Omnibus education bill SB 1196

by David Safier
Today's Star editorial warned of the rush to legislate in the waning days of the Arizona legislative session. This passage jumped out at me.

Reading legislation is way above my pay grade, but I decided to look through the summary of SB 1196 to see what I could find.

The bill has 81 separate items. Many, I'm sure, are innocuous. Here are a few I want to highlight, not because there's anything wrong with them, but because I want BfA's intelligent, informed readership to see if they raise any red flags. I'm listing them out of order, starting with those that look most important to me.

• Under the Charter Schools heading:
  • 22. Permits charter schools to give enrollment preference to children of board members and employees of the sponsor and the school. A sponsor can be the school district governing board, the state board of education or the state board of charter schools. Should children of "employees of the sponsor" get preference? It sounds like you could set up semi-exclusive schools for school board, board of ed, or charter board parents' children.
  • 23.  Authorizes charter schools to provide instruction to a single gender, with permission of its sponsor. Are the anti-affirmative action and the anti-ethnic studies folks going to make a fuss about this? Will they call this gender discrimination, as they call ethnic studies programs racial discrimination?
  • 21.  Allows a charter school board with vacancies to achieve a quorum with a majority of the remaining members. There is a real problem with charter school boards acting as puppets for the people who run the charter. If they can get rid of dissenters and not replace them, doesn't that increase the chances for charters to misbehave? Shouldn't there be a limited time frame for filling vacancies? There is a similar provision for school district boards, but since those members are elected by the public at large, I'm not sure it raises the same potential problems. And an item for public school boards "Prohibits a single member from being a quorum." There is no similar restriction for charters.
• Under the Academic Receivership heading are a host of items about the ways districts can be taken over if they're underperforming. I don't know if these are problematic, but the value and necessity of state takeovers of school districts is in dispute, and the regulations should be looked over carefully to make sure they help, not harm the students.
• Under the Department of Education heading:
  • 6. Allows the Superintendent of Public Instruction to establish an alternate performance pay system for ADE employees.
  • 7. Contains a statement of intent to allow the Superintendent of Public Instruction to develop a performance pay system to improve employee productivity and morale. Performance pay in education is another disputed, problematic area. I don't think this is performance pay for teachers, but it sounds like it could be a way to stifle dissent, or simply discussion of educational ideas the Ed Supe doesn't like, by using pay raises as an encouragement for conformity.

I'm laying all this out because I haven't seen it laid out elsewhere, not because I'm condemning any of these items. Others in the list of 81 that didn't catch my eye might be equally or more important.