Tucson Citizen.com
Caveat Lector - Politics, Government and the Free Press – by Mark B. Evans

TUSD has greater problems to solve than Mexican American Studies

by on May. 06, 2011, under Editorials, Politics

Is Tucson Unified School District ungovernable? Last week’s debacle of a board meeting sure makes it look that way.

TUSD has stumbled from one crisis to another over the past 30 years with only brief periods of stability. While students taking over a board meeting was a unique event, raucous, riotous TUSD board meetings are nothing new.

In the 1980s student violence and teacher labor unrest plagued the district, as did implementing court-ordered desegregation. In the 1990s, voter rejection of a budget override, growth in the suburbs and school decay in the city core created budget crises, in the 2000s declining student enrollment, declining state support for public education and student accountability and school labeling regimes gave the district fits.

Now it’s a debate over how and what some students are taught about U.S. and Mexican history. Considering the sea of troubles the district is in, reforming Mexican American Studies is the least of the district’s worries.

There have been five superintendents in the 12 years since a blue ribbon panel proposed the MAS program as a way to curtail the increasing Latino student dropout rate in TUSD. George Garcia created MAS and Stan Paz implemented it after he became superintendent in 2000.

Paz was supposed to restore TUSD to its glory days when it was the best school district in the state. He managed to irritate everyone and left in 2004 right before the board intended to ask him to leave. Roger Pfeuffer then spent four years as interim superintendent. He was primarily tasked with creating a plan to reduce the number of district schools but the board rejected his plan after thousands of people yelled at the board at community forums.

The board hired wunderkind Elizabeth Celania-Fagen in 2008 to right TUSD’s sinking ship, but she fled to Colorado two years later taking several top district officials with her.

Now John Pedicone is the new savior. He did for Flowing Wells what few people thought possible in a public school district with high rates of poverty – he made it excel.

The hope is that he’ll do the same for TUSD.

But TUSD ain’t no Flowing Wells. When Garcia retired in 1999, TUSD enrollment peaked at 64,000 students. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the state passed several education reform measures that included charter schools, allowing inter-district attendance and a quasi-voucher system cloaked as tax credits.

As a result, disaffected TUSD parents who are mostly white and affluent have voted with their feet, leaving for suburban districts and charter and private schools. Today, TUSD’s enrollment is slightly more than 53,000 and continuing to fall.

Once a diverse student body both racially and economically, TUSD is now an oxymoronic minority majority district, mostly Latino, with roughly three out of five students coming from families who qualify for federal school meal assistance, a benchmark of poverty.

About 20 percent of its schools are under the state’s “corrective action” thumb due to low test scores and other factors and another 10 to 15 percent are in danger of coming under the state’s thumb. It has too many schools and too few teachers.

Meanwhile, the Republican Legislature is doing every thing it can to dismantle public education while blaming schools and teachers for failing to thrive under the state’s destructive policies.

So the district has far greater problems than whether a handful of Latino students are taught that Che Guevera was good guy and it’s an open question whether one superintendent and a volunteer school board have the experience, resolve and resources to solve them.

It’s a good bet that Pedicone will want to make other changes to how the district is governed that are sure to rouse various rabbles. Those will be fights for the district’s future, not one small program affecting just a few students.

Board President Mark Stegeman would be wise to drop his effort to reform MAS and instead allow the state’s action against the district run its course.

Let the state be the MAS boogeyman, not the TUSD board and superintendent.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 6th, 2011 at 10:28 am and is filed under Editorials, Politics. Tags for this post: , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Kasey

    Well said.

  • jim hannley

    I appreciate your chronology and your perspective on the District and the very serious challenges it faces. The “white flight” you observe should be of concern to all of our community. If we proceed with a significant number of white and Latino students attending schools which are de facto segregated, it will reflect upon our community as a place divided by race decades from now. My graduation class of 1970 at Rincon was much more diverse with Mexicans, whites, Jews, from families of professionals and wage workers. I think there is no need for heroics on the TUSD board in effort to rescue the MAS from the clutches of the State. Should Stegeman follow your advice, the State may use a hammer to reform MAS. Will Stegeman sit smug when hundreds of parents attend a future board meeting demanding to know why the District let the State cut $10M from its funding as a consequence of lack of resolve in reforming MAS? I don’t think so.

  • ado1

    Regardless of TUSD having become as you state “a minority majority district, mostly Latino…”  the central issue appears to be whether this minority majority district, mostly Latino, should be allowed to persist in promoting racism disguised as a  Mexican-American Studies program.  It appears to me this charge of racism has been factually documented more than once over the past year or so.   La Raza doctrine and ideology, which is part of the  TUSD Mexican-American studies program,  is by it’s very nature an Hispanic racist organization.   It’s very name supports and telegraphs that fact, and that is of course the way many young Latinos(and older ones too) do interpret  it.  No school, public or private ought be including racist ideology and/or dogma,  as part of any program, however noble and well meaning the original program’s intent may have been.

    • Jim Hannley

      I have been concerned and I have inquired to what extent the concept of “Aztlan” meaning an actual locality or a province which defines Hispanic. I want to know if there is a thrust for separation by race. In my mind, Class is supreme. Race is a component of class and is important in class struggle. Divisiveness by race weakens the working class and leaves them subject to attacks on wages and as is the case now, on taxes and reduced services.

      • leftfield

        So, how do you get that component of the working class that serves the interests (unwittingly or otherwise) of the ruling class to develop a degree of class consciousness?  It’s an age-old question.  I assume you are not talking about the idea of the already class-conscious members of the working class compromising in an attempt to “win over” the “vendidos”.

  • Fraser007

    Would you want your kids going to TUSD…….nope.

    • ado1

      Well this goes off into a different area than class content  advocating racism.  I would want my children, were they still of K-12 ages,  have the best education tax dollars can provide.  Unfortunately, what I have witnessed over the last three or four decades has been a gradual dumbing down of course material and test standards to adjust to the lowest common denominator in the student body.  That is simply not right.  Kids in those schools are not learning as much as former generations of students learned, and of course being cheated out of a quality education,  as are the taxpayers being cheated by supporting an educational system that no longer has standards of learning at the same level it once did for these same kid’s parents and grandparents.   Much can be said about this as far as causes, parental involvement in their kid’s education at home, etc.   However, to answer the question posed about would I want my kids to go to a public school in Tucson,  most likely not.  In this day and age I would likely opt out and send them to a parochial or private school.

    • Ferrari Bubba

      Hey 007: After living in The Old Pueblo for 20 years, and enjoying it’s beautiful Sonoran desert beauty, that’s the question that der Frau and I had to ask ourselves. Did we want our 5 year-old son Harrison to be subjected to a TUSD education? Not on your life! Painful as it was, we moved out of state, where the kids still salute Old Glory at the start of each day, and the principal stll his a paddle hanging on the wall in his office to be used when necessary. The school doesnt look like a prison either, with no barbed-wire topped fence around it and no TPD police patrols either. Think back what Tucson looked like 60 years ago, and that’s what we have in Bismarck. We teach the three R’s, not revisionist history. Maybe our son has a chance to be something in this world, rather than flipping burgers, or sitting around on welfare feeling sorry for himelf and collecting food stamps. — Yer pal, Ferrari Bubba

  • Ryn Shane-Armstrong

    Mr. Evans,
    Thank you for this editorial.  It’s certainly food for thought.
    Real quick question for you: If the TUSD board and superintendent were to follow your suggestion and “Let the state be the MAS bogeyman,” wouldn’t this result in a huge economic fine of roughly 15 million dollars?  I was under the impression that the state (Horne and Huppenthal) are looking to penalize TUSD for alleged violations of the law.  Is this correct?
    Regards,
    rynsa

    • Mark B. Evans

      They lose money only if the state finds they’re violating the law and refuse to change the program to the state’s satisfaction. They key will be what remedy the state insists on and whether the administrative law judge agrees. Stegeman manufactured a controversy instead of waiting for the state’s ruling. Pedicone and other board members have said if the state finds the district in violation for the same weak reasons Horne asserted, it would contest the findings with the administrative law judge and eventually in Superior Court. It had been the board’s and Pedicone’s position all along to defend the district and MAS against the state’s action but that it believe the best course of action was to work through due process rather than join the suit against HB2281. Then Stegeman turned the anger of MAS supporters against the state toward the district and created a fiasco.

      • A.P.

        Stegeman tried to bring the classes into compliance with the PUSP as any responsible Board member would do. Everyone knows that if the PUSP goes in front of the Court again, half of the provisions will be tossed. Everyone seems to base their opinions on bit and pieces of information and not all the working parts.  Have you ever read the PUSP? Do you know that it is going back to court soon too?

        Anything Stegeman, or anyone tried to do to bring reason to the situation has been condemned by the MAS crowd.

      • Mark Stegeman

        Your position is that essentially that we should cede local control: cede it once to a state government which claims that local jurisdictions cannot manage themselves and uses this argument to justify laws such as SB2281; and concede it again to local interests (the specific interest is secondary) who would rather shut down and disrupt a government than take the risk of losing a vote.

        • Mark B. Evans

          My position is that you have bigger problems than MAS’s future. You were in the middle of due process. You should have let that run its course and resisted it as best you could. If in the end, the state forced changes, you had a boogeyman to blame. It was still TUSD vs. the state. Instead, you turned it into white TUSD vs. Latino TUSD.

          • Carolyn Classen

            Mark, the speakers at that limited 30 minute Call to the Audience were 99% in support of the MAS program.  And so was the large crowd outside.

            • Mark Stegeman

              I agree: all but one of the called speakers supported MAS and I would bet that most of those not called also supported MAS.  I am not sure how that bears on the points of the editorial.

          • Mark Stegeman

            It is not just white TUSD vs. Latino TUSD and that generalization seems unhelpful.  MAS has boith white supporters and Latino opponents.

            • Fraser007

              Its Latino TUSD and white TUSD who cant afford to get out.

            • Mark B. Evans

              You’re right. I over generalized. A better way to say it would be that instead of fighting a common enemy in the state it became  internecine.

        • Vato Loco

          Dr. Stegemen, your tunnel vision in obviously impairing your judgments, or possibly your stubborn and despotic mannerism be it right or wrong, come hell or high water. We are the community. You work for us! This is not Maricopa County and please stop calling yourself a Democrat (Dixiecrat is more fitting). What our Xican@ community and the progressive TUSD community did on the Board meeting this past Tuesday is stop your undemocratic “power play” of ramming Dr. Pedicone’s agenda of ending our successful MAS program with as little input from the community as possible, down our thoats. Please stop playing the victim and twisting, contorting our representative democracy as your actions resemble one of a tyrant… Dr. Pedicone is bragging how he has your vote and that of two other board members to make our classes elective, hence killing our program, to our community. TUSD is a Latino and progressive community and our children will continue to attend TUSD schools long after you and Dr. Pedicone have been run out of office. Enjoy your last day’s as the recall effort is well on its way and your and Dr. Pedicone’s 15 minutes of fame are coming to an end. Paz y refleciones.

          • Fraser007

            And thats why our town is so screwed up. Progressive and Latino.

      • Mark Stegeman

        Let us take your point about manufacturing a crisis away from the current charged issue and ask a hypothetical question:  would you in general say that someone who resists extortion manufactures a crisis?

        • Vato Loco

          “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”Letter From Birmingham Jail- Martin Luther KingMake no mistake, we are in a civil rights struggle! Many of you(AZ Star included) would have us passively sit back and accept the unjust actions of the political despots to Dr. Pedicone and Dr. Stegemen. As a parent of a Mexican American Studies student and a member of our Chican@ TUSD community and the progressive TUSD community in general, we will not compromise our successful program and the educational gains we have made… Without agitation there is no progress! We will not go back in history when Mexican-American’s in Tucson were sent to 1C schools(1920- 1960′s), as many of you “hatemonger’s-young and dumb-old and bigoted-hate radio listening-unread” Star commenter’s would have us. We will not compromise our successful MAS program and the education of our beautiful children! Dr. Pedicone has the 3 board votes to make our classes electives; hence, killing our successful program. In nine days, Huppenthal will find us out of compliance with his fabricated findings. However, our community will win the legal battle and strike down Dr. Pedicone’s/Stegemen’s discriminatory act and Huppenthal’s unconstitutional law. We will win the WAR. Mexican American Department will continue of change the lives of ALL the school children it comes in contact with and the program will expand. Dr. Stegemen, you will be recalled, and sadly be recorded in history as a “Dixiecrat” of the old south… so enjoy your last days of your Apartheid regime. Paz y refleciones.

          • leftfield

            Well said, Vato. 

            • Fraser007

              Don’t you just hate when Anglos use mexican terms like they are a native speaker.

              • Ryn Shane-Armstrong

                What?

                • Fraser007

                  That was a comment for my left leaning friend Leftfield. Vato.

                  • Vato Loco

                    Fraser, your short ignorant comments speaks to your cognitive incompetency.   Vato, or any Calo words can be utilized by any person who would like to invoke them…  Food for thought,  leave our progressive city and go North with the rest of those Dixiecrats in Maricopa County…  Grow up, have an original thought, and please stop listen to the John Injustice propaganda show…  Paz y reflecciones

                    • Ferrari Bubba

                      Hey Vato Loco: There you go again, using the Queens good english just like you were an anglo! If you chastise my friend Leftfield for using the ‘cholo’ vernacular, why do you do the same with our mother tongue? Tit for tat, mi hermano? — Tu amigo, Lowrider Bubba

                    • Fraser007

                      “Progressive” is why we are so screwed up. You don’t know me or my background so thanks for showing your true colors. Oh… pardon me for the short answer. Sometimes brevity sends the message better. Leftfield know that maybe you should. Vato.

                  • leftfield

                    My comment was a reply to “Vato Loco”.  So, I addressed him as “Vato” for short.  That’s the long and the short of it. 

                    • Fraser007

                      Thanks Leftfield.

                    • Vato Loco

                      For the record, my comment  was directed at Fraser’s comment  “Don’t you just hate when Anglos use mexican terms like they are a native speaker.”

        • Mark B. Evans

          There is no extortion here. The state passed a law and the SPI is tasked with enforcing it. TUSD has due process rights under that law.  You’re being stubborn. You grossly misjudged the reaction to your reform effort (as you admitted to Brodesky in his column). Moreover, you created it in a vacuum. You don’t make changes to a charged issue like this unilaterally. You quietly build consensus, if you can, and if you can’t do it quietly, you do what all good elected officials do, you create a committee to study it and recommend changes. By trying to force this issue to a vote you forced MAS supporters to dig in and draw a line in the sand. They have no choice but to insist on no changes of any kind now. If they attempt to compromise, they become sell outs.

          Here’s the final point about the larger issues affecting TUSD. You’re going to need the support of the Latino community to effect any real reforms on how TUSD is governed. You need to close schools, you need to reorganize the district bureaucracy, you need a budget override, and you need education and curriculum reforms to solve the problems with underperforming schools in the state’s labeling system. You’re going to need all those people who were yelling at you last week. Instead you made you and John Pedicone their enemy. I know you think you’re right and perhaps you are. But you went about it badly and you and Pedicone and TUSD will pay the price for a long time.

          • Mark Stegeman

            I did not try to force it to a vote.  I put a proposal on the table.  Voting was a possibility but in the end was not the best option at that meeting.

          • Mark Stegeman

            You do make several good points, though.

      • Carolyn Classen

        Mark, I was there on Tuesday night from 5 p.m. to adjournment (10:15 p.m.) and it wasn’t much of an “open meeting” as we outside the TUSD building couldn’t hear 2 of the 5 board members (Grijalva & Cuevas) nor communicate with anyone about the audio problems.  There were metal barricades & uniformed officers blocking the front door so no one could enter once the meeting began or replace people who left.  At one point we had to yell/chant “no audio” so someone would fix the PA system. 
        Dr. Pedicone and Dr. Stegeman were told ahead of time by the Hispanic community that this resolution was not popular. They pleaded with both of them to delay the vote on the resolution & have a larger meeting to accommodate the anticipated audience.  A mere 30 minute Call to the Audience was not enough time, and then citizens were arrested for defying that restriction, only because they wanted to speak & exercise their 1st Amendment rights.
        Why didn’t TUSD just wait for the State audit/investigation to be done and if it is negative & call for the elimination of the MAS program, then Dr.Stegeman & Dr.Pedicone would have looked like heroes trying to “save” it by making them electives.

        • http://thechollajumps.wordpress.com James Kelley

          They have a right to listen and speak at appropriate times during the meeting, not disrupt and violently stop and block elected members from excercising their constitutional governance.

          The mob has had their say, over and over and over again. The same people ove and over. Those that want to speak in opposition are shouted down and interrupted by board memebrs friendly to the mob. Who is standing up for the parents teachers and students that are tired of  paying for the garbage being passed off as curriculum? Curriculum that is in violation of state law on two levels?

          • leftfield

            “They have a right to listen and speak at appropriate times…”

            Superseding all reactionary blather, they have a right to justice.  They have a right to stand up against evil.  Sometimes those rights mean you have to offend the sensibilities of the oppressors.   

            “You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations…” 

            Read MLK’s letter from jail again. 

        • Mark Stegeman

          My goal is not to look like a “hero.”  I definitely agree that I did not handle the free speech issue well, at the meeting; the same however could be said of some members of the audience.

  • Cuauhtemoc

    What a bunch of mierda! Just because a couple teachers have a couple of Che Guevara posters on the wall doesn’t mean that the curriculum focuses on him. The truth is that Chicano Studies focuses on Mexican Americans that fought for social justice for people in their community. I would say that Cuauhtemoc, Zapata, Las Adelitas and Valentinas, Corky Gonzales, Ema Tenauca, Sal Castro and many more are better examples of Chicano History. But thats not it how about the countless Mexican Americans that have served proudly in the military in Vietnam, Korea, WWII and many almost every other war that the U.S. has ever fought and came back to this country to be treated like dirty Mexicans. You need to learn about Chicano History before you go and judge. We are Chingon and we’re not afraid to go chingazos for our rights!
     
     
     
     
     

    • Mark B. Evans

      It seems you missed the point of the editorial. Try reading it again.

    • Fraser007

      So who were those guys you mentioned?? Oh yea those.

  • Wilbur

    Wow, I think you nailed it Mr. Evans.  The only things I would add would be that starting with Garcia TUSD got fat and happy off the desegregation budget, increasing the deseg budget to it’s current 60 million levels. Then when it transitioned from Garcia to Paz a financial decision/mistake to spend 10 million dollars the district didn’t have eventually brought the state down on TUSD, freezing the deseg cash cow from unrestricted growth.  Additional, none of the superintendents you mention have had the will power to live within their budget, and make the tough decision to cut unproductive programs.  Finally, the recent court decision to allow TUSD students full access to open enrollment has exacerbated the student flight.

    Again, very well written and accurate article.

  • Fraser007

    All the more reason why people will not move here or place their kids in TUSD and why employers will not move their business’s here.

  • Judy Moler

    I have no problem with the kids learning about Che Guevera.  As a graduate of Tucson schools, including Tucson High, I do have a problem with students not being required to take American History and other Civics classes normally required for graduation.  While I like the idea of their learning of a vibrant and important culture, I believe that should be done as an elective.  One of the most important missions of public education in the United States is to give our students an understanding of the society in which we live—how we got where we are—so that when it is their turn to take over, they will have a firm foundation on which to
    build a better society.  If they don’t have to learn our background, they will not be able to accomplish that.

    • Fraser007

      They can study Che Guevera all they want. No employer will care. The Asian and Indian and Anglo kids will be taking engineering, business,math etc. They will beat you all the time.

      • leftfield

        Is it not possible, fraser, that one could study the life and works of Che Guevara as well as science, math, etc?  I did.

  • The Lou Show

    Leave MAS alone.  These classes were just fine for so many years.  HB2281 is wrong because it specifically targets MAS, leaving the study of slavery and the holocaust alone.  In this manner, HB2281 is racist.  The law, and the attempts by TUSD to devalue MAS (turning these classes into electives), is culturally insulting.  There is evidence that students taking MAS have excelled academically in other ways.  If residents of the district end up complaining about lost revenue, let them focus on the true cause of the disconnect, the legislature and the law, not the district.  Repeal HB2281.  It has created numerous problems.

  • leftfield

    My guess is, Dr. Stegeman, that you can’t win here.  You are stuck in a very unenviable position and I think the attempt to find a middle ground was doomed from the start.  I say this in all sympathy as someone whose own position on the matter has best been described earlier by “Vato Loco”.  That is, this is a battle in a much larger war with the stakes every bit as high as they were in Birmingham and the enemy every bit as entrenched.     

  • http://thechollajumps.wordpress.com James Kelley

    Why is dismantling a poor performing entity bad? It has failed time and time again and using the same model you think it will excel? TUSD needs to be dismantled. A new organization based on a new model. Let’s look at what works in the communities surrounding TUSD maybe. Let the complainers run their own schools on the money alloted to a charter school and see how they do.

    • Fraser007

      Why bother. The kids that are sent there dont give a damn. Their parents dont care, their culture doesnt care. Why do you think every time they become a majority everything turns to shit. This city in circling the drain. Business wont come here any more, crime, illegal alien peons flowing here, too many liberal who cant or wont solve the problems. TUSD is only the top of the boil. Sorry but its who is moving here (or into TUSD) My old high school in TUSD may be closed next year. Poor performance and not enough kids. When I went we were tops in Tucson/Valley and TUSD. Now its mostly hispanic and black. So you tell me what the problem is. Dare you?
      Values, goals, culture.

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