Submission: Marshall Tuck’s track record proves him unfit as state superintendent candidate
Business banker Marshall Tuck is running for California superintendent of public instruction again. He’s backed by ideologically charged billionaires – several of whom supported reactionary measures like 2008’s Proposition 8, which would have banned gay marriage in California. With Tuck having nearly unlimited funding, voters will be deluged with his messaging. There’ll be plenty of unsubstantiated claims that he ran successful schools.
Those ads won’t reveal the truth about Tuck’s record. There’ll be no mention that, when he ran the Green Dot Public Schools, one of his high schools “achieved” the dubious distinction of back-to-back years of zero students scoring proficient on the mathematics portion of the California State University entrance examination. There won’t be discussion of how, under Tuck, one Partnership for Los Angeles Schools’ high school went five years without achieving even 20 percent of students scoring proficient on either the mathematics or the English portion of those same CSU exams.
Five years.
These awful proficiency rates were reflected in SAT scores as well. Under Tuck’s watch, the schools he managed were year after year among the lowest scorers on the SAT in Los Angeles.
Tuck’s record of terrible academic results isn’t his only issue that will be obscured as election season ramps up. His abject treatment of students of color is something he works hard to hide, in a fashion similar to his contemporary counterparts Tom Horne and John Huppenthal, former state superintendents of public instruction at Arizona.
Using their positions of authority, Tuck, Horne and Huppenthal closed down popular and
