Plaintiffs, TUSD object to desegregation plan

TUSD and a number of plaintiff representatives have raised objections to the proposed Post Unitary Status Plan (USP) proposed by the court appointed Special Master Willis Hawley. One plaintiff representative said the USP was not a desegregation plan but an employment act.

The Tucson Unified School District, the Mendoza Plaintiffs, the Fisher Plaintiffs and the United States Department of Justice submitted a Stipulation regarding the filing of the Joint Proposed Unitary Status Plan with objections by the parties on November 9, 2012.

TUSD and the plaintiffs are objecting to certain provisions in the proposed USP which they believe either overstep the Court’s authority or offer remedies for problems that do not remain or never really existed. In its objections, the District noted that the “unfortunate result of the Special Master’s failure” is that the “Special Master’s initial efforts to create a unitary status plan, were completely uninformed by any findings related to activities already underway or fully implemented in the District.”

The plaintiffs have been allowed little time to review Hawley’s proposal, but to date they have been unhappy with failure to address “the primary focus of both the District Court and the Ninth Circuit in finding that the District was not unitary was its failure to monitor its activities, report on them and evaluate the effectiveness of those activities.”

Instead, Hawley worked primarily with an agenda and according to various sources with the guidance of the AERA and Augie Romero, the former head of the Mexican American Studies department.

According to the Stipulation “the time from November 9, 2012 to December 14, 2012 will allow for a robust public comment process, the State of Arizona will have the opportunity to file a brief and the Special Master will have the opportunity to review the Draft USP and provide his input.”

It was members of the Fisher team that fought for the provision for the State of Arizona to be specifically noted in the Stipulation.

TUSD is objecting to the imposition of “two obligations with regard to faculty and staff.” Hawley is ordering that the District, “develop and implement a plan for the identification and development of prospective administrative leaders, specifically designed to increase the number of African American and Latino principals, assistant principals, and District Office administrators.”

The District says it has “no objection to the development and implementation of such a plan,” but the District would be required to provide financial support to enable current Latino and African American employees to secure the required certifications to become administrators.”

The District cites a “Labor Market Study” which shows that “by virtually every possible measure, the District has more Latino administrators and certificated staff than would be expected based on a variety of possible labor markets. The District has the expected number of African American administrators and certificated staff based on the Arizona labor market.”

TUSD says that with those numbers, there is no reason to treat Latino and African American employees differently by giving “financial support to secure additional degrees or certifications.”

The Employment Act

The employment act portion of the USP, to which the plaintiffs and District most strenuously object, is the requirement that the District “hire or designate people for at least twenty-one positions” which are mainly “senior administrative staff positions, which will require either a thorough recruitment and interview process (for new hires) or a substantial reorganization of duties and obligations (for designating existing personnel).”

The proposal also requires the District to “designate, hire, or contract for appropriate trainers for all certificated staff, administrators and paraprofessionals to provide the professional development necessary to effectively implement the pertinent terms” of the USP.

As schools are on the chopping block, and teachers are anticipating pink slips this year, one member of the plaintiff group wondered if the district would eventually end up with more administrators than teachers and students.

Overstepping boundaries

Student assignment and school boundaries have been an issue since the Court’s involvement in 1978. As the District contracts and expands lines have been drawn and redrawn. Many believe that since the true nature of the District’s “Equity Plan” on discipline and the Mexican American Studies classes became widely known, an exodus occurred. Whatever the reason maybe, the District is hemorrhaging students for the past few years, and is now is facing the closure of up to 30 schools in the near future.

Despite the fact that the Ninth Circuit did not order Hawley to address boundaries, and no one can guess what schools will even exist in the next few years, Hawley proceeded to address the issue.

Hawley’s involvement stems in part to the fact that the District has not made any real effort over the years to develop any academically successful magnet schools on the south and west side of towns. They served up expensive and gimmicky programs without success to underserved children, like International Baccalaureate and Emilio Reggio, while the successful magnets schools on the east and north sides of Tucson offered traditional and back to basics curriculum.

The District’s only objection to Hawley’s proposal is the requirement that magnet schools allow only 50% of their seats to be filled by students from the school’s attendance boundaries. The problem with that is that they cannot recruit students to the failing magnet schools on the south and west sides, and must fill those schools with unsuspecting neighborhood children.

Also, the District argues that “particularly the District’s high schools, may have magnet programs but also serve a large geographic area in which there are no other alternatives for students who do not wish to be transported long distances.”

Many say that Hawley appears only concerned with meeting the needs of adults. “It is time for him to focus on the needs of students. One way to do that with all the desegregation money available would be taking a good chunk of it to entice TUSD’s best teachers to work at schools in the south and the west to make sure those kids have access to the best teachers,” said Rich Kronberg, co-founder of TU4SD a public school advocacy group. “Teachers won’t move schools and take on tougher jobs for $500 or $1000 a year, but offer them $5,000 or even $10,000 a year and see what happens. For a paltry $5 million…less than 10% of the annual deseg funding… you could get between 500 and 1,000 of TUSD’s best into the schools that serve the kids Hawley claims he wants to help.”

Mexican American Studies

The District as well as some of the plaintiff members are objecting to the requirement that the District “develop and implement culturally relevant courses of instruction designed to reflect the history, experiences, and culture of African American and Latino communities.” The District says that “It is unprecedented in a desegregation case, particularly one in which there were no findings of constitutional violation related to the curriculum, to mandate specific courses or curriculum. The Mendoza Plaintiffs dismissed the only count of their Complaint related to curriculum in a stipulation filed on January 7, 1977.”

As a matter of fact, it was the Fisher plaintiffs who fought for Stipulation’s language that emphasized the need to allow the state to intervene, and or participate in the matter of curriculum, arguing that it is the state, and not the federal government who dictates curriculum for public schools.

The courts seem to agree. According to the District, the courts have “outright rejected any requirements related to curriculum in a desegregation decree, and held that a district could not be required to provide particular curricular offerings to or for its minority students.”

As a matter of precedent, the Second Circuit, noted in 1999, that “curriculum is a sensitive matter, drawing subjective inputs from education policy, local politics and parental preference. Absent some extraordinary showing, we will not conclude that the Constitution requires a local school board to adopt one curriculum over another, or that children of differing ethnicity and race require separate curricula or teaching techniques.”

It is that point that some plaintiff members and TUSD Governing Board member Michael Hicks want to emphasize. “For too long the District has cheated many of its students,” says Hicks. “Some of what the Special Master is requiring is great in that we are going to finally be held accountable for the education we provide. On the other hand, the MAS classes, did not provide a quality educational opportunity, but merely placated politicians by creating angry kids to serve their political needs. We can do better for our students, we have to.”

University High

Nothing will draw the public to the hearing as much as the matter of University High, according to a desegregation plaintiff. For years, liberal elites at the University of Arizona have used University High as a publically funded private school. They can tell their friends that they DO send their kids to public schools, all the while their kids are in the confines of a school that prevents the admission of the average underserved student in TUSD.

They say it is so discriminatory in its enrollment practices that it refuses the District’s own students who do not meet the rigorous standards while accepting students from wealthier districts around the area. While it is frequently referred to as a magnet school, it does not meet nearly any standard that would qualify it as such.

The plaintiffs have asked over the years that the district do more to put quality teachers in struggling schools so that their students might become qualified to attend UHS, the District has refused to end the practice of social promotion mostly practiced in south and west side schools. The plaintiffs believe that as long as the District was meeting the needs of the higher socio-economic class, the District could say, “see, we provide great schools to kids, and your kids just can’t compete.”

That attitude is precisely why the Ninth Circuit ordered the District back under Court supervision. It found that the district acted in “bad faith” in its attempts to close the achievement gap.

As a result, Hawley has required that the District revise UHS admissions criteria. This will surely be met with outrage from the liberal elite desperate to remain as “public school advocates.”

Pursuant to the Order dated September 24, 2012, final objections and responses to the public comment process, the State of Arizona and other Parties’ objections will be filed on December 14, 2012.

The public is encouraged to participate in the process, by submitting comments at a Public Forum, or email and regular. Comments must be received by November 28, 2012.

Three Public Forums will be held from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. on the following dates:

Monday, November 26
Tucson High Magnet School
400 North 2nd Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85705

Tuesday, November 27
John Valenzuela Community Center
1550 South 6th Avenue
South Tucson, AZ 85713

Wednesday, November 28
Palo Verde High School
1302 S. Avenida Vega
Tucson, AZ 86710

Editor’s note:

According to TUSD the “Parties have agreed to very ambitious definitions of “Racially Concentrated” schools and “Integrated Schools” in an effort to encourage students to take advantage of opportunities to attend schools that reflect the racial and ethnic enrollment of the District as a whole. A “Racially Concentrated” school is defined as a school that has a single racial or ethnic group representing more than 70% of a school’s enrollment. An “Integrated School” is one in which no single racial ethnic group deviates from the District average by more than 15%, and in which no single racial or ethnic group exceeds 70% of the school’s enrollment. As of the 40th day of the 2012-13 school year, the District’s Latino enrollment was 64.1% at the elementary school level, 64.6% at the middle school level and 56.4% at the high school level. As a result, in order for a school to be an Integrated School, or to not be a Racially Concentrated school, it must have a Latino enrollment that is less than 6% above the District average for elementary and middle schools, and less than 14% above the District average for high schools. In desegregation cases, it is typical for student assignment plans to have as their goal schools that are within +/-15% of the District average for each racial or ethnic group.”