Ducey’s offer of a 19 percent raise for teachers is a moving target. Here are a few random thoughts, some of which may be out of date by the time this post hits The Range.
Did Ducey Blink?
Ducey didn’t just blink. His knees buckled, he reached for the white handkerchief in his breast pocket, straightened himself out, waved the kerchief over his head, put on his best smile and tried to pretend his offer of a 19 percent raise for teachers is what he wanted to do all along.
It wasn’t. The teachers forced his hand. Instead of demonstrating, patting themselves on the back and retreating to their classrooms, they refused to go away. They were out last week, they were out this week, and they’ll be out next week in ever growing numbers. It’s a rolling thunder sweeping across the nation, from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Kentucky to Arizona, and the storm is building in intensity. First the media covered the spectacle, then it covered the issues. (Lesson learned: If you want media coverage, earn it. Make a spectacle of yourself, then do it again. Say something outrageous, then say it again. That’s catnip for journalists.) Nearly all the coverage has been on the teachers’ side, because the teachers are right and because they impressed the nation with their tenacity, their unity, their fearlessness.
If I sounds like I’m proud of the practicing members of my profession . . . you goddam betcha I am.
Did I See This Coming?
Nope. Didn’t even imagine this moment was possible, let alone that it could come this soon.
Should Teachers Cheer?
Absolutely. They won a big victory. They should cheer for a full minute. Hell, this is a biggie, make it ten minutes. Then get back to the business of guaranteeing increased funding levels for teacher salaries, for support staff salaries, for school repairs, for school supplies — for all the stuff the “Dismantle public schools” Republicans who run this state have refused to pay for.
Did Ducey Win At Least a Partial Victory?
I think he did. He looked good up there when he gave his press conference. He looked gubernatorial. He looked like The Boss. A caring boss who only wants to do what’s best for teachers and students.
But his momentary, partial victory could hurt him in the long run. His funding proposal is a high bar for him to jump over, but it’s probably too low for teachers to accept. He made teachers look more credible by admitting a 20 percent raise is reasonable, which strengthened their hand. If he has to pull back his offer or has to deal with an even higher demand from teachers, his 19 percent solution may come back to bite him.
Where’d All That Money Come From?
Ducey said he could barely scrape together one percent for teacher raises last budget. Before that, he stole money from the students’ trust fund, the State Land Trust, to come up with about $300 million a year, because he said there just wasn’t enough money in the budget. Now, in the face of mounting pressure applied where it hurts, right in his electability, Ducey waved a magic wand over his black budget hat, reached inside and said, “Wait a minute! Look what I found. Enough for a 19 percent raise! Without raising taxes!”
If the money is there when the pressure is on, it was there before. Either he’s lying now and he doesn’t have the money, or he was lying before when he said he didn’t have the money.
Is Ducey Lucy?
Ducey took a half inflated football, placed it on the ground in front of teachers and told them to kick it downfield. Is he planning to pull it away at the last minute — put a poison pill in the budget increase or say, “Jeez, sorry, I just don’t have enough to give you a 9 percent raise. How about 5 percent?” Or will Ducey stay true to his word, only to have the legislature run up and kick the ball sideways, out of bounds?
Anything is possible. At the moment, Ducey’s 19 percent solution is words, not deeds, a tentative proposal he put on the table, maybe a trial balloon so see how teachers will react. It doesn’t mean a thing at this point.
What Should Teachers Do Next?
Should teachers accept Ducey’s offer? A $4,000-plus raise this year, doubled over the next two years, is pretty tempting. Or should they hold out for the entire 20 percent this year? Should they say, “No deal unless you include the support staff and add more money for schools”? Should they continue with plans for more walk-ins? A walkout? A strike?
I’m not giving these people any advice, only my admiration and praise. They have been so outlandishly successful, they have so far surpassed expectations, it would be foolish for me to tell them what to do. I’ll just say, keep it up!
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2018.
No deal unless you include the support staff and add more money for schools
Push them to refuse it. If he offered 19% he can go 30-40%. Demand double pay or quit. Let’s stay together on this. We are winning.
Its obvious the polling numbers from his Koch friends showed extreme vulnerability on this issue. Otherwise he would have brought this idea in the S of the S. It was teacher pressure along that brought this on. No strings attached. No more accountability reviews, reports or data gathering. No game playing with the voucher referendum. No deals on vouchers. No more tax credits for private school donations. No more preempting local school districts. They are up to their ears in state mandates with no money already. We will see. If Yarbrough loses any money going to his STO he wont tolerate it. As Booboo said, the Rangers not going to LIKE it.
It is not EITHER give raises to teachers in public schools OR allow tax credits and choice policy, Frances Perkins. Education should be better funded (and MUCH better overseen) across the board, in public schools, in charter schools, and in private schools subsidized with public funds. It’s the political parties that try to divide supporters into camps and pit them against one another, as though it were somehow logically impossible to have more than one fully funded, high functioning system using public dollars at the same time. Other countries have high functioning alternative systems running simultaneously, neither one taking away from the other. We could, too, if the “SUPPORT PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!!” crowd could stop translating its rage at losing its monopoly on the use of public funds for education into scorched earth policy initiatives whose main goal is not improving services in the system they favor, but rather burning every other system to the ground.
From the point of view of those who want EVERY teacher in EVERY system, public district, charter, and private, (and within EVERY public district) paid much better, the following should be duly noted: it’s entirely unclear from this blog of Safier’s and also unclear from Howard Fischer’s Star article on the same topic…
http://tucson.com/news/local/ducey-proposes-pay-raise-for-teachers-by-including-this-year/article_17fdade0-adc8-5200-baba-64aaca55b96f.html
…what the mechanism would be under Ducey’s new “19%” proposal for forcing every district in the state to pay teachers what they are worth. As Tim Steller pointed out recently, “[…] Arizonas school system is decentralized. Most of the power to set teacher salaries resides in the individual school districts, so while a statewide walkout by teachers could lead to the Legislature increasing funding for schools, in the end the districts would all have to pass that money on to employees. The dramatic, West Virginia-style outcome is unavailable in our system.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/steller-column-successful-west-virginia-strike-has-arizona-teachers-wondering/article_46a42321-f813-5b36-8ac6-cd8c52bc106c.html?id=201408&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Sadly, in Arizona, the raising of the “average” salary that Howard Fischer’s article talks about is not the same as ensuring that every teacher in every school gets a fair wage.
On the topic of Safier’s current mood of jubilation over teachers’ seemingly successful salary advocacy, wasn’t he one of the primary spin doctors trying to excuse TUSD’s failure to get 123 and 301 money distributed to teachers? The TUSD average salary is NOWHERE NEAR the state’s average salary, but in the last 4 years, as the TUSD board voted again and again for adding positions to central admin, hiring expensive out of state consultants, and OUTRAGEOUSLY inflating the Superintendent’s compensation, I have never seen a single blog post of Safier’s holding the district’s feet to the fire over its teachers’ lower-than-the-average-salary-in-AZ levels of compensation. And this while they have the highest (deseg-augmented) per pupil funding in the region.
Scratch the thin veneer of “teacher-focused!!!” advocacy here and elsewhere, and you find nothing but sad attempts to use (some, but not all) teachers as leverage for certain political agendas. “Support teachers in public schools but put teachers in charters and publicly subsidized privates out of work!” “Support teachers generically, but put no pressure on TUSD to pay teachers better!” “Teachers must be used to flip the governorship, so if Ducey proposes raises, disparage his proposals and suggest that genuine improvements can only come from a Democrat in the governorship!”
Etc., ad nauseam.
Why not just exempt teachers from state income tax and property taxes for a de facto extra raise?
At least at decentralized public school districts, you, as a citizen have input. You can boot out board members. You can raise hell. Try that at family run or for profit charters or try it at private, sectarian, religious schools. Ask those Catholic schools how much they pay teachers? That pesky Constitutional prohibition on public money for sectarian schools, we can money launder around it. Ask BASIS “board” how much profit they make,or where the teacher improvement fund goes. Raging hypocrisy from anti public school types.
Public schools suffer from failed leadership and runaway pension plans. Get your own house in order before anything else is given to you. Our trust has been violated.
Its fascinating to see the selective way commenters like Frances Perkins, who outsource their thinking to political parties and use these comment streams as dumping grounds for politicized cliches, read and understand comments that dont pass their orthodox party thinking! litmus tests.
Frances: Someone who writes that all education sectors need to be better funded AND much better overseen is not going to be a fan of lack of transparency in ANY sector or at ANY school, including a Basis franchise. So you dont score points by hauling out your shopworn, old news complaints about Basis in trying to deride what those commenters have written. You just show a lack of ability to UNDERSTAND what theyve written.
What people who pay attention to whats going on at the ground level know is that salaries differ from one charter and one private to the next, but Salpointe teachers are paid better than TUSD teachers, so there is no uniform superiority of public school salaries to Catholic school salaries that can be used as a bragging point by the SUPPORT PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!! crowd at this point. Like most things, including how responsive a so-called democratically controlled district like TUSD may be to citizens raising hell, reality is much more complicated than your politicized cliches suggest it may be, and both properly paying ALL teachers and properly supporting and professionalizing the field of K-12 education, unsurprisingly, will require a bit more of us than voting D in the next Arizona governors race.