If Arizona has any hope of building an economic future, it has to come from our ability to offer quality public education to students. Given that Arizona ranks last or nearly last in every measurement of public education, I would like to offer a few suggestions to turn this around.
First: Bombard all local, state and national representatives of our state to return the $1.2 billion it owes public education. Arizona voters passed Proposition 301 in 2000 to provide additional monies for educational programs. However, since 2009, state officials have failed to provide these monies to public education, and have instead used more than $1 billion of 301 funds to balance the state budget. Gov. Ducey’s latest proposal to use state land trust money to fund public education is a total sham because it uses money already designated to public education to pay back its debt to public education. The Legislature misappropriated 301 tax money for more than five years, and the money to repay the schools should logically come from the state’s income tax surplus. We the public must demand that our representatives correctly and honestly rectify the debt. Teachers, you know what other public servants like the police, firefighters and bus drivers would do in this situation.
Second: Restore the yearly pay ladder and cost-of-living increments for teachers so they are guaranteed a decent raise now and into the future. Presently, teachers are guaranteed nothing, and basically, they have received nothing this century. In fact, teachers have not only lost financially as our state government let education funding fall to 50th in the nation, but they have also lost any job protection in terms of tenure or seniority. That’s why the teacher shortage is at crisis level.
Third: Allow school districts to create charter schools to address specific needs within the districts. The state banned that starting this year. Now, the for-profit charter schools have an unfair advantage of doing this and are funneling some of the best local students out of the districts while not having to worry about serving the underprivileged students the large districts deal with. If TUSD, for example, could create more schools like C.E. Rose, Dodge or UHS, it could compete with Basis or Sonoran Science Academy.
Fourth: Tell the Legislature to stop wasting millions on the latest student and teacher evaluation tools. The only things No Child Left Behind has created are a bunch of wealthy test writers and the concept of labeling a school, its students, parents and teachers as failing or needing improvement. And spending tons of money on an incredibly time-consuming teacher evaluation “instrument” such as Princeton, New Jersey’s Danielson FFT is counterproductive. Its underlying purpose is to quantify teacher performance in order to make it easier to fire underperforming teachers while doing virtually nothing to improve the quality of teaching. Not only do teachers have to spend hours accumulating their own statistical data proving they are doing the job, the district must also provide statistics for every teacher based on school-, district- or state-level measurements, as well as results of student-parent surveys. Teaching was once considered an art, and our best teachers were once considered an inspiration. Now they are reduced to numbers in a data-collecting machine.
Please read online the 156-page Danielson FFT at www.tucsonea.org/Teacher_Evaluation.pdf to get an idea of what a time-wasting disaster it is for public education.
Lastly: Do what you can to encourage good teachers to continue to educate.
Write stories to publish in the newspapers and other media about great teachers, present and past. Alert the television stations to outstanding teachers and outstanding events at school.
All of us need to improve the educational climate of our state.
