My thoughts on Stegeman’s game playing gets a three-peat

by David Safier

You get the sense you've hit on something when an idea gets picked up by two Tucson papers. I rewrote my post, The games Mark Stegeman plays, for the Tucson Weekly and Inside Tucson Business. Actually, it was on the Bill Buckmaster show that I first aired the idea that Dr. Stegeman, whose field of specialty in economics is Game Theory, practices what he teaches as a TUSD School Board member, which I guess makes it a four-peat.

Last Friday Stegeman was on the Buckmaster Show, and Bill asked Stegeman what he thought about my post. Stegeman's answer was pretty evasive — we need to talk about important matters at TUSD, not personalities, and anyway, Game Theory refers to lots of aspects of decision making. In the comments section of the Weekly article, Stegeman addressed my assertions more directly, saying basically I don't know what I'm talking about. But it looks like David Hatfield, the editor of Inside Tucson Business, thinks I may have hit on something. In his column, H.T. Sanchez might be what TUSD needs, he mentions my analysis favorably.

Sanchez didn’t get a unanimous show of support [from the TUSD Board] but in his case it was 4-1 and that one vote had to do with the political game being played by that one board member, as David Safier points out in his guest opinion on page 21.

I wrote my post hoping it would encourage people to take a closer look at the politics at TUSD to get a clearer understanding of the decision-making dynamics of the Board — and the upper level administration — and stop taking what happens at face value. Getting the idea into the public eye with the two columns may help that along.