Doug MacEachern

Phoenix

Look, I don't want to bad-mouth Tucson ...

Well, that's not entirely true. I do kind of enjoy trimming the sails of Arizona's most ostentatiously "progressive" community.

Let's not even talk about Speedway, the ugliest main drag in America. At least traffic moves on Speedway. Tucson is a community that somehow created for itself a suffocating, twice-daily, rush-hour gridlock without actually having a lot of cars or places for people to work at.

How? Call it a "weird trick" discovered by environmentally conscious Tucson voters who wanted to keep their community free of those awful Phoenix-ish freeways. You just vote down transportation-improvement plans and — voila! — everything freezes in place.

Once you force yourself to come down off picturesque Ina Road and Skyline Drive up in the Catalina Foothills, which is where all of Tucson's most well-heeled liberals live, you must drive downward into, you know, hell. Which is to say Tucson proper. Which in nearly every respect is a basket case, especially financially.

The most successful Tucson ballot proposition in several years was Proposition 401, which last year passed with 62 percent of the vote. Prop. 401 doesn't authorize a new project or hike spending on, say, education. It simply allows the financially troubled city to spend $50 million more per year. In Tucson, this is what passes for enlightened progressivism.

Which brings us to Rio Nuevo. No city in the country knows how to make the public's money disappear like Tucson, and almost no urban-development money pit has sucked in taxpayer resources like Rio Nuevo. In Tucson, "Rio Nuevo" is Spanish for "Where did my freaking $230million go, you incompetent thieves?"

I'm not kidding. In 2011, an Arizona auditor general's report found that the community's 10-year, $230million plan to renovate downtown Tucson produced nearly nothing of value thanks to "bad judgment, bad management and misplaced priorities."

But because the report pointed no direct fingers alleging criminal behavior, elected leaders citywide breathed a collective sigh of relief. This is what in Tucson is considered progress. Welcome to Tucson, where incompetence isn't an indictable offense!

But, really, for real-deal, Tucson-quality incompetence, nothing can match the Tucson Unified School District.

For many years, Arizona public school districts have honed a well-earned reputation for keeping (scarce) taxpayer dollars out of the classroom. According to those busy auditors at the state office, last year, we spent just 54 cents of each education tax dollar in the classroom, which is 7.4 percent less than the national average. In Arizona, excellence in education is defined as keeping administrators in really excellent Audis and Beemers. And lots of 'em!

Tucson schools, however, are much more excellent at that kind of excellence.

Despite raking in from various sources more than $1,000 more per student on average than Arizona public school districts overall, Tucson spends even less than the state average in the classroom. Lots less, in fact.

In 2012, TUSD spent just 49.2 percent of its funding in the classroom. Less than half! You go, TUSD! Alas, the Altar Valley Elementary district, which is 20 miles west of Tucson, found even more innovative ways to waste money, spending just 44 percent of its cash on kids. Still, TUSD's effort was an honest stab at educational malpractice.

Where TUSD has really excelled at educational malpractice, however, has been at treating its students as political pawns.

The whole mess concocted by the avowed Marxists of TUSD's old Mexican American studies department was a national embarrassment for the district. The activist-educators head-stuffed the kids with political agitprop dressed up as "history" and "literature," then literally dressed them up in paramilitary khakis and berets and marched the tykes around at school board meetings. They bought them chains and taught the kids how to do a "Saul Alinski treatment" on the hapless board members, chaining themselves to the board's seats, pounding tables, bellowing chants and issuing non-negotiable demands.

With federal judges now involved in screwing up the education of TUSD students, those days of left-wing indoctrination supposedly were done. Not quite.

Earlier this month, administrators at TUSD's Davis Bilingual Magnet School held a schoolwide rally, ostensibly to honor the late labor activist Cesar Chavez. But really, as it turned out, it was to get the kids charged up for demonstrating at that evening's Tucson City Council meeting, where the council would consider adding a new paid employee holiday honoring Chavez.

"All of you need to be there to demonstrate our support for this important recognition," the school principal reportedly said. On stage with the principal was the guest of honor at the rally, activist Dolores Huerta, who famously told students at another TUSD rally several years ago that "Republicans hate Latinos."

All that tumult over the Mexican American studies scandal — which basically boiled down to political activists using students as props — does not seem to have made much of a dent.

As one annoyed parent who actually videotaped the rally observed, the incident had "all the stuff you need," including teaching the elementary school kids the claps and the chants: "The cult of personality and kids being told that they were all one and not individuals. It was really bad. They were indoctrinating these kids."

But, then, that's Tucson. Where progressive politics trumps all. And where the main drag is Speedway.

(Column for March 16, 2014)