It all comes down to numbers, but the most important numbers in the state audit of Tucson Unified School District revolve around its shrinking enrollment. If the district’s student enrollment numbers stabilize—or, better, increase—the problems with spending, which are significant but not major, can be eased without great difficulty. If the district can’t reverse its enrollment slide, other fixes aren’t going to matter much.
I’ll go over the main points of the audit. If you want to go to the source, here’s the entire TUSD state audit, and here are the report highlights. Hank Stephenson’s article in the Star does his usual good job covering the issue, though, damn it . . .
[WARNING: Rant Ahead.] I am really tired of the Star’s standard “If TUSD bleeds, it leads” headline and opening. The audit and the Star both present a nuanced analysis of district’s spending issues, giving valid reasons for some of the expenditures, but you wouldn’t know that from the paper’s head and the first 70 words. The headline: “Audit slaps TUSD on high costs for administrators, underused schools.” “Slaps.” That stings. All that’s missing are three big red exclamation points to hammer the point home. Next comes the one-two punch of the opening paragraphs reinforcing the “TUSD: Bad!” theme. After that, the article adds nuance, but by then the initial district damning has already set the tone, adding unnecessarily to the community’s negative perceptions of the district. [Rant completed. We will continue with the previously scheduled topic.]
Tucson Unified’s enrollment has been declining for years, from about 61,000 students in 2000 to around 45,000 currently. The enrollment drop has slowed in recent years, but it hasn’t stopped. The result is underused schools, which means higher building costs and more school-based administrators per student than if the schools were at capacity. If enrollments continue to decline, it’s going to be hard to resist another round of school closures, which will accelerate the downward spiral. If enrollment numbers rise, other problems will diminish.
Superintendent Trujillo has told me reversing the district’s downward enrollment trend is high on his list of priorities. This is his first year at the helm, so it will take time to see what kind of changes he has in mind.
Most of the other concerns in the audit have to do with Tucson Unified’s spending more than similar districts at the same time its achievement levels are lower.
The audit gives the district’s average scores on state tests, which are lower than those of similar districts. I did some research teasing apart the data and found a surprisingly wide variation in the scores on state tests among the district’s schools with similar socioeconomic makeups. Some are among the highest scoring schools with similar characteristics in Southern Arizona districts. Others are among the lowest. It’s a serious problem. More state funding for remediation and teacher training would help, but even without that, the district needs to put significant efforts toward addressing the situation.
Most of the spending problems have a “Yeah, but” attached to them.
The district has higher administrative costs than other districts. The salaries are similar in school and higher level administrative positions, but they’re high in middle level positions, partly due to earlier professional development programs which boosted salaries and the amount of time those administrators have been in the district. Beyond salary issues, Tucson Unified has more administrators per student than in other districts, but many of them are required by the extra planning and oversight demanded by the district’s desegregation plan.
Transportation costs are higher than other districts, but again, that’s related to the desegregation plan which requires bussing students to schools outside their neighborhoods. If you remove the deseg mandates, Tucson Unified’s transportation efficiency is equal to or better than other districts.
Those extra deseg-related costs don’t mean the plan’s costs are depleting district funding, by the way. Deseg brings in an extra $63 million a year which more than covers its added administrative and transportation costs. Financially, deseg is a net plus for the district.
Tucson Unified also spends more than most other districts on plant operations, for a few reasons. Many schools are below student capacity, which means the cost per student goes up. Also, the district has lots of very old buildings which tend to more inefficient and in greater need of upkeep than newer schools.
Increasing student enrollment is an uphill battle, and it’s the biggest battle the district has to fight if it wants to maintain financial stability. Charter schools continue to drain students away from the district. Some parents choose to enroll their children in other districts, which means TUSD-area students move to schools in the high rent areas like Catalina Foothills and Vail. And private school vouchers are a smaller but significant issue in the district’s declining enrollment.
Tucson Unified’s challenge is to figure out how to fight its way uphill.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2018.
Dare I state the obvious, David? Increasing enrollment in a district this troubled and this poorly managed is not a goal to be desired. What does that important-sounding term “increasing enrollment” mean at the ground level, David? It means putting more kids in malfunctioning schools where too many classrooms are manned by under-qualified or entirely unqualified “teachers.”
As for the Star’s coverage of TUSD, it is very weak indeed. They have pulled so many punches in reporting on what’s actually going on in the district and given TUSD’s PR department so many “gimmes” in their misleading reports on (largely manufactured and misleadingly presented) “POSITIVE!!!” things the district cooks up to feed to them, it would take hours to list all the patsy-Pollyanna pieces they’ve published just in the last 4 years. The “AWARD TUSD WON FROM THE COLLEGE BOARD!!!” is the most nauseating one that comes to mind. School districts should not be winning awards by corralling bright kids at University High School and forcing them to take AP courses it does not benefit them to take so they can be milked to drive up a failing district’s stats, rankings and awards that can be advertised to the public to “IMPROVE THE DISTRICT’S PUBLIC IMAGE!!!”
Heads up to you and everyone drinking your Kool-Aid: it’s the district’s actual level of responsibility in delivering high quality services to students that needs to improve, NOT their “public image,” which, though it is low, is not yet as low as it should be, thanks to the weak media locally yielding to pressure and pulling punches on coverage.
The weak-minded will keep blaming evil CHARTERS! and evil VOUCHERS! for TUSD’s enrollment declines. Those who’ve been close enough to the district to see it clearly and understand what it is know that the enrollment declines are caused by good parents who know what good education is recognizing a sinking ship when they see it and getting their children OFF. The declines in enrollment in TUSD are to be commended, applauded, celebrated by everyone whose goal is improving the quality of education kids in this region receive. But some have the goal of salvaging a malfunctioning public institution by any means possible: they lie, promote ill-advised policy and shovel out misleading PR that, if it is successful in influencing public opinion and setting the policy agenda, results in increasing the number of underserved students in the region, damaging their academic potential and impairing their prospects in life.
Exactly. What could possibly cause enrollment to increase in TUSD? Who’s kidding who. Close some more and cut some staff. merge them into a manageable size and try to hang on.
If this were a business problem the turnaround strategy would have two basic steps. First right size by eliminating underused and revenue draining assets and second, use the funds this raises to fix the product. It seems like the audit has identified the underutilized … probably those already well known to the District. But has anybody measured the product ( quality and relevant education ) versus a sensible peer group ? That would not only be test scores, but in-depth understanding of current and future parent’s ( both those who stay and those who leave) expectations. I realize that government sponsored monopolies and private enterprise are different, but they are similar in crises…right size the structure and improve the product.
Betsy de Vos would love the comments of “Stop Defending the Indefensible”, but was really quite unable to support her record with charters and vouchers in the state of Michigan recently. How about we quit the bitterness and taking all examples from our own individual experiences and learn to improve public facilities instead of furthering the myth that private enterprise automatically does it better? The bottom line is that while there are charters that are good, and there are private schools that are good, there are also aLOT, especially in this state, that are miserable. If we give a good god da*n about the 80% of kids who are in public schools, we have to improve that boat, not stand on the sidelines and cheer as it goes down. Whats indefensible is to continually deride those that DO give a good god da*n about those kids. If you want to Exit (and I believe this commenter already has) do it. But torpedoing the ship and laughing gleefully as the 80% disappear into the waters is not particularly defensible itself.
“Fix the product” is not a term in their vocabulary. They believe they should prevail because their ideas about how to organize education and society are correct, not because the real institutions associated with these ideas actually meet the needs of the constituents they serve. When one of their institutions declines into the miserable state TUSD is in, they don’t consult constituents or “fix the product.” They gag constituents and block valid information from getting to the public to try to prevent damage to the “public image” of their institutions and ideas. Simultaneously their own rhetoric becomes more shrill and hysterical: “PRIVATIZATION!!!” “PUBLIC FUNDS TO RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS!!!” “KOCH BROTHERS!!!” “RICH PEOPLE BAD GUYS!!!”
Note that any attention to what is actually happening to students in the institutions they love to defend is 100% absent from their rhetoric. Their game is all about deliberate, systematic, relentless diversion of attention from what really matters in education, and about substituting official-sounding abstract concepts like “DECLINING ENROLLMENT” for the reality of what is happening on the ground, “for more than a decade now, parents by the thousands removing children from schools that are failing to educate them.”
@ Betts Putnam Hidalgo
Not sure from what you wrote if you understood the reference in “defending the indefensible.” It refers to the fact that the “Save Public School” crowd’s methods of argument fit right in to the rhetorical practices the writer we know as Orwell describes in his essay “Politics & the English Language”:
*** “In our time, political speech and writing are largely defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called “pacification.” Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called “transfer of population” or “rectification of frontiers.” People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called “elimination of unreliable elements.” Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
We can thank “George” [Eric Blair], for providing a good gloss on contemporary use of the terms “declining enrollment” and “privatization.” God forbid that in talking about what is happening in local schools, we should call up accurate mental pictures of concerned parents correctly identifying un-remediable dysfunction in the delivery of “education” to their children and doing what’s necessary to find settings where their children can actually learn and thrive.
According to the Democratic Party, “increasing enrollment in TUSD,” a goal whose advisability they are 100% incapable of questioning, should be achieved, not by fixing the product, but by coercive policies that effectively block low-SES parents’ (but not high-SES parents’) ability to access sound alternatives to the public district system, cf. their “SOS” campaign.
Orwell / Blair talks about euphemisms being used when HONEST language does not “square with the PROFESSED aims of political parties.” That’s it, right there: “Save our schools!” Translate: make sure the poor have no viable alternative to having the per-pupil funding derived from their tax dollars automatically fed into a district that for decades now has found it impossible to effectively and responsibly educate their children.
P.S. When I make decisions about policy, I want to hear from those directly affected. In the case of voucher policy, that would be those who CANNOT AFFORD alternatives if the policy is abolished. I’ve heard from plenty of those, many of them refugees from TUSD, within the Catholic school system. The opinions of people who CAN afford alternatives but choose not to use them because of ideological commitments are interesting, but neither relevant nor persuasive.
The public schools, the Unions and their promoters have created the quagmire they currently find themselves in. It should not be a surprise that they refuse to accept responsibility for causing it. I am so glad that choice is coming to education. It will improve all competitors.
The monopoly is over.
Betts Putnam-Hidalgo recommends that we should “learn to improve public facilities.”
How’s that going for her in TUSD, after more than a decade of attending board meetings, commenting regularly in the Call to the Audience, and three unsuccessful campaigns running for a seat on the TUSD Board? Campaigns in a district like this are time consuming and expensive ordeals that most citizens with full time jobs and without supplementary private economic resources (or significant business patronage) cannot afford to run. Kinda limits the field of possible candidates, doesn’t it? Who on the current Board is an authentic defender of student well being, rather than vested interests or political networks of one sort or another? Would Betts Putnam-Hidalgo say her new friend Rachael Sedgwick? And how effective is she, as one person on that 5-person Board?
Whether BPH’s arguments are defensible rests entirely on whether, in massive democratically controlled public school districts serving low-SES populations like TUSD, “improving public institutions” can actually be done. Unfortunately, the last 30 years of local history provide scant evidence that that is possible with this particular district.
But according to David Safier we should “increase enrollment in TUSD” and that will solve all the district’s problems, and immediately it will become efficient, responsive and responsible.
Right.
If the media is not giving you all the facts, Betts Putnam Hidalgo — which is certainly true of the media here in Tucson, Arizona — you don’t know anything about what the schools in Michigan actually are without directly observing them. You do, however know what TUSD is. While knowing what it is and what poor services it delivers to poor minority students, your continuing commitment to keeping people less wealthy than yourself locked into these malfunctioning schools and denying them the economic freedom to choose better schooling options is BENEATH CONTEMPT.
I have no objection to those who improve pubic schools serving low SES populations — it is a noble effort and they should keep trying — but those who use coercive public policy to imprison the poor in failing schools are not worthy of my respect or anyone else’s.
You use your name but your attempts to pass as “just regular folks” and a defender of the “common man” are ludicrous. Improve TUSD and then let people CHOOSE to enroll, as you have chosen to enroll, having, as you know you do, the economic freedom to consider and reject other options.
Culturally, Tucson Unified is a sitting duck. Less than 40% of the parents rate the quality of education excellent so 60% of 46 thousand students are just waiting for a convenient and quality charter school to open. That’s 28 thousand students of eventual shrinkage.
Most administrators are completely unprepared for a competitive environment. In a competitive environment, you have to know your excellence ratings and you have to know that if you do a great job, you probably will only be able to move them a couple points a year.
Chandler Unified, ranked second in the nation, only moved their ratings an average of 2 points a year from 1998’s 38% excellent rating to its current 75% excellent rating.
The nation as a whole is really a sitting duck. They are sitting at just 24%. When charter school brands achieve full strength in Arizona in a few years, they will be able to open tens of thousands of schools nationwide.
A district with TUSD’s economies of scale could be measuring and adjusting every two months and not just measuring parents, it should be measuring students attitudes and motivation levels and most importantly- teachers. What percentage of them think their school is an incredibly great place to work?
Instead, the auditor general report paints a picture of a bureaucratic nightmare of one overlapping layer after another with competing for education theories fighting for dominance. And, competing for their share of the loot.
And, the poor small businesses in TUSD districts having to pay an extra $63 million a year for the pleasure of this mess.
As a result, job creation in Tucson runs well below the state.
Not likely to change.
I agree with Betts about comments from “cute pseudonyms,” though I won’t venture a guess as to the identity of that person. I like to see lots of comments on my posts, but when one person with a variety of handles occupies such a large amount of space with multiple comments, it distorts and detracts from the discussion.
Might I suggest starting a blog of your own where you can pontificate, just like I do, and have the freedom to choose your own topics? That way you won’t have to be a counterpuncher, you can set your own agenda.
You can set up a blog for free in a few minutes. I’d even be happy to write a post mentioning your blog site to give you a bit of startup recognition, and you can publicize your posts on Facebook and Twitter as well. Then you can come back here and take the occasional shot at me any time you like.
It’s the policy you support that I respond to, David, not to you personally. As long as you support that policy — and keep relevant facts about conditions in the schools out of your defense of your policy positions, as it seemed to me you’d done here — I’ll keep commenting. If people in the comment streams address my comments directly, as Putnam-Hidalgo did here, it seems fair to respond to those comments.
Sometimes I don’t comment on your posts at all, as you may have noticed. Sometimes I write one thing and nothing more. So your contention that I’ve set up a regular blog within your blog is not accurate.
I note that Huppenthal will sometimes respond multiple times and you haven’t yet blocked him or suggested he set up a separate blog for himself, but perhaps the things he writes — and his back story with you personally — feed and reinforce your narrative and political agenda better than the sorts of things I write. It’s convenient for Democrats to give the impression that it’s only Republicans who oppose their ideas, and not also other Democrats (or former Democrats) who recognize that “SOCIAL JUSTICE” is not actually served by some portions of the policy agenda Democrats are promoting.
Since you’ve taken the trouble to “write back” today, I will keep your feelings and preferences in mind in the future and will try to be more modest in my contributions. But unless you block me, I’ll keep commenting when what you write about education policy seems to need a response from the ground level.
Cheers, David.
A reply to the reply: Just for the sake of accuracy, I didn’t suggest you’ve set up a blog within this blog. I was simply suggesting that if you’re bursting with things to say, you might venture to find an audience. That’s what moved me to start blogging, and has kept me at it.
As for blocking, the only comments I’ve blocked are advertising spam, comments wildly off topic, or comments which are vile and/or contain ad hominem attacks, all of which are Weekly policies for The Range.
A Note: The two comments which put a name (which may or may not be accurate) to a commenter who prefers to remain anonymous have been removed. People have a right to their anonymity in this space, unless there is an exceptional reason to reveal their identities. This was definitely not one of those cases.
Integrity, unlike Blog for Arizona. I like that.
My God, John. Are you serious? Did you notice the second part of this sentence in my comment? “People have a right to their anonymity in this space, unless there is an exceptional reason to reveal their identities.” Your name is written between the lines in the phrase “exceptional reason.”
When you used not one but two aliases to advocate for yourself and make racist comments, you were hiding your identity when you were an elected official, because you were saying things you didn’t dare to say using your real name. That’s among the most egregious uses of anonymity.
Blog for Arizona, which I was part of at the time, performed a great public service by exposing your anonymous comments. I was proud of what we did then, and I was even prouder recently when those comments helped prove that your campaign against Mexican American Studies was fueled by racial animus.
“When a country has political parties, sooner or later it becomes impossible to intervene effectively in public affairs without joining a party and playing the game. Whoever is concerned for public affairs will wish his concern to bear fruit. Those who care about the public interest must either forget their concern and turn to other things, or submit to the grind of the parties. In the latter case, they shall experience worries that will soon supersede their original concern for the public interest.
“Political parties are a marvelous mechanism which, on the national scale, ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just, what is true. As a result — except for a very small number of fortuitous coincidences — nothing is decided, nothing is executed but measures that run contrary to the public interest, to justice and to truth.
“If one were to entrust the organization of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.”
–Simone Weil