An Educational System With No Guardrails. No Accountability. Steve Williamson and Karen McClelland welcome Dr. Teresa (Terry) Leyba Ruiz, Democratic candidate for Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction. She has been an educator for 35 years in K-12 and a former President of Glendale Community College.
As for why she’s running for office, Ruiz says she has a million reasons to run for the office: The million Arizona children receiving a public education.
Asked about the impact of privatization on public schools, she notes that it’s negatively impacting high-performing schools as well as those that are underperforming. “The impact is that schools are closing, communities are disrupted, parents have to travel farther, children have to travel farther to get to school.”
Ruiz calls Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, under the guise of parent choice or school choice, a fraud. “When students no longer enroll in a public school, they do not have to take the assessments. We don’t know who’s teaching the children, we don’t know what they’re learning, we don’t know what their academic progress is…I think we should all be concerned about that for the future of Arizona.”
She says, “The answer is not to create more private or charter schools. The answer is to invest in public schools.”