David Safier

Special Master Hawley needs to take a few deep breaths

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by David Safier

6a00d8341bf80c53ef019b01628984970c-200wiThis falls into the "Be careful what you wish for" category. I mainly applauded the Unitary Status Plan put together for TUSD by the courts. It clarified and updated the desegregation plan the district has been under for decades. And it was necessary to appoint a Special Master to oversee implementation of the plan. But Special Master Willis Hawley is getting a little hyperactive about his duties. He needs to take a breath and see if TUSD can work things out before he jumps in with both feet. We've got a new Supe in town and a reconstituted board. They're on the side of deseg. These things take time.

First Hawley wanted TUSD to scrap part of its magnet program because the magnet schools aren't sufficiently integrated. H.T. Sanchez wants some time to let the district finish its efficiency audit and demographic study, then look at holistic changes to the district. Makes sense to me.

Now Hawley is telling TUSD to scrap its new admissions plans for University High School (UHS) because he doesn't think they represent the best way to bring UHS closer to the district's racial balance. The district plans to add a motivation test to allow students who don't quite make the GPA/entrance exam cut to be accepted into the school. Hawley wants something that looks more like college application material — student essays, staff recommendations, etc. His isn't a bad idea. In fact, TUSD is looking at adding the those items for the 2014-15 school year. But once again, the district wants the chance to make a good faith effort to work things out on its own.

Blast from the past: Barry Goldwater’s disappointment with the Goldwater Institute

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by David Safier

I was strolling around the internet and happened on a 1999 article in the Phoenix New Times, Think Tank Warfare. It's about Barry Goldwater's hopes for what the Goldwater Institute would be and how his hopes were dashed as the institute became a propaganda and lobbying arm of business interests and the doctrinaire, libertarian far right. He was especially dismayed at G.I.'s embrace of charter schools and vouchers.

Goldwater had hoped G.I. would be a genuine policy research institute, similar to the Morrison Institute at ASU. His wife Susan, speaking after he died, said,

"He liked the idea of academics doing this thinking. What he didn't like was seeing it turn into a special-interest, big-business lobbying group."

As for G.I.'s push for charter schools and vouchers:

"Barry Goldwater was an absolute believer in public education," his widow says. "I think he was nervous about charter schools. Was he against them? I don't know. He was nervous about what they would do to the public schools. He didn't favor religious education."

Susan complains that Jeffry Flake's push for vouchers, a system that would allow parents to spend tax dollars on private school tuition, is advancing an agenda that would promote religious schools at the expense of public education.

"They're wanting to promote their religious agenda, and Barry would have gone down with the ship fighting that one," she says.

Craig Barrett and Michael Block lie by omission — again

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by David Safier

Screen Shot 2013-12-04 at 6.13.00 PMScores from the PISA international tests came out Tuesday. If you just look at the raw scores, the takeaway is, U.S. students are far behind the rest of the world. It's a hopeful sign that many people in the media, possibly for the first time, are taking a more measured approach to the data and considering factors that add a degree of depth to their analysis and make a blanket condemnation of U.S. schools look questionable. But not Power Lunch on CNBC. Uh uh. Host Sue Herera interviewed the top two people at BASIS charter schools — Craig Barrett, president and chairman of the board (and Gov. Brewer's educational right hand man), and Michael Block, BASIS' founder — and asked them flat out, no nuance, why U.S. students are lagging so far behind internationally. Barrett, an intelligent man who has lots of experience in the educational field (though he's never taught at a K-12 school), answered, disingenuously,

"It's probably a combination of three things. Great education systems like Shanghai — or BASIS — have great teachers, high expectations and a degree of accountability, or tension, in the system. . . . You hardly find that at all in the United States."

I guess Barrett forgot to mention the fourth thing: both Shanghai and BASIS have highly selective school populations. BASIS uses a triple selection process to make sure its high school students are among the most intelligent and conscientious in the state. Shanghai is a city filled with China's elite. While 24% of China's high school graduates go on to college, the number is 84% in Shanghai. On average, Shanghai's parents spend as much on tutoring and weekend activities for their high school aged children as the average Chinese worker makes in a year. Oh, and children of immigrants aren't allowed to attend Shanghai's high schools. If they want to go to school, they have to return to the rural villages they came from.

Great campaign slogan, Andy

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by David Safier Andy Tobin has a radio hit piece out against Ann Kirkpatrick. It's boilerplate stuff: Obama-Kirkpatrick-Obamacare-Kirkpatrick-Obamacare-Obama-Kirkpatrick. The only truly wonderful part of it is the opening: "Hello, I'm Andy Tobin, and I'm running for Congress because I'm sick of Washington, D.C." Let me suggest a few follow-up slogans for the Tobin campaign: "The federal … Read more

Going on the Buckmaster Show today

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by David Safier I'll be doing my regular Blogger Beat discussion with Bill Buckmaster on his radio show today. We'll be talking about TUSD, other education issues (maybe the PISA international exam whose results came out yesterday [Spoiler alert: don't get too upset over the U.S. scores]) and whatever else comes up. The Buckmaster Show … Read more