As I was leaving the studio of the Bill Buckmaster Show Thursday, Bill told me that TUSD’s new superintendent, Dr. Gabriel Trujillo, was on the show last week, and Trujillo mentioned that the district is rebranding itself as Tucson Unified in place of the longstanding tradition of referring to it as TUSD. It’s not a huge deal, obviously. It doesn’t change the way the district operates or educates its students. But I like it. Words matter, and the feeling the public has about the district matters.
The words “Tucson Unified” have a nice, positive ring to them. They link our city name with a sense of togetherness, indicating that Tucson is unified in our pursuit of education for our children.
The rebranding process has been going on for awhile. It began before Trujillo was chosen as interim superintendent, then superintendent, but I hadn’t noticed it until Bill pointed it out to me. From this point forward, I’ll use “Tucson Unified” instead of TUSD in my posts.
If you haven’t had a chance to hear Dr. Trujillo, the interview on the Buckmaster Show is a good place to start. You can listen to it on the show’s website. He comes across as smart, positive and personable. Early indications are, the board made a good pick.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2017.
“The feeling the public has about the district matters,” David? That is a revealing statement, and perhaps the best way to describe the motivation behind how some interact with the district and the media, i.e. working against reporters’ and members of the publics’ efforts to communicate honestly with the electorate about what conditions in the district actually are.
But what the district ACTUALLY IS matters more to the soundness of students’ educations and to the overall quality of our community than “the feeling the public has about it.” People who take the trouble to track budgets have already seen too much money wasted on rebranding and PR, money that could have been applied to make genuine progress in the all-important bedrock reality, the quality of services delivered to students.
Perhaps you can start helping the STUDENTS in the district by reporting on what matters to them: not name changes and attempts to paste “Unified” over the very real discord, turf wars, and infighting which have too often characterized how the district operates, but, for example, what percent of classrooms in TUSD have fully qualified teachers delivering instruction to students and how subs are managed. (Outsourced? Underpaid?) If Trujillo starts to make beneficial change in those areas, we will have some REAL achievements, worth celebrating and reporting. Reporters and bloggers could do some genuine good if they contributed to UNIFYING the public behind those worthy goals.
What an absolute joke.
One of the worst school district in the state should be worried more about the shitty quality of education in its lousy classrooms, rather than marketing.
Since the district has and is already spending the money to re-brand itself, how about a name that says it all, to the parents, the students and the teachers who are actually trying to make a difference.
Instead of Tucson Unified — which sounds like a British Football Club — I give you the succinct “TUC U!”
“We are not a dump!” Might have been more fitting if you are trying to fool all the people all the time.
Let’s pull four numbers:
1. The overall student growth percentile of Tucson Unified;
2. The percentage of teachers saying that they are Very Satisfied with their job;
3. The percentage of parents saying they are Very Satisfied with the quality of their child’s education;
4. The percentage of students saying they are Very Satisfied with the quality of their education.
Really, the only four numbers that count in education. Tracking these three numbers, we will be able to see if this new Superintendent is someone who can make a difference – someone who can unify the district.
All four of these numbers have fallen dramatically for the nation 2011-2015, but not in Arizona – we went up significantly.
At the bottom of all 50 states, our schools continue to sit, a fact always worth noting: near the very bottom of all 50 in every category. We stay there because of hard core bickering by politicians, charter school proponents and citizen grouches who never go near schools and resent every cent spent on someone else’s kids. Voting in the affirmative doesn’t seem to matter. The super majority of politicians in Phoenix has proven they will nullify election results they don’t like. People actually can be public school superintendents and despise the idea of public education. Not what the founders envisioned.
Maybe that’ll get them out from under the Deseg order. Hahahaha.
TU will remain, like TUSD, a cesspool where the adults play political and social engineering games and the kids get screwed.
This is fluff.
Response to Constant Voter: you say “At the bottom of all 50 states, our schools continue to sit, a fact”
No, a falsehood. Here are a few facts:
1. In the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress, our 8th grade African Americans scored number one in the nation, up from 6th in 2011 in math.
2. Our Hispanics ranked 11th, up from 35th in 2011.
3. Our white students ranked 6th.
From 2011, 4th grade to 2015 8th grade, Arizona’s combined Math and Reading gains on NAEP ranked number one in the nation, primarily because the rest of the nation tanked under the flaws of “Race to the Top.”
In the most recent National Center for Education statistics, Arizona ranked first at increasing the number of high school graduates, no other state was even close.
Nationwide, the percentage of parents rating their child’s school excellent dropped from 36% to 24%, a point away from a 47 year low. Numerous districts, such as Chandler Unified, hit all-time highs at 75%.
Murders by juveniles in Arizona dropped from 70 in 1992 to 7 in 2012, the largest such drop in the nation.
Stop giving them good news. It’s not what they want.