By Rich Kronberg
The October 25, 2011 issue of the Arizona Daily Star had an article reporting some of the results of an internal survey, which was electronically administered, repressing the responses by employees of TUSD. The article included the usual statements from Superintendent Pedicone about this survey being the beginning of a process to change the culture within TUSD. This column began as a comment in the comment section of the on-line version of the ADS.
Now that TUSD spends much more money on its public relations department I am sure there will be tons of spin put on these sorry results. Here is what I have gleaned from reading the many comments by current and former TUSD employees.
Front line employees…teachers and principals…generally feel completely disconnected from the central administration. It is clear that many of the teachers in particular feel the administration is more interested in playing politics and appearing to be doing something to make a change than in actually doing the things it needs to do to change its dysfunctional culture. This feeling is not paranoia. The fact that so little of the district’s budget…53%…is actually spent in the classroom is a far better indicator of TUSD’s priorities than any spin from Pedicone or the Governing Board. They are spending millions and millions on lawyers while classroom teachers have to beg for boxes of tissues for their class.
The state’s Auditor General releases a report that details just what percent of each district’s budget gets spent in the classroom. The most recent data (2010) shows that TUSD spends 53% of its budget in the classroom while its peer group…the other large Arizona districts…spend about 60% of their budgets in the classroom. This translates to several millions of dollars more that would be spent in the classroom even if TUSD only operated at the norm for its peer group. TUSD also spends almost $200 more per student on administration than the rest of its peer group. That is one major contributing factor in the small percentage of money spent in the classroom.
Superfluous and incompetent administrators are not the only way that TUSD diverts money away from the classroom. For years now, the Governing Board and administration have been enamored of silver-bullet programs that would supposedly “fix” TUSD. These programs usually begin with grant money. By the time the grants run out each of these programs has a cheering section…mostly generated by the administrators who supervise the programs. The size of these cheering sections generally has absolutely nothing to do with the academic success the programs produce. Almost no data, other than anecdotal, has ever been presented to the public to support any of these programs. More and more money goes into them instead of the classroom and TUSD’s results do not improve.
TUSD can’t get its act together, at least in part, because they don’t have standardized curricula. There was testimony from several individuals at the Raza appeal hearings, including from TUSD staff, about this lack of coherent curricula. It is an interesting and revealing side note that in Arizona the Governing Boards are supposed to vote their approval for any curriculum in use by a particular school district. This never took place with the Raza Studies curricula that have caused such tremendous problems for TUSD. Members of the public who have tried to get copies of TUSD’s math curriculum have been stonewalled and rebuffed, and TUSD’s own assistant superintendent of curriculum has admitted under oath that her biggest job so far has been trying to figure out what the heck the curricula are for the oh so many programs TUSD runs.
I expect part of the concern over allowing incompetent teachers to continue working involves multiple double standards within TUSD. Let’s examine a few of them. First and foremost must be the fiasco at Rincon High last year. On the superintendent’s recommendation, the Governing Board directed the firing of half the teaching staff as part of a so-called turnaround model since Rincon High was deemed to be a persistently underperforming school.
Subsequently, it turned out that Rincon was one of only a very few of TUSD’s high schools to meet the standard of adequate yearly progress. Some have claimed the three reasons for the turnaround were: (1) the desire to grab the millions of federal dollars associated with turnaround schools. (2) the desire to get rid of experienced relatively well-compensated staff and replace them with beginning teacher making just about poverty level wages, and (3) the desire to remove Rincon from the facility so the already favored students at University High could have the facility all to themselves.
A second reason for staff being concerned about the lack of accountability must come from the widely known, and bragged about fact that few, if any MAS staff has never been evaluated. Conscientious teachers, who fret over evaluations, resent this sort of privilege for a few “movie stars.”
But the most significant double standard appears when we see how incompetent administrators go unpunished…or even rewarded… while teachers are fired. What consequences did the administrator who could not count instructional hours or the one who could not get the buses to pick up and deliver kids on time and at the right stops face? He received a $2000 bonus. What consequences did the administrator who failed to inform high schools that the scoring methodology for the AIMS tests changed last year face? She received a bonus. The answer to all of these questions is, “No consequences and a bonus to boot!”
In many school districts the teachers’ union promotes the economic interests of teachers by protesting publicly when the district budget gets as out of whack as TUSD’s budget. In another life I was the president of a local union in a district about the same size as TUSD, and we would do everything we could to inform the public when the district was focused more on administrators than on teachers. Not so with the Tucson Education Association. The union is completely absent as a force for change. They represent the employees so poorly that they are continuing on as the recognized bargaining agent only on the sufferance of the administration and the Governing Board. I have yet to hear a TUSD leader complain about the small percentage of the budget spent in the classroom. All they seem capable of doing is defending Raza Studies and screaming about how the poor performance of TUSD is really someone else’s fault. They don’t defend the contractual rights of their members and have remained silent while TUSD has continued to go down the tubes. Most employees in TUSD view the union as irrelevant because it is.
It is really up to voters to make the changes at the top that are required to turn TUSD around. The next chance will be in 2012 when three members…a majority of the Governing Board…will be up for re-election. By defeating Burns and Cuevas and electing candidates who will focus on education instead of indoctrination as well as holding the administration accountable for its incompetence, TUSD can be turned around. It won’t be easy. The powers that have controlled TUSD for many years and operated it without much concern for the quality of education it delivers to students will not give up their control without a struggle. Ultimately, it will come down to whether voters can see through the spin and elect the sort of Governing Board the kids who go to TUSD deserve.
Rich Kronberg taught public school in New York City and Anchorage, Alaska for 39 years.