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PART OF THE USA TODAY NETWORK Copyright � 2020 The Arizona Republic 02/02/2020February 2, 2020 12:33 pm (GMT +7:00) Powered by TECNAVIA
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Hardly a day goes by without theTrump administration finding anew way to slash the safety net.
But its latest proposal — whichwould cut Social Security disabilitybenefits by $2.6 billion over 10 years— is one of the cruelest. It would re-quire millions of beneficiaries to re-prove their disability — and navi-gate a complex web of red tape andpaperwork — every two years. Hun-dreds of thousands of people couldlose benefits even though their con-dition has not changed.
We’ve seen this movie before,when the Reagan administrationimplemented a similar policy. Peo-ple with Down syndrome, cerebral
Proposed cuts to Social Securitydisability benefits
are among thecruelest yet See DISABILITY, Page 5D
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Your TurnRebecca Vallas
Guest columnist
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC ❚ Founded in 1890 ❚ A Gannett newspaper
REPUBLIC EDITORIAL BOARD ❚ Greg Burton, Joanna Allhands, Phil Boas, Elvia Díaz, Abe Kwok and Robert Robb
It’s the day before school begins.You and your child walk or drive toschool — or maybe you log in to theschool’s website — to answer thebig question of the school year:Who did you get this year?
Is it the good teacher you’veheard about from neighbors witholder kids? Or that one, the oneyou’ve heard parents speak aboutin frustration?
Year after year, especially in theall-important elementary schoolyears, we have accepted this gameof chance as normal. But it needn’t
be. And it shouldn’t be.In fact, in this very basic scenar-
io we can see the single most im-portant norm that prevents ourpublic schools from reliably provid-ing the best possible educationalexperience to all children: We ex-pect each individual teacher to beall things to all children at all times.
We ask teachers to be contentexperts and pedagogues; to assesschildren’s socio-emotional and ac-ademic development and manageclassrooms of 30 or more kids; toteach reading and math to childrenof all abilities; to be role models andsocial workers; to be data analysts,
Why do we leave our kids’education to a game of chance?
It’s time to freeArizona students
and teachers fromthe false promise
of that one unicornteacher who can
do everything for all kids
See EDUCATION, Page 4D
MERRY ECCLES/
USA TODAY NETWORK;
GETTY IMAGES
Last week, the 9th Circuit Court ofAppeals struck down two provisions ofArizona’s election law, claiming thatthey violated the federal Voting RightsAct. The reasoning was particularly con-torted and tendentious, even for the 9thCircuit.
The more important provision was aban on ballot harvesting, or the practiceof political activists collecting large vol-umes of mail ballots, rather than voterspersonally mailing them in or droppingthem off at a polling place.
The less important one says that ifpeople vote in the wrong place, their bal-lot is not counted, rather than figuringout what races they were eligible to votein and counting just those votes.
Now, Arizona is hardly alone in thesepractices. In fact, according to some ac-counts, they are in place in the majorityof states.
See ROBB, Page 4D
Ballotharvestingdecision is unfair
Robert RobbColumnist
Arizona Republic
USA TODAY NETWORK
Your TurnCarole G. Basile
Guest columnist
The Arizona Republic - 02/02/2020 Page : D04
PART OF THE USA TODAY NETWORK Copyright � 2020 The Arizona Republic 02/02/2020February 3, 2020 8:59 am (GMT +7:00) Powered by TECNAVIA
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4D ❚ SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2020 ❚ THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC
(ISSN 0892-8711) · (USPS 030-920) · Vol. 130, No. 260
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Letters to the editor, opinion columns and articles submitted to TheArizona Republic may be published or distributed in print, electronic orother forms. For more information, call us at 602-444-8499.
Published daily by Phoenix Newspapers Inc. 200 E. Van Buren St., Phoenix,AZ 85004 or P.O. Box 1950, Phoenix, AZ 85001. Phone 602-444-8000.Periodicals Postage Paid in Phoenix AZ 85026.Member: Alliance for Audited MediaPostmaster: Send address changes to The Arizona Republic, P.O. Box 1950,Phoenix, AZ 85001.
Greg Burton, Executive Editor602-444-8797, [email protected] Bratti, Regional President, Advertising602-444-8701, [email protected] Boas, Editorial Page Editor602-444-8292, [email protected] Stacy Sullivan, Community Relations Director 602-444-8749, [email protected] Josh Susong, Investigations and Enterprise Director602-444-8299, [email protected] Tulumello, News Director602-444-8002, [email protected]
Opinions
Montini veers into the inane withcomparison of Biden-Trump kids
Never let it be said that Ed Montiniwill not strive for advancement.
He has progressed from the absurd tothe inane. His column equating theTrump children’s abilities with Joe andHunter Biden has earned him advance-ment to inane.
The Trump children have been in-volved with the business operations foryears. They have formed independentventures and have acquired an enor-mous amount of experience in the mar-kets they serve.
Hunter Biden has no experience inany business endeavor and did not ac-complish anything other than beingkicked out of the U.S. Navy Reserve fordrug use.
I would say that Mr. Montini was try-ing to compare apples and oranges, but itis more like trying to compare apples to arusted out and useless hulk.
Al Rocush, Gilbert
The Senate Republicans mightwant to polish up their resumes
To the Republicans, especially in theU.S. Senate:
If you fear the wrath of Trump and arenot able to act on the obvious corruptionin front of you, just wait for the wrath ofvoters this November.
Get your resumes updated!Robert Luby, Mesa
Let’s hope the sisters who taughtMontini aren’t spinning right now
Today, E.J. Montini takes us down adifferent road in his lifetime journey ofonly left turns. He takes a break from hislectures on constitutional law and the as-sorted shortcomings of U.S. Sen. MarthaMcSally.
Today, we have a short lecture on situ-ational ethics.
We learn that it is perfectly acceptableto participate in a specific wrongdoing ifsomeone else does something worse.
Montini must have been absent at pa-rochial grade school the day the nunstaught about the fallacy of situationalethics. Hope the sisters are not turningover in their graves.
Ollie Byrne, Scottsdale
Trump has been cutting the CDCbudget as a pandemic looms
The impeachment trial continued todominate the news this past week. How-ever, we need to focus also on the gravity
of the coronavirus and not forget that theTrump administration has plans to orhas already cut the Centers for DiseaseControl budget.
At a time when we need this organiza-tion the most, it will be crippled by apresident who does not appear to believein science and continues to be self-serv-ing in his pursuit of power and wealth.
Thomas Dusbabek, Chandler
Trump and McConnell are leadcharacters in America’s decline
When the book “The Decline and Fallof the American Empire” is written, Don-ald Trump and Mitch McConnell willhave pivotal roles.
Fifty years ago, majority senatorsstood up for law and governmental proc-ess. Not any more.
Mike Epstein, Phoenix
Walk in another man’s shoes beforeyou start to judge and criticize him
To reader Pete Williams who wantssports columnist Greg Moore to “stickwith what you do” — that is, to writeabout sports.
But heavens, please don’t write aboutracial justice. It seems to me that Mooreis eminently qualified to stick with whathe does.
Moore’s opinion piece regardingwhite privilege in advertising was a re-vealing observation by a man of color,who I believe has seen and personally ex-perienced the kinds of bias that remaininvisible to white folks.
That position in our society is a privi-lege.
My advice to Mr. Williams is simple.Don’t judge anyone’s experience with so-cial justice unless you’ve walked in theirshoes. Time to learn.
Please?Rick Rouse, Mesa
Don’t listen to the critics, Karina.You can criticize the senator.
Karina Bland has every right to bashMini McSally. Good job, Karina!
Bob Dobreski, Mesa
Planning the next big steps forU.S. Rep. Adam Schiff’s career
I would like to make a few suggestionsof future jobs for Adam Schiff once hisCalifornia congressional district wisesup and votes him out of office.
Future careers could include a writerof fictional novels or an actor in soap op-eras!
C. Wilt, Cornville
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
trauma interventionists and a host ofother roles.
It’s an unreasonable expectation. It’sbad for learners. And it’s bad for teach-ers. It rests on the faulty assumptionthat all kids require the same thing fromteachers and that, therefore, any teach-er can adequately serve every learner.
We know better.In recent decades, the field of educa-
tion has significantly advanced our un-derstanding of how different instruc-tional approaches, interventions andsupport can help different learners. Weknow we need educators who can meetchildren where they are in their cogni-tive and socio-emotional development.We have come to understand the neces-sity of personalizing learning.
If the goal of personalization is to lib-erate learning from an assembly-lineexperience and meet children wherethey are, we’ll never succeed if we con-tinue to ask teachers to endure theirown assembly-line experience.
And make no mistake: that’s what wecurrently do. In fact, we not only ask allteachers to do the same thing. We askthem to do the same thing for years. Toooften, in too many schools, the job of be-ing a teacher looks pretty much thesame on day 3,000 as it does on day one.
That’s troubling on two fronts. First,the job is too complicated for most nov-ice teachers to perform well. Second, aprofession that looks the same on day3,000 as it does on day one isn’t offeringpathways for professional growth andadvancement. That’s a recipe for burn-out and attrition.
If we’re serious about improvingpublic education, we need to simulta-neously address the learner experienceand the educator experience. We have tolight this candle from both ends. It’s theonly way to propel our education system
out of the present-day trap in which wesuffer from both unsatisfactory learningoutcomes and an education workforcecrisis that is commonly referred to as ateacher shortage but is, in reality, muchmore than just a supply problem.
On the learning experience front, thedata is clear. Despite the No Child LeftBehind Act of 2002 and the Every Stu-dent Succeeds Act of 2015, the academicperformance of U.S. students hasproven frustratingly stagnant, as re-corded in the Programme for Interna-tional Student Assessment (PISA) sur-vey conducted by the Organisation forEconomic Cooperation and Develop-ment.
Additionally, disparities by socio-economic status remain high.
On the educator experience front, thecrisis in Arizona’s education workforcepersists. According to a study by the Ar-izona School Personnel AdministratorsAssociation, 24% of Arizona teacher po-sitions remained vacant as of Decem-ber. Perhaps more tellingly, more thanhalf of all positions that were filled wereheld by “by individuals not meetingstandard teacher requirements.”
Nationally, according to data main-tained by the U.S. Department of Edu-cation, the number of people enrolled inteacher-preparation programs in theUnited States declined by 35% betweenacademic years 2010-11 and 2016-17.
We need to build the next educationworkforce. Colleges of education,school districts, policymakers and com-munity leadership need to work togeth-er to build learning environments thatcan do two things:
❚ provide all students with deeperand personalized learning by buildingteams of educators with distributed ex-pertise; and
❚ empower educators by developingnew opportunities for role-based spe-cialization and advancement.
By building teams, we can free bothlearners and educators from the falsepromise of that one unicorn teacher
who can do everything for all kids.Sometimes a student needs one-to-
one instruction from a content expert;at other times, she would benefit from asmall-group project. Sometimes,whole-group learning is appropriate; atother times, individually leveling up inmath problems is the way to go. Thisstudent rocks the multiplication tablesbut is challenged by spelling; that onecan write a Shakespearean sonnet butstill occasionally confuses hypotenusewith hypnosis.
Different locks require different keys.That’s why our economy values collab-orative work in the professions. Youngprofessionals in many fields are accus-tomed to agile teams — small groups ofpeople with different but complemen-tary skills who work cross-functionally.
The approach has expanded from thetech industry to many other sectors, es-pecially health care, which has been de-veloping teams of distributed expertiseamong both physicians and medicalsupport personnel for years.
We should value and develop distrib-uted expertise in education as we do inother professions.
Learning environments should bestaffed by a range of professionals, in-cluding novices, experienced teachersand specialists. During the course of anormal work day, novice teachersshould have the opportunity to workwith a range of experienced colleagueswith diverse areas of expertise.
These areas should include pedagog-ical skills and content mastery, the abil-ity to conduct assessments and the abil-ity to analyze them, the ability to pro-vide individualized instruction and theskills to facilitate group-project learn-ing. And much more.
In short, we need to unpack the taskswe ask each and every professional todo and reallocate those tasks, sustain-ably, across teams.
By doing so, we would create moreopportunities for instructional special-ization and, crucially, more leadership
roles that could help schools attract andretain talent. We need teacher-leaderswhose responsibilities require both in-structional expertise and managementacumen as they direct the work ofteams.
We also need organization leaderswho know how to build systems, em-power teacher-leaders and work withcommunity stakeholders to identify andmeet school and community learningneeds.
This isn’t just theory.In the past two years, Arizona State
University’s Mary Lou Fulton TeachersCollege, where I serve as dean, hasworked with schools throughout theValley to field next education workforcemodels. As of January, nearly 400 of ourstudents are working as teaching resi-dents in teams with experienced teach-ers in 80 schools across 14 districts.
Many of our partners have seenenough to ask for more. So we’re work-ing with them to design even more ro-bust models. That includes workingthrough the challenges of financial andorganizational sustainability.
It’s hard work. But it’s the right work.No parent should have to look at that
list in the window or online and think“uh oh.”
And, on the first day of school, noteacher should have to look out at aroom of 30 or more expectant faces andknow, deep down, that there is no pos-sible way to serve all of those childrenadequately or fairly all of the time,alone.
We can surround our kids with theadults and the expertise they need. And,in doing so, we will make a commitmentto the professionalism of educators thatmatches their commitment to the learn-ing experiences of our children.
Carole G. Basile is the dean of Arizo-na State University’s Mary Lou FultonTeachers College, which is partneringwith Arizona schools and other organi-zations to develop the Next EducationWorkforce.
EducationContinued from Page 3D
The ban on ballot harvesting was ac-tually a recommendation of the 2005 bi-partisan Commission on Federal Elec-tion Reform, co-chaired by former Dem-ocratic president Jimmy Carter andJames Baker III, a longstanding Repub-lican bigfoot.
The commission found that absenteevoting constituted a major ballot securi-ty risk. It recommended that third-par-ty handling of them be limited to familymembers, the postal service and elec-tion officials. It expressly called onstates to ban political organizationsfrom having custody of them.
Arizona’s law (House Bill 2023), en-acted in 2016, mirrors the commission’srecommendations nearly exactly. Infact, it’s a bit more generous in also al-lowing caretakers to mail or drop offmail ballots.
You will often hear the assertion thatthere has been no fraud in Arizona re-garding ballot harvesting. The majorityopinion reiterates the contention.
That’s not true. The Maricopa Coun-
ty elections department has credibly re-ported instances of people collectingballots falsely claiming to be depart-ment employees. What happened withthe ballots collected under false pre-tenses isn’t known. But the assumptionthat ballots fraudulently obtained were,from that point, handled with pure andpunctilious honesty is, to understate it,not on firm foundation.
In 2018, a North Carolina electionscommission invalidated the results of acongressional election because of ballotharvesting fraud that was committed.
In Arizona in 2018, there were around600,000 mail ballots that weren’tturned in. That’s a lot of potential votesfloating around.
I’ve concluded that there’s no rea-soning to be had on this point. You ei-ther think there’s a ballot security vul-nerability with political activists han-dling tens of thousands of ballots unsu-pervised, or you don’t. I’m in the campthat does.
Curiously, the 9th Circuit majoritydoesn’t necessarily disagree. It refers tothe commission’s recommendation onballot harvesting, scrupulously fol-lowed by Arizona, as “common sense.”
It does not find either the ban on bal-
lot harvesting or tossing the ballots ofthose who vote in the wrong place per seillegal. Other states can employ bothpractices. Just not Arizona.
Why? Because we are a racist state.Led by racists and, by inference, popu-lated by racists. That’s starker than themajority opinion states it. But it’s thefoundation of its decision.
In making the case for Arizona’s scar-let standing, the majority opinion citesterritorial practices, being one of the laststates to join the federal Children’sHealth Insurance Program, low levels ofeducation funding, and a campaignclaim by failed gubernatorial candidateAndrew Thomas to be tough on illegalimmigration. I am making none of thatup.
Now Arizona, as all states, has a his-
tory of racial discrimination in voting.But the notion that we are, at present,markedly worse than other places, to besingled out and denied the use of ballotsecurity measures permitted otherstates, is nonsense.
Judges treating states differentlybased upon the judges’ evaluation of thesouls of their leaders and people is con-stitutionally suspect. That’s particular-ly true when it comes to what states arepermitted to do to ensure the integrity oftheir elections.
This decision stands on shakyground. The district court upheld Arizo-na’s election law provisions, as did athree-member appeals panel. This enbanc decision, reversing both, was di-vided, with two spirited, and illuminat-ing, dissents.
The U.S. Supreme Court previouslystruck down a 9th Circuit injunctionagainst Arizona’s ballot harvesting ban,allowing it to be in place for the 2016 and2018 elections.
The odds of any case being taken upby the high court on appeal are long. Butfor Arizona, in this case, they are betterthan most.
Reach Robb at [email protected].
RobbContinued from Page 3D
The odds of any case beingtaken up by the high courton appeal are long. But forArizona, in this case, theyare better than most.
