If you’ve been looking at coverage of education issues in the Star recently, you’ve read that TUSD is shafting teachers by keeping their compensation unnecessarily low. In July of this year, Alexis Huicochea wrote an article headlined, Tucson Unified going slow on teacher raises despite Prop. 123. Then last Friday, Tim Steller wrote a column with the headline, TUSD teachers’ money balanced district’s books. Most likely, neither of the Star staffers wrote their own headlines, but their stories make a similar point: TUSD is holding back money that should be going into teacher compensation.
Is it true? That’s a complicated question which I can’t answer to my complete satisfaction. I’m sure the claim in the Huicochea article is mostly false. I don’t know how accurate Steller’s column is, though I know he didn’t make his point clearly and forcefully enough for me to arrive at a satisfactory answer.
Before looking at the two articles, I want to separate out two related but distinct issues. One is the question of how much money teachers make through their salaries and other compensation. The other is where the money comes from—which funding sources are used to pay teachers. Both are worthy of discussion, but they’re two separate topics, and when they’re tangled together, it can lead to sloppy logic and false conclusions.
The funding source issue is part of a very complex discussion about budgets which is beyond my ability to sort out successfully, though I try. Huicochea and Steller aren’t experts in the art of budget analysis either, based on what they’ve written. I don’t get the sense they understand the process any better than I do. And even people who have the necessary background in school district budgeting and accounting and make the effort to sort out budget issues can disagree.
The Star pieces are focused on two different TUSD funding sources: Prop 123 and Prop 301. Their assertions, so far as I can tell, are at least partly accurate when it comes to the specific use of the money flowing from those two propositions. But even if there were questions about how the funding was distributed, does that mean teachers got less money than they should have received, as the pieces maintain? Let’s start by looking at Huicochea’s article.
In her article, Huicochea left the distinct impression that TUSD teachers were only getting a $700 raise, far less than teachers in other local districts, and according to her article, the reason was, the district reneged on its promise to devote most of its Prop 123 funds to teacher salaries. But if you look at the new employee contract, it shows returning TUSD teachers received a $2,000 raise. Here’s the 2015-16 contract. Here’s the 2016-17 contract. You’ll see two identical looking teacher salary tables, but the numbers on the 2016-17 contract in each category are $1,500 higher than they were in 2015-16. Moving up a year in experience adds another $500. That means a returning teacher gets a $2,000 salary boost.
Did all the added funding come from Prop 123? That’s a separate question. As a teacher with 30-plus years in public schools, I received hundreds of monthly paychecks from school districts, yet I never once asked myself which funds were used to pay my salary. I never once called up the payroll department or the administrator in charge of budgeting to try and find out. I didn’t care. When it came to my salary, all that mattered to me was the numbers on my paycheck.
So, from this retired teacher’s standpoint, what matters is, returning teachers got a $2,000 raise, not the $700 figure which is the takeaway from Huicochea’s article. Did the raise come from Prop 123 money? That’s a different issue. True, the board voted $700 for salaries after Prop 123 passed as the article said, but it voted in the remainder of the raise before election day. If people want to argue the district cheated teachers by guaranteeing them a raise even if Prop 123 went down, then gave them the rest of the raise after the proposition passed, that’s their choice. That’s not how it looks to me, but I don’t have any control over the conclusions people arrive at. But to say, or imply, TUSD teachers got a $700 raise is simply false. Was TUSD “going slow on teacher raises despite Prop. 123,” as the article’s headline says? Not according to the teachers contract, which is what matters.
Steller’s article doesn’t offer a definite answer to his assertion that teachers got less compensation than they should have in some years, though that may be true. He’s talking about performance pay, which is in addition to teachers’ salaries and is supposed to come from Prop 301 funds. He says some of those funds which should have gone to teachers were held back, starting with the last year John Pedicone was superintendent and continuing during the years H.T. Sanchez has been superintendent. That may be absolutely true, or maybe not. In a Facebook comment string, former Superintendent John Pedicone wrote that Steller was wrong about what happened with Prop 301 money on his watch. Who’s right? I don’t know, but until the difference of opinion is cleared up, it certainly muddies the waters.
But once again, this retired teacher is more interested in how much money TUSD teachers got, or didn’t get, in performance pay over the past four years. That leads me to ask two questions. First, how much did TUSD allot for teacher performance pay during those years? Second, and more important, how did performance pay at TUSD during those years compare with what was given to teachers in other local districts? If the compensation for TUSD teachers was significantly lower than other districts in the Tucson area, that matters, and it needs to be explained. If, on the other hand, TUSD teachers had similar access to performance pay as other teachers in the area, then it’s either a non-issue, or it’s an issue the other districts should be held accountable for as well.
I don’t have the skills or the time to answer the two questions I posed. It would mean going back four or more years into the salary and compensation structure at TUSD, doing similar investigations into some representative districts in the area, then looking at all the information gathered and having the knowledge and understanding to draw accurate conclusions. That would be a major endeavor, well above my pay grade and ability level. I’m relatively certain Steller hasn’t done the background work either. He writes multiple columns every week—writes them well and informatively, I should add—on a wide variety of topics and has to do serious research for each of them. The monumental amount of time necessary to do a cross-district comparison may be justified for a lengthy investigative article on the subject, but not for one day’s column. Unless he’s done significantly more work than is indicated in his column, Steller’s conclusion, and its importance in how much TUSD teachers were compensated, is still an open question.
Full Disclosure Note: I was criticized in the comments section recently for not revealing contributions I’ve made to candidates for the TUSD board. Though that post and this one are more analytical than political, the commenter was more right than wrong. So, in the interest of full disclosure, I have contributed to the campaigns of Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2016.
David, what are you doing giving them money? Our schools and our community have suffered greatly under their leadership. TUSD now appears to be the least trusted public school organization in the state.
Can you not see how badly the board needs to change? You are hurting Tucson. Kids, parents, and businesses. Please stop it.
Steller’s column was about how a district administrator said flat out that TUSD used PROP 301 money on things OTHER than teacher salaries and incentives. That is a violation of Prop 301.
Anything that David Safier writes concerning TUSD MUST be reviewed Cautiously and Critically!
He is a Minion of TUSD!!!
Wait – you mean the $400,000 white hispanic Sanchez and the greatest exploiters of illegal immigrants, the MEChA Grijalva’s are stiffing teachers? American teachers, many of them white? Say it ain’t so, say it ain’t so!
“I never once called up the payroll department or the administrator in charge of budgeting to try and find out. I didn’t care. When it came to my salary, all that mattered to me was the numbers on my paycheck.”
Of course you didn’t care. For 30 years you lived off the backs of hard working taxpayers, most of which you had disdain for, would now consider them “Deplorables”. But you stuffed your pockets with those taxpayer dollars!
David, here is a point made by many teachers who retired during that 4 year period, and there were a lot of them. If they were not paid the full amount possible of 301 funds for performance that THEY PERFORMED, then they were denied a substantial yearly sum which could have greatly impacted their retirement pensions after they retired. To save the funds they had earned to give to younger teachers in the future is just wrong. A simple point I make: I was able to buy back $2K of prior service before my retirement. By doing that, my pension (a fairly small one) increased $200 a month for the rest of my life. Now granted I am comparing apples and oranges as prior service is different from performance pay from 301, but the result is the same. It makes a huge difference to the retiree. A lot of hard feelings out there over this one.
David: interestingly, your blog and the “full disclosure note” say the same thing: “I question whether the data on the district’s failure to distribute 301 money is accurate or comprehensive enough to be conclusive,” in other words, “I support the re-election campaigns of Kristel Foster and Cam Juarez.” As another commenter said recently, your blogs on TUSD can usually be summarized thus, with no loss of information: VOTE FOR MY FRIENDS! VOTE FOR MY FRIENDS! VOTE FOR MY FRIENDS!
Those who heard you in 2014 justify and excuse flat-out lies about enrollment numbers and mock the idea that board members should tell the public the truth are pretty certain that your professed concern with accuracy and data is just one more ingredient in the noxious partisan snake oil you sell.
The most chilling moment in the September 29 TUSD Board forum was when Kristel Foster talked “touchingly” about how HT Sanchez wants to stay in town and how she and he are having talks about where in Tucson his daughter, now in elementary school, should attend high school. I imagine that the majority of the people in the room had the same thought simultaneously: “My God, that woman actually thinks she can talk people into voting for her by waving the prospect of another decade of Sanchez at the helm in front of them!” (Let’s see, at the going rate of between $400K and $500K lost on his compensation per year, how much would that cost TUSD – $4 to $5 million?) Then she went further with her heartfelt appeal, pouting and speaking in doleful tones with her self-consciously modulated, “sincere” sing-songy voice: “If he goes, it won’t be just him – a lot of people will go with him!”
Hallelujah! You mean we could get rid of all of them at once?
Where do we sign up?
David Safier’s TO DO list, 2016 TUSD Board election edition:
1. Praise Sanchez. “Not your father’s TUSD!” “At the helm of a rusty old ship, but moving it in the right direction!”
2. Undermine the notion that school districts can desegregate when there are charter schools in town. (If we don’t build a Fruchthendler-Sabino pipeline, after all, more white students may leave TUSD!)
2. Disparage Alexis Huicochea.
3. Promote Prop 123. (Note to self: Make sure to mention I will be “holding my nose” while voting for it.)
3. As an avant-garde “progressive” blogger with “beaucoup de credibility,” fail to cover the fact that the supposedly pro-labor candidates Foster & Juarez voted to outsource subs, voted to increase to $21 million the contract with the outsourcing company, and then received $5K donations from a joint account co-owned by a housewife in the Phoenix area and her husband, who just happened to be a marketing executive in the for-profit company to which subs were outsourced. Make sure to fail to mention that, though Juarez said he would return the donation, it appeared at the time that the last campaign finance report was due that he had not in fact done so.
4. Disparage Tim Steller, only make sure to cut him more slack than I did for Alexis Huicochea. (Huicochea is a woman, after all, just like Diane Douglas…)
5. Blame all TUSD’s problems on funding insufficiencies attributable to Ducey and the AZ leg.
6. Lamely justify TUSD’s failure to apply 123 funds to teacher salary improvements, as Sanchez had promised TUSD would do. (Note to self: “He lies all the time. Who notices any more?”)
7. Blast the evil hedge funds that support PRIVATIZATION. Keep forgetting to mention TUSD’s outsourcing subs to a for-profit company.
8. Accept another dinner invitation from the Grijalvas. (Just how many dutifully sycophantic blog posts does it take to earn one…?)
What,Again glad to see you have kicked the drug habit. You are on fire you adorable deplorable.
The only board member that is presently in, the way I understand it, who was part of the original decision making is Stegeman. He was president and Pedigone was superintendent. The last few years the newer boards have been doing what they have to to straighten it out. So yes the board needs to be held responsible but not the present board and superintendent. They have created a solution. However, I do not know how the teachers who did not get what they feel they should have should be compensated nor do I know what was behind the original decision to change what the teachers’ were paid.
Oops, I mis-numbered my list. It actually includes 9 sycophantic blog posts, not just 7.
Do I get another dinner invitation?
Or perhaps another television appearance with Ann-Eve?
The “as an ordinary teacher” routine, which Safier pulls out of his bag of tricks now and then, is a scam.
David, fess up: Did you, during the years that you taught, have to rely on your teaching salary as your sole means of support? You often seem, when you refer to yourself as “a retired teacher” and say all you ever cared about was the size of your paycheck, to imply that that’s how you lived your life, like most members of the middle class, scraping by.
Reflect on this a little bit: if that wasn’t what your life was / is like, perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to “pass” as an Ordinary Joe and perhaps you shouldn’t be spinning things like the district’s failure to fulfill its 123 promises and its hoarding of 301 monies.
On this topic I much prefer gcb1’s posts to your blogs.
I’m surprised that no one mentioned that salaries were essentially frozen for about 8 years in TUSD. No one moved a step. No one got a pay raise. So a teacher, with 20 yrs experience, may only be on step 12. At Step 10, an experienced teacher finally breaks $40,000. Like gcb1 mentioned, salary stagnation not only affects the here and now, it affects your pension. I notice the new TUSD salary schedule actually has 81 steps. Hilarious! Anyone on step 80 or 81, please reveal yourselves. Here is the TUSD salary schedule, pp. 72-73 http://tusd1.org/contents/employment/Docum…
It might have been OK to stiff teachers (not really), but it certainly was not OK to give an inexperienced Supt, with a touch of narcissism, a salary higher than the President of the United States. Vote out the incumbents.
TUSD is a money pot and political base for the Grijalvas.
David, this is not so complicated. (1) Over the past several years, the 301 plans were designed in a way that caused millions of dollars intended for teachers to instead accumulate in the bank. Read TUSD’s accounting statements and external audits if you have any doubt. The amount not spent has accumulated to more than a full year of 301 funding. (2) None of the one-time 123 money and only a quarter of the ongoing 123 money went to teacher raises (notwithstanding promises to the contrary just a few weeks before). (3) The pay for long-term substitutes has been significantly cut. That is it. It is quite straightforward, unless you are deliberately trying to obfuscate it.
And that’s what he does, Mark, as I’m sure you are aware. He deliberately obfuscates every issue where a clear understanding would mean that people might not vote for his good friends Foster and Juarez (or Grijalva and Darland in the last election cycle).
If people always consulted the comment streams, they could develop a more well-rounded view of what is actually going on, but I think part of what happens here is that people backing the Board majority link and like Safier’s blog posts and then many who are directed here read just the posts and not the comment streams. The posts are always designed to “look like” real reporting, and the topics in the blogs are always selected to reinforce readers’ support of the board majority.
I’d appeal to Safier’s conscience as a progressive, if I thought he had one. But it’s pretty clear at this point that he does not.
Mark Stegeman sometimes highlights information that the public should be aware of.
Other information that the public should be aware of, he does not circulate.
His methods are, in the experience of those who have observed the district closely for the last several years, just as selective as any other political operative’s, including Foster & Juarez’s, including Safier’s.
It’s good that the September 29 TUSD Board Forum made it crystal clear to the public that Stegeman is angling to force the “Give University High School separate site!!!” proposal through. If he gets a board majority aligned behind that again, it will be fascinating to watch his supposed advocacy for implementation of the desegregation order and cooperation with the desegregation authority fade. It seems highly unlikely that removing the opportunity to take UHS’s AP course offerings from the population enrolled at Rincon, the high school with which UHS co-locates, is going to pass the sniff test with Judge Bury and Special Master Hawley. People who believe that a co-located middle school solves the integration problems with this plan have never taken the trouble to understand desegregation policy. They engage in wishful thinking and over-estimate the degree to which their self-serving manipulations will be able to win over Bury and Hawley, two men who have shown themselves very capable of recognizing a scam when they see one.
Sadly, if Stegeman is re-elected, no matter who is elected to the Board with him, it seems likely that the infighting and dysfunction on the Board will continue. From what I’ve observed, it follows him like the cloud of dust followed Pig Pen’s friend Charlie Brown.
Unless you read Steller’s column, you wouldn’t know from reading this blog that he spent most of his time using the public utterances of the TUSD CFO to back up his arguments that TUSD has been using 301 funds to “balance” their overall budget. That inherently means that they were NOT giving that money to teachers when they deserved it. This was not a matter that was publicly questioned by ANY of the Board members, including Stegeman, who now suddenly weighs in because he is up for re-election.
Safier is a blatant apologist for his friends, Foster and Juarez, and he is obvious about his loyalties in terms of both his writing and where he puts his money. There has been a pattern over the years that he puts out one of these defensive blog posts anytime Sanchez or the Board majority are being held accountable for their sleazy practices. Like all true paranoids, Sanchez thinks the Tucson media (when it bothers to report on anything going on in TUSD) is against him and Safier is his designated defender. The fact that he was a teacher in another state gives him some supposed credibility, but the more telling part of his resume is the fact that he is a Democratic Party regular who frequently contributes to the party’s candidates and causes.
Like many of the readers of this blog, I am also a Democrat and an educator. I recently stopped recurring contributions to some of my party’s candidates because they had time during their campaigns to host a fundraiser for Foster and Juarez, who do not deserve re-election. I’ll still likely vote for these Democrats, but they don’t need my money if they are going to back other Democrats who have made the jobs of my colleagues in TUSD harder every day they have been in office. Party loyalty can cloud your judgment, but the actions of Foster and Juarez in office have convinced me that they need to go. However, unlike other former Stegeman foes who now find common cause with him because of his opposition the Board majority, I’m also for ending his eight years of scheming and obfuscating. Stegeman is adept at makeovers, but he isn’t fooling everyone.
Imagine, just for a minute, Adelita running for Congress when El Gordo retires.
Can you see it? El Gordita representing Arizonians in Washington D.C.
It’s the plan my friends, and the people of his district will vote for her, or else!
Que Ruben (how’d those signs get in the back of my car?) Reyes.
What should we know Juan? Or else what?
TUSD is a lost cause. The institutional culture of the central administration is corrupt, ignorant, and self-serving. Years ago, the balance was tipped in favor of the mentality that now prevails and the district passed the point of no return. It cannot be reformed. You couldn’t even successfully explain what needs to be done to your standard-issue TUSD bureaucrat. They don’t speak the language of professionalism either in the field of education or in the field of public administration. All they know is quid-pro-quo and protecting their “homies” and gaming the system to produce stats that conceal rather than reveal the reality in the schools.
What is happening now with the Sanchez regime is like watching a sick animal that becomes infested with parasites. When the organism’s natural defense systems have long since broken down, it becomes easy prey.
Parents should get their children out. Everyone else should resist the temptation to become involved. It’s a waste of time to allow constructive energy to be sucked into this sad institution, with its chronic lies and its sick addiction to the exploitation of the poor and ignorant.
Watching the recent TUSD Board candidate forums, my overwhelming impression was: some of these candidates are better than others, but none of them will be able to solve this district’s problems. The old rusty ship is sinking under the weight of its own malfeasance, and a new slate of officers will not keep it from going down.