I was out of town when the TUSD board passed the proposed 2015-2016 budget at its June 23 meeting. The vote was the usual 3-2 split. I didn't see it covered in the Star, though maybe it was there and I missed it. But covered in the Star or no, it hasn't been posted here, so I thought I'd give everyone a chance to look at the budget and comment, pro, con or somewhere in between.

The budget won't be adopted until the July 14 meeting, so it's not written in stone. The TUSD web page with a summary of the budget, which I put below, has links leading to more details and an email address where people can make comments or recommendations.

The summary shows that the budget has been increased for classroom and classroom-related spending and decreased for administrative costs. It also states that employees are getting across-the-board raises.

• The budget earmarks 50.8 percent of funds to be spent in classrooms or tied to classrooms as defined by the Auditor General.
• An additional 15.9 percent is earmarked for Student and Instructional Support.
• It cuts a total of 8percent from administration in the following areas:

• Executive administration, 9 percent
• Legal Services, 5 percent
• Human Resources, 6 percent
• Finance, 10 percent
• Operations, 8 percent
• Technology Services, 9 percent
• Leadership, 5 percent
• Student Services department, 7 percent 

• Curriculum and Instruction increased by 5 percent.
• The budget reduces the tax rate by an estimated 21 cents, saving taxpayers almost $5 million in 2016.
• It carries forward $14 million from the 2014-15 school year.
• The budget gives across-the-board pay raises to employees.
• The State required budget forms were created using the new ERP/Infinite Visions Accounting System.

As I've said before, I'm no expert on budgets. To my untrained eye, this looks pretty good, but I'm willing to stand corrected if I'm shown differently. The floor is open for comments.

At tomorrow's meeting, the Tucson City Council is going to be chatting about a message they'd like to send Gov. Doug Ducey and Arizona Legislature: restore funding for Joint Technical Education districts...now, please.

The state's budget cut about 7.5 percent of funding, or roughly $344, per student that enrolls in a JTED course, starting in 2016.

From the so-called memorial the council members are considering tomorrow evening:

Whereas, JTED students are able to earn more, pay income taxes sooner and have more disposable income than their peers...and the city believes Arizona must continue to serve and educate students and sustain, if not improve, the workforce development JTEDs currently provide...any monetary cut in JTEDs is an issue of regional concern and has a serious impact on the future integrity of our skilled workforce and future prospects for Arizona and its economic recovery.

In March, business leaders, heads of Pima County's school districts and JTED leaders held a press conference as part of the joint efforts to make a case for the program. That, of course, did not work. The state Legislature went on to approve the budget, and Ducey signed it shortly after. 

"JTED was a referendum approved by tax payers in Pima County, approved at over 70 percent across the board, a huge percentage of passing a bill that says 'we want to raise our taxes because we want more money to go into career and technical education programs,'" said Pima County JTED superintendent Alan Storm at the time. 

That same month, Tucson Unified School District students planned a walkout to protest the budget cuts, but the district ended up hosting a forum with hundreds of high school students. Among the speakers were U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva and TUSD board members.

"There is a choice, we can all sit and allow the Legislature in Phoenix to continue to fund prisons or to start funding you," TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez said at the forum that took place at the Tucson High auditorium. "We could also do nothing, be uninformed and sit here and allow big companies that make billions of dollars a year get tax breaks, maybe that money can be redirected toward you. My personal preference is that you are supported, that you are educated, my personal preference for a better Arizona, a better Tucson is for you to take a hold of your state, it is your state, your future and your responsibility, thank you for being here. I want to tell you how many millions of dollars are going to companies for tax breaks, I want to tell you how many millions of dollars are going to prisons."

Friday I wrote a post about the wildly unequal funding of organizations promoting progressive education and those on the privatization/"education reform" side. The big bucks are flowing to the privatization crowd, mainly from what Diane Ravitch calls the Billionaire Boys Club, while progressive educators get the little money they have through contributions from small donors and by looking for change under sofa cushions. My case in point was an online education news network being started by ex-CNN and NBC anchor Campbell Brown. She's got enough money to hire 13 people, including a former editor at Time magazine and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Her message is anti-union, anti-tenure, pro-charter and pro-voucher. And she's not alone. She's joining a network of well funded organizations that have plenty of money to get out a similar message.

The comments on that post aren't as wild and wooly as on some of my other posts—things can get pretty heated in Comments Land—but there are a few interesting points I want to respond to. A few people said, maybe the progressive education side isn't getting as much money because its ideas are tired and unpopular. Wrong. It's not about which side has the better ideas. It's about which side is favored by people with lots of money. Money may be speech according to the Supreme Court, but more money flowing to conservative politicians and ideas isn't a sign that they have the better, or even the more popular, ideas. It's just a sign of what big money wants.

Someone else's whole comment was a link to a group called the Progressive Education Network. I assume the point was to spotlight an equivalent organization to those on the privatization side. So I went to the website. Very nice looking, very professional. From the look of things, the group might very well have some big money behind it.

Next I went to the group's 2013 tax return. Total revenues for the year: $300,000, enough to maybe pay the salaries of 4 or 5 of Campbell Brown's 13 staffers. The president, secretary, treasurer and 6 directors get no compensation. They're volunteers. Under expenses on the tax form, there's no compensation—salaries—listed. Most of the money, $230,000, goes to pay for hotels, speakers, services and lodging/board.

No one would be foolish enough to give me a couple million to start an online education news network. I'm the wrong guy for the job, in spades. But it would be nice if someone on the progressive side of education got that kind of money to put together a slick, comprehensive website to cover education news, staffed with serious, experienced journalists.

I don't see that happening. But ex-CNN and NBC anchor Campbell Brown is getting big money to start an online news network with a privatization/"education reform" slant. It must be nice to have friends in high financial places.

Brown's nonprofit news site is supposed to go live in mid July. She's hired 13 people so far, including a former editor at Time magazine and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. It takes a decent chunk of change to pay 13 quality staff members while also taking care of general startup costs. But money isn't really a problem when your funding comes from the likes of Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Walton Family Foundation, among others.

As in the world of politics, there's a financial imbalance between the people supporting conservative and progressive education agendas. In education, the big money is on the anti-union, anti-tenure, pro-charter, pro-voucher side. They have the means to package and disseminate their message. There's just not the same kind of money on the progressive side.

This isn't Brown's only educational venture. She also runs another nonprofit with deep pockets devoted to fighting teacher tenure and seniority laws in court. And she's hardly a lone voice crying in the wilderness. A number of well funded organizations push a similar agenda. For instance, there's Students First, the group started by Michelle Rhee who built her educational reputation on lies and half truths about her successes as a teacher and as chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools. She raised lots of money before she got kicked out of her own organization. Students First also has a high powered Board of Directors. One of the board members is Dan Senor, who was an aide to President George W. Bush, chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, foreign policy advisor for Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential bid — and Campbell Brown's husband.

A layoff of 600 workers isn't good news, usually. But if, say, they're working the phones to scam people out of their money, it's not such a bad thing when they lose their jobs. That's a big part of the story behind the layoffs at the Phoenix-based Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix.

The Republic has an article about the layoffs that's full of facts and figures—drops in enrollment, revenue, and stock prices (the graphic at the top of the post shows the stock values for the past eight months)—but it misses the real story. There's a hint of what's going on when the story mentions who lost their jobs. It was mostly enrollment counselors, the people who call prospective students and try to talk them into signing up. The high pressure sales pitches, often filled with lies, got University of Phoenix and lots of other for profit colleges into trouble over the years. They conned students into enrolling in programs which often had little merit, and even when the coursework was potentially valuable, all too often the people who were talked into enrolling lacked the basic skills needed to benefit. As a result, students pile up costly loans they can't pay back. And when they default, it's usually the taxpayer who's stuck with the bill. University of Phoenix gets almost 90 percent of its revenue from U.S. student grants and loans, and it gets its money whether or not the students pay back the loans.

An AP story, Why the gov't let many trade schools become diploma mills, does the subject more justice.

This is one of the sadder education columns I've read in awhile. The title asks, Is Special Education Racist? — in other words, are too many black children given special education designations? The authors' answer is no. In fact, they say, despite the fact that a proportionately larger number of blacks are labeled as needing special ed than other children, there should probably be more black children enrolled in the programs.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the authors are racists who believe that blacks are naturally inferior intellectually. In fact, the authors are college professors from Pennsylvania State University and University of California, Irvine, who have published a study concluding that black children "are far more likely to be exposed to the gestational, environmental and economic risk factors that often result in disabilities." Because more black children are exposed to these risk factors than children in the rest of the population, more of them are likely to have traits that qualify them for special education.

Here is the authors' analysis of exposure to lead, which has terrible effects on children.

Thirty-six percent of inner-city black children have elevated levels of lead in their blood. The figure for suburban white children is only 4 percent.

Continuing to list risk factors:

Black children are about twice as likely to be born prematurely and three times more likely to suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.

This is not good news:

Teachers have been fleeing Arizona in droves, resulting in such a serious shortage of experienced teachers that state officials are warning of serious consequences if the exodus continues.

Over the last five years, thousands of teachers have left the state, according to a 2015 report by the Arizona Department of Education, with this past school year being possibly the worst. The report warns if teachers keep leaving, “students will not meet their full potential” and “Arizona will not be able to ensure economic prosperity for its citizens and create the workforce of tomorrow.” It calls for increased pay for teachers and more overall education funding in the state.

Why are so many teachers leaving? Educators say reasons include low pay, insufficient classroom resources, and so many testing requirements and teaching guidelines that they feel they have no flexibility and too little authentic instructional time. According to new Census Bureau statistics, Arizona is near the bottom of a state list of spending per student, $7,208. The average per pupil spending around the country is $10,700, and the state is near or at the bottom for classroom spending per student. But it is near the top of a list of states showing which ones get the biggest percentage of their education revenue from the federal government.

Read the whole depressing report here.

TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez is giving a total of $17,000 to two schools. A couple of thoughts on the gesture.

First. I don't know if Sanchez timed the gift to lessen the impact of the complaints about his overly generous new contract, but if he did, it won't do much good. His gift is close to what the two previous superintendents gave back to the district—their yearly bonuses—so the gesture just puts him in line with his predecessors. He's still taking a big compensation bump over the next few years which has been greeted with nearly universal criticism (with me taking longer to get there than it should have. Mea culpa). I'm guessing nothing short of a reopening of the contract to lower the pay increase will help much.

Second. Sanchez chose two schools to give the money to: Davis Bilingual Elementary and University High. They're probably worthy choices, but I'm sure there were a few among many, many schools and projects he had to choose from. No matter where he decided to give money, and no matter how much he decided to give, it's small potatoes compared to the overwhelming need. If he brought his salary down to the previous level or took a small raise, it would be a clear statement that he doesn't put his needs above those of others in the district, but it wouldn't make a dent in the programs that need to be funded, and at most it would mean pennies in salary increases spread across the district.

The big issue, the one that we shouldn't take our eyes off of no matter what other legitimate concerns people have, is the state is starving the schools of funds. TUSD can work to save money however and wherever it can. Superintendent Douglas can try to reduce the bureaucratic mandates to schools which are currently built into state law. But so long as Arizona is sitting in 49th place, thousands of dollars per student below the national average, we're cheating our children out of the educations they deserve. 

With the horror of the shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, a little more than 24 hours old, and with the racial hatred that led the murderer to fire on the members of a devout Bible study group so palpable, I feel that it's more important than usual to point out that today, June 19, is Juneteenth—actually, the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth. It's a celebration of the end of legal slavery in the U.S. and a reminder of how great the resistance was at the time and how jagged the path to racial equality was and continues to be.

This old white man, who considers himself reasonably well educated, knows very little about Juneteenth. I hadn't even heard of it, I believe, until the posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison's novel, Juneteenth, in 1999, and I might not have paid attention even then if Ellison's Invisible Man wasn't one of my all-time favorite novels. Juneteenth: it seemed like a strange word and an odd title to me at the time. I put the blame partly on myself for not digging deeply enough into the history of race relations in the U.S., but I can't blame myself for not having the holiday even mentioned in the history textbooks I read in school or in the mainstream media I absorbed all my life. That omission, as well as the omission of so much of the history of racial oppression in this country from slavery to the present day, is part of that same jagged path, with all its switchbacks and washed-out bridges, we are taking in our attempts to increase our knowledge and understanding of our shared history and to move toward greater racial equality. That the road is so torturous is one of the great shames of our nation.

Here are two descriptions of the history of Juneteenth you can read if you wish. One is on the Juneteenth.com website. The other, a more caustic and cynical view titled The Hidden History Of Juneteenth, appeared on the Talking Points Memo website yesterday.

Here's a very short history of the events leading to the holiday, which I'm quoting directly from the juneteenth.com website so I don't put my shameful ignorance on further display:

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

Is that a scalpel or a butcher's knife in Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas' hand?

This is something to watch, warily. From today's Capitol Times Yellow Sheet (actually this is the teaser, since I don't have access to the Yellow Sheet itself):

Douglas told our reporter she has chosen the group that is going to comb through Title 15 in an effort to rid schools of unnecessary mandates and administrative burdens, and it won’t include any lobbyists or “alphabet soups,” a reference to the many education groups that are generally known by their initials.

This isn't new news. María Inés Taracena reported in The Range in April about a News Release Douglas put out saying she was planning to form the committee, which is supposed to come up with its findings in December, to be presented to the legislature when it begins its 2016 session.

I took a look at Title 15 in the Arizona Revised Statutes. The titles of the sections alone take 16 computer screens to get through. That's just the titles. I scanned through the screens—18 chapters, divided into Articles, further broken down into specific items. The mind reels.

Looking over Title 15 is probably a good idea. Putting the task in the hands of anti-regulation conservatives, however, is dangerous. One person's necessary regulation is another person's onerous attack on freedom.

To this point in her tenure, Douglas has taken a measured approach to her job. Compared to my worst fears and expectations, she's been a pleasant surprise. If she and the committee adopt a "Do no harm" approach to evaluating the rules and regulations, things might turn out OK, or at least not too bad. But I can already see Republican anti-"government schools" legislators sharpening their axes, looking for "burdensome regulations" to chop to pieces and turn into kindling. This is worth watching, and watching carefully. It could have a significant impact on the already problematic future of Arizona education.

I don't believe Douglas has published a list of committee members. When we know who's sitting on the committee, we'll have a better idea of her intentions.