Bus drivers are administrators?

by David Safier

I finally got around to watching last week's debate on Prop 100, which aired on KUAT, between Ann-Eve Pederson from the Arizona Education Network and Farrell Quinlan, the Arizona State Director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses.

I'm not going to comment on the debate itself except to say Pederson handled herself and made her points extremely well, and by the end, Quinlan was left with little more to say than "Prop 100 isn't the solution." He's right, of course. It won't bring in enough funds to cure our budget woes or restore funding for schools and health care. But to see him go from "Prop 100 is a terrible idea" to "You know, it won't really solve the whole problem" shows what happens when the anti-tax crowd has to deal with people refuting their ideas.

But my favorite part was when Quinlan tried to finesse his language to imply there's one administrator lurking behind every teacher — holding the teachers' coats, he said once.

For every teacher we have teaching in Arizona schools today, there's an administrator — I don't know, holding their coat or doing something — but we have, for every teacher, we have an administrator or somebody who's not in the classroom backing them up.

Listen up, Ladner. Bus drivers are administrators! Quinlan didn't even bother to hide behind your "bureaucrat" term.

Here are the facts: Arizona school districts have the same 1-to-1 teacher to non-teacher ratio as most states, which includes lots of bus drivers and maintenance people and food services people and so on. About 9% of the entire staff are administrators.

While Quinlan didn't exactly lie, he went as close to a lie as he could without quite crossing the line.

In her response, Pederson straightened him out handily. But I'm betting the 1TO1 Virus created by the Goldwater Institute will continue to spread in conservative circles as it is used again and again. However, if the media is inoculated against the disease and doesn't spread it beyond conservative circles, its virulence can be contained.