January 21, 2000

Ever since I student taught in the seventies, right through several years of substituting in Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District, and after sixteen years of communications with my sons' teachers and administrators, I've been disappointed by the sizable percentage of educators who hold parents in very low regard. But that's just some individuals who should not be in the profession and does not reflect badly on the good ones.

The bigger problem is the public schools' systematic obfuscation of finances and methods of assessing pupil achievement and instructional efficacy. Whatever the grading system, there is always a way to tweak the "objective" numbers to gloss over the negative data, such as giving lower-achieving students' numbers more weight, "norm-referencing," curving, etc. And just try to decifer a district's budget sometime; many corporate accountants can't read them.

Latest case in point: the huge disparity between what Fairfield-Suisun school officials said they needed for deferred maintenance. Within days, district-wide estimates varied by tens of millions of dollars, a new school's maintenance estimate dropped over $300,000 , and asbestos clean-up costs dropped from almost $1 million to perhaps "zero," according to Deputy Superintendent Michael Lenahan (former director of finances).

That brings us to the matter of newly created administrative posts . It was after Superintendent Sharon Tucker finished double-dipping salaries from FSUSD and her former district that Acting Superintendent Lenahan was given the new post of Deputy Superintendent.

That followed the creation of a maintenance supervisor and a public relations director. Now the board is proposing an energy czar to implement policies of a company lobbying to be paid millions in saved energy costs they will identify. One problem: One member of the board remembers that we already contracted such an arrangement three years ago, but nobody in the district administration can tell us the previous company's name.

Wow. Do you feel like a duped dope, or what? That might explain the Public Policy Institute of California's poll results announced last week in which they snidely reported that Californians believe the state's schools are deteriorating, but that we don't want to pay more taxes to fix them. Maybe they can't dupe all of the dopes all of the time after all.

© 2000 Cynthia Hahn