In 2112, when people look back at what Arizona was going through during its centennial, I’m betting that SB 1070 will not be the main topic of conversation.
It will probably make for an amusing anecdote, a political oddity born of short fuses and small minds, one that was met with marches in the streets and a chorus of loud whispers of, “What the hell’s wrong with you?!” from the business community. It will have been a blip, one with neither a lasting legacy nor an impact.
No, the real head-scratching will be reserved for Arizona’s long-term, self-destructive attack on its public-school system, an attack born of vindictiveness, fueled by classism and marked by blatant hypocrisy.
The origins of this right-wing crusade against public schools and their teachers are well-documented and needn’t be repeated. What does deserve mention is the zeal with which this campaign has been carried out, especially in the face of ever-mounting evidence of its wrong-headedness, not to mention the willingness of those involved to double back over their own philosophical tow line in a Captain Queeg-like effort to teach other people a lesson.
One would have thought that the creation and proliferation of under-performing charter schools would have been a big-enough “screw you!” to public-school teachers. Backers tried to portray these places as “educational laboratories,” wherein new and improved teaching techniques and curricula would be born and nurtured. This, of course, turned out to be a giant crock, seeing as how, since charter schools are publicly funded, they must, by law, follow the same curriculum guidelines as real public schools. Therefore, the only significant difference—and it’s a biggie in the eyes of the teacher-haters—is that charter-school teachers cannot unionize, and their jobs are therefore at the daily whim of whoever is in charge of the building at that particular moment.
While there are certainly a few success stories, studies show that charter-school students are less-well-educated than their counterparts at the nearest-adjacent public school. This should be a good enough reason for the cash-strapped Legislature to pull the financial plug on most, if not all, charter schools. But there’s no way that’s going to happen, since, for the past several years, lawmakers’ eyes have been focused on the Holy Grail of fake-ass neo-conservatism—the use of public money to send kids to private schools.
The Republican majority in the Legislature, along with their willing cohorts at the conservative Goldwater Institute, have been searching for ways to circumvent state law—not to mention their own stated ideals and common decency—for several years now. They came up with a voucher system that a conservative Arizona Supreme Court took one look at and responded with (and I’m paraphrasing ever so slightly here), “Are you out of your freakin’ minds?!” And now, for the past two years, instead of looking for creative ways to shore up education funding, these people have been looking for back-door ways to bring back vouchers.
A couple of weeks back, I interviewed a guy from the Goldwater Institute who was touting SB 1553, which had been signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer. The new law will cynically use handicapped kids to prop open the back door to vouchers, making those who scream about government handouts and then turn around and promote the use of public money to send kids to private schools ever so giddy. He started out with the falsest of all such premises—that “we should apply free-market principles to education.”
First, the use of the term “free-market principles” should send the reasonable person screaming into the street. It’s like hearing Newt Gingrich talk about family values. Plus, we don’t really have a free market (and we should probably all thank God for that, considering how the lower and middle classes get dicked by this sorta-free market). Most importantly, educating our state’s young people is a public responsibility and a sacred trust. State legislators should do everything in their power to make Arizona’s schools the best they can possibly be. If someone with means wants to opt out of that system and send their kids to a private school, that’s the American way.
According to the “logic” employed by these people, if someone can only afford to ride the public bus back and forth to work, the state should use public money to help that person buy a car. Or if they can only afford a small TV that only gets the local stations, it’s the Legislature’s duty to provide them with cable and broadband. I simply don’t understand how people who tout personal responsibility and decry government giveaways can turn around and—with a Botox-straight face—claim that they are acting in the public interest and in accordance with their own principles.
The final history of this dismal period has yet to be written, and we, as a state, may yet come to our collective senses and find a way out of our various messes. However, it may someday be shown that things were bad while we were adhering to the avowed philosophy of the political majority—but it wasn’t until they decided to talk out of one side of their mouths and do the exact opposite that the train went completely off the tracks.
This article appears in May 5-11, 2011.
This what people who follow the news on national TV remember about AZ:
*the shooting
*Sheriff Dupnick
*students at the TUSD meeting
*elected AZ official Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state over SB1070
I think we’ll skip southern AZ when we come out this year as snowbirds.
People will also remember the Baja AZ news. We got a big laugh out of that article in the Wall Street Journal. Interesting how the news that is on national TV and in the newspapers concerns southern AZ.
A lot of people will recall the misdirection of a bunch of kids who think it is okay to just storm into a place and ‘take over’…and worse yet, that these kids’ parents think it is okay. Methinks there will be a lot more Loughners (sans the illness part) who justify their actions to get what they want, how they want to get it, and when…with no respect to due process or the law.
On the good side – we still have this rag of a paper (Tucson Weekly)where we can vent unlike our AZ Daily RED Star (yes, I still subscribe) which has no clue as to what being unbiased is and we can get a great kick out of Tom Danehy’s writing. He is like the verbal Fitzsimmons – don’t have to agree with him to appreciate that he is damned funny and articulate.
As someone who teaches at a college level, I can show you how many of these students cant write a coherent sentence or haven’t the faintest clue about grammar and punctuation.
And they show little in the way of logical thinking to try to understand a problem and come up with a solution.
Its a sad day for Arizona when we are the 49th dumbest state followed only by Nevada. But then the populace keeps voting these people into office so I guess they are getting what they want.
Its no wonder than high tech industry shies away from Arizona. After all, they only want employees that know how to show up on time, put in a full days work and actually care about a career.
When schools can get back to teaching the basics and instilling a sense of responsibility into students, then things may change. But they need funding and support from our government and there is little chance of that happening now.
Since Arizona is, in fact, at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to public education (even at the university level where they keep building grandiose buildings and raising tuition – and the different budgets BS is a simple bookkeeping entry), it is almost a requirement that a child go to a private school if he/she is going to learn to read and write.
Let’s not forget that those who send their children to private school, at great personal expense, also pay the same schedule of property taxes for the unconscionably failed Arizona public school system that others do without deriving one cent of benefit from it.
It is not for lack of funds that the Arizona public education system has failed, it is the waste of funds on “bloated” administrations, the waste of money on new building which are used for a few years and abandoned for lack of enrollment and ridiculous expenditures on courses, either outside of the core curriculum or core course that should never have been allowed except for political correctness and reverse discrimination.
Perhaps these ignorant and illogical legislators whom you refer to with such disgust and disdain, are actually products of the Arizona public school system!
“born of vindictiveness, fueled by classism and marked by blatant hypocrisy”
Typical Danehyism. He doesn’t get what he wants so he invents ‘facts.’ The simple fact is that the money is not there and the legislature has no choice. Charter schools, remember, take far less money to support than do public schools (no building funds), so they help ‘balance’ the budget. That teachers are paid satisfactory salaries on an annual basis by comparison with the taxpayers who are paying them – salaries that include perhaps excessive benefits – for 180 days work and refuse to extend their work days without demanding additional pay, when extending the school year to 200 days would provide the most likely improvement in achievement and could be done with only the building maintenance costs if teachers would be sensible and just allow the added time, is the biggest impediment to improving public education and the biggest incentive to look for other alternatives.
We have a monetary solution; it’s called Budget Override. Yet look how many have been defeated in the last few years. So, instead of ranting on state legislature, try berating property owners in school districts that defeat overrides. Every tax dollar, whether levied by city, county or state, eventually comes out of our wallet. Corporations do not pay taxes! It’s a cost of doing business like rent, utilities, etc. The higher cost comes out of my wallet. maranabob
Why can’t I divert all my income tax dollars to PUBLIC school vouchers, like my neighbor can for his kids’ private school?
This morning I emailed my daughter the following: Didn’t you have a district-wide (or site-wide) meeting with Calvin Baker [Vail School Dist.] over the budget cutbacks this week?
Her reply: It’s today at 2:30, I’ll let you know what is said tonight. Just a tid-bit of info – one of [son] Jeremy’s teachers isn’t coming back next year, she can’t afford to teach children anymore. Instead, she has been hired at WAY better pay to teach in the prison. In AZ, we spend more to educate our prisoners than we do to teach our children.
Spend thrift ARIZONA campus chancellors need to go: lessons learned at University of California. (The author who has 35 years’ consulting experience, has taught at UC Berkeley (Cal.) where he was able to observe the culture & the way senior management work)
University of California Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau gross over spending, inept decisions: recruits (using California tax $) out of state $50,000 tuition students that displace qualified Californians from public university education; spends $7,000,000 for consultants to do his & many vice chancellors jobs (prominent East Coast university accomplishing same at 0 cost); pays ex Michigan governor $300,000 for lectures; Latino enrollment drops while out of state jumps 2010; tuition to Return on Investment (ROI) drops below top10; NCAA places basketball program on probation: absence institutional control.
Californians, UC Board of Regents Chairman Gould, Calif. State Legislature should take note of chancellors, like Birgeneau, who ignore California’s deficit and replace them with those who understand the basic concept of public service to Californians.
You are so right when it comes to this topic and I could not agree more.
“I think we’ll skip southern AZ when we come out this year as snowbirds.”
@Sharon Lin: Will you please stop complaining about a city you don’t live in? And enough with the idle threats about how you aren’t buying a house in Tucson, and how you won’t visit southern Arizona. None of us care what you do.
So many snowbirds do visit and LOVE it here. WE have enough negative people and, frankly, we have enough people. So one more snowbird staying away is okay. We’ll miss the few dollars you might have spent but with our fabulous desert, the amazing food, etc…we are quite certain someone else will take the place of one disgruntled snowbird….
“I think we’ll skip southern AZ when we come out this year as snowbirds.”
Yeah, please don’t bother. The last thing we need are any more narrow-minded
conservatives, who have little to say about issues that face those of us who actually
live and work in this stifling, mis-guided environment. Arizona is still a lovely place
to visit…enjoy it’s beauty and attractions while they last. If the current state
government has anything to do with it, Arizona will be a paved-over, cookie-cutter,
Tea Partier’s paradise.
“Backers tried to portray these places as “educational laboratories,” wherein new and improved teaching techniques and curricula would be born and nurtured. This, of course, turned out to be a giant crock, seeing as how, since charter schools are publicly funded, they must, by law, follow the same curriculum guidelines as real public schools. Therefore, the only significant difference—and it’s a biggie in the eyes of the teacher-haters—is that charter-school teachers cannot unionize, and their jobs are therefore at the daily whim of whoever is in charge of the building at that particular moment.”
I know this comment is coming a bit late, but I feel compelled to testify…I have worked both sides of the fence, and everything Mr. Danehy says in the quote above is EXACTLY what I have experienced as a teacher this year. I left the public school districts last year, for what I believed to be the “greener grass” of charter school teaching. I paid no heed to the statistics on charter school teacher job satisfaction, and the promise of below-average pay…I was determined to make it work, because frankly, teaching in the public schools had been no picnic either. In retrospect, it was the most difficult year I have had as an educator, almost rivaling my first year.
At the risk of sounding like a whiner, it was not at all what I imagined, hoped for, and all my altruistic intentions went right out the window within weeks of employment at the charter school. I’ll admit it: I was being naive…stupid, really. I was pissed off at the public school system, which I felt had let not just teachers down, but all the students as well. What I failed to realize was it has been out of our hands (meaning the general public, the districts, and the teachers), for some time now. The districts have been working, somewhat hap-hazardly, to keep up with a state government that cuts and slashes at education; that is bent on the downfall of the public school system, in favor of “school choice”, couched in promises of increased performance and progressive learning opportunities, that just don’t live up to expectations. Should these schools come under closer scrutiny, I think fewer than half would make the grade (so to speak).
I really went into this system believing I was doing the right thing. What was I in denial about? Was it the right thing for me, or the students who I left behind? Was my concern for the future of our children, or my own self-interest? A little of both, I suppose. But I learned the hard truth–the grass is generally NOT greener on the other side… it is made of astro-turf, fails in its original promise and intention, and is more about the “product” than the person. If I decide to stay in education, and if I am one of the “lucky” few to be re-employed in an already strapped public school system, my fifth year is sure to be another challenging one. But my eyes are now wide-open, and I will not be so easily fooled again.