No question about it. Republicans with most of the power in Arizona are enemies of public education. They’ve demonstrated it over and over, for years. But what would they do to public education if they could do anything they wanted? It sounds like a simple question, but it’s a tough one to answer. I’m going to take a stab at it.
We have to begin by defining our terms. “Public education” and “publicly funded education” are two different things. Public education is both funded and run by the public, with publicly elected school boards which have the power to make the final education and personnel decisions. Only school districts fit that description. Charter schools are a public/private hybrid, publicly funded but privately operated, answering to the owners and their appointed boards. At one time, private schools were both privately funded and privately run, but with the growth of vouchers, they’re becoming kind of a charter/private hybrid, getting a whole lot of their funding from the public but having even less public oversight and control than charter schools.
Arizona’s supporters of public education often say Republicans want to “dismantle” public education. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that term. It sounds too much like the plan is to take public education apart, piece by piece, until it’s no longer there. To my ears, “dismantle” sounds a lot like “destroy,” and I don’t think that’s accurate. About 75 percent of Arizona’s school children attend public schools. Of the remainder, almost 20 percent are in charters and between 5 to 8 percent are either in private schools or home schooled. There’s no plausible way to create enough charters and private schools to get take care of the 75 percent currently in public schools. I suppose districts could be made into collections of charter schools, an experiment currently being tested in a few cities in other parts of the country, but I don’t see it happening here, at least not on a statewide scale. Public education is here to stay, and I think most Republicans are OK with that. They don’t want to dismantle, as in destroy, school districts. What the want to do is damage, degrade and devalue them.
Regardless of the words we use to describe it, the question is, if Republicans had their way, what would the damaged, degraded, devalued public education look like? I doubt many Arizona Republicans have thought this question through and have a coherent answer, but if they did, I think it would go something like this.
“Public education for everyone,” they would say, “is too damn expensive, even here in bottom-of-the-barrel-in-per-student-spending Arizona. And too much of what we spend is wasted on all those failing kids in failing schools. What we need is quality education and adequate funding for those who need it and are willing to take advantage of it, and good-enough-for-low-skilled-work education for the rest. Why waste all that money and effort trying to give a comprehensive, K-12 education to children who won’t need more than a 6th grader’s understanding of reading, writing and arithmetic to do what their employers will require them to do?
“What we really need,” they would continue if they were willing to be brutally honest, “is a three-tiered education system. At the top will be a world class education for the children who will grow up to be the captains of industry as well as the innovators, scientists and technology geniuses who will provide the knowledge base to keep our business sector moving forward. Those students will attend the state’s most expensive private schools or a handful of academically challenging charter schools filled with cherry-picked students who will either rise to the challenge or fail and drop off along the way. The second tier will be schools that provide a strong education for students who will need to go on to college so they can fill in the middle ranks of the economy. They will include some middle-priced private schools, charter schools with a college prep curriculum, and assorted public schools in high achieving — read, middle-to-high income — areas. The lowest tier will be schools set up to warehouse the rest of the students, where class sizes are large and the cost of buildings and educational materials are kept to a minimum, where teachers are just good enough to keep order and give students the kind of basic skills they will need for low paying, low skill jobs.”
How would you go about this? For one thing, you would provide taxpayer money to subsidize tuition to expensive private schools, making it easier for those with means to give their children the best possible educational experience. At the same time, you would keep the general school funding level low. Then you would transfer as much of the general education funds as possible to district and charter schools with the highest achieving students, which tend to be in the higher income areas, and that would further beggar the public schools serving the lowest income students in the state.
Arizona is well on its way to achieving the right wing, anti-public school vision, though there’s lots of work left to be done to get it right. We have two forms of private school vouchers. The legislature wants to institute “results-based funding” for district and charter schools. Our most recent education legislation allows anyone with a bachelor’s degree to teach, which would help fill the teaching slots in low income schools where teaching conditions will be so undesirable it’ll be hard to find credentialed teachers willing to apply.
Republican elected officials should feel proud when they see how much work they’ve done to damage, degrade and devalue public education. As for the rest of us, who value a quality education for all children? We should hold them responsible for the work they’ve done, in letters to the editor and phone calls, at rallies, and where it counts the most, at the ballot box.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2017.
I heard this morning that Ducey has signed a bill to degrade the certification that a teacher needs to teach in Arizona, an idea shared by Dr. Sanchez and Lisa Graham Keegan (http://tucson.com/news/opinion/column/gues…) a while ago. Where in this would you place that initiative, David? I put it into yet another way to degrade Arizona schooling, and it makes me happy that my son is almost out of K-12. Soon we will have the old buildings that have received no capital improvements, teachers staffing them that have received little to no teacher training…..what a mirage public education in Arizona will be. And he has the unmitigated GALL to call himself the education governor? He ought to go get some before he talks about it.
Your post assumes an alternative reality. Look at national results for the last 4 years. Parent grading of their child’s school down from 36% A in 2011 to 24% in 2015 (Gallup). Teacher job satisfaction down from 62% very satisfied to 39% very satisfied (Met Life). Math scores down for the first time ever, reading scores – no improvement, education productivity down 15% since 2000 (NAEP).
Now look at Arizona. African American 8th grades first in the nation in math, Hispanics 11th up from 35th in 2011, white 8th graders 6th. Urban Institute ranks Arizona schools 11th in the nation considering all test scores reading and math. Vail, Chandler, Mesa all have internal, longitudinal measures showing parent “A” grades above 65%. If you can’t get to those numbers, you can’t survive in Arizona’s school choice environment. Just look at Tucson Unified – less than 40% of their parents grade their child’s school an “A” and they are being peeled like a banana, losing 14,000 students in the last decade and a half.
You can only get away with your nonsense by focusing on cost. How expensive are Arizona schools? A metric without any meaning in education science, except that we know that more expensive states produce fewer jobs for their high school and college graduates (Tax foundation and StLouis Federal Reserve data).
You also contort the meaning of the word public to support an institution with absolute bigotry and racism in its roots – the district school. Designed to keep out Catholics, minorities and the poor.
In the so called public schools across the nation, 99.5% of the public is excluded from district schools. They are doing exactly what their racist and bigoted designers intended – keep out the public. That’s the heritage you are laying claim to.
Arizona is the only state in the nation with a claim to a public education system, one in which all schools, every one of them, is open to the public.
You are advocating for a system in which the worst teacher in the worst school in the worst school district in the nation is guaranteed a full class room.
We are advocating for a system in which every parent has so many choices that every full classroom is evidence that the teacher is among the best in the nation.
We will see who the voters believe.
Everyone seems to be forgetting somethig. There are accreditation standards for public schools. If a high school loses its accreditation, graduates will not be accepted into college. Hiring non-teachers to teach is a quick way for a school to lose its accreditation. These standards are not controlled by the states.
Look in the mirror David!
Invoices for TUSDs outside desegregation law firm, Steptoe & Johnson, total approximately $772,000 for 11 months and 5 days in 2016. This includes charges for driving to and from Phoenix, meals, and hotel rooms.
The fees for driving, meals & hotel rooms were for $4,390 out of the $772,000 billed by Steptoe & Johnson.
The amount TUSD paid its outside desegregation legal firm under Dr. H.T. Sanchez far exceed anything paid to the Districts outside desegregation legal firms in recent years.
TUSD has incurred far more legal bills fighting the desegregation order than the plaintiffs have billed to protect it and have it fully implemented.-ADI
Ducey Math:
(Public Education – Funding) x (Teachers – Certification) = Gullible Voters
(Private Education + Funding) x (Charter Schools – Oversight) = Gullible Voters
Republican have cut public education funding over a billion dollars since 2009 so I would say they are trying to degarde public education. Spending education monies on charter schools which many are independently owned and are for profit. Also more than several elected public officals own or on the borad of directors for charter schools. Since Symington was governor Republicans have warred against public education.
Did Southern Arizona Democrats want to degrade the quality of services offered in the largest public school district in the region, which serves just under 50,000 students?
Probably not, but that is exactly what they did when they had rock-solid majority control of the TUSD Board 2012-2016. Though I’ve been a voting, donating, volunteering Democrat in this state and other states, the degraded spectacle of TUSD 2012-2016 will prevent me from voting for, donating to, or volunteering in support of any AZ gubernatorial or legislative candidate that endorsed members of the 2012-2016 TUSD Board majority.
Until the Democratic party stops excusing and enabling the mess that is TUSD, their policy agenda of restricting the use of public funds available for K-12 education to the public district system will be irresponsible and discriminatory, one that, if implemented, would lock minority and lower SES families into “educational” institutions that do not meet their needs. (And no, for the millionth time, increasing funding to TUSD is not all that is needed to improve services to its low-SES students. Anyone who doubts that should take a close look at what was done with Title 1, desegregation, 301 and 123 funds 2012-2016.)
I have to laugh when I see school districts that have had to go to home owners for funding, that are held up as a “See, they’re doing well without high state funding”. That is smoke and mirrors by supporters of Ducey’s efforts to kill public education. Vail is doing well because over and over, the voters in the district have voted to approve school bonds and school overrides. The district is making up for the lack of state funding on the backs of homeowners who value a quality public education. Kids who live in poor school districts don’t have the luxury to do this. Before you give me the school choice bullshit, those parents cannot afford to drive their kid to the better school district on the other side of town so they’re left in the lousy districts.
We are last in the nation in education funding. We are last in the nation in teacher’s salaries and we are ranked 45th in the nation in education performance. Those stats can all easily be found on the web. No smoke and mirrors, just the reality of a state government that doesn’t give a damn about the education of our children unless their parents are filthy rich.
“Parents cannot afford to drive their kids to better schools…..”
I seem to remember something about busing kids to achieve racial integration. Then we dreamed up magnet schools based on proportionate racial improvements. But neither government nor public schools were effective at achieving a satisfactory outcome.
The only thing left to do is cut funding to the upper income area schools and fund the lower income schools at 150% of normal expenses. Then we can see how effective money can be in leveling the playing field. Would it increase success rates at the bottom or decrease success rates at the top?
I guess it begs the question, “can we only accomplish social engineering rather than providing a quality learning experience?” And then, “should public schools try to accomplish both?”