Loved the education part of Gov. Ducey’s State of the State address—with a few exceptions, of course. Great stuff, mostly. Unfortunately, it’ll take lots of money to accomplish even half of what Ducey proposed. Lots and lots of money. And he didn’t commit dollar one.
My understanding is, the state is expecting to see about $24 million in revenue that’s not already accounted for. Even if all that went to education, it only comes to about 7 percent of the $350 million a year voted in when Prop 123 passed, so it’s not a hell of a lot of money. I’ve read that it’ll cost the state about $20 million just to cover the extra costs from the minimum wage hike. And of course, education isn’t the only area in dire need of additional funding, or the only sector Ducey made financial promises to. So that puny little $24 million, a tiny fraction of the state’s nearly $10 billion yearly budget, will have to be stretched way beyond the breaking point for it to make any kind of a difference anywhere.
Here are some of the education proposals in Ducey’s speech. As you read them, count the potential costs on your fingers and toes, with each digit worth $10 million. Warning: pretty soon, you’ll need to start in on your neighbor’s fingers and toes as well. It’s gonna take a lot of “This little piggies” to get us all the way to market.
• Increase investment in public schools above and beyond inflation.
• Raise teacher pay.
• Pay down teachers’ student debt.
• Create “Teacher Academies” at our universities and community colleges where prospective teachers’ educations are paid for and teaching jobs will be waiting upon completion, debt free.
• Give a $1,000 signing bonus to teachers who commit to work in low-income schools.
• Expand full day kindergarten.
• Connect schools in rural areas and on tribal lands to high speed internet and create a statewide coding and technology initiative.
• Increase per pupil funding at excelling schools, with even more going to excelling schools with low income students.
For the first two proposals to mean anything at all will take $100 million and counting. For them to really make a difference will cost more like $400-800 million. And that’s just the first two proposals. Remember, the legislature has something like $24 million in walk-around money total.
OK, I admit, I’m being unfair. Ducey promised he’ll unveil his proposed budget Friday, and it may be that he has a rabbit or two hidden in his hat. I’ll try hard to suspend my disbelief, and my cynicism, until Ducey has a chance to pull out his wallet and show us the money, though with 235 days gone by since the passage of Prop 123 and his promise back then that it was only a first step, my patience is wearing thin. If he puts some serious money where his mouth was during his State of the State speech, I’ll give him credit where credit is due. If not . . . well, there’ll be time enough for “If not’s” once Ducey presents his budget.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2017.
Please remind us how Prop123 really isn’t providing new money, just returning to us what was already voted on.
Prop 123 did not “return to us” what had already been voted on. It took money out of an account we already owned (the land trust) and attempted to use that to settle a debt that is STILL (after the passage of 123) unpaid.
Kind of like if your neighbor withdrew money from your IRA to pay back 75% of a debt he owed you and told you you could “suck it” if you wanted the other 25%.
Why would Safier not “remind us” that Prop 123 was a scam? Because he, like other TUSD-supporting, state-and-local-malfeasance-excusing sell-outs, promoted the passage of Prop 123’s illegal disenfranchisement of the voters who passed Prop 301.
If Prop 123 hadn’t passed with Safier’s support, Safier’s friend Sanchez couldn’t have had the money he needed to embarrass himself by failing to distribute 123 funds to teacher salary improvements in TUSD as he had promised prior to the Proposition’s passage. And Safier wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pitch some of his slipperiest and most counter-intuitive propaganda ever in trying to justify Sanchez’s failure to distribute anything but a small % of the 123 funds to teachers. And that would have been such a shame, such a missed opportunity for those of us who pay attention to BOTH state level and local problems with education funding to roll our eyes and gnash our teeth at yet another example of some of our local “supporters of public ed” being pretty much as malfeasant, but in different ways, as the state level bozos have been.
Maybe David just thinks that teachers are over paid. He is looking for an admin job.
I actually felt that David was moving closer to the reality base that those of us who wisely opposed 123 were occupying. Let’s not beat him up for his past sins. He is realizing that the fox in the henhouse has been enjoying the chickens.
There’s more than one fox in the henhouse in Arizona, gcb1, and I think, from various commentary you have made locally, that you know it.
Safier is a firm friend and staunch ally of one of our most voracious local foxes (Sanchez of TUSD), and that is a past and present sin I and others will not be able to forgive him for…unless he repents of it publicly.
Did you watch yesterday evening’s TUSD Board meeting? The man who spearheaded the movement to get rid of Isquierdo in Sunnyside spoke in the Call to the Audience, recommending that TUSD’s changed majority make a move now to get rid of Sanchez, who, he said, shares many of the same administrative behaviors with Isquierdo. Subs also spoke about the district’s lies about their pay and benefits and the damage outsourcing to ESI has done to them.
Do the numbers so that you know what the governor is saying. Inflation for 2016 was 1.7%. 1.7% times $9,000 per student is $150 per student x 1,000,000 students is 150 million dollars total, for the entire package, all the items in his list. But, likely he is subtracting for what prop123 will be adding so $150 million is a rough bogey.
Also, the attacks on Superintendent Sanchez are just a part of the sickness of public education. The characteristics of higher performing public schools is a stable cohesive school board strongly supporting a long serving school superintendent. The TUSD culture quickly burned through two outstanding superintendents and now is evidently working on a third. What a tragedy for the students.
jhuppent@hotmail writes, “The TUSD culture quickly burned through two outstanding superintendents and now is evidently working on a third.”
Are you implying that Sanchez is an “outstanding superintendent”?
What’s outstanding about him? His willingness to co-write an editorial with Lisa Graham Keegan arguing that we should solve our teacher shortage problem by reducing teacher credentialing requirements? His willingness to fight the desegregation authority and waste millions of dollars of the limited funds available for education in this sad district on legal fees associated with ill-advised challenges to court rulings? The fact that under his administration, six schools just lost their magnet status? The fact that he bragged about voluntarily reducing desegregation levies and voluntarily gave more than $3 million in desegregation funds back to taxpayers? His willingness to accept an outrageous compensation contract that mis-allocates hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to his salary, expense accounts, bonuses, etc.? His willingness to outsource substitute teachers, cut their compensation and destroy their ability to qualify for healthcare? His tolerance of south and west side schools serving largely minority populations having classrooms filled with long-term subs who don’t have teaching certification? His willingness to be a “leader” in local efforts to sell the shoddy Prop123 funding proposition to constituents in his mismanaged district, persuading them (falsely) that the majority of the money would actually be used to improve teacher compensation, which is disastrously low thanks to the AZ “do it cheaper” approach to “education”?
These are the only ways in which this man is outstanding:
1) in capitulating to and collaborating with anti-public education, irresponsible state level leadership
2) in having a track record in office which demonstrates consistent tendencies to be both self-serving and dishonest
The fact that Ducey-collaborators and defenders like “jhuppent@hotmail” rise to Sanchez’s defense is very telling, and this is what it tells: Sanchez was brought in by Ducey “kitchen cabinet” members like Lea Marquez Peterson to serve a disastrous conservative education reform agenda and to ingratiate himself to Ducey et al. with a flagrant anti-integration, pro-corporate program that is destroying TUSD.
I am not knowledgeable enough to rise in his defense, I don’t know his prior track record in Texas. I am merely making the observation that high performing schools have cohesive school boards and long serving Superintendents. I am also making the observation that the two prior Superintendents were outstanding and had long track records of being outstanding. The fact that TUSD culture could burn through both of them indicates that problem is the culture, not the Superintendent. Good Superintendents become outstanding under cohesive school boards, supportive communities and time on task.
I am sure that after you burn through him, other people will come forward to burn through the next victim.
Jhuppent:
You need to be a bit closer to what is going on in Southern Arizona to draw the correct conclusions about what is happening in TUSD. The idea that Sanchez is a victim of anyone or anything besides his own poor judgment is ludicrous to people who’ve seen what has been happening on the school sites and in the Board meetings. He has had a Board majority who has rubber stamped every weak idea he’s had, including his self-concocted outrageous compensation package. When he has lied to them and to the public this majority looked the other way and / or covered for him. Why? Perhaps because they had brought him in through an improper, untransparent hiring process when he had had only a few short months of experience as INTERIM Superintendent in a much smaller district. They recognized that if the degree of his unfitness for office and the number of mistakes he was making were recognized they would be held to account for it.
It may be true that high-functioning districts have unified Boards and Superintendents who stay in their positions for longer than TUSD has been able to retain Superintendents during the last decade, but this does not mean that retaining any Superintendent, no matter how weak and malfunctioning, for more than two years will CAUSE a district to become high functioning. Using any means possible to retain an incompetent manager in the position — including lying to the public and bribing the Superintendent with inflated compensation packages put together with public funds that should be applied in the sadly underfunded schools — will only make conditions in the district worse.
I have through the years spoken with many people about the district and its problems, including professors of education, current and former board members, current and former site administrators and central administrators, current and former teachers and parents. I have repeatedly heard two things: there are entrenched problems in the middle administration that make the district virtually ungovernable and, when we’re talking about the last several years, there have been serious difficulties introduced for the Superintendent by the role Stegeman has played on the Board. (As for your speculations about the district’s “culture” burning through the last two Superintendents prior to Sanchez. Some who had a good view of the Superintendency during that period believe that in Pedicone’s departure, Stegeman was the deciding factor.)
TUSD is admittedly a tough case. It needs a Superintendent who has a decade or more of experience and a proven record of success in managing (and reforming) a troubled urban district operating under a desegregation order. Adding to the difficulty of recruitment is the fact that this administrative task must be undertaken in a state that brutally underfunds education, where the governor (the subject of Safier’s post) will use every trick in the book to avoid funding the schools at the right levels and from the appropriate sources.
Regardless of the local and State-level conditions that will make it difficult for the community to recruit for the TUSD Superintendency, many of us who are close to the district and its schools feel that we can’t continue to allow this much damage to occur from relentlessly poor and dishonest management in a district serving almost 50,000 students.
If the needed change in leadership happens, there will no doubt be people like you who don’t understand what has been happening at the ground level in the district who will spin it as a sob story and a tragedy. But the opinions of the ignorant are irrelevant. What matters is the quality of services delivered to students in our schools. Before the funding increases Safier wants can actually improve those services, it would be necessary to get rid of an administration that has a more than three year long track record of constant mismanagement and misapplication of this e between $300 and $400 million TUSD receives each school year.
If jhuppent is pseudonym for John Huppenthahl, the infamous and discredited state official that had everything to do with dismantling the Mexican American Studies program and getting a ridiculous law on the books where legislators, not educators, have veto power over curriculum, there is no point in arguing one way or another. This is not a person who responds to reason in arguments. The posts above that DO argue against this person are full of valuable and accurate information but its REALLY hard to believe that Stegeman would be the nail in the coffin of Pedicone, who saw a compliant board quickly flip to one that was, at least during the campaign, completely opposed to his major contributions to TUSD–school closures and the before mentioned dismantling of the MAS program. A few years into the new Supe, though, and those same candidates were not only allowing school closures to proceed, but allowing their new hire to completely ignore the desegregation order, of which the MAS program was part. Replacing a demonization of the past Superintendent came a demonization of not only Stegeman’s role during the MAS disaster, but of Stegeman himself. Now he is blamed for just about everything from school closures to the lead problem in Flints’ water. Personally, I don’t buy it: he did a terrible job on MAS, undeniably, but beyond that I see no reason to give him this much power or this central a role in our districts’ problems. In the most recent re-election campaign, people who vociferously opposed Dr. P in their first campaign sidled up and made sure to distribute pictures on FB with both Dr. Pedicone (who all of a sudden became a highly respected educator who I “always hoped to work with”) and the district lawyer of the time who issued the order to ban the MAS books. Both of them, incidentally, are darlings of the local democratic party, which doesn’t really keep track of its darlings and their activities all that well, but certainly does keep getting them elected.
In any case, if jhuppent is in fact John Huppenthahl, it is a pleasure to see him using his real name as a pseudonym, instead of the numerous pseudonyms he used during the MAS days to pose as just another joe, instead of an elected official. If jhuppent is someone else, my apologies to you!
That is simply one person’s opinion. And we are all entitled to them. But the problems still exist. Finger pointing and hand wringing do nothing for the children in the middle of this political quagmire.
Betts Putnam-Hidalgo:
It’s possible that it’s Huppenthal — during the period that jhuppent has been posting there’s been enough internal consistency among the posts and enough alignment between what is written under that name and Huppenthal known agenda to make it plausible — but it’s never safe to assume. Whether or not “jhuppent” is Huppenthal makes no difference in terms of whether there is a “point” in responding: the point in responding is to get ideas that need to be considered into a public forum — not to influence the opinions of the specific commenter who posts under the screen name “jhuppent.”
You disagree with the informed opinions cited in the above post about Stegeman’s role in Pedicone’s departure and feel that Stegeman has been maligned by the PCDP party establishment. It’s certainly true that they have demonized him. Whether there is actually something problematic about the way he interacts with the district’s administration is a separate question. With the changed majority and Stegeman now in the clerk’s role, we’ll have sufficient opportunity to observe how he chooses to conduct himself in a leadership role. Many of us will be watching closely, hoping to see constructive conduct.
In a district with a history like this there are many odd alliances that form out of desperation and lack of better alternatives. (Who would have thought we would see Kristel Foster nominating Michael Hicks to be president of the Board and speaking favorably of his character? And yet that is what happened in the last Board meeting, as I know you are aware.) It has seemed to me that the alliances between Stegeman and his former MAS opponents, including both you and Morales, would not be durable once Stegeman was again part of the majority because there is not enough overlap between the real goals and priorities of the two parties in question, once the common enemy of the previous majority is no longer in place to unite them.
Time will tell. It will certainly be interesting to observe what happens in district governance and district alliances in the coming months.
Concerning Pedicone’s departure: He knew me well before he signed his contract extension in August 2012, and I did not change over the next few months. What changed, in the November 2012 election, was two seats on the board. That is the reality, however anyone chooses to frame it.
No, Mark, you are not the authoritative arbiter and interpreter of THE REALITY of what has happened in TUSD, but it is interesting that you are reading this dialogue and that you chose to weigh in here with one of your characteristic “interventions.”
However anyone chooses to frame what happened with Pedicone, what matters now is how you conduct yourself in office. And that, as I wrote above, will be closely observed.
That Ms. Putnam-Hidalgo and Stegeman — both strong critics of the three person majority that was in place in TUSD 2012-2016 — want to attribute Pedicone’s resignation to the results of the 2012 election that put this majority in place is not a surprise.
For the record:
Pedicone’s contract extension was signed in August of 2012. The election that changed the TUSD Board majority to Grijalva-Foster-Juarez occurred in early November 2012 and Foster and Juarez assumed office in January of 2013. Pedicone’s resignation letter was dated March 20, 2013, more than four months after the results of the election were clear.
The Star article on the resignation stated, “Pedicones resignation from Tucsons largest K-12 school district […] is effective at the end of June more than one year before his contract is set to expire. The announcement, made Wednesday at Tucson Unified School District headquarters, came as a surprise to many as Pedicone has repeatedly voiced his commitment to TUSD despite its many challenges.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/pedicone-resigns-tusd-to-launch-immediate-search-for-new-leader/article_c1e50118-9188-11e2-ac5c-0019bb2963f4.html
The public statements made about the resignation, including the resignation letter
http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/tucson.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/1/d2/1d262a68-9191-11e2-a919-001a4bcf887a/514a089f4ceb2.pdf.pdf
do not make clear what specifically motivated the resignation, which is common in statements of this kind. Nothing in the letter and nothing in the timeline leading to the resignation determines that the resignation was necessarily a reaction to the change in the governing board majority.
A lot can happen in four and a half months. I see no reason to disqualify the assertions that have been made by more than one person close to top-level TUSD decision makers — assertions made independently of one another, on separate occasions, and with no knowledge of what the other parties making the same assertion had said — that the largest factor in Pedicone’s resignation decision was Stegeman’s behavior between August of 2012 and March of 2013.
In closing, it’s worth noting that there is at least one factual error in Ms. Putnam-Hidalgo’s post. She states, “Pedicone[…] saw a compliant board quickly flip to one that was, at least during the campaign, completely opposed to his major contributions to TUSD– [including] school closures…A few years into the new Supe… those same candidates were […] allowing school closures to proceed.”
It was not years after coming on the Board and after the Sanchez administration was in place that the new members (Foster and Juarez) reversed their positions on school closings. It was immediately after they came on the Board, before Pedicone’s resignation. The Board voted for the closings in December 2012, immediately before they joined, the desegregation authority approved the closings in February 2013, immediately after they joined, and the new majority made no move to stop or revise the closings asked for by Pedicone’s administration and approved by the previous Board and the desegregation authority. The closings occurred between the 2012-2013 school year and the 2013-2014 school year, just as Pedicone stepped out of the Superintendency and as Sanchez assumed the role.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/us-judge-gives-tusd-go-ahead-to-close-schools-cites/article_6a8a16dc-6476-51a3-8923-1a4676a8fed4.html
It may be true that the PCDP operation has demonized Stegeman, but it is unfortunately also true that others, in opposing PCDP’s view, have been led to view him in a more positive light than a careful examination of his behaviors in office would suggest is deserved. Those who’ve watched the district’s recent history without a revisionist impulse and wishful thinking coloring their judgments know that it will be important to keep a very close eye on what Stegeman does with his role, going forward.
I get this feeling that our governor wants very little to do with educating other people’s kids. I also feel that he’s mostly looking forward to surviving his own future, with a tall stack of buttered bread and a big pot of beans. What’s next, Doug?