Lest we forget.
When Doug Ducey was pushing Prop 123, he promised that it was only a “first step” toward improving Arizona education, leaving the impression that more money would be forthcoming after it passed. His actions, however—cutting the state education budget while giving tax cuts to his rich friends who invested in his campaign—made it abundantly clear, he never had any intention of spending more on education than he absolutely had to.
Once Prop 123 passed, Ducey was asked, if it was just a first step, what comes next? His answer:
“We’re going to take the rest of the day off,” he said. “We’re going to celebrate a little bit.”
That day has stretched into 55 days without a public statement about the promised next step. I’ve seen nothing in the news. I’ve received three AzAWESOME (why arizona rocks.) emails from Ducey’s communications team, along with an AZ Briefing Room and a Week In Review email. Only two of them mention education briefly, and they say nothing about any plans regarding K-12 education.
The eight week silence is deafening.
This article appears in Jul 7-13, 2016.
Anyone who thought Ducey was going to do something else for education — or that he would be “moveable” on this issue through the pressure of interest groups and the public pronouncements of female clergywomen social justice advocates, stay-at-home mom education funding advocates, etc. — should be sitting in the corner wearing a dunce cap, David, not filling space in a local paper and wasting the public’s time with “Next Step Watch: Day 1, Day 5, Day 32, Day 36, Day 55.
Lest we forget:
When HT Sanchez was pushing Prop 123, he promised that the money TUSD received if the Proposition passed would be used to give teachers raises, and helped mobilize teachers, TEA, AEA, his media friends including Safier, etc., ad nauseam to beg the public to vote for the Proposition. Sanchez’s actions, however — giving only 30% of the 123 money, once it was received by TUSD, to teacher raises — made it abundantly clear, he never had any intention of using the bulk of the money filched from the land trust to significantly raise the salaries of full time, permanent, professional teachers, in a district which is bleeding permanent, professionally qualified teachers at alarming rates and replacing them with impermanent, insufficiently professionally credentialed subs.
On the topic of subs, was any of the 123 money used to restore some of the damage done to their pay scale and benefits after their services were outsourced under the Sanchez administration? No. I suggest you watch the subs commenting in the Call to the Audience at last night’s TUSD Board meeting, David. Then sit tight and watch your friends in the Board majority voting to approve a budget which has no improvements to their pay scales and (recently removed) benefits. The video of the meeting is not up yet, but once it is posted you can find it here:
http://www.tusd1.org/contents/govboard/gbvideo_archive.html
In general I suggest you turn your binoculars — and your condescension and sarcasm — on subjects a little closer to home, David. There are several people in Southern Arizona who merit just as much mockery as you dish out to Ducey, but month after month goes by and you never give them what they deserve.
As an educator in Phoenix, I was glad proposition 123 passed as I was then given a long overdue raise. I am happy that you are keeping the focus on the next step. Voters need to be reminded of what was promised for future funding so that come the next election they may make better choices.
A good percentage of the population will believe, since 123 passed, that Ducey “did something” for education. They listen to the teachers who say, as the commenter above does, that they are “glad proposition 123 passed” and that as a result they received “long overdue raises,” and thereby much of the pressure that had been building to increase funding to public ed — and to do it in a PROPER way — is dissipated.
It’s only those who should have voted against 123 — the teachers, their unions, the “education advocacy organizations,” etc., who think, naively, — stupidly, to put the accurate term on their behavior and attitudes — that their capitulation should have resulted in “next steps.” If they had been paying attention to what type of ALEC-influenced strategy 123 was and understood what the proper political response was — to oppose 123, stating clearly why it was the wrong way to fund public ed and then marshaling all the pressure that was building behind increasing funding in the run-up to the November 2016 elections — they might have had some chance of getting the right outcome.
As things stand, they’ve lost a good portion of their potential base: some, as I stated above, think something good has been done for public education and Ducey did it. Others are so disgusted with the establishment Democrats who endorsed the Prop that they’re unwilling to get behind people who sold out or “held their noses” and voted for the proposition.
What a mess — a mess complicated, in Southern Arizona, by the pitiful shenanigans of the crew running TUSD, progressives-in-name-only who seem to be taking several pages out of the Ducey-ALEC play book: inflate administrative salaries and give central administrators fat bonuses while keeping the professionals in the classrooms on poverty-level wages, outsource subs, agree with Graham-Keegan that the right response to the teacher supply crisis is to reduce teacher credentialing requirements, give deseg funding back to taxpayers and brag about “reducing expenses” in a tragically underfunded district, agree that deseg funding can be phased down once the deseg case is resolved (NOT sound deseg policy to anyone who understands deseg), in every possible way cooperate with the corporate over-testing agenda. The policy choices in TUSD for the past three years give the impression that HT Sanchez is a closer ally of Lea Marquez-Peterson, one of Ducey’s chief allies in Southern Arizona, than he is of his supposed “boss” Adelita Grijalva, who looks very much like she’s being duped by her ill-advised confidence in Sanchez and led to the edge of a “how-could-you-possibly-think-the-admin-behaviors-you-and-your-puppets-are-rubber-stamping-could-possibly-be-perceived-as-progressive?!” political suicide cliff.
But Safier persists with his inane Ducey-watch and pulls every punch when writing (or, more often, choosing not to write) about TUSD. His commentary is a waste of space in a supposedly “progressive” paper and an embarrassment to the party whose “interests” he pretends to promote.
I couldn’t agree more with the analysis of the commenter above. It saddens me that teachers were brought to such a desperate place that they would be willing to sell out their future chance at any type of prosperity for piddly scraps now. Of course, this was the strategy all along of Ducey-after all he takes his plays from the ALEC handbook. The cowardly capitulation on the part of the AEA and ASBA should give members of those organizations pause. I seriously question their leadership. Additionally, I would ask people to pay close attention to the recommendations of the Classrooms First folks. If you haven’t taken a look at their initial suggestions, I strongly suggest you do so. It’s not looking good-another shocking surprise. What a shame that all the energy so painstakingly harnessed for public education over the past couple of years was squandered on a shill like Prop 123.
An article titled “Public Schools? To Kansas Conservatives, They’re ‘Government Schools’” by Julie Bosman, printed in the New York Times July 9, 2016, might be a clue for Ducey’s so-called next step. Using semantics to demonize public schools as government schools the plan to further defund and ultimately eliminate public education in favor of charter schools in Arizona can continue. A long time ago, state and local governments were responsible for creating and maintaining infrastructures such as emergency services, utilities, medical and mental health facilities, and public education. Then the public fell for the politician’s lies that spinning all these services off to the private sector would “save” the tax payers money. So here we are today, paying more in taxes, getting less and paying more for services, and all the while money continues to disappear in a black hole inhabited by dark money special interests.
Dark money special interests=Hillary Clinton. Let’s be honest.
David, why would we expect to hear or see anything substantive regarding comprehensive K-12 proposals from either Ducey or anyone else until after the 2016 election cycle is over? The people to be asking questions about “next steps” are the Democrats and Republicans seeking legislative seats in the August primary and November general elections. Ducey isn’t going to put any kind of sweeping plan out until he knows the names of the new players and the numbers on each side. Also, why in the world would we expect that a died-in-the wool ideologue like him will propose anything other than a continuance of his pro-charter, pro-privatization, anti-public schools campaign?
The two main political blogs in this town (this one and Blog for Arizona) focus far too much on what is going on in state and national politics. The TUSD Board election (which has enormous consequences given that TUSD is the second largest school district in the state and the bellwether for the “state of education” locally) and other races for local office deserve more attention from these two outlets because God knows we won’t get it from the ever-weakening Star and the TV stations that focus on stories about fires and car accidents. The Weekly would garner more attention and respect if they got over their obsession with Ally Miller and Doug Ducey and devoted more time to serious coverage of local races whose outcomes will have serious effects on daily life in Tucson and Pima County.
Let’s really be honest – dark money and special interests = all of them. Happy Bastille Day!
I think the time has come for real names, full disclosure of interests are a requirement for publication. You have all the right in the world to your opinions and acceptance in the public debates but let us end the hiding behind unsigned views.
Say it and sign it, or shut up!
Hakeson (H. Akeson?) : The Tucson Weekly’s policy is to permit anonymous comments and Safier has written on more than one occasion that it is his intention to respect commenters’ anonymity. Some of the most well-informed and valid commentary in these streams during the past three years has come from people who choose to remain anonymous, and in some cases, what is said in anonymous comments seems to indicate that this may be because the authors of the comments have direct connections with the institutions discussed (employees, or, in the case of a school district, parents with children enrolled in the district’s schools).
If you have never been in the position of someone with a stake in an institution who does not have the freedom to comment under your own name because you fear retaliation, be grateful that you’ve never been in what, for those who experience this, is a difficult and uncomfortable situation.
I read these comment streams regularly and I do not want people in this situation to be denied the ability to provide their perspectives in Tucson Weekly comment streams. If you don’t like anonymous commentary, you can always choose not to read comments that do not have names attached to them. You should not, in my opinion, be advocating that other readers be denied the ability to access information provided by anonymous commenters because you do not happen to like this form of commentary.
Grounded, and sent to my room.
No, Harvey, you have not been grounded and sent to your room. You’ve just been asked not to impose your preferences (“Say it and sign it, or shut up!”), which many other readers do not share, on people who have good reason to maintain their anonymity when they comment.
As one of the anonymous commenters above noted, the mainstream media organizations in Tucson do not do a good job getting comprehensive, sound information about local governance to the public. The Arizona Daily Star, for example, sometimes does not report relevant information on TUSD, and there have even been instances within the last year of the Star deleting online comments that criticize TUSD leadership or that contain information not favorable to the district. In this context, alternative channels of information are much needed. Safier won’t address many of the relevant topics directly in his blogs, probably because of his relationships within the Democratic Party, but some of those who comment in the streams on his pieces have been willing to do so. I hope they will continue; it would be an unfortunate loss if we could not keep hearing from them.
More power to Citizens United, “Dark Money” in campaigns, secret agreements for holding people in foreign countries for the United States, on and on. I do understand the need to protect whistleblowers. There are ways around it if you really wanted to receive the information and relay it through a third party as received from “tipster” or “informant”. I also understand “time is money” and so much is done on the cheap these days. I also realize there are “unstable” people living among us. How can I hide if you use my first name?
I believe the point “Another Anonymous Commenter” is trying to make, Hakeson, is the very well founded, reasonable, and civilly expressed point that the public needs fairly complete and honest information about local governance delivered through the media — mainstream, alternative or via citizen commentary — if they are to make well-founded, constructive decisions about how to vote in elections. That’s the point of the democratic system, isn’t it, to be able to vote leaders out when their records in office do not merit them being entrusted with additional terms in office? What do you do, then, when certain parties who control or influence local media coverage decide it falls within their purview to prevent certain facts — say, for example, the gross administrative incompetence of a key figure employed by a public institution or a systematic, pervasive practice of lying to cover up problems and irregularities — from reaching the public’s attention? Those who know what is going on and believe they have a responsibility to communicate it find ways to get the information out, and sometimes that may involve anonymous commentary to protect those in vulnerable positions.
You choose to post under your name, I assume with good reason, and others choose not to, we can only assume also with good reason. If their commentary is civil and their information relevant, it is their business how they choose to communicate, not yours. If you don’t believe information delivered anonymously is worth considering, discount it in your own mind and move on. In any case, it would be best to refrain from expressing your opinion by issuing peremptory, uncivil commands to other commenters. “Say it and sign it, or shut up!” How rude.
Got it! Good bye.