kleenex…
To flood every classroom with unlimited pencils, paper, scissors and tissue paper would cost less than one half of one percent of our 9 billion. Why then are all classrooms in America short of these supplies? Economists know the answer – its called problem of the commons and it can’t be solved by money.
Nice try Shirley. Your dismissing of others comments is so typical of the reason problems aren’t solved today. If you ignore the opposition they become strident. Why not admit it and work with them instead of trying to marginalize them?
This is what the current President does and it will haunt him the rest of his life.
By the way this machine thinks you asked a question when you said, “Are we sure they’re done by real people.” The machine in me says that should have ended with a question mark rather than a period. And, Arizoana is spelled A-R-I-Z-O-N-A.
Machine Out.
I think David nicely laid to rest the “overpaid administrator” meme earlier this year when he pointed out that the administrative costs per student at BASIS were somewhere along the lines of 10x what TUSD spends on admin. Yea charters & private! Obvious solution there…if you happen to own one…
David has provided a rather one-sided reading of the study referenced. The study points out the looming demographic challenge posed by the ongoing retirement of the Baby Boom generation, especially in states that the United States Census Bureau projects to simultaneously experience an increase in the youth population over the next 15 years. States like, ahem, Arizona for instance.
The study outlines a body of non-controversial involving the impacts of having smaller working age populations- the people who at any given time carry the primary load of paying the taxes that sustain state spending. The problem in a nutshell is that states/countries with large working age populations tend to grow quickly (and thus generate healthy tax revenue growth) while those with shrinking working age populations tend to grow relatively slowly. Second and perhaps even more crucially the elderly draw upon public health spending at far higher rates than the average spending. Thus the sustainability of the current provision of public funding is very much in doubt, and will need to be revised.
This not however to be understood as some sort of cartoon super-villain call to slash and burn education spending. If you can discover a giant ocean of oil under the cactus patch or something I’ll be happy to spend a good deal of it on public services. Otherwise, expect a spirited competition in our pluralistic democracy, especially between the needs of health and education.
Fortunately Arizona already leads the nation in NAEP gains despite the post recession funding cuts.
So Matthew Ladner is saying the problem in AZ is us old people. He’s postulating there are too many of us drawing down the state coffers, leaving no money for schools. FALSE. We’re here paying taxes, which are then used by the legislature to give tax breaks to corporations.
TUSD is under court orders to do certain things that cost money. Not all of its spending can be compared to other school districts without these constraints. Huppenthal’s comparing apples to oranges.
Marian-
That is another creative reading of what I have to say. The point is that retirees are out of their prime earning years and thus their prime taxpaying years. The medicaid cost per recipient by age is a factual rather than an ideological point. It would be great if we could have 10k Baby Boomers per day reach retirement age until 2030 and keep everything the same, but it is not really an option.
Matthew, it’s true, I jumped to your conclusion, that we have to cut the amount we spend on education, and didn’t explain the reasoning which led to your conclusion. I’ve found over the years that your method is to begin with your conclusion, then work back to ways you can “prove” its validity. In fact, you’ve been advocating for cutting education funding every since I began reading your work when you were employed at the Goldwater Institute. The “proof” has changed, but the song remains the same.
Your study leans on one fact, our aging demographic, as a reason we have to cut education funding. It doesn’t deal with any other variables, like, say, our current and increasing income inequality which is concentrating money in the hands of the wealthy and super-wealthy, or the decreasing progressivity of our tax policies which allow the one percent, the one-tenth-of-one-percent, and corporations to hang onto more of their wealth. Making our tax system fairer, making the wealthiest individuals and corporations shoulder their fair share of the tax burden, would go a long way toward maintaining or increasing the amount we spend on education instead of decreasing it as you suggest.
You said in your comment that Arizona needs to “discover a giant ocean of oil under the cactus patch” if it wants to increase the amount it spends on education. I may have found that oil in a post I wrote Monday: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archi…. In it I noted that general fund taxes in Arizona went down by 30 percent since 1992. That means our tax revenue is about $4 billion a year less than it would be if we hadn’t cut taxes. Spending half of that restored revenue on education would move us from 49th to 34th place in per student funding and leave lots more to deal with other areas which desperately need a greater infusion of funding. If the reinstating of 1992 levels of revenue were done in a way that reversed the current regressivity of Arizona’s tax structure, it could be done without increasing the tax burden on people at the bottom end or in the middle of the economic spectrum. We could find that oil gusher of funding even with our aging population.
What a treat: a real-time ongoing written conversation among three of the principal ideologues responsible for the sadly malfunctioning institutions of “education” in this state. Here are some questions from one of the many, many Arizona residents dealing with the increasingly difficult task of trying to educate children in a system damaged by the utopian-theoretical tampering of both the political left and the political right :
LADNER & HUPPENTHAL: RE the success of school choice policies, you might want to consult some of the documents produced by employees of the Arizona State Department of Education. Take this quote, for example: “Among the key lessons taken from Arizona’s experience with many various forms of school choice is that in nearly every instance, the haste to enact a program was not accompanied by a prudent investment in the necessary infrastructure to oversee it. This has left the ADE [Arizona Department of Education] and ASBCS [Arizona State Board of Charter Schools], among others, under-resourced to handle the demands of an ever-expanding system. […] the ASBCS is tasked with overseeing 535 charters serving 145,000 students, yet it has a staff of only 9. By its own account, it is severely understaffed for the amount of work it is required to undertake by law.”
Not all parents are qualified to assess the legitimacy of the methods employed by patched-together charter and private operations in Arizona that are currently receiving tax dollars to “educate” our citizenry. Thus the notion that consumer choice necessarily produces the optimal educational results is faulty. To the extent that public funds are made available to alternative educational institutions, these institutions should be subject to the same oversight — oversight of how they allocate funds and whether they employ properly qualified staff and administrators — to which other publicly funded schools are subject. This oversight, like the oversight the health department provides in the food service industry, is necessary to protect citizens from damage. Why have you collaborated in the creation of an unregulated, unaccountable, undemocratic education “system” that removes policy decision making within schools from realms where it is responsive to constituents (cf. policy formation in the Basis schools) and channels the sadly limited amount of public funding available in this state indiscriminately into some institutions that are responsible, and others that are conspicuously NOT responsible, fiscally or educationally?
HUPPENTHAL: Did you not understand that, as chief administrator of publicly funded schools in Arizona, your responsibility was to ensure, through the enforcement and administrative means at your disposal, that all the schools receiving funds were well overseen and responsible? Did you believe your responsibility was to create or reinforce mechanisms for moving constituents from one part of the system which you did not like (TUSD, for example) into another part of the system which suited your ideology better (Catholic schools utilizing vouchers, for example), while allowing all components of the system to get away with things (non-transparent budgeting, for example) that no institution receiving public funds should ever be allowed to get away with?
SAFIER: You may agree with something David O’Brien wrote recently: “there are some resources so important that they should not be subject to competition and market manipulation. Instead, they should be controlled by the public through the instruments of democratic government.” But note what follows: “As in the private sector, bureaucracy and bad management, most notably at the level of boards of directors, sometimes lead to inefficiency and corruption. The solution on both fronts is engaged, committed, and creative citizens, including government-employed professionals, dedicated to the common good.” You’ve been an advocate for defending public district schools from encroachment by “privatization,” but where has your advocacy for good public management “at the level of boards of directors” been for the past three years? Where has your effective criticism of “inefficiency and corruption” in “government-employed professionals” been? If the largest local school district is known to be a car with a gas tank that does not channel much fuel into the engine that moves the car forward, but directs it to all sorts of other places, the solution is not to ADD MORE GAS, the constant theme of your commentary. Government institutions need to be sufficiently funded, but they also need to be efficient and well managed. If they are not the latter — and if you prove repeatedly that you are an enthusiastic advocate for elected officials who have no ability to ensure that they BECOME the latter — you will not be able to rally public support behind your overly simplistic “RAISE TAXES AND INCREASE FUNDING!!!” agenda. Become a credible and effective advocate for fixing the malfunctioning mechanisms for getting the fuel from the gas tank to the engine in this vehicle and then you might be able to ask the state’s residents to ADD MORE GAS.
David-
I don’t recall advocating for decreased funding. I do however recall efforts to accurately portray what we actually spending. In any case, the amount of spending is decided through direct and indirect democracy in Arizona through things like district elections, statewide ballots and the election of public officials. All of this is well outside of the control of a mere analyst such as myself. On your point on taxes, I would simply note that Fred Duval campaigned on a pledge of not-raising taxes, which tells you about everything you need to know about the preferences of the Arizona electorate on that front imo. You are of course entitled to your opinion regarding the desirability of higher taxes, but democracy has thus far trended in a different direction.
Ground Level- whatever the perceived shortcomings of the regulations of charter schools in Arizona may be, they have been knocking the ball out of the park academically. Arizona was the national leader in NAEP gains in 2015, and Arizona charter schools exceeded the statewide average, so we have a very positive trend working in both district and charter schools.
https://jaypgreene.com/2016/05/16/arizona-…
You are too modest, Matthew. You have always been more than a “mere analyst.” As the head ed honcho at Goldwater Institute, you had an outsized influence on Republican elected officials and helped craft and sell important education legislation. Your long-standing connections with Jeb Bush have broadened your influence to a national level. Our “direct and indirect democracy,” as you call it, can be bent by the influence of money and power. ALEC proves that, as does the Goldwater Institute and many other well funding right wing think tanks and organizations. If it weren’t for the opaque nature of dark money, we’d know far more about the people who directly and indirectly find ways to bend democracy to their wills.
It is jolly good fun to be the colossus of your imagination, but alas out here in the real world I must content myself with playing a much more modest role in an ongoing pluralistic debate. Moreover, your tribe commands far more money, dark and otherwise, in this contest than does mine. It never fails to amuse when Xerxes attempts to portray himself as Leonidas.
Nice try, Matthew, and clever references. But it ain’t so. However, it makes sense for you to say so. The less said about the phenomenal amount of wealth pouring into various causes on the right, the better it is from the right’s standpoint. The more the benefactors and the amounts they spend are made public, as has been happening recently, the more important it is to try and keep up the illusion that your causes are poorly funded, grassroots efforts.
You’re not a colossus, Matthew, but you’re generally a player. Don’t try to pretend otherwise.
TRUTH-O-METER
Ladner says, “your tribe commands far more money…in this contest than does mine.”
Safier says, in the odd, folksy diction he has been adopting of late, trying perhaps to give the impression to the ignorant that he is a man of the people, “it ain’t so.”
What would we find if we took the total amount of funds commanded by public district schools in the US and compared it with the total amount of funds commanded by the alternative sector? Is there any sense in which Safier’s assertion could be understood to be true? It seems unlikely. And in that Safier doesn’t respond to questions posed to him about why he doesn’t provide valid commentary in support of making sure the public district schools he supports actually have competent governance and administration that ensure the massive amount of funds they command are being used to meet students’ needs, I think on the whole Ladner comes off looking more straight-forward and less manipulative / misleading in his rhetoric in a comparative assessment of the arguments made in this exchange.
Public district schools in AZ need to be better funded, but media commenters like Safier who…
–support politicians involved with dubious management practices and policy adoptions in public school systems
–refuse to answer questions about why they are doing nothing to support the improvement of conditions in the public district schools for which they are constantly begging more funds
…do not improve the public’s confidence in the legitimacy of the “SAVE PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!!” movement. We might be willing to save the public district system if we saw that its most “passionate advocates” had even the slightest bit of concern for turning it into something that could function well and meet students’ needs. When we see them turning a blind eye to what’s actually going on in public schools and in local public school governance and excusing gross mismanagement, this does more to undermine confidence in the public school system than anything Ladner and his chums could do.
Responding to the point made by: Questions from the Ground Level
No, as Superintendent I never felt it was my responsibility to regulate schools in districts like TUSD. In fact, I felt the reverse. I felt it was my job to help them accomplish the things they wanted to do to improve. The last thing TUSD needed was my people telling them how to run their schools. Nationwide, 75% of all schools who enter school improvement are worse off 5 years later – that is what happens when State Superintendents run local schools through the power given to them by the federal government programs. It is not a pretty picture.
I call it the two drunks in the bar problem. If you went to any two drunks in a bar and asked them how to improve schools, you would get their strong opinions. Then, going across the nation to school improvement divisions, you would get the same strong opinions and the devastating results.
QGL, You have your strong opinions, how are they different from the two drunks in the bar?
When I was chairman of the board of two charter schools, the percentage of teachers rating our schools as outstanding places to work went up every single semester for 7 years. Not excellent, not good, not satisfactory – outstanding. Nationwide, only 9% of teachers rate their school an outstanding place to work. On every issue, how is this going to help our teachers accomplish what they want to do?
Let’s see: how do the notions that…
A) budgeting in public institutions should be transparent
B) the state department of education should play some role in ensuring that budgeting in educational institutions receiving public funds is transparent
…differ from the opinions of two drunks in a bar? If a former Arizona state superintendent of education can’t see any meaningful difference between the two and can’t recognize the superior claims to legitimacy of A) and B) over random drunks’ opinions, then we’re in real trouble. (We ARE in real trouble in this state and have been for some time now.)
As for Safier: didn’t he just “hold his nose” and vote for Prop 123? Does he really think that in summoning Matthew Ladner and conjuring a debate with him in a comment stream on Tucson Weekly he will regain whatever imagined status he might have had previously as a valiant warrior against the forces of darkness / privatization? Sorry, attention span is short these days and people are distracted by their electronic devices, but not to that extent. We are still capable of remembering what happened last month.
Is TUSD a problem that will never be solved? So tired of rehashing the hash. Maybe the state should take it over and close it.
David-
There are a great many players, that’s how democracy works. I have never once in my career worked for an organization that could command but a tiny fraction of the financial resources spent annually by either your buddies in the NEA or your pals in the AFT much less both of them combined.
Now if I am reading an above comment as some of the anti-123 flat earth crowd is mad at you for voting to increase public school funding by $3.5 billion, please standby while I pull up a couch and pop some pop-corn…
And THERE is a very satisfying end to this exchange, where Ladner commiserates with David about the unreasonable opinions of the “flat earth crowd” on123 and makes it clear that in addition to Ducey, Rat T et al., David has added Ladner to his list of fellow travelers RE how to vote on that particular proposition.
Thank you, Mr. Ladner. If you’d like to read some of the blow-back David received after he joined TUSD admin, the AEA, etc. in supporting the proposition, you might want to read the comment stream on this piece:
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/05/18/with-prop-123-hanging-in-the-balance-the-push-for-education-funding-begins-nowitstarts
Matthew, I willingly take my hits about my position on Prop 123. For me it was a 55-45 deal — 55 percent for, 45 percent against. If I changed my perspective slightly, I could have been a No vote. Most of my friends and associates who aren’t teachers went the other way. I respect their votes. But I call it like I see it, and I’ll take my licks from people who disagree. That, we will both agree, is democracy at work. It looks like you and I voted the same on Prop 123, but, I would guess, for significantly different reasons.
As for the money that my “pals” at the NEA and AFT spend compared to the amount the Goldwater Institute and the FEE have at their disposals, there’s a bit of false equivalency there, on two levels. First, lots of the work the teachers unions do and the money they spend is on the local level, focusing on contract and working conditions issues, things like that. Only the lobbying part of their budgets can be compared to what is done by advocacy groups like the ones you’re part of. Second, both national unions are collections of state and local affiliates, not monolithic, autonomous entities. Similarly, a great number of “education reform” groups, right wing think tanks and advocacy groups are actually separate affiliates of a larger network funded by a like-thinking group of high economic rollers. One major example, which I’m sure you know better than I, is the Koch Brothers’ Kochtopus, a web of interrelated groups which pretend to be autonomous. And the Koch Brothers are only one example of the many single-minded billionaires who have an outsized influence on bending public opinion and legislative action. Your groups are, in many ways, affiliates: threads in the larger web.
Safier argues in another blog that poor area children have lower test scores so expectations must obviously have be reduced. They actually teach the answers to the test rather than imparting knowledge. (AIMS)
Then does he support a million dollars to move east side kids into poor areas so they can under achieve?
Folks this is the cousin to Outcome Based Education (OBE) in the 90s where they had children teaching children. Are the teachers unable to communicate thoughts to the students?
Until public schools are held accountable they can not achieve improvement. They seem to lack the desire.
More money please.
The same people demanding more and more money gets poured into the bottomless pit that is TUSD have been silent since the recent story broke that TUSD administrators (most of whom earn six figure salaries) got a nice raise thanks to Prop 123…the teachers? Not so much. It’s the same vicious cycle that we’ll simply rinse and repeat as we’ve done for decades. I already hear the cries for taxing corporations more and raising property taxes to feed the beast. There is NEVER enough money for the TUSD bureaucracy.