I listened to the 2 hour, 45 minute audio of Tuesday’s Classrooms First Initiative Council meeting and can report that nothing happened.
OK, that’s not entirely true. In the weeks following the May 17 vote on Prop 123 vote, a number of people and organizations submitted school funding proposals to the council—revenue-neutral proposals for moving around existing funds, not adding money to the education budget—and on Tuesday they got up one by one and explained their proposals to the council. In other words, very serious people presented very serious proposals, which very serious council members listened to very seriously. If I had been at the meeting, I’m sure I would have seen very serious nodding of heads by the council members as well. Everyone got their say, but that doesn’t mean much. The only people who matter are the council members. It’s up to them to make the final funding proposals. They can take what they want from the submitted ideas and leave the rest.
I may write about the proposals in a later post, but right now I want to look at the council members, since they’re the ones who will decide which proposals to listen to and which to ignore. Five members represent charter schools, including Greg Miller, the President of the State Board of Education who founded Challenge Charter School, and Kathy Senseman, President of the State Board of Charter Schools. Four of them represent school districts—two superintendents, a chief financial officer and a teacher. That’s a 5-4 split in favor of charter schools, in a state where students attending district schools outnumber charter school students 5-1.
Co-chairing the council are Doug Ducey and Jim Swanson, the only two council members with no direct connection to education. Ducey’s anti-funding, pro-privatization stance on education is an open book, but we don’t know much about Swanson. He’s the President and CEO of Kitchell Corporation, a commercial contracting business whose market includes, according to its website, “K-12: Building and renovating facilities that make best use of public funds and stand the test of time.” If more charter schools are built, Swanson stands to reap some of the benefits. His only other education connection, so far as I could find, is a December, 2014, guest opinion in the AZ Republic singing the praises of tax credits for private schools. He’s definitely an education privatization kind of guy.
To sum up, the council has 7 votes for charter schools and privatization, 4 votes for district-based public school education. Also on the council are Ed Supe Diane Douglas and Dawn Wallace, an Education Policy Advisor at the Department of Ed. Even if the two of them side with the district people, it’s still a 7-6 majority for funding proposals favoring charters.
Ducey hasn’t spoken publicly about the Tuesday meeting yet, and no one in the media has asked him the “next step” question for awhile so far as I’ve seen. I don’t know if Ducey is planning to proclaim the work of the Classrooms First Initiative Council part of his “next step.” If so, it will be the first step in his expected post-Prop-123 dance away from the idea of increasing education funding. If not, well, here we are, Day 36 of the Ducey “Next Step” watch, and still, nothing.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2016.
It would be an interesting experiment if someone could attempt to assess Classrooms First Initiatives council members in terms of their credentials / competence in identifying sound educational and public administrative practices, rather than in terms of their “district school” vs. “charter school” and “private voucher” affiliation.
The fact is, all three sectors in Arizona (district, charter, voucher-funded private) need improvements in transparency and in the degree to which the state is able to verify / require that sound educational methods are employed, in exchange for its gift of public funding in support of the education of students enrolled in these institutions.
David knows there are problems in large urban public districts, including the one his friends run (TUSD) with bidding and hiring processes and transparency. He has even written — very occasionally and not very effectively — about a few of these problems during the last three years since Sanchez was installed as Superintendent. But every time it comes time to write about state level initiatives underway, David reverts to simplistic black hat (charter /voucher) white hat (public district) breakdowns.
Could you answer this question honestly, David: if the council was composed of a majority of long time, entrenched mid-level administrators and bureaucrats from Sunnyside and TUSD, how would that go, in terms of the ultimate outcomes recommended by such a group for producing improvements to the education available to students in Southern Arizona?
Is this “Classrooms First” council, just a put up job to give political cover to a Ducey predetermined outcome? Maybe check ALECs, and Graham-Keegan’s policy proposals and you will have a fair idea of what a pre-determined outcome would look like, so Ducey can trot in and say, “Gee, a bi-partisan group looked at the issue and came up with the proposals, not me!” Critics on this site constantly whine about TUSD, but there are about 250 public school districts in this State, with an incredible range of sizes, needs, tax bases, and student diversities, and a one size fits all “solution” is complete nonsense. I love the issue, the legislature starves districts, of operational money, and capital money (the next lawsuit), then says “see, they aren’t doing their job and we need more choice and more privatization”, which is nonsense. This playbook from ALEC is going on in many States, including Nevada.
The “outcome” was predetermined the minute Proposition 123 passed allowing little Dougie and his gang to walk away from their court-ordered liability to return the money they misappropriated from educational funds. Anyone expecting more money for education in Arizona should take up a vigil and await the sunrise in the west.
Frances – I wonder if you will at some point recognize to what degree:
A) having a low functioning, conspicuously poorly led public district this large — almost 50K students enrolled and and a hundred thousand or more people in the Tucson area directly connected through their family relationships with those students, getting their primary impressions of whether or not “public district schools” are responsible in dealing with young people’s educational needs — is a huge PR problem for the “pro public schools” / anti-privatization movement. All the propaganda about the supposed superiority of public districts — which may be true of well managed districts like Flowing Wells — comes off as self-serving lies to constituents who have tried to get students educated in this district. TUSD administrators are conspicuously not responsible – educationally, fiscally – and, though the district IS under-funded, it is quite easy for anyone who observes them to see them wasting and mis-applying the limited funds available to them — or, as Sanchez bragged in his State of the District address this spring — GIVING MILLIONS OF DESEG DOLLARS BACK TO TAXPAYERS — in this context, what an “achievement” to brag about. If anyone who has watched the tragic bungling of the district’s affairs for the last three years needed evidence to confirm that the current leadership does not understand what kind of administrative actions are needed to deliver the best possible services to students enrolled in these beleaguered schools, that was it. Go on the district’s website and watch the address. There is a video of it available for your viewing pleasure.
2) current leadership in TUSD is collaborating with the privatizers and playing into their hands. My guess is that this is because they are money starved through their own mismanagement — can’t marshal public support, can’t pass bonds and overrides, can’t cooperate with deseg authorities and so waste those funds in ill-advised legal battles (or give them back to taxpayers) and so the only funding option they have is to knuckle under and make nice with Ducey and his friends. Sanchez co-wrote an editorial about how we need to reduce teacher credentialing requirements with Lisa Graham Keegan. TUSD governance and administrative leadership helped pass 123. They can’t and won’t stand up for the defense-of-sound-public-school-policies-and-funding-mechanisms because they seem to have no principles higher than “give us more money any which way.”
For God’s sake and for the sake of children enrolled in our state’s poorly managed school “systems,” wake up and smell the coffee and stop disparaging commenters who “whine” about TUSD. I suppose if you’d been on the Titanic you would have complained about passengers who “whined” about that iceberg on the horizon, too.
If we can’t force reform and secure better leadership in TUSD, it seems unlikely the cause of public schools will prevail in our state. We need to get rid of the poster-child-of-dysfunctionality privatizers point to when they say: “See? This is what public schools are.”