G.I. Guarantee Watch: Darcy Olsen tells it like it isn’t

by David Safier

No word from the Goldwater Institute in my snail mail today. Will G.I. admit Matthew Ladner made an error when he wrote our school districts have ""an almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio"? I guess I'll have to wait another day to find out.

I'm reasonably certain the letter will tell me how right Ladner is and how wrong I am. Darcy Olsen, President and CEO of G.I., loves her Matthew along with all his half truths and outright lies. She repeated a slew of them Thursday on the John C. Scott show and Arizona Illustrated Thursday, including Ladner's lie that school districts have a 1-to-1 ratio of administrators and bureaucrats to teachers.

There is so much I could write about — there were howlers and mouth-droppers aplenty — but I'll try to limit myself to the highlowlights.

Here she is on AZ Illustrated:

"In the K-12 system there are just a little bit over 100,000 employees.
Bill, only half of those are teachers. So you basically have one
bureaucrat or official or administrator per teacher, and that's the
wrong ratio. And that's one of the reasons our students are struggling
so much to keep up with students in other states."

Just like Ladner, Olsen included every school district employee who isn't a teacher, including bus drivers, maintenance workers and food service workers, as a bureaucrat, an official or an administrator. It's an amazingly misleading statement, typical of the G.I. spin I hear and read on an almost daily basis — except in this case, she and Ladner wandered beyond the boundaries of spin and into the land of lies.

Olsen's final sentence in that passage adds a new and wonderful twist. Our students are struggling to keep up with other states, she says, because of our overblown bureaucracy. In the fantasy world she's created, other states have less "bureaucracy" than Arizona, and if only we cut out some of that useless fat, we wouldn't need to spend another penny on education. Spending on education, of course, is the whole point here. Olsen wants less, so she accuses schools of wasting money right and left.

[Note to Olsen and Ladner: the AZ Auditor General says schools districts average about 9% spent on administration, which, according to Arizona Education Network, is 2 points lower than the national average.]

On the John C. Scott show, Olsen made this statement about charter schools:

We have charter schools in Arizona. We know these schools generally are performing better than the traditional public schools.

No, they're not generally performing better, according to a recent Stanford study comparing charters to district schools in a number of states. In the study, students in Arizona's charters had slightly lower achievement scores than similar students in district schools.

And finally, as an added, non-education-related bonus, here's a statement Olsen made about the proposed 1% sales tax increase on AZ Illustrated (She made a similar statement on the John C. Scott show):

Families cannot afford a sales tax increase. They call it a penny, but it's actually almost 20%. It would cost the average Arizona family about $600 a year.

The mind reels at the mendacity of those few sentences. You read that statement about a 20% increase, and you shudder at the thought of paying an extra 20 cents on the dollar because of the sales tax hike. That's what Olsen wants you to fear, but what she's actually saying is that the one cent sales tax is a 20% increase over the current sales tax. She hasn't told a lie, exactly, but she's proven once again that nothing G.I. says can be taken at face value.

And the $600 a year cost to the average Arizona family? If you pay one cent more on every dollar you spend on a taxable item, you have to rack up $60,000 in purchases before you reach $600 in added tax. That's $60,000 in taxable items, not $60,000 in income. Anyone who spends that much must have an income well over $100,000 a year. Average for Arizonans? I think not. Ballpark for Olsen and Ladner? Certainly for Ladner, who made about $141,000 in 2007 according to G.I.'s tax form.

Honestly, I could pull out a number of other statements Olsen made Thursday, but. . . enough. Suffice it to say, every word that comes from her is carefully crafted to further G.I.'s agenda without any concern for giving an honest account of the issues. Her performance would be a thing of beauty if she were on the stage, but with the power G.I. wields in this state, this kind of deception is a toxic pollutant poisoning Arizona's atmosphere.