- Image courtesy of shutterstock.com
TUSD hired a group of five consultants to help it develop a five-year strategic plan. The hiring process has earned the district two days of bad press in the Star (here and here) and put a cloud over Superintendent H.T. Sanchez’s head. And rightly so. There are questions that need to be answered. Whether the cloud results in a light sprinkle or a thunderstorm remains to be seen.
I only know what I’ve read about possible conflicts of interest in the Star, so I’m not going to weigh in on that issue. But I do want to look at some problems with the consultants themselves — two in particular, Cathy Mincberg and Terry Abbott. Their backgrounds are inextricably linked to the fortunes of Rod Paige. He was the superintendent of the Houston School District who went on to be George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education. During Paige’s tenure in Houston, the district used deceptive practices to inflate student scores on high stakes tests. Before the problems were widely publicized, the press was marveling at the “Houston miracle.” When Paige moved to D.C. with Bush, he was instrumental in creating and promoting No Child Left Behind, based in large part on the bogus Houston model.
The two consultants are also linked to some of the heavily funded groups that form a major part of the middle-right-to-a-little-left contingent of the conservative “education reform” movement.
Education consultants bring their own agenda to the table, which often has more influence on their conclusions than the feedback they receive from the district and the community. These two consultants who promoted the failed educational policies of Rod Paige and the Bush administration (along with a third Texas educational heavy hitter on the team, Mike Moses) should not be the people advising TUSD about its future.
Whether or not there were improprieties in the hiring of the consultants, it was a botched job. TUSD should find a way to cancel the consulting contracts, then cancel the February 25 meeting with the community, after which it can restart the search for consultants using greater transparency and deeper research into the people being hired.
Here’s a look at the two most troubling members of the consulting team, Cathy Mincberg and Terry Abbott.
Cathy Mincberg, the President and CEO for the Center for Reform of School Systems, heads the consultant list. According to a 2001 article in the Houston Press written during the early days of the Bush adminstration,
Cathy is a former HISD board president who, like past trustee and then-superintendent Paige, utilized a revolving door to move from an unpaid board position to her $150,000-a-year district job.
In 2004, the New York Times reported,
Ms. Mincberg helped engineer Dr. Paige’s rise to superintendent in 1994 while she was on the board and before she became a paid administrator.
Mincberg’s Rod Paige connection is definitely troubling. The Paige connection with the next consultant, Terry Abbott, is even closer. He joined Paige as the Houston District’s press secretary in 1997. When Paige went to Washington with Bush in 2001, Abbott followed and became Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Education. He wrote,
“I was there to help Secretary Paige help the President get No Child Left Behind ready for approval by the Congress.”
By November, 2001, Abbott was Deputy Commissioner for Communications at the U.S. Social Security Administration.
There’s an abundance of articles about Mincberg and Abbott with too much information for me to include all of it. Here are a few points worth noting.
• When Mincberg was chief business officer for the Houston School District, she received Superbowl tickets from Hewlett-Packard and failed to record a trip to a technology forum paid for by HP.
• Mincberg was part of KC Distance Learning and spoke to the Gates Foundation about online learning as a disruptive (that means positive) innovation.
• The Center for Reform of School Systems (CRSS) is partly funded by the Eli Broad Foundation, which supports the conservative “education reform” agenda. CRSS conducts administrator training for the foundation. (Abbott did work for the Broad Foundation as well.)
• When Mincberg was looking at the Las Vegas Superintendent job, she gave a speech that “extolled the benefits of using a business model to operate an education system. [She] explained how the outsourcing of school food services saved millions in taxpayer dollars in the Houston Independent School District, according to people who attended the meeting.”
• Mincberg spoke at the Tucson Metro Chamber’s Outlook event in March, 2013. According to an article about the event, Mincberg “is a big proponent of privatizing every aspect of public education possible and actually did so in Houston, where food service and transportation were privatized. Both steps resulted in heightened efficiencies, lower costs and opportunities to move money saved in those areas to better teacher-student interaction.
“She downplayed the role of poverty and ethnic differences as reasons for student underperformance. To support her position she commented on a number of public school districts around the country that have successfully narrowed or eliminated student performance differences based on household income and ethnicity.” One slide in her PowerPoint presentation stated, “Instead of doing what works, we hear many people say, ‘They’re poor, they come to school without breakfast,” and so on. In the corner of the slide is the word “Excuses.”
• As Houston Schools’ spokesman, Abbott was described as “a junk-yard dog. He will stand in front of people who are shooting bullets at you.” His way of dealing with the press was to feed it positive information about the district and complain about the media when it wrote anything negative. According to the Houston Press, “Abbott developed a reputation for taking hair-splitting and parsing to new heights when it came to responding to reporters.”
• The Houston Press called Abbott “the masterful public relations guru for Rod Paige.” It continued, “Many sources credited Abbott with presenting educators and news media around the country with such a wonderfully buffed up image of Paige that he was easily propelled not only into the top education spot but to top honors in awards given by educators.”
These consultants are mired in the George Bush, No Child Left Behind past. They’re not the people who should be leading the discussion about TUSD’s future. The strategic planning process should be stopped and restructured before it causes the district serious damage.
(Hat tip to commenter Mike for bringing this issue and some of these sources to my attention.)
This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2014.
I guess the purchasing department didn’t just take a look at the flyer when they did their original search:
http://crss.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CRSS-Brochure_printed.pdf
This article loses credit by failing one of the first principles of reporting. The writer did not check Rod Paige’s name and referrred to him as Rodney Paige throughout the article. Rod Paige’s name is Roderick Paige.
What other incorrect information is included in the article???
Let’s run another superintendent out of TUSD. Yea.
Cathy Mincberg also has a checkered past in Portland. http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/20…
Elaine, thank you for pointing out my error. I changed “Rodney” to “Rod.”
@ Elaine ~ The Christian name issue — albeit an error — it is certainly a minor one and a bit laughable to try to suggest the entire piece is subject to factual errors.
Unless you can come up with more, I suggest you put up or shut up.
There’s a lot of apparent dishonesty/shady deals with the new TUSD board.
1. H. T. Sanchez says that he will consider the TUSD superintendent job only if he is the only candidate . . . huh? Stegeman and Hicks had reservations about this odd appointment.
2. H. T. Sanchez tells this Texas group that he wants to work for them in the future, and then the rules with regards to contracts change a couple days before they get a $92,000 contract which the TUSD board now doesn’t have oversight (changed from $50,000 to $100,000) and there are no other bidders.
Did H. T.’s people seriously offer this supposedly necessary consulting job to other contractors? Or did they give them the cold shoulder?
What in the world is going on with doing a “internet search” to find a couple folks to send bids to? You’d think they’d study who other schools districts went with and called around or something.
I think that H.T. Sanchez’s folks know their boss’s preferences, I’m glad that Stegeman and Hicks alerted the attorney general and hopefully H.T. Sanchez will be kicked out as Superintendant. Once the investigation gets going, it’s just going to look worse by the day.
The Texas group that H.T. Sanchez hired sound like a bunch of conservative political spin-doctors that have an agenda which includes making money doing basically nothing for TUSD.
Not surprised Adelita Grijalva immediately concludes that this is just “coincidences” . . . kinda obvious that she knows it ain’t proper and she’s trying to spin the story. Adelita I think is up for election in 2014 . . . she needs to be fired for being both corrupt, as well as pushing the political, and apparently hate inspiring, MAS classes for political reasons that have nothing to do with guaranteeing the future of all of TUSD’s students.
I also hope that Raul Grijalva is kicked out of office this fall, or that another democrat can beat him in a primary, time for more intelligent, and less hateful/inflammatory, politicians to run the country.
Yet another example of the bloated, flatulence filled gravy train known as modern day Tucson education … with too many idiot administrators making $100,000 a year, all on the taxpayer dole.
Sanchez, his minions, as well as Adelita et. al. are an embarrassment to the community. Just asked them how they completely wasted $10 million in taxpayer dollars (that’s right, $10 million) on a computer system for TUSD that was never implemented.
And @ Arthur Schlotzky, I agree with your points; however, there is no way in hell Ralph Grijalva (he goes by “Raul” for obvious political reasons, the phony that he is) will ever lose his seat in the House as his district has been gerrymandered to ensure his will get re-elected forever.
Sanchez is done. No better than the idiots in the Sunnyside District. (As if we thought TUSD is any better). We all live in a slimy Mexican village.
This is an excellent column. Why is TUSD’s superintendent aligning himself with the corporate reformers who have done so much to turn public education into a profit making concern for hedge fund managers and companies that produce standardized tests? That is the real scandal here. The contract/money is standard TUSD insider dealing…for which the district has been repeatedly dinged by both the state and the federal government. Recent investigations into insider dealings by TUSD administration has cost TUSD millions of dollars in fines that should have gone to educating students.
Rod Paige’s first name…as anyone familiar with his background will tell you…is “Coach.” He was a guy who rode his connections (as opposed to his knowledge or intellect) to become the Secretary of Education. In that respect, he is not at all dissimilar to the current holder of that office, Arne Duncan.
You know, I knew my column would bring out comments from the TUSD and Sanchez haters, but I want to make clear, I’m not a member of that club. I think hiring this group of consultants was a mistake, and one of the purposes of this post is to make people aware that some of the goods they’re selling aren’t what TUSD should be buying. Buyer beware.
But overall my sense is, TUSD is moving in a positive direction right now, and Sanchez is one of the reasons. I consider this post to be part of the loyalty I feel toward education and toward the district, to make sure it doesn’t take a wrong turn. No real harm has been done in this transaction. It’s my hope that less harm — and some good — will be done because the backgrounds of the consultants are out in the open. Knowledge is strength and power.
I was initially positive on H. T. Sanchez, even though there was negative press regarding his appointment as superintendent (he was the only candidate), but this is another negative piece of evidence.
I just think that Sanchez will waste TUSD dollars that are sorely needed in the classroom. TUSD is trying to scrounge around for $10,000 for Science & Math, and it certainly appears that Sanchez gave a consulting group that he admittedly wants to work for about $92,000, he probably will work for this consulting group post-TUSD at some point given how he sings their praises. It looks bad, and when there is a perception that the person at the top is corrupt, it basically takes air out of any efforts to make TUSD better.
When the papers start running stories about how H.T. Sanchez is being investigated by the Arizona attorney general, that’s bad press, maybe TUSD should just focus on doing a good job and then they would need a $500,000 budget for pr. If it was this was the “immaculate coincidence”, how long will it take H.T. Sanchez to prove it, and what is the cost to TUSD in the interim? If he really cared about TUSD (hey he’s new to Tucson, not sure why he would be loyal to the students yet), he would immediately ask that the contract be voided, just to avoid the bad press, but he wants to have this amazing help from this mysterious consulting group that has resources that he doesn’t as the head of the largest school district in Arizona.
TUSD is out of touch, real issues are ignored, and they include student nutrition/meals for needy students, science and math education, and other issues.
Given TUSD’s apparent corruption and predilection for embroiling itself in political fights, don’t see the citizenry ever voting for a bond for the school district. H.T. Sanchez’s appointment was tainted from the beginning, and this is just another piece of evidence that he’s not ready for prime time, and is mostly looking after his own interests.
Tucson is beginning to remind me of a place where I once resided in New Hampshire… everyone there knew it as Peyton Place…a small town of intrigue, deception, and adulrous behavior.
The stories were true.. I knew the players, and the author, Grace Matalious, and her family.
I moved there several years after she published her book, the movie, and the TV series.. and nothing had changed.
Except the players didn’t screw the high school kids, or the majority of the taxpayers.. just themselves.
Go TUSD… history (or the novel) is resurrected.
UM TUSD, can you find someone besides Mr. Sanchez to play “Thomas Makris?”
Schools don’t have enough custodians, grounds workers come only every 9-12 days to groom the sites, no pay raises in seven years, less librarians, less counselors, larger class sizes, smaller staffing, but suddenly $92,000 appears for corporate reformers to come in and tell TUSD what we need. Some of us old timers would do it for free.
I think this Weekly article from a year ago is worth re-reading, particularly the concerns raised in the constituent letter. While I don’t agree with a lot of what Dr. Stegeman does and says, he was right on the money with this one (and with raising the $50,000 threshold) and he was slammed by a lot of people in the community for his position.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2013/06/12/10-questions-you-need-to-ask-tusd-super-finalist-at-the-sanchez-qanda-forum
People should also be aware that superintendent search firms are political organizations and they are deliberate about trying to place individuals who will be friendly to their policy agenda in large urban school districts.
http://www.geekpalaver.com/2011/10/30/eli-broads-return-on-investment/