TUCSON – Kudos to Kold News and especially to reporter Valerie Cavazos. They have published sobering statistics on the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD).
Warning: The statistics could drive you to despair, despondency and depression.
To see the KOLD report, click on this link. Then scroll down to a map of the district, where different-colored dots represent each school. Click on a dot to get the name of the school as well as the following information:
- Classroom Utilization
- 2025 Student Count
- Design Capacity
- Enrollment Utilization
- Facility Condition
- School Grade
- ELA (English Language Arts) Proficient Score
- Math Proficient Score
- State Proficiency Score
- Enrollment History 2020-2025
- Enrollment Change 2020-2025
Three takeaways:
First, TUSD has too many schools to ever be managed effectively from a central office. The hierarchical “distance” from the top of the bureaucracy to the classroom is no doubt too long and too cluttered with such obstacles as directives, diktats, politics, red tape, useless apparatchiks, and one-size-fits-all policies and pedagogical nonsense.
Second, many schools are significantly underutilized; that is, they have far fewer students than the intended capacity of the facilities. There’s little doubt that the district’s plan to close some schools is justified.
Third, the big contradiction: Many schools have been awarded an undeserved grade of “A” or “B” for overall effectiveness but have math and ELA scores that are woefully substandard. Rhetorical question: How many district personnel have been fired for these abysmal results? Cultural question: Why do parents put up with this?
Regarding the first point: As a community columnist for the Arizona Republic in metro Phoenix for seven years, I would often delve deeply into the innards of public schools and write about my findings. In one column, I compared the bareboned administrative staff and overhead for the Phoenix Archdiocese Catholic school system, on a per-pupil basis, with the bloated administrative staff and overhead for a large public school district. From memory, the former had less than half of the staff and overhead of the latter.
The TUSD statistics call into question all of the grandiose plans to turn Tucson around from being a socioeconomic laggard of high poverty, high crime, and widespread shabbiness, to being a shiny city of prosperity and a center for aerospace and the industries of the future, with a spiffy redeveloped downtown being a catalyst, along with other nostrums du jour.
The renaissance is not going to happen unless Tucson’s Ugly School Disaster is overcome.
Mr. Cantoni is an author, freelance writer, and retired business executive. Contact: [email protected].
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