In my last post, I put up a chart, which I also included here, showing the decline in enrollment numbers at TUSD from 2000 to the present. The short takeaway from the chart is, the district’s enrollment declined slowly, averaging 350 students a year, from 2000 through 2007. Then the decline almost quadrupled, averaging 1,600 students a year, through 2012. Since then, the decline has slowed. The 2015-16 school year had the smallest decline, 417 students, in eight years.
I decided to pore over data for the 16 years in greater detail, looking at enrollment numbers from the beginning and the end of the school year and grade by grade, to see if I could find any trends worth noting. I did, and in the rest of the post, I’ll describe some of what I found. I’m going to restrain myself from drawing too many conclusions from the data. I make a few observations at the end, but really, there are far too many variables at work here for me to tease out clear causes and effects. [Note: I’m going to try and make things as clear as possible, but I’m comparing lots of numbers, which always makes for slow reading, and this isn’t the kind of writing I normally do. I’ll do the best I can.]
I chose to use the figures from the 175th day for the end-of-the-year numbers because that’s either the end of the school year or close to it, depending on the year, and the numbers for that day have fewer random ups and downs than other days. I also looked at student numbers on the 20th day, which is when things settle down after the first month’s enrollment changes, so it’s a reasonable place for a beginning-of-the-year count.
Looking at the enrollment on the 20th and the 175th day each year, I found, not surprisingly, that every year, TUSD had fewer students at the end of the year than at the beginning, which I suspect is true in other districts. For the 16 years from 2000 to the present, TUSD’s average decrease from the beginning to the end of the year was about 1200 students.Only three years had decreases of less than 950 students: 2009-10 (915) and both of the last two school years, 2014-15 (920) and 2015-16 (582). That means that the during the last two years, holding onto students for the entire school year had a significant role in slowing the overall decrease of students.
The grade levels didn’t all lose the same number of students from the beginning to the end of the year. In fact, most of the losses came from the high school grades. Looking specifically at the past three years, student numbers were reasonably stable throughout the year from 1st through 8th grade (there was actually a small but significant net gain of students in those grades last school year). In high school, on the other hand, the numbers decreased about 300 per grade from the beginning to the end in all three years. However, that’s an improvement over previous years when the losses were closer to 500 per grade from the beginning to the end of the year.
One area of growing strength for the district is its ability to hold onto high school students, not just from the beginning to the end of the year but from year to year. From 2000 to 2009, the district had an average of 1100 fewer 12th graders than 9th graders. After that, the gap began to shrink, and for the last five years, the difference between the number of 9th and 12th graders is less than half the earlier number, in the 400-500 student range.
Before high school, the number of students in each grade is close to the number in the grade before it, until you hit the 6th grade, that is, which has significantly fewer total students than the 5th grade. Not coincidentally, that’s the transition year from elementary school to middle school. Until 2006, the district lost about 300 to 400 students from 5th to 6th grade. Starting with the 2006-7 school year, that number jumped to between 500 and 600 students. This confirms what many people have noted before: many TUSD students leave the district to attend middle school at charters or in neighboring districts. However, over the past four school years, the loss has been cut to between 350 to 400 students, indicating that the district is holding onto more middle school students. And some of the students who left return in the 9th grade, when the number of students increases by 100 to 200 students over the 8th grade numbers.
The data indicates three areas where the district has slowed the decline of students in recent years. It has held on to more of its students from the beginning of the school year to the end. It has slowed the loss of students as they move through the high school years from the 9th grade to the 12th grade. And it has held onto more of its students moving from the 5th grade to the 6th grade. I can’t say why those changes have occurred, but if they are the result of actions taken by the district in recent years, it deserves credit for significantly slowing the student decline at TUSD.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2016.
Now it makes sense. As the students aged and the discipline problems became greater the parents took their kids and left. It’s also the same time frame that the ADS had an online comments section where parents and teachers could post their stories without identifying themselves. (Out of fear of retribution.) This has gone on in TUSD since the mid 90s when the board was taken over by radicals.
At this point it is much like trying to drag the Titanic off the ocean floor. It’s found peace right where it is at.
Peace on TUSD. Before they peace on you.
Let’s leave aside for the time being the excellent question raised by a commenter on your previous piece on this topic, “What makes you think the data is accurate?”
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/07/27/tusd-enrollment-2000-to-2016
That commenter pointed out that representatives of this district have a track record, during the last three years, of repeatedly being caught in lies in communications with the public, and that given what we’ve seen in the past, these behaviors seem likely to occur in cases where what is being reported is politically useful (e.g. enrollment figures given immediately preceding a board election).
You write, “That means that during the last two years, HOLDING ONTO students for the entire school year had a significant role in slowing the overall decrease of students.” You seem to like that term “holding onto,” which you use repeatedly throughout the piece.
But the numbers don’t necessarily mean what you suggest. Overall enrollment change during any period reflects transfers in as well as transfers out, something that was previously pointed out to you in discussions of UHS enrollment. If enrollment at the beginning of the year was 1000 and at the end was 995, it doesn’t necessarily mean the district “held onto 995 students for the entire school year.” It may mean that the district lost 30 and gained 25 during the course of the school year.
As commenters have written many times, you have to be on the sites in this district to understand what the numbers mean. Gaming the numbers in various ways is a standard-issue administrative practice. You have not been on the sites, and you never make the effort to talk to those on the sites who might be able to help you understand what is ACTUALLY going on, as opposed to what the numbers the district produces suggest is going on.
(What happened with that audit report not too long ago, David? Did it confirm the % of classroom vs. admin spending the district had been self-reporting?)
Not even filling the seats with illegals can stem the flood of students fleeing TUSD. How much destruction can Adelita Grijalva and H.T. Sanchez commit on our school system?
I think it’s great that you’re interested in these numbers but this is far from a real statistical analysis. Using the term “significantly” is misleading because the word “significant” is a term of art in statistics. When something is statistically significant it’s because the numbers have been analyzed using actual statistical models (like a regression model). You can also isolate variables to actually look at the data at a much deeper level and make much stronger inferences about what’s going on and answer more questions. Which students are leaving? What areas of the town are they leaving from the most? Are actions TUSD is taking slowing the decline in enrollment or are there other factors at play? Did the economic crisis influence student mobility?
You’re just making a very broad and vague statement/generalization with a few raw numbers that may or may not have any actual significance. The district should commission a study and do just that.
1) It is more meaningful to look at percentage declines. They paint a gloomier picture, though the current declines are still better than the big declines that occurred immediately after the two big rounds of school closures.
2) The data reported here do not match the numbers reported by the State Auditor General. In some cases the discrepancy is small and in other cases large. The 2015-16 decline is not yet available from the Auditor General, but in the previous year the decline was 857 (1.8%), not 826.
I agree with the previous poster. It’s a blog so I know it’s just for fun, but without at least taking the step of converting these numbers to a percentage of school-age children within the district, the numbers are 100% meaningless and not a single conclusion can (or should) be drawn.
If I missed those numbers I apologize.
Mark,
If you took the simple step of tying all your leadership pay to the people side of the business and to excellence, the district would heal and strengthen at a much faster pace.
Last time I looked at TUSD numbers, about 25% of parent rated the quality of their child’s education excellent. This means that 75% of your parents are open to other choices. The same is true for your teachers- about 25% rate their school an excellent place to teach.
These two numbers are ground zero for the battle to improve academic gains and for winning back your students. Get TUSD to 60% and student losses stop. Get TUSD to 70% and you grow back to 60 thousand students.
Get focused enough and TUSD can improve at 7 percentile points a year. Public education as a whole has dropped from 36% to 24% in the last four years, about the lowest number in 47 years of measurement. The typical Arizona charter school is in the 40s.
The Chandler Unified School district is at 75% after working on this for 18 years.
jhuppent: I agree with almost everything you wrote. TUSD’s capture ratio (share of TUSD resident children who enroll in TUSD) is about 65%, the lowest among Arizona’s large districts. Enrollment at the other large districts has stabilized on average, while ours still falls. Our administrative spending percentage is 2.5% higher than the average for the other large districts, which equates to $11 million. We can do much better. The “good” news about the capture ratio is that there is much upside. Nobody does better than about 85%, but I believe that TUSD could gain 5,000-10,000 students back by improving the quality of its product. I agree that Chandler’s management stands out among Arizona’s large districts. TUSD could learn much from them. I think that Gilbert provides another strong example.
PS Don’t be fooled by your current satisfaction survey. Only 80% of parents who rate themselves “highly satisfied” will rate the quality of their child’s education Excellent or give it the grade of an “A”.
Staff repackage this data and convinces boards that everything is great when alarm bells should be going off.
You need to restructure your survey for action.
To Huppenthal-grow to 60,000?
Tucson’s not growing. We have no economy, intentionally so. The only segment with growth is illegals.
Sounds like you’re on board with the Grijalva agenda. Make Arizona Mexico Again.
Mark Stegeman: thank you for letting us know that once again, there have been disparities between what the district reports and what an external audit finds. What a surprise.
David Safier: Why don’t you check what TUSD reports about enrollment against the auditor’s report before attempting to “inform” the public about the district’s enrollment?
John Huppenthal: Mark Stegeman doesn’t have much influence as a minority member on a board that for the past four years has voted 3-2 (Grijalva-Foster-Juarez voting against Hicks-Stegeman) on most issues that have come before it.
Three years ago the Board in this district hired a thirty-eight year old who had only a few months of interim superintendent experience in a district in Texas that was much smaller than TUSD.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/tusd-hires-sanchez-as-superintendent/article_fefa25c3-c515-5e22-b201-da035bdaf5a4.html
The Arizona Daily Star reported, “Sanchez’s résumé showed he spent the past 15 years moving from job to job in different Texas school districts about every two years, which he attributed to being called upon to serve by others. He had also never been a superintendent, aside from a three-month interim stint, which he left to come to Tucson.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/tucson-unified-school-district-reveals-finalists-after-court-order/article_c6c500d3-1492-59c1-b1f2-6d3d38f44753.html
The hiring process was so opaque to the public that the Arizona Daily Star filed a law suit to get the district to release information relating to it:
“After the district withheld the names, claiming executive session privilege, the Arizona Daily Star sued. Pima County Superior Court Judge James Marner ruled last month the names must be released. TUSD made great efforts to hide the candidates who were brought in for the interviews. A security plan the district submitted to the court showed box trucks were parked on either side of the candidate parking spaces to conceal them from view. Candidates were escorted to different holding rooms to keep them from seeing one another.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/sanchez-sought-view-on-tusd-deal/article_c45e9b34-cd62-50b2-babd-4bc1396eb9c4.html
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/precollegiate/star-lawsuit-pressing-tusd-to-release-candidates-names/article_b84b629b-20d1-5ce6-b8ca-a4eeab7ca072.html
For the last three years this district has suffered from what many observers believe is gross mismanagement, as the Board that brought this administrator into town has refused to hold him accountable in a number of key areas:
— for managing the desegregation case in a way that does not result in escalation of costs and increase of conflicts with the court
— for using hiring and staff-support practices that ensure that all classrooms are filled with fully qualified, permanent teachers
— for the development and implementation of a high quality strategic plan that can help to raise the public confidence necessary to pass bonds and overrides
just to name a few key issues.
How can parent satisfaction and teacher satisfaction be improved in a district with a board that won’t hold its administration accountable for telling the public the truth or for using proper practices in the administration of a public institution?
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/new-details-emerge-in-grijalva-kin-hiring/article_674695dc-d25c-5912-936a-c6bd531d1bbb.html
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/tusd-s-sanchez-gave-consultant-early-track-on-tucson-contract/article_010f280f-959a-557d-b7bd-d6d1a79ce7d6.html
More examples could be given.
What’s the point in advising a minority member of the board with no power to effect change that he should work to improve teacher and parent satisfaction? Is this the level of understanding of the on-the-ground obstacles to making beneficial changes you brought to the job when you were state superintendent of education?
A better question: Why is there no effective oversight from the state Department of Education and / or Attorney General’s Office in Arizona that can protect Arizona residents who enroll their children in Arizona public schools from this kind of mismanagement of their children’s schools?
“A better question: Why is there no effective oversight from the state Department of Education and / or Attorney General’s Office in Arizona that can protect Arizona residents who enroll their children in Arizona public schools from this kind of mismanagement of their children’s schools?”
Now that there is funny!
Parents who’ve had their children’s educations mismanaged in TUSD schools during the last three years don’t find anything about this subject funny.
Caught between malfeasant and incompetent local administrators and malfeasant / negligent / privatizing state legislators and governor, both the kids in our schools and the future of a state suffer irreversible damage.
Not funny at all.
The funny part to me is that all the public school supporters are crying for oversight of charter schools and yet the job has never been done correctly on the public schools they already had oversight of. It’s also funny that you would blame the Gov and the State legislators for the incompetence at TUSD.
Place the blame where it belongs. And see if you can get enough parents to care.
Larry The Cable Guy:
You write, “all the public school supporters are crying for oversight of charter schools and yet the job has never been done correctly on the public schools they already had oversight of”
Yep, that’s very true, at least in the case of TUSD, which “educates” somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 students in Southern Arizona.
I grew up in a blue state with an excellent public school system. One of the things I learned there was that states that care about public education (instead of caring about maximizing the degree to which the current public district system can be privatized, which is what AZ legislators seem to care about) not only FUND schools better, they oversee and regulate them better. They don’t just hand them money and say “do whatever you like with it.” They have enforcement and regulatory mechanisms in place that keep entire public districts from descending into the kind of dysfunction into which TUSD has descended.
The free market idea seems to be “let the state-sponsored public district product go to hell, that will only make our alternative products more attractive to consumers.” This is not the right way to look at the job of educating a state’s children. There will always be some parents who can’t or won’t protect their children’s best interests. Shall we allow those kids to attend schools that are so malfunctioning that can’t reasonably be expected to prepare these kids for constructive participation in our economy and society?
One would have to think that it would be much easier to fix TUSD that it would be to change the state. But to date in my opinion TUSD has worsened. You can’t win both fights at the same time. If TUSD can’t be fixed, the state is a moot point. I can’t blame them for withholding additional funding to a failing school district like TUSD It only makes sense. But in a way aren’t those at the state level hoping to get local change to improve the problem?
I haven’t seen the state close any Tucson schools for under performance. There still has to be widespread parental support to fix this mess.
TUSD continues to be what it is in part because of what the state does (and does not do).
The state licenses charters and writes private school tax credits into the law, while it does not put a stop to malfeasant practices in the public districts that are now asked to “compete” with alternative schools for student enrollment. The privatizers may be looking at dysfunction in public institutions as another way of maximizing their market share, rather than the way they should be looking at it: as something they have an obligation to correct, an abuse of public funds from which regulatory and oversight agencies should protect citizens.
Huppenthal is the one who, while in the office of State Superintendent of Public Education, made robo calls to state residents letting them know public funds were available to subsidize the cost of them pulling their kids out of public schools and enrolling them in private schools.
http://archive.azcentral.com/news/politics/articles/20140212arizona-furor-over-huppenthal-robocalls.html
If he really wanted to serve the best interests of the poor, he would have spent his time figuring out how to use the regulatory and enforcement mechanisms at his disposal to crack down on irregularities in procurement and hiring in large urban public districts serving populations that don’t have the advocacy resources more wealthy district have.
TUSD has been mismanaging its affairs in various ways for decades in ways that would never have been possible in states with more responsible regulatory systems. The state is at fault at least as much as malfeasant TUSD administrators and negligent constituents in the district.
We wrote about this two years ago… and explored the option of White Flight from TUSD. The correlation is amazing.
http://threesonorans.com/2014/10/02/100-mi…
Pardon me for saying so, but as an Anglo parent who chose to enroll a student in a more ethnically diverse Catholic school rather than in one of the Anglo-majority TUSD schools, the term “white flight” bothers me. It seems to obscure the motive for leaving, which in every TUSD-withdrawal case I’ve been familiar with has NOT been seeking more racially homogeneous school communities. The motive has been to find well-managed schools that provide better educational services and better facilities.
And if TUSD admin is pandering to the 3S’s and University, it’s because their central administrative recruitment process seems somehow to select for a capacity to be governed by venality and self-interest. They will pander to wealth and connections wherever those characteristics concentrate themselves. They are not, in my experience, social justice warriors with a burning passion for serving the underserved, whatever form the underserved may come in — minority and / or low income. They are stat-inflation, self-preservation, resume-building sorts. They will neglect a poor white kid just as much as a poor minority kid. Probably more so, because in the form of the desegregation authorities, they have people who are doing their best to make it harder for them to do the latter.
Thanks, by the way, Three Sonorans, for the heads up on Gallegos and the drop in the credit rating. Prompt and 100% more relevant than Safier, as usual.
http://threesonorans.com/2016/07/29/breaking-another-tusd-assistant-superintendent-resigns/
http://threesonorans.com/2016/07/29/tusds-credit-rating-drops-to-fifth-place-expect-higher-tax-rates-to-pay-back-bonds/
Focus on improving education and all the trivia, “agendas” drops away. My observation in 30 years of elected office and having done over 200 pieces of legislation is that people would rather fight over the nickel than reach down and pick up the 95 cents.
TUSD needs to measure it relationship with parents and teachers and make that measure the driving focus of its culture.
Look at this thread. The tremendous stress and turmoil. Until you get to a minimum level of peace, you really can’t pick up speed. We can all agree that teachers should be supported in their teaching function and that parents should feel engaged in the education of their child.
Yes, John, but how do you get to “peace” in a context like TUSD? How do you work with an existing bureaucracy like that to produce administrators who are capable of working toward “supporting teachers in their teaching function” and helping “parents feel engaged in the education of their child”? That’s not where these people are.
If you can’t get TUSD where it needs to go, is helping all the most concerned parents with the greatest social capital to exit the sinking ship and leaving poor children to go down on the Titanic a humane way to deal with the fact that there’s a bad crew running the ship? Somehow I don’t think the Carmelites would approve…but perhaps I’m wrong about that.
Peace be with you.
The only ‘peace’ or ‘solutions’ you will ever see in TUSD with a Grijalva in charge is total submission.
Make Arizona Mexico Again!
Or leave. The facts show what is being chosen.
Grijalva isn’t winning, she is losing – badly. Her sphere of influence is shrinking every year as her student count shrinks. Her Hispanic students are 2 years behind and every year they spend in her system, they fall further behind. Her ethnic studies are intellectual rot. The enormous resources extracted from taxpayers for desegregation are going to waste – just read the reports of the special master, they are posted on the TUSD Web site.
TUSD results are average results for a large district in America. But average doesn’t cut it in Arizona. You can’t have 4000 dissatisfied customers. They just leave. They have choices.
Wrong, Again:
Since Arizona is becoming Mexico again, maybe you should leave.
Start packing, because Arizona will be Mexico before you know it. The illegal brown man is gonna make your white ass pay.
Go far away, to a place that matches your frigid personality. Pluto would be ideal for you. It also gives those of us who are really tired of reading your nonsense a gift, since Pluto doesn’t have internet access.
AZ/DC
Adelita, is that you?
AZ/DC- What did I say that was wrong?
Give me some logic, give me some facts. The nature of your response suggests that you know that I am tight.
I am perfectly comfortable with the browning of Arizona. My associates growing up were Marcelino Lucero, Manuel Gonzales, Luis Rodriguez, James Ortega and Richard Sanchez.
We all went to school in the highest poverty neighborhood of Tucson and we all graduated from College.
What I am not comfortable with is public officials spending hundreds of millions of dollars and failing the same poor Hispanic kids I grew up with.
But what you haven’t given a satisfactory answer to, John Huppenthal, is the question of whether promoting exit from TUSD rather than oversight and enforcement to improve it was the responsible way to deal with its failures.
Salpointe is a great school. But not every high-school-age student living within the boundaries of TUSD can attend it, even with the tax credit funded scholarships now available. Ultimately, if some combination of forces at the state and local level can’t improve the functioning of TUSD to the point where it is responsibly meeting the needs of its ever-decreasing numbers of enrolled students, we’re going to be failing some of the poor Hispanic kids (and poor kids of other ethnicities) in Tucson, and that is not acceptable.
AZ/DC has not had a hit record in years…..oh, never mind.
Wrong, Again:
Do you truly think Adelita would be the only person who would disagree with your bullshit? Get out of your bubble and start paying attention. Calling you an ignorant troll would offend ignorant trolls. Take your foolish insight and leave this site, for the benefit of those who operate on more than 2 brain cells.
jhuppent@hotmail.com:
I was responding to the worst troll on this site, which actually isn’t you. Even you’ve got a long way to go to reach Wrong, Again’s immature status.
Gandalf:
I’ve never had a hit record. Heck, I’ve never even recorded an album.
A few comments about the numbers in my post.
Mark Stegeman, you commented that according to the Auditor General, the decline from 2103-14 to 2014-15 was 857, not 826. That’s less than a 4% difference, which is important statistically, but in terms of the analysis I was doing , it isn’t that high. And remember, I made it clear I consistently used the 175th day for my calculations. I don’t know what day or what compilation of days the Auditor General uses for its enrollment numbers. The different ways of coming up with totals could be the cause of the 4% discrepancy between the figures.
JD, you commented that I used the term “significant” incorrectly from a statistical standpoint when I said over the last school year, the K-8 numbers had a “significant net gain” from the 20th day to the 175th day. Guilty as charged. I hope I didn’t make it sound like I was performing a rigorous statistical analysis. I went back and computed the actual numbers. In the 2015-16 school year, in grades K-8, the district had a total 169 more students on the 175th day than the 20th day. That’s what I was trying to convey when I called the change “significant,” that it wasn’t just a 20 or 30 student change. I hope that clears up what I was trying to say.
ac/dc
Obviously thousands and thousands agree with me. That’s what this blog is about, the literally thousands that have spoken with their feet and the $190 million Adellita and HT have lost for TUSD in their quest to make Arizona Mexico Again.
Have you ever lived anywhere with a diverse population or do you just hate whitey?
I live in a place with a diverse population.
It’s called Tucson, Arizona.
Maybe it’s not near as whitebread as you would like, so do those of us with common sense a favour and disappear. Don’t worry, we will not miss you. There are plenty of other xenophobic know-nothings who can (unfortunately) take your place, stained as it may be.
Oh, and I don’t hate whitey. I AM whitey; or The Man or a honkey or a cracker or whatever else your feeble brain comes up with to attempt to slap a label on me. At this point I couldn’t care less, anytime we disagree I can only view that as a compliment in my favour. Not seeing eye to eye with your negative immaturity only makes me more of a person. Too bad that you’re not attempting to be more of one.
ac/dc
If you think tucson is diverse you need to step out of your cave.
Because in the 5th poorest city in the country totally run by liberals for decades all that matters is if you ain’t brown you ain’t down. And even with all your white guilt, you will never be brown.
I have no white guilt. Being that you’re a xenophobic racist you may not see that. I imagine that it is tough for you to see anything unless your lower intestine and stomach area are transparent.
I love how you included what seems to be all of your standard cliches in your 3rd paragraph! It just proves a point: you never have anything original, interesting, intelligent or even new to say. Every time you respond to me, you are actually strengthening my viewpoint. You’re actually better off when you keep your hands away from the keyboard. Please, do those of us who actually have intelligence a favour and keep your idle hands busy in other ways.
P.S. I didn’t bother to correct you last time because I was hoping you would would disappear, but since I didn’t get my #1 wish, (faulty star!) I guess I’m gonna have to point it out: My username is AZ/DC, not AC/DC. I wish it was the other way around, having their money could definitely pay off my mortgage…but alas, it is not so.
@ AZ/DC. Oh Dude, you have hit on a great name for a local band.
Your first single should be “Hiway to hell” a tune to warn the electorate of legal weed. Or what about “Hells Bells” a warning to taggers about defacing historic churches in our area. “Back in Black” letting the local goths that dark clothing in Tucson Summer is a bad idea.
Endless possibilities……
You can thank me later
Sad to see kids as the pawns in these ideologically laden, political games. I attended school in a big-city, blue-state community (with more primary schools than all the schools and all grades in Tucson put together). My folks were active PTA, occasionally interceding when kids were held to unreal standards, but mostly helping out and praising public-school teachers.
Our public schools were run like magnet schools, each with a certain flair and “personality.” And so far as i know, our ethnically diverse population (much more so than Tucson’s) served students equally well; at least, a lot of us made it into college from all these many schools. We didn’t piss and moan personalities or racism (which earlier had been a self-defeating issue) once it was fixed; as parents and kids, we simply aimed for the stars.
The lack of a future for most Tucsonans has been mentioned; for sure, it’s an ambition killer. All the statistics in the world aren’t going to solve the dampening of ardor for education sought after by our Arizona Legislature for most Arizona families and kids, and the general torpor induced by local lack of economic and cultural opportunities. Stop putting the responsibility off on others if you aren’t helping to fix these systemic problems.
Gandalf:
I’ll thank you now!
I’m happy that certain people come to this site to be fun, cool and clever. There are others who spread nothing but negativity. I’m glad that I cannot place you in that category.
Sincerely, DC
jake,
In TUSD’s case, you can’t lay any of the blame on the legislature. TUSD has lots of money and lots of programs. And, despite being a very large district, they get average results. However, in Arizona, average isn’t good enough. Nationwide, 7% of parents, with about 3.5 million students, rate their child’s school a “D” or “F”. You can get away with that in most states but in Arizona, we have choices. You can’t even get away with being rated a “C”. In Arizona, the parents of those 3.5 million students would be in motion.
Soon, TUSD will have no chance of being able to pass bond issues and overides will be completely impossible. They just simply have to get more customer focused or die. Traditional education culture is killing them. You wax idyllic because your parents took the action necessary to provide you with success. TUSD has to provide for their students what your parents provided you: motivation, great attitude and practice of academic skills and a satisfactory daily regime “did you laugh or smile a lot today?”
You can get a whiff of the issues by reading the Special Master’s report. Some commentators on this page (supporting local ed means supporting local reform) want more regulation of TUSD. The Special Master’s report makes it clear that there are already too many cooks. TUSD’s board needs to support their superintendent, clear the road for him and constantly encourage him and his principals to be customer focused.
No more bonds for TUSD. They have the money, they just won’t use it correctly.
John Huppenthal:
In Arizona, average isn’t good enough?
No, apparently you have to go for rock bottom in certain public districts, so you can ensure the ongoing availability of a certain number of citizens every year to join the ranks of the prostrate work force Ducey, the Kochs, and their ilk need to keep their enterprises going. God forbid the kids in our public schools should graduate from high school prepared to do something other than be forced to exchange their time and labor for minimum wage in one of the many “opportunities” Arizona provides to work in a low skills , dead-end job for a firm owned by someone happy to profit hugely while their workforce lives in poverty. If you can’t use certain individuals from Arizona’s public educational institutions this way, there’s always the possibility of turning them into “clients” in the private prison system.
The theory that opening the field of public education up to competition and management of some portions of the field by for-profit interests will force improvement in troubled public school systems is not sound, as Hirschman wrote prophetically in 1970 not too long after Friedman first floated the idea. Read Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and you will see an accurate prediction of what TUSD has become:
“…the presence of competition could do more harm than good when the main concern is to counteract the monopolist’s tendency toward flaccidity and mediocrity. […] [sometimes competition] comforts and bolsters [mediocrity] by unburdening it of its more troublesome customers. As a result, one can define an important and too little noticed type of monopoly-tyranny: […] an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy. […] If, as is likely, the mobile customers are those who are most sensitive to quality, their exit, caused by the poor performance of the local monopolist, permits him to persist in is comfortable mediocrity.”
So tell me: how does becoming “customer focused” help a school district where most of the customers who are empowered enough to demand a quality “product” have long since left? The few who persist in demanding improvement are at this point ignored. Watch the calls to the audience at TUSD Board meetings. Frequently, the governing board majority and superintendent get up and leave the room when certain subjects come up, allowing members of their constituency who’ve taken the trouble to attend the meeting and express concerns to address empty seats. They know they don’t have to pay any attention to constituents who complain because there will be no enforcement of proper process or adequate service delivery coming from the state level and the vast majority of their constituency can be relied upon not to mobilize and make their continuing underperformance uncomfortable for them. Meanwhile tens of thousands of children and young people are suffering what amounts to neglect, when you compare what they receive in their schools to what it is possible for healthy public school systems to deliver in other states.
Moral of the story for state-level ignorant, underperforming public officials in Godforsaken Arizona: You can’t depend on operations of the market and the “invisible hand” to do your work for you. In order to protect the vulnerable portions of your citizenry from abuse you have to do the tedious and difficult work of regulating, overseeing, enforcing.
But it’s clear that serving the common good and protecting the vulnerable from abuse was not our current leaders’ motive for entering public service. If the citizens in Arizona care about the students in our schools and the future of our state, we must find a way to put more responsible, better informed people in public office.
Huppenthal writes, “The Special Master’s report makes it clear that there are already too many cooks.”
No. What the special master’s report makes clear is that year after year, there is no one to make this district do what it should do.
The problems with the failures to implement deseg, with the failure to use public institution protocols for procurement and hiring, with the chronic unwillingness to take administrative action in areas that properly support teachers and ensure high quality service delivery to students illustrate what happens when quid pro quo machine politics takes over a public institution in a state where those entrusted with the powers of enforcement are willfully, persistently derelict in their duty to oversee public institutions.
It is astounding that there are so many who are willing to look at this situation and say, “Good thing TUSD is getting what it deserves,” or, “Good thing Adelita Grijalva’s power base is shrinking.”
What about the tens of thousands of students enrolled in TUSD: are they getting what they deserve? That’s the question the community should be asking about its largest local school district. Preoccupied with adult-level partisan political games, too few people are asking it.
Wallethub just released national standings by state, and guess what? California,Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico all finished in the 40s, with reading being some of the worst in the country.
Could it be that we are trying to teach students that don’t speak or comprehend English?
Can you propose any other plausible reason?
Supporting Public Ed Means Supporting Local Reform
Its not just the Special Masters report that suggests more regulation can’t heal TUSD. Look at the nationwide data for struggling schools. These are schools that have a great deal of oversite by state Departments of Education. Result: after five years of oversite, 75% of all these schools are worse.
Regulation is a dead end. I did a thirty year policy and literature review to enlighten my self as to what we could do better in Arizona. It was an intellectual desert waste land.
School choice is the only policy tool left and the evidence is that it is working in Arizona. Not just working but working spectacularly.