After I wrote a long post about the new contract and salary deal for H.T. Sanchez at TUSD, I steeled myself, waiting to have my head bit off in the comments section. To my surprise, that's not what happened. The commenters took a variety of positions on the contract, but the arguments tended to be more nuanced than the usual polarization I find in the comments section. [That's not true, however, of the very long 28th comment, which called me naive and ignorant and argued at length about how badly Sanchez has harmed the district. I'm fine with that, by the way, it comes with the territory. My surprise was that my post didn't get more comments like that.]

In the course of the back-and-forth, one anonymous commenter said I was "missing the point" on one issue. And you know, the commenter is right. So I want to post the comment here as a kind of post script to what I wrote initially.

In a reply to a comment, I wrote that the size of Sanchez's salary wasn't directly relevant to the salaries of teachers and other staff. With 3,000 teachers and even more support staff, any lowering of his salary would result in pennies for everyone else. Earlier, I had also mentioned Mesa Superintendent Michael Cowan, whose district is a similar size to TUSD and who has a similar salary to Sanchez's. Cowan's is probably a bit lower, though it's hard to tell with all the add-ons to the base salary. But, as someone pointed out in another comment, Cowan refused a raise because of the financial problems Mesa, like all Arizona school districts, is suffering through.

With that background, here's the comment.

David: You seem to be missing the point here. It doesn't matter whether Sanchez and his cabinet refusing to take a raise and / or bonuses could make a material difference if the amount they refused to take were divided up and applied to teachers' salaries throughout the district. This has to do with morale and the ability to lead. Does it make sense for Superintendents and central administrators to take raises and bonuses in a context in which the legislature is further cutting funding to an already disastrously underfunded school district? The quote from the Mesa Superintendent Cowan provided a perfect example of how a good leader handles himself in a situation like this. The behavior of the leader sends a message to the troops which either improves morale and unifies the force or degrades morale and impairs his ability to lead. It seems that Sanchez has done the latter — and in a context where morale and confidence in his leadership were already dangerously low.

Point well taken. I'm not sure how it could have or should have come about, but the best outcome for the sake of the district would have been for Sanchez and other top administrators to forego raises at this point while committing to stay on. It would have hurt their pocketbooks— hough not anywhere near as much as the non-administrative staff is being hurt by the state budget cuts to education—but it would have sent a message to the rest of the TUSD employees: We're in this together.

So, I was watching the latest Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The main topic was our out-of-kilter bail system which can victimize low income people and their families from the moment they're taken into custody, whether they're innocent or guilty. It's a topic I've become more interested in lately with my growing understanding of the evils of our system of mass incarceration. (The most eye opening book I've read in years is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I recommend it highly.) I was more than usually attentive to what John Oliver was saying, and something kept knocking around in the back of my head. "Bail bonds. Bail bonds. When have I looked into that subject before?"

And then it hit me. Back in 2011 when I was trying to learn everything I could about BASIS charter schools, I googled Michael Block, who started BASIS with his wife, Olga Block, and I came upon an paper he wrote in 1997, before BASIS was a twinkle in the couple's eyes. The piece by Block, who is an economist by training, is titled, Runaway Losses: Estimating the Costs of Failure to Appear in the Los Angeles Criminal Justice System. The gist of his argument is, having defendants purchase bail bonds from private companies is preferable to pretrial screening and court-run pretrial release systems. Bail bonds, good. County pretrial release systems, bad. And, to take that to its logical conclusion: Private market, good. Government services, bad. According to the paper,

Not only does the private market perform better the main task of assuring the appearance of criminal defendants, but now we see it does it at a dramatically less cost to the taxpayers. These results should suggest a clear public policy agenda.

At the very top of the paper are the words, "American Legislative Exchange Council, Report Card on Crime." At the end are the words, "ALEC has prepared model legislation that addresses these issues. You may reach us at (202) 466-3800." (That's still the phone number of ALEC's Washington, DC, office, by the way.)

TUSD's Superintendent H.T. Sanchez has a new contract that extends his stay through 2018. His supporters are cheering because it means continuity of leadership, something the district hasn't had in ages, from someone they believe is a competent, steady hand at the helm. His detractors are booing, saying he's an overpaid, under-competent superintendent, and the sooner we get rid of him the better. I'm planning to get into the actual salary and bonus issues eventually, but it'll take me awhile, so if you're not interested in my views on Sanchez, superintendents and school districts, you can save yourself some time by skipping down to the paragraph that begins, "Let's look at Sanchez's contract, salary and benefits." Meanwhile . . .

Most of the discussion over Sanchez comes down to one question: Is he good or bad for TUSD? If you're one of those people who think he's a bad superintendent who is destroying the district with his ego and ineptitude, then you're right to think he should go, the sooner the better. If he's as bad as you say, he's being paid too much even if he's working for free.

I don't share that view. I think Sanchez is basically competent and knowledgable, and I think he's decisive enough to take steps that can help move the district forward. I give him generally positive marks for the job he's done at TUSD. He's far from perfect. He has some ego and control issues that bother me, and he's certainly made mistakes, some of which I've written about here. Recently, I'm disturbed about the district's continually declining enrollment, and I wish Sanchez could figure out some way to turn the numbers around, but I also know this isn't a new issue. If enrollment levels were steady or increasing before he came, TUSD schools would have been full, and the issue of school closures that rocked the district before Sanchez arrived never would have come up. I also hate the idea of substitute teachers being outsourced to a private company, because I don't like seeing public services privatized. I think the district is balancing the budget on the backs of its substitutes, who make poor salaries at best and apparently are paid less at TUSD than neighboring districts. This could end up hurting the district in the long run by making it even harder to find the substitutes it needs to function. But if it's really a million-dollar-plus budget issue that's being considered as the district struggles to balance its budget, it's as much a problem of the state's underfunding our schools as it is a problem caused by Sanchez.

So, since I have those and other concerns, if I see multiple problems with Sanchez himself and things he's done since he's been at TUSD, why do I support him?

I taught under a number of superintendents during my thirty year tenure as a public high school teacher in the Portland, Oregon, area, and none of them made the kinds of dramatic changes that turned schools or students around. I no more believe in the magic superintendent who can turn educational darkness into light than I believe in magic "education reform" schools which take low performing student bodies and turn them into Harvard material. Both myths are destructive to our system of education. We absolutely need to pursue excellence every way we can, but we also need to understand that miracles are rare; otherwise they wouldn't be called miracles. If we expect miracles from teachers, schools and superintendents, almost all of them, even the best, will come up short.

As part of its approval of a $1.4 billion budget last night, the Tucson City Council agreed to kick $25,000 to Access Tucson to keep the public-access station from going dark over the next few months.

The city is combining the public-access facilities with the city's own Channel 12 in a new community media center that is designed to handle both those responsibilities as well as some new responsibilities. You can can see the details here.

But while the city goes through the process of selecting a new organization to run the community media center, it will continue funding the cost of putting programming on the Access channel. The downtown studio closed to the public last month.

Access Tucson Executive Director Lisa Horner said she was surprised by the council's decision, which was hammered out as the council members discussed the budget. 

"Clearly, there was political will to ensure that the channels for community media not cease to program while the city channel maintained funding as well," Horner said.

The latest news in the for-profit college scandals is, the U.S. government is planning to forgive federal loans owed by tens of thousands of students who used the money to pay for a nonexistent education at Corinthian Colleges. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the college's approach had "the ethics of payday lending." Remember the payday lending comparison for later.

This scam run by for-profit colleges to steal, generally from low income students who want to better themselves, isn't new news. It's old news. And if the problems were dealt with earlier and more diligently, and solutions weren't opposed so vigorously by the industry's lobbyists and their right wing enablers, the U.S. government might not be on the hook for debt relief that could be as high as $3.5 billion, and fewer ex-students would be on the hook for student loans they paid to waste their time with substandard, often worthless, education.

I started covering this issue in 2009 with a post titled, For profit colleges need oversight as well. I'm not bragging about how prescient I was. My post cited two articles which opened my eyes to the problem, one in Pro Publica about the University of Phoenix, and the other in the Washington Monthly about the for-profit college industry in general, titled, The Subprime Student Loan Racket. Remember the subprime loan comparison for later.

This is from the opening of the Washington Monthly article. Remember, this was in 2009.

Question: What do these two statements have in common?

"Research shows that a quality early childhood education experience can yield significant long-term benefits on overall development of a child."

“JTEDs and technical training is critical to the future of our state, and it will continue to be critical to the future of our state."

Answers: (1) Doug Ducey made both statements; (2) Doug Ducey doesn't want to fund preschools or JTED adequately, because: (3) Doug Ducey says we can't afford it.

The statement about preschools is from an article in April with the cutest picture of Ducey crouching down in a preschool you ever did see—teacher holding a baby care book and smiling at a child in the foreground, young, bearded guitar player looking like he's singing soothing children's songs in the background, Ducey, caring and fatherly, looking adoringly at one of the children. In the same article, we learn that Arizona has far fewer children in federally funded preschool programs than the national average and that only special education students get any state preschool funding. And we learn why Ducey is against funding early education, even though he admits its importance.

"We know that there's a good return on investment,'' he said. But Ducey said people need to recognize the state's financial condition.

The statement about JTED—Arizona's Joint Technological Education Districts—is from a Sunday article in the Star's business section. Business leaders all over the state praise the JTED programs for generating trained, motivated workers in a number of technical fields, saying they're essential to growing Arizona's economy. Yet we learn that the legislature's most recent education budgeting fiasco will have the effect of cutting JTED funding so drastically that the programs will be gutted, and many will simply die. And we learn why Ducey allowed the cuts to happen.

“We had to do what had to be done in this budget session." 

To recap. Our governor agrees that preschool and JTED are valuable programs for individual students and for the state. Yet he agreed not to fund them. And the reason he gave is that we can't afford the programs.

Saying we can't afford to fund preschool and JTED at the needed levels is pure, unadulterated bullshit, as is Ducey's position that we can't afford to fund public education at needed levels.

I just want to get down a few scattered, end-of-the-week thoughts about Ducey's proposal that Arizona dig deeper into the Permanent Land Endowment Trust Fund to add $360 million per year to K-12 funding for five years starting in 2017. There are a lot of moving parts in this proposal, and I want to lay out a few of them.

First, unexpected tax money has flowed into the state coffers lately, and some people are saying, "Let's hold a special session to give some of that to our cash-strapped schools right away." Ain't gonna happen. Ducey wants to reduce income taxes to zero — there's been a carefully orchestrated effort recently to publish some "thoughtful," even "scholarly," op eds on the joys of zero income tax to prime the pump—and if Ducey starts off the next legislative session with a surplus, he can use that as an excuse to begin chipping away at the income tax.

Second, a group of business people have said they want a sales tax increase with the revenues dedicated to education, just like the proposed increase Ducey fought against so vigorously a few years ago. Increasing the money from the trust fund could slow the momentum of that movement, something Ducey would far prefer to fighting members of his business base over a tax measure.

Third, Republicans have been trying for years to get permission to sell off parts of the land the state holds in trust to business interests. They always say they want to do it "for the schools," because who's gonna say, "We want to sell some of that prime land so our fat cat friends can grow even fatter"? I'm thinking, if they can lower the amount in the trust fund sufficiently, or get schools addicted to using those funds, Republicans will be in a better position to make a case for selling off the most attractive parcels to their friends.

I can't contain my excitement. Thursday I wrote a post about Nevada's new vouchers-on-steroids law which allows all Nevada students to set up Education Savings Accounts, unlike Arizona where Republicans have used the elephant's-trunk-under-the-tent-flap approach to allow only a small portion of Arizona students to set up ESAs, then expand the criteria until it reaches their goal of universal vouchers. In the post, I mentioned Matthew Ladner, who was the education guy at the Goldwater Institute and is now the Senior Advisor of Policy and Research at the organization Jeb Bush created, the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Those two groups were the main forces behind the Nevada bill.

Ladner, seeing his name in my post (I guess he loves Google Alerts as much as I do), chose to respond in the comments section! I'm not excited simply because Ladner is a national figure and a major practitioner of the dark arts of the "education reform"/privatization movement. It's because Ladner and I have history. We go way back. Some of the most fun I had when I wrote on Blog for Arizona was when he and I, along with a large group of informed commenters, argued in the comments sections of posts where I debunked the nonsense that came out of Ladner and G.I. (I generally used the heading "Fool's Gold" for those posts. Get it? GOLDwater? Fool's Gold?). The debates literally went on for dozens of comments and tens of thousands of words.

Good times. When in 2009 I said Ladner's claim that Arizona spent $9,700 per student on education, rather than the nationally accepted figure closer to $7,000, was absurd, we argued and argued and argued, until he wrote, in one of G.I.'s daily emails, that I was at least partly right.

Over the past couple weeks I have been debating progressive blogger David Safier and his readers about per pupil spending in Arizona public schools. It's been a good exchange, and I have learned things in the process.

Ladner learned things in the process? Be still my heart! Of course, he didn't exactly say he was wrong, but he wrote,

In the absence of reliable national numbers, I have pledged not to make claims about where Arizona ranks, even if the usual suspects continue to claim Arizona is ranked 49th.

I remember writing during our back-and-forth that even the numbers in the yearly Report Card put out by ALEC (few people knew about ALEC back then) agreed with my figure, not his, and he acknowledged I was correct about that. Then—this is priceless—Ladner took over the duties of writing the ALEC report cards, which now claim Arizona spends $8,806 per student. His report card also gives Arizona a B- grade because we "provide high-quality educational options to all students."

Arizona created Education Savings Accounts, aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka vouchers on steroids. We were the first. Then came Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee. Nevada, where Republicans gained control of the legislature and the governorship in January, just passed a similar program. The major difference is, all the other programs are limited to kids who fall into a few categories. Every year the Arizona legislature tries to add more categories to the mix with the ultimate goal of making the voucher program universal, but it has a long way to go. The new Nevada law includes all children, no exceptions.

Other than the universal coverage, the Nevada ESA is pretty much a carbon copy of the Arizona program. The other major difference is, students receiving voucher money have to take yearly standardized tests in English and math and report the results to the state, while in Arizona, no tests are required.

Here's how it will work in Nevada. If a student has been enrolled in public school for 100 consecutive days, that student will be eligible for a voucher. Like the Arizona version, the money from the state goes into a savings account which the parents can spend on approved educational activities, including tuition, books, tests and tutors. The children don't have to be in school. As in Arizona, home schooled children qualify. Any money that's not spent one year rolls over to the next. If it's not all spent by high school graduation, the remainder of the money can be used for college expenses.

How much money does that come to in Nevada? If you're a low income family, your child gets 100 percent of the state funding the public school received. Higher income families get 90 percent of the public school allotment. That comes to about $5,000 per child, though, if it's like Arizona, special needs children who get extra funding in public schools will also get the extra funding in private schools, which can add $10,000 or more to the yearly total.

We need some good old investigative journalism like this, courtesy of the Akron Beacon Journal, here in Arizona.

No sector — not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals — misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.

A Beacon Journal review of 4,263 audits released last year by State Auditor Dave Yost’s office indicates charter schools misspend public money nearly four times more often than any other type of taxpayer-funded agency.

Since 2001, state auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.

And the extent of the misspending could be far higher.

To be fair, we do get some good investigative journalism here in Arizona, especially given how shrinking budgets have stretched reporters to the breaking point — some of it looking at education in general and charters in particular — but this angle is begging to be explored.

The article is chock full of interesting facts.

When private firms audited the charters, they only found misspending in one half of one percent of those they audited. The state's audits found problems in 17 percent.

[The private audits] aren’t designed to detect fraud. They merely check revenues against expenses, ensuring tax dollars going in match receipts and cash balances.

Often, though, the receipts are unavailable.

“You have a system in Ohio, and everywhere else, where every single year charter school operators are getting audited. And every single year, those audits come up clean. It’s because they are not set up to catch fraud waste and abuse,” [Kyle Serrette, director of Education at the Center for Popular Democracy] said.

[snip]

And the difference between state and private auditors was profound: For every $1 private auditors found to be misspent, state officials found $102 in their audits.

Arizona's regular charter school audits, like Ohio's, are conducted by private companies.