Diane Douglas, Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, ran as a Tea Party candidate. The banner headline on the first incarnation of her campaign website read, “Kill Common Core.” Not “Stop Common Core.” Not “End Common Core.” “Kill Common Core.” With an over-the-top opening line like that and her conservative educational track record as a school board member in Peoria, nothing awful she might have done when she was elected would have surprised me. The surprise for me has been, she’s done a pretty good job so far. She’s gotten into knock-down, drag-out cage match battles with the governor and the state Board of Education in an attempt to assert her authority, which have been a whole lot of fun to watch, but when it comes to the schools themselves, she’s mainly taken a moderate, “First do no harm” approach. She has toured the state in a genuine effort to understand the needs of parents and teachers and has put forward thoughtful suggestions for improvement. I had a chance to talk with Douglas during her most recent Tucson event and was impressed by her sincerity and her commitment to serving the state’s school-aged children. She wasn’t my first choice for Ed Supe and still isn’t, but I’ll take her over the two previous superintendents, Tom Horne and John Huppenthal, as well as most any other Republican who might occupy the office. She’s been a thoughtful, independent voice for education who has avoided ideologically-based stances and has stood up to the state’s Republican establishment.
When Douglas put out a press release saying she’s endorsing Donald Trump after attending his xenophobia-fueled immigration speech last Wednesday, I wasn’t surprised. Trump’s hair-on-fire rhetoric and simplistic, draconian “solutions” to complex problems are right in her Tea Party wheelhouse, so Douglas must feel right at home with the Republican presidential candidate.
What concerns me is the fact that she took a public stand on Trump at all. So far as I remember, she stayed out of the Prop 123 controversy, even though the fate of the proposition had a direct impact on the schools she oversees. Yet when it comes to Trump, she not only gave him her unqualified endorsement, but did it in her official capacity with a news release on the state email system, which may have been illegal.
Is Trump’s election really so important to Douglas that she feels the need to make a public, official endorsement? Or—and this is what most worries me—is her very public endorsement a signal that she’s cozying up to Governor Ducey, who is such a strong Trump supporter he introduced the candidate at the Wednesday rally? Ducey is getting ready to revamp the way the state allocates education dollars with his Classrooms First Initiative, and if he gets his way, charter schools across the state as well as school districts in high rent areas will benefit. He could use Douglas as an ally, but in the past she criticized his charter-centric attitude, and she launched the Zip Code Project whose goal is to help educationally disconnected youth to succeed. If she stays true to form, she should be exposing Ducey’s funding priorities, fighting against them actively and publicly, but I don’t recall hearing public statements from her on the subject.
Ducey gave Douglas the head of Arizona Board of Education President Greg Miller on a platter when the governor forced him off the board. That was a win for Douglas, who locked horns with Miller on a regular basis. Was there a quid pro quo involved, where Ducey gave Douglas something she wanted and she plans to give him her support, or her silence, on his educational priorities in return? That would certainly help Ducey win the support for his educational agenda from the far right, who like the Ed Supe more than they like the governor.
Ducey and his cronies are skilled deal makers, while Douglas is still a political naif without a politically savvy staff to advise her. She could be cajoled and co-opted by Ducey and his crowd into “compromising” with them without getting anything substantive—anything that would genuinely help the majority of Arizona’s school children—in return. That would make his life a whole lot easier, but it would be a betrayal by Douglas of Arizona’s most vulnerable children.
This article appears in Sep 1-7, 2016.
This is probably going to draw blank stares from the Tucson media, but conservative doesn’t mean incompetent. Likewise, dispite Hillary Clinton, liberal doesn’t necessarily mean corrupt.
David, you write, “She could be cajoled and co-opted by Ducey and his crowd into “compromising” with them without getting anything substantive—anything that would genuinely help the majority of Arizona’s school children—in return. That would make his life a whole lot easier, but it would be a betrayal by Douglas of Arizona’s most vulnerable children.”
Gee — who does that sound like? It sounds a whole lot like you and the rest of the chumps who jumped on board with Ducey’s 123 scheme:
— 123 promoters compromised without getting anything substantive in return
— 123 promoters made Ducey’s life easier by betraying AZ’s most vulnerable children
Very eloquent. Now all you have to do is pin the tail on the right donkey — yourself.
This state is a mess. Awful and incompetent people win their primary elections, simply because they are Rs. A wealthy, mean-spirited tightwad is off to Congress. A stained glass instructor leads our public schools. A franchisor, with one of the worst and most failed franchises is our governor. An elderly zealot against brown people, who has cost Maricopa County millions of dollars, wins his primary. Pardon me, if I think this state is hopelessly backward.
Yes, Pima Mujer, like the situation here in New Mexico,where the electorate went wild to elect an Hispanic Female as governor, she looked and sounded good, but has turned out to be incompetent, following the Republican party ideas , which, after five years is working in direct contrast to the things needed here in N.M. The state has somehow misplaced 632 million $$ in the “rainyday” emergency funds, nobody knows where or how the money went. But, not to worry, the Gov. is trying to distract from that issue by calling for bringing back the death penalty. I should add that I am interested in things in Arizona as I lived there in the 1940’s.
Agree entirely David! Here’s my take on it: https://restorereason.com/2016/09/03/open-letter-to-diane-douglas/
The key to improving the state’s politics happens, conveniently, to be just what we’re talking about here: education.
But you can’t improve our education system when so-called defenders of public education are committed to ignoring several conspicuous elephants in the room, the largest and smelliest being a school district serving tens of thousands of young people that is run by a political machine whose governance and administrative decisions seem, time and time again, to indicate that it knows little about sound methods in education and cares less about the actual fate of disadvantaged children in its schools.
Safier should “remove the beam from his own eye” before proposing to do surgery on his political opponents’ problems with transparency and compromise. Safier’s buddies (including a 123-promoting TUSD Board majority comprised of his chum Kristel Foster and her go-along to get-along pal Cam Juarez and led by a Board member whose candidacy Safier endorsed, Adelita Grijalva) are neither transparent nor uncompromised, and anyone who is paying even the slightest bit of attention to the local politics surrounding our education system knows it. (RE transparency: Check out the recent AZ Attorney General finding that Grijalva-Foster-Juarez violated Open Meeting Law when they chose to discuss the Superintendent’s goals / bonus in executive session instead of in a publicly accessible open meeting. RE inadvisable compromise with Ducey and his cronies: Check out various TUSD board members’ and administrators’ promotion of 123, or the Sup they hired agreeing with AZ legislators that it will be appropriate to phase down deseg funds in the future and — astoundingly — giving more than $3 million in unspent deseg funds back to taxpayers rather than applying them when we have thousands of students in underfunded schools who would have benefited from the proper application of these funds to, for example, pay bonuses to secure permanent, qualified teachers in classrooms currently filled with subs. Instead they keep throwing fat retention bonuses and inflated compensation packages at central administrators to keep them in their seats doing the poor job they are doing.)
But Safier’s concern is with DIANE DOUGLAS and how SHE might make Ducey’s life easier by betraying our most vulnerable children. What a crock.
sounds like pima mujer would trade ‘of the people, for the people, and by the people for some professional politicians? Or is it Marxism? I will still take my chances with citizen representation. Just look at the mess that Hillary has become.
To: Supporting Public Ed Means Supporting Local Reform
You are obsessed with achieving more regulation of TUSD. To what end? State departments of education have substantial oversight deemed to be failing by the feds. How has that worked out? 75% of schools in school improvement are worse after 5 years (nationwide data). This means that the so called experts aren’t experts at all.
Also, look at the layer of regulation added by the deseg special master. Read his report, posted on the TUSD website. That layer has not worked out well.
No, Huppenthal, (or whoever you are) I am not “obsessed” with anything — including “achieving” more regulation of TUSD.
It is not unreasonable for citizens to expect the state’s regulatory mechanisms to protect them from gross mismanagement of public institutions. Our laws, including ARS 38-431 and ARS 15-910 are there to ensure that our public institutions are well managed and that:
–decisions about how the public funds available to them are applied are made in transparent ways (cf. ARS 38-431)
–and can be shown to have benefit to the populations they are intended to benefit (cf. the reporting requirements in ARS 15-910).
I have read various materials relating to the deseg cases, including special master reports, plaintiffs’ objections, court rulings, district’s responses, plaintiffs’ advocate reports and editorials, etc., ad nauseam, and what they seem to indicate is that year after year goes by and the district resists making a good faith effort to do what needs to be done to remediate inequitable conditions in its schools. Forty-something years after the initial case was decided, inequitable conditions in the district are still conspicuous and troubling.
In part because the state has not required the district to do what it should do according to its own state-level transparency and reporting laws, the district continues to do what it does best (underperform), and constituents’ grievances end up getting channelled into the federal court system. The federal court comments on the situation by producing plans, reports and rulings, but it doesn’t seem to have the on-the-ground enforcement capability it needs to ensure proper implementation of deseg plans. So the cycle of underperformance and commentary on underperformance continues. (And anyone who says the district continues to underperform intentionally so it can continue to receive deseg funds does not understand deseg law and policy. Programs that are implemented with deseg funds to redress inequity and improve student achievement — by, for example, by attaching permanently higher salary levels to certain hard-to-fill teaching positions to ensure certified teachers fill them — are supposed to stay in place and continue to receive funding after school districts implementing them are out from under court order.)
Perhaps an analogy would help to clarify what’s going on here: the student (TUSD) will improve (INTEGRATE) if he does his homework (APPLIES FUNDS WHERE HE SHOULD AND FOLLOWS THE LAW AND COURT ORDERS). The parents (VARIOUS STATE AGENCIES INCLUDING THE STATE DEPT OF ED AND ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE) are the parties most likely to ensure the completion of homework (PROPER APPLICATION OF FUNDS AND ABIDING BY TRANSPARENCY LAWS). The teacher (FEDERAL COURTS / SPECIAL MASTER) gives a report card that says the student who hasn’t done his homework has not improved and in fact is failing. Is this the teacher’s fault? Does it mean there should be no teacher? No.
You, as a former state Superintendent of Education (if that is in fact who you are) are like the parent who should be supervising the student completing his homework who instead loudly complains that the teacher’s expectations or grading standards are unreasonable and “don’t work.” In fact, there’s a party involved here who should be providing oversight and guidance, and in any proper analysis, the absence of that oversight and guidance will be understood to be part of the reason for the conspicuous dysfunctionality and failures in the system.