Yup. Looks like all those “pro-public-ed” unions and advocacy groups who, like you, got talked into going along with 123 and thought their capitulation would then yield some actual progress in the right direction with “next steps” were taken for a ride.
What.
A.
Surprise.
Wait…in addition to crickets, I think I hear something else: Ducey et al. chuckling, rubbing their hands together, and patting one another on the back as they prepare to dispense funds from the land trust and dole out more tax breaks to their wealthy friends.
What do you suppose we’d hear in conversations taking place among members of the governing board majority and top administration at TUSD central? Lots of self-congratulation on their successful effort to help Prop 123 pass by such a very narrow margin? What a close call they had! They almost didn’t succeed in undermining the statewide structure for public education funding for the sake of a few quick bucks before the 2016-2017 school year begins. Given their track record for the last three years and the massive compensation increase recently given to the TUSD Superintendent, it seems pretty unlikely that they will be able to pass those bonds and overrides they’ve been talking about taking to the voters, so what other decent prospect for $$$ did they have? (Of course, they do have one thing going for them: some devoted friends in the media who always seem willing and able to help them promote the faulty merchandise they try to sell to the public. It’s amazing what you can accomplish these days with a gullible electorate and a few fast friends in the 4th estate….)
I am so content to let you guys have both sides of this argument. Have at it.
Don’t you know, Il Duce is too busy giving the ALEC litmus test to his court packing candidates, and destroying city and county governments to worry about vaulting Arizona beyond 49th n education expenditures. And, for the inevitable rant about TUSD by rat and again, please, I haven’t seen either of your petitions to run for the board yourselves.
Before another penny comes forward, the education community has the obligation to prove that $300 million a year can make a difference for students. But, the truth is, it won’t make a difference. No proposition has been so intensely tried and failed. Take New York city, they, like Arizona, have 1.1 million students. They spend $24 billion a year, we spend about $9 billion a year. Yet, our Black students outscore their Black students, our Hispanics outscore their Hispanics and our white students outscore their white students (NAEP).
Frugality worked well for Arizona. During the period of time, 2011 to 2015, in which operational spending by schools was reduced by over $400 million per year, Arizona led the nation in academic gains from 2011 fourth grade to 2015 eighth grade (NAEP). Arizona African Americans now rank number one in the nation in eighth grade math, Hispanics rank 11th and our white students rank 6th. (Haven’t heard that have you?)
Obviously, education cultural elements which do not work are being reinforced by money. Perhaps defunding and even greater frugality is the route to success. The nation has over 15 million students who read less than 5 minutes a day and who need their fingers to add 6 plus 3. We have been traveling a different route and need to travel an even more different route. This article argues we should travel the same route.
John Huppenthal
That’s right, because
–having copy paper strictly rationed and under lock and key in our public secondary schools and getting parents to run Costco fundraisers to ensure teachers have enough paper available to deliver and evaluate instruction
–having counseling departments so insufficiently staffed that parents have to pay for the installation of supplementary staff to enable these departments to meet students’ most basic needs
–having books in the libraries of college prep high schools largely out of date or in insufficient supply while students run a coffee shop to try to fund new book acquisitions
definitely supports the delivery of high quality education to our young people in Arizona. Are we to consider that creating a situation in which constituents are forced to raise funds to keep “public” schools functioning is an “improvement” over previous conditions?
Another dubious strategy for “improving” the cost efficiency of education delivery: paying our hard working, college-educated teachers at such a low rate that if they are the sole support of their families, they qualify for government aid-to-low-income programs. (But isn’t this just another sleight of hand, transferring the real cost of educating children out of one budget — the education budget — into another budget — the social services budget? So does reducing teachers to poverty level wages actually “save” taxpayers money? Someone should do the analysis needed to answer that question, and someone should also inform Huppenthal of something that seems to have escaped his attention, that as a result of the draconian cuts to education and perhaps also because of far too much punitive emphasis on gearing what happens in the classroom to maximizing the results on standardized tests, we now have a situation where we cannot retain a fully educated, properly credentialed work force in our schools.)
What an accomplishment, reducing the spending in our public schools by hundreds of millions of dollars, while increasing students’ ability to score better than students in other regions on low-order thinking skill multiple choice tests (if the data cited in the comment above is, in fact, accurate). But I’d like to see what was done from 2011 to 2015 to Arizona public school students’ capacity to understand complex written arguments, identify the weaknesses in them and respond to them intelligently in their own words, engage in real-world problem solving and collaborate successfully with others. Those are the instructional goals the teachers in private schools are allowed to keep at the center of their classroom practice and curriculum design, but none of those things are properly measured by the corporate-produced tests that dominate classroom time and enforce the mindless content cramming and TEST-PREP that passes for “education” in public schools these days.
It’s true that TUSD does not apply the money allocated to it as well as it should, but what was achieved, during Huppenthal’s tenure in office, to improve oversight of the district’s budgeting and financial controls? If any permanent structural improvements were made in the Department of Education’s ability to ensure the proper operation of governance and administration in matters relating to fiscal management of public institutions of education, there seems to be no trace of them now. The constituents in our largest local public school district remain, from one year and one decade to the next, at the mercy of ignorant mismanagement, with insufficient protection from abuse available to them in the form of state-level oversight and enforcement. (What Huppenthal is most remembered for is not any improvements to state-level support for financial efficiency and transparency in our public districts, but his role in curricular issues like MAS.)
But in spite of what many interpret as recent state-level administrations’ tireless attempts to starve and dumb-down education available to those who can’t afford to pay private school tuition, as of yet there aren’t many citizens in this region whose education has been so lamed that they find themselves able to believe the ridiculous assertion that IMPROVING PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS OF EDUCATION has been the goal of these administrations. Wasn’t there a robo-call that went out while Huppenthal was in office making sure Arizona citizens were aware that they could use public funds to enroll their students in private schools? Most of us, in spite of the damage done in recent years to the schools utilized by 80% of our population, are still capable of remembering that robo-call and asking this question: Is that the kind of initiative orchestrated by those whose real motive is to improve the quality of services available to students in public schools?
Odd, considering Huppenthal’s sometime nom de plume, that he fails Logic 101. He presumes that frugality leads to improved student outcomes, yet provides no evidence to support this. Perhaps an analysis of weather patterns or the success rate of Wildcat basketball would provide similar results.
I don’t assume that frugality causes improved outcomes – but I do point out that, over the last four years, in Arizona, extreme frugality was associated with extremely good results. More likely, our environment of highly competitive school choice was the driver.
Most teachers across this nation would consider a thousand dollar a year budget for school supplies a gift from heaven yet, that would be about 1/2 percent of total spending. No state in the nation has a teacher supplies budget of one thousand dollars. Why?
As for improvements in the Department of Education, we made enormous improvements. When I came into office, the computer system, the brain stem of the education system, was available only 50% of the time and school districts were getting 6 week turnaround on financial transactions. Within two years, we replaced both the operating system and the hardware. When I left office, the system was at 99.9% availability and provided instantaneous turnaround on financial transactions. The improvements enabled many school districts to save over hundreds of dollars per student in reduced accounting software costs.
In special education, our approach of mediation over regulation has resulted in an environment in which there are only two of the nuclear level lawsuits between special ed parents and school districts. In other comparable states there are as many as sixty five.
Our standards division held over three hundred training sessions across Arizona- training teachers how to train other teachers in the standards. In Arizona, teachers support the common core standards 8 to 1. Nationwide, they oppose them 5 to 4. Nationwide, the standards were a disaster, math scores went down for the first time ever and reading scores stopped going up. In Arizona, our combined reading and math gains from 2011 fourth grade to 2015 eighth grade were the highest in the nation. Our African Americans now rank first in the nation in 8th grade math, our Hispanics rank 11th and our white kids rank 6th (National Assessment of Educational Progress).
We didn’t have near the money of other states, but we didn’t use that as an excuse. Our excellent ratings went up 7% a year for four years, our employee engagement was the fourth highest of any state agency and our per employee charitable contributions were in the top ten of all state agencies.
You reference the Tucson Unified School district. The percentage of parents rating their child’s school excellent hasn’t improved in a decade. Yet, they are one of the highest spending districts in the state, spending over $30,000 more per classroom than Vail. As a result, TUSD is losing over 500 students per year. That is like shrinking one school per year.
Money is not the answer in education.
I’m not going to address the remarks that assume the validity of Common Core or the reliability of standardized test scores as measures of student learning except to say that there are many in the field of education who would not agree with Huppenthal’s assumptions on either of these subjects.
RE the remark that “money is not the answer in education.”
The answer in education is the application of money in places where it will have good effects in supporting student achievement. When taxes are being collected for the purpose of educating the population, the State Department of Education should be playing a role in ensuring that those funds are applied where they will benefit the children being educated in public schools. Why has the state not found a way of preventing the misapplication of funds in TUSD? Why, for example, has the state not played an effective role in ensuring, as required in ARS 15-910, that the appropriate application of deseg funds is properly documented and reported AS REQUIRED BY LAWS ENACTED BY THE AZ LEGISLATURE? Decade after decade goes by, the money is wasted in ineffective programs or applied to targets that have little to do with the purposes for which it has been collected, while purposes that should be supported by these funds go unfunded, and there is no ENFORCEMENT OF ARS 150-910 or of the court’s orders in the case.
Why? So that “deseg” will have such a bad name in the community that the AZ legislature will have public support when they want to eliminate deseg funds entirely? So there will be another thing to point to to illustrate that “money is not the answer in education,” when in fact this is not what is proved by this fiasco. What is proved is that “misapplied money is never the answer in education” and what is also proved is that officials willing to take the responsibility of ENFORCING PROPER APPLICATION are desperately needed — and entirely lacking — in the ignorant and negligent state of Arizona.
These funds could have good effect, but unfortunately their proper application has never been adequately attempted, much less adequately achieved. Seems to me that it is not TUSD alone, but also the State Department of Education, in its failures of oversight and enforcement, that should be understood to be at fault.
Yup. Looks like all those “pro-public-ed” unions and advocacy groups who, like you, got talked into going along with 123 and thought their capitulation would then yield some actual progress in the right direction with “next steps” were taken for a ride.
What.
A.
Surprise.
Wait…in addition to crickets, I think I hear something else: Ducey et al. chuckling, rubbing their hands together, and patting one another on the back as they prepare to dispense funds from the land trust and dole out more tax breaks to their wealthy friends.
What do you suppose we’d hear in conversations taking place among members of the governing board majority and top administration at TUSD central? Lots of self-congratulation on their successful effort to help Prop 123 pass by such a very narrow margin? What a close call they had! They almost didn’t succeed in undermining the statewide structure for public education funding for the sake of a few quick bucks before the 2016-2017 school year begins. Given their track record for the last three years and the massive compensation increase recently given to the TUSD Superintendent, it seems pretty unlikely that they will be able to pass those bonds and overrides they’ve been talking about taking to the voters, so what other decent prospect for $$$ did they have? (Of course, they do have one thing going for them: some devoted friends in the media who always seem willing and able to help them promote the faulty merchandise they try to sell to the public. It’s amazing what you can accomplish these days with a gullible electorate and a few fast friends in the 4th estate….)
I am so content to let you guys have both sides of this argument. Have at it.
Don’t you know, Il Duce is too busy giving the ALEC litmus test to his court packing candidates, and destroying city and county governments to worry about vaulting Arizona beyond 49th n education expenditures. And, for the inevitable rant about TUSD by rat and again, please, I haven’t seen either of your petitions to run for the board yourselves.
Before another penny comes forward, the education community has the obligation to prove that $300 million a year can make a difference for students. But, the truth is, it won’t make a difference. No proposition has been so intensely tried and failed. Take New York city, they, like Arizona, have 1.1 million students. They spend $24 billion a year, we spend about $9 billion a year. Yet, our Black students outscore their Black students, our Hispanics outscore their Hispanics and our white students outscore their white students (NAEP).
Frugality worked well for Arizona. During the period of time, 2011 to 2015, in which operational spending by schools was reduced by over $400 million per year, Arizona led the nation in academic gains from 2011 fourth grade to 2015 eighth grade (NAEP). Arizona African Americans now rank number one in the nation in eighth grade math, Hispanics rank 11th and our white students rank 6th. (Haven’t heard that have you?)
Obviously, education cultural elements which do not work are being reinforced by money. Perhaps defunding and even greater frugality is the route to success. The nation has over 15 million students who read less than 5 minutes a day and who need their fingers to add 6 plus 3. We have been traveling a different route and need to travel an even more different route. This article argues we should travel the same route.
John Huppenthal
That’s right, because
–having copy paper strictly rationed and under lock and key in our public secondary schools and getting parents to run Costco fundraisers to ensure teachers have enough paper available to deliver and evaluate instruction
–having counseling departments so insufficiently staffed that parents have to pay for the installation of supplementary staff to enable these departments to meet students’ most basic needs
–having books in the libraries of college prep high schools largely out of date or in insufficient supply while students run a coffee shop to try to fund new book acquisitions
definitely supports the delivery of high quality education to our young people in Arizona. Are we to consider that creating a situation in which constituents are forced to raise funds to keep “public” schools functioning is an “improvement” over previous conditions?
http://www.tusd1.org/contents/distinfo/spotlight/102014uhs.asp
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/rincon-uhs-students-brew-up-cafe-to-pay-for-new/article_e8a582e5-3759-5107-95a6-38bee11e2f5a.html
Another dubious strategy for “improving” the cost efficiency of education delivery: paying our hard working, college-educated teachers at such a low rate that if they are the sole support of their families, they qualify for government aid-to-low-income programs. (But isn’t this just another sleight of hand, transferring the real cost of educating children out of one budget — the education budget — into another budget — the social services budget? So does reducing teachers to poverty level wages actually “save” taxpayers money? Someone should do the analysis needed to answer that question, and someone should also inform Huppenthal of something that seems to have escaped his attention, that as a result of the draconian cuts to education and perhaps also because of far too much punitive emphasis on gearing what happens in the classroom to maximizing the results on standardized tests, we now have a situation where we cannot retain a fully educated, properly credentialed work force in our schools.)
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/tusd-struggling-with-vacancies-to-meet-us-directive/article_780ff1ba-4f03-592e-ba67-189c275aa07f.html
What an accomplishment, reducing the spending in our public schools by hundreds of millions of dollars, while increasing students’ ability to score better than students in other regions on low-order thinking skill multiple choice tests (if the data cited in the comment above is, in fact, accurate). But I’d like to see what was done from 2011 to 2015 to Arizona public school students’ capacity to understand complex written arguments, identify the weaknesses in them and respond to them intelligently in their own words, engage in real-world problem solving and collaborate successfully with others. Those are the instructional goals the teachers in private schools are allowed to keep at the center of their classroom practice and curriculum design, but none of those things are properly measured by the corporate-produced tests that dominate classroom time and enforce the mindless content cramming and TEST-PREP that passes for “education” in public schools these days.
It’s true that TUSD does not apply the money allocated to it as well as it should, but what was achieved, during Huppenthal’s tenure in office, to improve oversight of the district’s budgeting and financial controls? If any permanent structural improvements were made in the Department of Education’s ability to ensure the proper operation of governance and administration in matters relating to fiscal management of public institutions of education, there seems to be no trace of them now. The constituents in our largest local public school district remain, from one year and one decade to the next, at the mercy of ignorant mismanagement, with insufficient protection from abuse available to them in the form of state-level oversight and enforcement. (What Huppenthal is most remembered for is not any improvements to state-level support for financial efficiency and transparency in our public districts, but his role in curricular issues like MAS.)
https://www.mla.org/About-Us/Governance/Executive-Council/Executive-Council-Actions/2012/Statement-on-Tucson-Mexican-American-Studies-Program
But in spite of what many interpret as recent state-level administrations’ tireless attempts to starve and dumb-down education available to those who can’t afford to pay private school tuition, as of yet there aren’t many citizens in this region whose education has been so lamed that they find themselves able to believe the ridiculous assertion that IMPROVING PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS OF EDUCATION has been the goal of these administrations. Wasn’t there a robo-call that went out while Huppenthal was in office making sure Arizona citizens were aware that they could use public funds to enroll their students in private schools? Most of us, in spite of the damage done in recent years to the schools utilized by 80% of our population, are still capable of remembering that robo-call and asking this question: Is that the kind of initiative orchestrated by those whose real motive is to improve the quality of services available to students in public schools?
http://www.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/20140212arizona-furor-over-huppenthal-robocalls.html
Odd, considering Huppenthal’s sometime nom de plume, that he fails Logic 101. He presumes that frugality leads to improved student outcomes, yet provides no evidence to support this. Perhaps an analysis of weather patterns or the success rate of Wildcat basketball would provide similar results.
I don’t assume that frugality causes improved outcomes – but I do point out that, over the last four years, in Arizona, extreme frugality was associated with extremely good results. More likely, our environment of highly competitive school choice was the driver.
Most teachers across this nation would consider a thousand dollar a year budget for school supplies a gift from heaven yet, that would be about 1/2 percent of total spending. No state in the nation has a teacher supplies budget of one thousand dollars. Why?
As for improvements in the Department of Education, we made enormous improvements. When I came into office, the computer system, the brain stem of the education system, was available only 50% of the time and school districts were getting 6 week turnaround on financial transactions. Within two years, we replaced both the operating system and the hardware. When I left office, the system was at 99.9% availability and provided instantaneous turnaround on financial transactions. The improvements enabled many school districts to save over hundreds of dollars per student in reduced accounting software costs.
In special education, our approach of mediation over regulation has resulted in an environment in which there are only two of the nuclear level lawsuits between special ed parents and school districts. In other comparable states there are as many as sixty five.
Our standards division held over three hundred training sessions across Arizona- training teachers how to train other teachers in the standards. In Arizona, teachers support the common core standards 8 to 1. Nationwide, they oppose them 5 to 4. Nationwide, the standards were a disaster, math scores went down for the first time ever and reading scores stopped going up. In Arizona, our combined reading and math gains from 2011 fourth grade to 2015 eighth grade were the highest in the nation. Our African Americans now rank first in the nation in 8th grade math, our Hispanics rank 11th and our white kids rank 6th (National Assessment of Educational Progress).
We didn’t have near the money of other states, but we didn’t use that as an excuse. Our excellent ratings went up 7% a year for four years, our employee engagement was the fourth highest of any state agency and our per employee charitable contributions were in the top ten of all state agencies.
You reference the Tucson Unified School district. The percentage of parents rating their child’s school excellent hasn’t improved in a decade. Yet, they are one of the highest spending districts in the state, spending over $30,000 more per classroom than Vail. As a result, TUSD is losing over 500 students per year. That is like shrinking one school per year.
Money is not the answer in education.
I’m not going to address the remarks that assume the validity of Common Core or the reliability of standardized test scores as measures of student learning except to say that there are many in the field of education who would not agree with Huppenthal’s assumptions on either of these subjects.
RE the remark that “money is not the answer in education.”
The answer in education is the application of money in places where it will have good effects in supporting student achievement. When taxes are being collected for the purpose of educating the population, the State Department of Education should be playing a role in ensuring that those funds are applied where they will benefit the children being educated in public schools. Why has the state not found a way of preventing the misapplication of funds in TUSD? Why, for example, has the state not played an effective role in ensuring, as required in ARS 15-910, that the appropriate application of deseg funds is properly documented and reported AS REQUIRED BY LAWS ENACTED BY THE AZ LEGISLATURE? Decade after decade goes by, the money is wasted in ineffective programs or applied to targets that have little to do with the purposes for which it has been collected, while purposes that should be supported by these funds go unfunded, and there is no ENFORCEMENT OF ARS 150-910 or of the court’s orders in the case.
Why? So that “deseg” will have such a bad name in the community that the AZ legislature will have public support when they want to eliminate deseg funds entirely? So there will be another thing to point to to illustrate that “money is not the answer in education,” when in fact this is not what is proved by this fiasco. What is proved is that “misapplied money is never the answer in education” and what is also proved is that officials willing to take the responsibility of ENFORCING PROPER APPLICATION are desperately needed — and entirely lacking — in the ignorant and negligent state of Arizona.
These funds could have good effect, but unfortunately their proper application has never been adequately attempted, much less adequately achieved. Seems to me that it is not TUSD alone, but also the State Department of Education, in its failures of oversight and enforcement, that should be understood to be at fault.