Blog For Arizona

Good-bye BfA. Hello, The Range.

by David Safier

I just put up my first introductory post on The Range, which means this is my last piece at BfA after 6 years and 3,000-some posts. You can continue to follow me over there if you wish. And (maybe I shouldn't say this, but...) if you aren't interested in the music/food/entertainment/weird-videos postings at The Range, interspersed with some more serious stuff, you can bookmark my writing here and get a listing of all my blog posts and columns. Myself, I like to skim through and look for things that interest me, which is kinda what blogs are about, but it's up to you.

It's been great. The writing company as well as the reader loyalty and informative commenting have been wonderful. See you in the blogosphere.

A second self-indulgent trip down memory lane

by David Safier

As I count down to my exit from BfA and entrance onto The Range, I'm taking a look back on my tenure here. Mike Bryan says I've written over 3,000 posts, and I believe it. Even scrolling through them at lightning speed takes some time. Here's a continuation of my first self-indulgent trip down memory lane, stopping just before the horrific January 8, 2011, shooting.

• I started blogging about charter schools in earnest in 2009, looking at the Imagine School chain, which has gone from bad to even further downhill, BASIS, which does a good job at what it does but lies through its teeth about how it does it, and other charters.

• I went after candidate Steve Kozachik in a post in 2009 when he ran for city council for the first time. Boy, was I wrong. Sorry about that, Steve.

• I began my series about the "Creative Headline Writing Team" at the Star in 2010 when it was coming up with jaw-droppingly misleading and/or politically slanted headlines. I capped the series with a "Worst Star Headline of the Year" contest in December. Probably coincidentally, the paper's headlines have gotten better since then.

• The Goldwater Institute's education guy, Matthew Ladner, was pushing the "Florida education miracle" pretty heavy. I wrote a series of posts, "The Floridation of Arizona Education" in 2010, taking apart the not-so-miraculous educational progress in the Sunshine State. Since then, Arizona has adopted a number of Florida education ideas, while Florida has backpedaled on some of them. Ladner now works for Florida ex-Guv Jeb Bush.

Thank You David!

By Michael Bryan

I think I can safely speak for the entire staff and readership of BlogForArizona when I say "Thank you!" to David Safier for his last 6 years of hard work, and the fun and satisfaction we have all derived from David's efforts. We are all looking forward to his continuing contributions to public discourse with his new and larger platform at Tucson Weekly's The Range.

Speaking just for myself now, I want to acknowledge David's contributions and praise him mercilessly. I am gratified and excited by David's new project and I think Jim Nintzel incredibly wise to have sought out David to add some punch to the Weekly's blog.

When I first met David during the election integrity trial of 2007, and invited him to co-live-blog the event, little did I know what an ideal partner and collaborator he would become. At that point, BlogForArizona was still just my own private obsession. David changed that for the better by making BlogForArizona his own obsession - and we are all better for it. David deserves a great deal of the credit for the successful transformation of this blog into a group project over the past several years.

David has brought his intelligence and wit to bear on a project that too few of us undertake, and less of us succeed at: public citizenship. David has become one of Arizona's most vocal and eloquent public citizens. It has been one of my chief satisfactions in founding and running BlogForArizona that it has become a platform for David, and the other excellent public citizens who collaborate on BlogForArizona, to answer that vital calling.

David has cultivated his entrepreneurial energy, his deep love of public policy, his concern and compassion for our childrens' futures, and his engaging and interesting authorial voice, to create a public personae that will deservedly continue to grow in influence and authority. Through his selfless efforts and energy David been a tireless advocate and resource for Arizona's citizens. He has become a regular guest on Buckmaster's Blogger Beat, a regular contributor to the Explorer's op-ed pages, and more recently, a frequent contributor to the Tucson Weekly's opinion page, all while blogging regularly and engagingly here on BlogForArizona.

Most impressively, David has accomplished all that not by being a bomb-throwing, divisive gadfly, but by being a well informed, fair, and thoughtful citizen seeking to share his concerns and insights with the public. David is role model and exemplar of how the internet has empowered citizens to take an active role in making their communities better.

BlogForArizona is poorer for David's departure, but Arizona is better off because more people will be able to engage with this extraordinary citizen's work.

If you haven't yet done so, please share in the comments your thoughts and well-wishes for David as he moves on to his next project.

This can't be good

by David Safier

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce announced its 2014 legislative agenda. Along the way, Speaker of the House Andy Tobin, who's running for Congress in CD-1, said Washington is what's wrong with Arizona.

“If the federal government took its foot off the throat of Arizona, we would be doing a lot better,” he said.

The ed news is, the Chamber wants to promote a world-class education system. So far so good. It wants to do it by adding more educational choice -- not so good. That's code-speak for more vouchers, more money and latitude for charters and a continuing shrinking of funds for our school district schools. If there's any question about the direction this is heading:

Toward that end, the Arizona Chamber announced nationally recognized education leader Lisa Graham Keegan, a past Arizona superintendent of public instruction, will lead an effort to bring about major reforms to Arizona’s education system.

Keegan brought us charter schools when she was in the state senate, made sure they were under-regulated when she was Arizona's Ed Supe, was McCain's education advisor when he ran for president, and currently works fist in glove with Craig Barrett, the multi-millionaire ex-CEO of Intel who is Brewer's point man for the state's conservative "education reform" agenda and has said he wants to make sure we don't "throw money" at education.

At least there's no question where the Chamber stands.

Explorer News, a press release is not a news story

by David Safier

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to mention that I write a monthly column for The Explorer, a weekly distributed mainly in the Marana/Oro Valley/Foothills area. But seeing as how I'm criticizing the paper, it probably isn't necessary.

A few days ago, I went to the online home page of The Explorer and found the image at right among its news clips. No problem with the headline, "State Senator Al Melvin signs 'No New Taxes' pledge" or the pic of him shaking Grover Norquist's hand. But I looked at the copy below and thought, "This sounds like it's written by Melvin's PR team, not by a reporter."

Sure enough, I followed the link to the "story." It's more than a mere puff piece. I'll bet my blogger's hat it's nothing more than a copy of a Media Release Melvin sent to The Explorer, and most likely to every news outlet in the state (except maybe the Weekly, which Melvin hates).

If the Explorer thought this Media Release was newsworthy, it should have rewritten it as an objective piece stating what Melvin did -- he went to Washington D.C. and signed the "No New Taxes" pledge. The paper could include a quote from the release, that's fine. But to publish a campaign-crafted puff piece with all its self-congratulatory language as news goes against any notion of what journalism is supposed to be.

If the paper is going to publish all or part of a Media Release, at least it should be called what it is by revealing the source. Don't simply put this at the bottom:

"© 2014 The Explorer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed."

If I'm right, that's not even accurate, unless The Explorer can copyright material that was sent to the paper.

NOTE: The link to the Melvin story is no longer on The Explorer's home page. However, the story itself is still on the website.

A self-indulgent trip down memory lane

by David Safier

My new home on The Range is official. While New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is clinging to his last shred of plausible deniability, Weekly editor Dan Gibson lost his when he committed to my new position in print. He went so far as to say my presence on the blog "should class up the joint a bit." Stay  classy, The Range!

I've been looking through my old BfA posts and found (a) there are a lot of them and (b) a few of them are worth remembering. So, without anyone requesting it, I'm taking a trip down memory lane. This one stops in July, 2009. If I don't get bored, I'll keep plowing up through to the present.

• I met Mike Bryan, who started BfA, when he and I co-blogged an election integrity trial in late 2007. At lunch one day, I told him I'd like to write regularly on the blog, mainly about education. He quizzed me, probably to see if I had anything to say, then handed me the keys to the kingdom. I wrote my first post under my byline in February, 2008. Since then, the blog has grown to include multiple contributers from the Tucson and Phoenix areas.

• McCain declared his rustic pleasure palace in the Sedona area was a "ranch" in 2008. Dr. Word (a character I created for that post) was furious, saying that a ranch had sheep and cows and animals like that, and McCain's spread was all opulence, no cattle. A few others made the same observation independently of mine, but the Guardian in the U.K. actually referenced my post directly. I decided to look through the web to see if there was a real McCain Ranch and discovered there once was an appropriately fictional McCain Ranch, owned by The Rifleman on the old TV series. I uncovered a bunch of black and white stills from the show, put McCain's head on Chuck Connors' shoulders and captioned them.

If the plate don't fit, we must adjust it. Give us a hand.

by David Safier

Somebody at the Star made a great catch. They spotted this license in Tucson sometime last week. Someone bought the new Extraordinary Educators license plate from the state that has "ARIZONA" at the top and "Support our Schools" at the bottom and put an all-too-appropriate message in between.

Ann-Eve Pedersen sent me the pic and suggested, since the two of us are taping our cable access show, Education: The Rest of the Story, Friday afternoon, it would be fun to have people help us come up with some other messages for the license plate. We'll use the best ones on a segment of the show. My first thought is, "PLEASE, GOV," (Support Our Schools). I'm sure you can do better.

Remember, the clock is ticking. Deadline Friday morning.

Here's the template license, for reference.

EARLY ENTRIES NOTE: Cheri has chimed in with 5 entries here, including Arizona [Y CANT YOU] [B WILNG2] and [SLOW2] Support Our Schools. On Facebook, we have dozens. REFUZS2, OUGHTA, SUKSAT, DEMANDSU, EVERY1, 4KIDS, and on and on. C'mon, join the fun! The contest ends Friday morning, because Ann-Eve Pedersen and I will be announcing the winners at our taping of "Arizona: The Rest of the Story" Friday afternoon.

"15 Months in Virtual Charter Hell": an inside look at K12 Inc.

by David Safier

This is simply chilling. A teacher who spent a year teaching in one of K12 Inc.'s online charter school tells all in an Edweek blog post, 15 Months in Virtual Charter Hell: A Teacher's Tale. Since Education Week is subscription only, I don't know if non-subscribers can read it (Will someone tell me in the comments please?), so I'll give you a taste of the bitter gall in the story.

Darcy Bedortha is a teacher who decided to give online education a try at one of the K12 Inc. schools (she doesn't say which one). "I became a teacher because I am an advocate for youth and social justice," she writes, but she soon found that wasn't her role. It was to manage and unmanageable number of online students, keep them from leaving and recruit new students.

Darcy taught high school English. One day a week, she had "blackboard sessions" with her classes. About 10% of the students logged on. Students enrolled and dropped out regularly, meaning they were working on a whole assortment of projects and assignments she had to oversee -- 30 separate courses at one point.

My first month of teaching exhausted me, and there was never a moment in 15 months to catch my breath (many of us taught summer school, with no extra compensation, per employment agreement). Teachers are responsible for setting up courses, due dates, course pathways, etc. in connection to an extensive and ever-changing digital curriculum which is fraught with technical glitches and system-level errors. Teachers are also required to be available to students during the day, late into the evening and on weekends. In addition, they must contribute to "special projects".

At one point, when a colleague took an unexpected leave, Darcy had a 476 student classload. A normal classload was 300 students or more.

"Vouchers on steroids" for all!

by David Safier

Republicans love widows and orphans funds. What better way to pass conservative legislation than to have it serve the least fortunate? "How dare you oppose services for those poor, neglected [fill in the blank]!" Then, once the legislation is passed and the elephant's trunk has slipped under the tent flap, the rest of the pachyderm's body inches inside the tent, expanding the legislation to serve the people they really care about. Hint: it's not the widows and orphans they really care about.

Our Republican lege passed the Goldwater Institute-created Education Empowerment Accounts (also called Education Savings Accounts) in 2011. If you want a play-by-play accounting of the bill, you can read my 2011 post about it. The basic idea is, the state sets up voucher-like accounts for children which their parents can spend for a variety of educational purposes -- private school, tutoring, educational materials and so on. What they don't spend one year rolls over to the next. Anything left unspent when the child graduates can be used for college tuition. It's the first of its kind in the country and possibly the most dangerous form of school voucher legislation I've seen.

Originally the bill was limited to students with learning disabilities and foster children. Then it was expanded to include children attending schools with state grades of D or F. In this next legislative session, Rep. Debbie Lesko, holding hands with G.I.'s ed guy, Jonathan Butcher, will push a bill to make the vouchers available to every child in Arizona. (FYI: Butcher is also co-chair of ALEC's Education Task Force.)

Huppenthal: "We need more money for schools . . . oops, I mean for data collection"

by David Safier

I'm learning that Ed Supe John Huppenthal is either a true geek or a geek-wannabe. He loves plowing through data and studies. His pride and joy is an educational computer-based math game he created, FreeThrow, which he's been trying to get schools across the state to use and hopes to sell nationally. I know Sunnyside District uses it to some extent (though I can't say whether it's because of the game's effectiveness or as a way for Isquierdo to curry favor with Hupp), but I haven't seen anything recent about other districts using it.

And Hupp's a crazy promoter of improving the Ed Department's data system. He's once again begging the lege to send him $16.5 million to upgrade the system. He'd actually like more than $50 million, but he's trying to lower his expectations.

Maybe the money is needed. Maybe the schools and staff would benefit from a computer system that functions better. But when will he become an equally enthusiastic promoter for increased education funding? Here's the closest Hupp has come to advocating for more money for schools.

"Our school system needs to be compensated at least for inflation," he said. "And they need a little bit of catch-up ground from the cuts over the last couple of years."

That's a pretty weak sermon coming from the Ed Supe's bully pulpit. It's nothing close to his continual drumbeat for (Oh boy! Computers!) money to upgrade his data system.

I'm finding a new home on The Range

by David Safier

Soon, probably next week, I'll be moving from Blog for Arizona to Tucson Weekly's blog, The Range. I love this blog, but I was given the opportunity to be part of the Weekly and I took it. The paper's editor, Dan Gibson, and I sat down and talked. He says he wants me to do what I'm doing here, just do it over there. He gave me no direction, which is fine by me. I imagine I'll make a few adjustments. I have to introduce myself to a new readership, and I expect many of them are younger than the BfA readers (and way younger than me). A large number of readers, I'm sure, have school-aged children or will in a few years, and those people will be thinking about education from a personal viewpoint. And while everyone who reads BfA is a political junkie at one level or another, many Range readers go there for the music, entertainment and food stories as well as video links to the absurd. It'll be an interesting challenge for me to try and get their attention.

It's quite a change of virtual venue. This is a pretty serious bunch of bloggers here at BfA, and with occasional exceptions, the posts are thoughtful and meaningful. A recent Range post, on the other extreme, had the headline, "So, There's This Guy with Two Penises." And it's by Mari Herreras, a terrific journalist whose articles always leave me more informed, even those about education where I try to keep up on what's happening. Mari does write serious posts as well, of course, as does Jim Nintzel, but when I link to The Range, I'm usually looking to find out about what folks younger than me are doing and thinking. So my posts will be a deviation from the norm.

I'm hoping loyal readers will develop a split allegiance. I'm certainly going to be reading BfA on a regular basis, and I expect you will too. There's no better place  to get a sense of what progressives are thinking and what they're doing in Arizona and around the country. But come visit me over at The Range as well, and add to whatever comment stream my posts generate. If you want to make sure you never have to read about "This Guy with Two Penises," you can create a bookmark that will go directly to a list of my posts. You'll also be able to contact me via a yet-to-be-created email address at The Weekly.

NOTE TO DAN GIBSON: If my cheesy "Home on The Range" headline is a deal breaker, let me know. Once I got it in my head, there was no way I could get it out.

Are the Ammunitionally Correct violating a writer's free speech rights?

by David Safier

Dick Metcalf is a gun enthusiast, writer on guns and hunting and defender of a pretty strict interpretation of the Second Amendment and gun rights. But in his regular Guns & Ammo column in October, he wrote a column, "Let's Talk Limits," where he said, “The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.” He argued that the Second Amendment talks about a "well regulated militia" and says the right to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed," but it doesn't say "shall not be regulated."

He's been banished, or, as the Duck Dynasty defenders would say, his free speech rights have been violated. The gun mags won't publish him, and his television program is off the air.

He knows that the odds of returning seamlessly to his old career are slim. When people ask him what’s next, he shows them a photograph taken shortly after InterMedia dismissed him. In it, he holds a gun, and a sign that reads “Will Hunt For Food.”

Obviously, no, Metcalf's free speech rights haven't been harmed any more than those of Duckster Phil Robertson. Neither of them has a constitutional right to be published or be on television. Metcalf is still a free man who can write, blog, publish youtube videos or stand on a soapbox in a public square to his heart's content. If gun mags don't want to publish him and TV networks don't want to air his shows, that's their right.

You mean companies in other countries have trouble finding skilled employees?

by David Safier

Word to the wise: Take every company's complaint about how unskilled its workforce is with a grain of salt. Every boss wants workers who are highly skilled, motivated, obedient and willing to work for peanuts. When that doesn't happen, they blame it on someone else, usually the schools.

Today's NY Times has a story about high tech companies setting up in Ireland having trouble finding skilled workers, even though the unemployment rate is high. The story says they have to import workers from other countries to fill the positions.

Remember those recent international tests -- PISA -- where the U.S. ranked low, proving our workforce isn't educated enough for the 21st century? Well, Ireland scored 16 places above us, so they should have no problem finding skilled employees if it's all about how well students score on the tests. Apparently factors other than test scores are in play.

The article doesn't say what countries the imported workers come from, which leaves out an important part of the story. Either the reporter didn't do her job, or the companies complaining about a lack of skilled workers aren't saying where they went to find workers. Could many of them come from eastern Europe or other countries where the workers are used to low wages and poor working conditions? Could it be as much about what companies are willing to pay as the Irish workers' lack of skills?

Kavanagh: Put First Things First second (again)

by David Safier

AZ Republicans are well known for balancing the budget on the backs of children. Starting with a near-bottom education funding per child in the country, they cut 21% more over the past few years -- the highest cuts in the nation, naturally. Funding went back up a bit recently. Now it's only a 17% cut because the courts forced them to put back some of the money they were under legal obligation to include to account for inflation (and of course, they're fighting the ruling).

Now Rep John Kavanagh wants to protect children on the backs of children. He proposes taking 25% from First Things First which funds the Arizona Early Childhood Development and Health Board and give it to CPS to help it take care of its 6,000 case backlog and other problems. That comes to $45 million a year.

How nice of him to be generous with funds from a program Republicans love to hate. They tried to sweep funds from First Things First in 2009. The AZ Supreme Court nixed the move unanimously. Then they tried to repeal First Things First funding by ballot measure in 2010, only to have it voted down 70%-30%.

Here's an idea, Republicans. Stop starving the budget. Create some reasonable tax hikes on people and businesses that can afford it (taxpayers are shouldering a larger portion of taxes now, with businesses, including out-of-state corporations, paying less) and create a budget that gives our children what responsible adults are always supposed to give children: a helping hand.

Maybe CPS should consider taking funding for children away from the legislature and put it in more responsible hands.

William Bennett's War on Drugs, battles with addiction and tendency to say reprehensible things

by David Safier

Now that Colorado has legalized marijuana and more people are talking about ending the incredibly destructive War on Drugs, it's a good time to take a trip down memory lane and think about my favorite soldier in the war, the nation's first drug czar, William Bennett.

Reagan declared a War on Drugs (I just found out that Nixon used the term in 1971, saying drug abuse is "public enemy No. 1") and Nancy launched her unbelievably patronizing "Just Say No" campaign (Nothing to it, Just Say No. Wasn't that easy?). William Bennett was Reagan's Secretary of Education. Come the Bush I administration, he was appointed the nation's first drug czar.

But there was a little problem. Bennett had a serious addiction to nicotine. He promised to quit, which he eventually did. When confronted with the fact that during his tenure as commander-in-chief of the drug war, the needle didn't move on drug use, he said, half seriously, that at least it got him to quit smoking.

What happened to Bill Bennett after that? Well, he went on to be one of the founders of K12 Inc., the publicly traded, for-profit chain of online charter schools which has received more bad press than any other charter school group I can think of -- and earned every critical word. He offered to resign when it was discovered he had a serious gambling addiction and lost millions of dollars (but he had plenty of money from the sale of his book, The Book of Virtues, so he said he really didn't have a gambling problem because he never put his family in financial jeopardy). K12 didn't accept his resignation.

However, some time later, on his radio show, Bennett said what he later claimed was a thought experiment.

"[I]f you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

He followed that by saying it would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do," but that it's true, that would lower the crime rate. After that statement, K12 Inc. decided to accept his resignation.

I could go on and on. For instance, Bennett was Reagan's second choice to be his Ed Sec. The first choice, Mel Bradford, had pro-Confederate views, and that's how Bennett got the job. And Bennett apparently said it was "morally plausible" to behead drug dealers, and he lamented that they were granted habeus corpus rights. I'll stop there.

My confusion over TUSD's deseg progress (or lack of it)

by David Safier

I have to admit, I'm confused about the whole TUSD deseg thing, and Mari Herreras' cover story on the subject in the Weekly confused me still more, because it makes it clear just how complex the whole thing is and how important the next few years are in what we hope will be a movement toward greater desegregation and better education at TUSD.

Naturally, I'm all for the deseg effort -- "What do we want?" "Desegregation!" "When do we want it?" "Now!" -- and I support the main points of the court-ordered Unitary Plan the district has to follow. But should special master Willis Hawley be putting so much pressure on the district so soon after the plan has been ratified? Shouldn't he give the new guy and his newly constituted board a little breathing room?

I admit I have a soft spot for H.T. Sanchez and the two new board members, Cam Juarez and Kristel Foster. And I understand soft spots make you soft hearted which can make you soft headed. So maybe I'm giving them too much latitude by saying, "Take the school year and get an idea of what's going on before you make any big decisions. It's been 40 years. What's another year?"

Melvin's bogus Lincoln quotes in June, 2011

by David Safier

Now that Cap'n Al's misquote of Lincoln has gone national at Talking Points Memo, it's time to wonder, did the gubernatorial candidate read the Republic back in June, 2011, when he first tweeted the same bogus quotes which you can read at right?

At the time, the Republic ran a Fact Check on Al's misuse of the quotes, tracing their origins to William J.H. Boetcker in 1916.

So when Al, confronted by his latest misuse of the quotes, said "“That’s news to me,” and “If anything, it’s an innocent mistake on my part,” you have to wonder how soundproof and media-proof the man's bubble is. Or maybe Al figured, if the lie was good enough for a state senator, it's good enough for a candidate for governor. After all, do any of his supporters read the papers, and if they pick one up occasionally, do they take anything they disagree with seriously?

La Paloma charters: "We do expel quite a few kids a year."

by David Safier

Raena Janes, who founded the La Paloma Academy charter schools, has a Q&A in today's business section. Naturally, she sings the praises of her schools. What's her secret? The school emphasizes character. "We demand that our students are respectful and caring."

Sounds good, right? Why can't school districts do that? The answer is, they can try, but there's one thing they can't do. According to Janes,

"[W]e do expel quite a few kids a year that don’t want to be a part of that program."

Ah. If you can be selective -- charter schools can expel kids virtually at will with little or no cause -- you can end up with exactly the student body you want, unlike the come-one-come-all neighborhood schools. And where do you think the La Paloma undesirables end up? You guessed it. Back at their neighborhood school, of course, often in the middle of the year. If the child returns after one hundred days, the district school won't get any state money for the rest of the year. La Paloma keeps it all.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, an education prof at University of Texas at Austin, says, "School Choice means Schools Choose." That about says it. I'll give Janes some credit. Unlike the heads of BASIS and Great Hearts charters, she owns up to her selectivity.

Denver, TUSD, Koch Brothers, Bill Bennett

by David Safier

The Douglas County School District near Denver broke campaign laws by paying a scholar to write a "scholarly" puff piece about the district just before the school board elections. The TUSD connection is, the Douglas district's superintendent is Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, who was TUSD supe before John Pedicone. What makes the connection less than trivial is, Fagen is one of the few public school superintendents in the nation to embrace vouchers, and the recent school board elections pitted her pro-voucher, anti-union candidates against a more progressive slate. (The progressives lost.) Meaning, we may have been lucky that Fagen chose to leave Tucson.

Also part of this story is, national conservative money poured into the elections on the pro-voucher, anti-union side. Both the Koch Brothers and Jeb Bush supported the "reform" candidates, with direct contributions to candidates and by funding independent campaigns. School board elections are being nationalized, mainly by big money conservatives, because the "school reform" movement is both pro-privatization, anti-government and anti-union, a three-fer for conservatives. Schools are a political battlefield, now more than ever.

While the conservative money flowing into a local school board election is perfectly legal, the district buying a "scholarly report" before the election isn't, according to a Denver judge. The report was written by Rick Hess, a somewhat respected conservative educational scholar working with the American Enterprise Institute, who should now lose whatever respectability he currently has. He got $30,000 to write about how wonderful and innovative the school district is.

Give to the public school(s) of your choice by December 31, get your money back (Such a deal!)

by David Safier

Only four giving days until the end of the public school tax credits for the year. Please, if you pay state taxes, take advantage of the 100% back offer. Give $200 for an individual, $400 for a couple, to any public school or combination of schools -- charters count -- and you can subtract it from what you owe in 2013 state taxes. Won't cost you a penny.

If I may make a suggestion, give to a school that gets less money than others, which means a school with students from poor families who don't make enough to pay significant state taxes. TUSD lists the 26 schools in the district that receive the least per student, in order. Joan and I split our money between Hollinger Elementary, Grijalva Elementary and Catalina Magnet High (not to be confused with Catalina Foothills High). The first two are on the low money list. Hollinger has 96% of its students on free/reduced lunch, Grijalva 89% and Catalina High 76%. If you want to spend an enjoyable 6 minutes and fall in love with a bunch of kids, watch the youtube video about Hollinger's GATE Bilingual program. Grijalva Elementary looks like it has a good overall program with a bilingual strand at each grade level. And Catalina High is a virtual United Nations, with, if I remember correctly, over 40 languages spoken. All can use an extra infusion of cash for their very deserving kids.

If you want to read more, I wrote a column on the tax credits in the Explorer. But in a little more time than it would take you to read the column, you can go to the district website of your choice, click on the link (here's the one for TUSD), choose your school and enter your credit card information. Done! Instant boost for kids. BEFORE DECEMBER 31!!!

He-Knows-More-Than-I-Do UPDATE: Rex Scott, principal of Catalina Magnet High, gives more information about his school, a very worthy candidate for a school tax credit, in a comment.

Dave, many thanks to you and Joan for your generous contribution to the students at Catalina Magnet High School. We do indeed have over 40 languages and dialects represented on our campus, along with almost as many nations. Our school also has the highest mobility rate among any of the TUSD high schools, which speaks to the fact that many of our students are continually in search of affordable housing options. Over 10% of all the Youth On Their Own students in Pima County attend Catalina and many of those kids are part of our refugee and immigrant community. Folks who want to help the school and its families can also make donations to our on-campus food and clothing bank. We are blessed to have a terrific relationship with the local neighborhood association and several businesses in our area who support those endeavors, but contributions from other sources are always welcome.

Happy New Year to you and all your readers!

Rex Scott
Principal
Catalina Magnet High School
3645 East Pima St.
Tucson, AZ 85716

John Huppenthal: an Obama-influenced, Communism-promoting leftist?

by David Safier

Welcome to Ed Supe John Huppenthal's world, which he shares with other conservative Republican candidates across the country who aren't quite wingnut enough to satisfy the truly addled wingnuts. Hupp is being attacked by Diane Douglas, a primary challenger from the right. How will he respond? That'll depend on how seriously he takes her challenge.

To find out what's wrong-headed left-headed about our current Ed Supe, there's no better place to look than Seeing AZ Red. According to a post, Hupp's main sin is his embrace of the Common Core. The often gullible right hasn't been gulled by Hupp's changing the name to Arizona College and Career Ready Standards. They know it's still the Common Core.

It has also become difficult to sell the [Common Core's] leftist standards — long in multiculturalism, self esteem and social justice and short on actual education — to the groups he is addressing. “Unwavering“ in his commitment to Common Core, Huppenthal admits outside of the rebranding, nothing will actually change in his Obama-influenced vision for Arizona classrooms.

[snip]

FrontPage Mag exposes the shocking Common Core ‘Exemplars’ and the Daily Caller reveals graphic sex and the praising of Communist Castro.

I join others debunking the myth that schools alone can cure poverty

by David Safier

My Tucson Weekly column takes apart the misleading conservative slogan, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation." The phrase sounds all progressive in a Brown v. Board of Education kind of way, but its purpose is to distract us from other pressing civil rights and economic rights issues. If education is the -- THE -- civil rights issue of our generation, that means all the other issues been solved, and that means we can cut social programs and services, and we can forget about income inequality. Just fix our failing schools, and everything else will take care of itself.

Here's what's interesting and telling about people who want us to believe education is the civil rights issue of our generation. They don't much care about civil rights. According to them, we've already realized Martin Luther King's dream, and it's time to replace "We shall overcome" with "We have overcome, so let's move on, shall we?"

Except for education, which is the one place they say the civil rights struggle continues. Why this one exception? Because blaming education for all of society's ills has so many benefits for conservatives.

The political right would love to take all our social and economic problems, wrap them up in a neat little bundle and dump them inside the schoolhouse door. No need to address problems like bias toward minorities. No need for remedies to the widening income gap and worsening economic stratification, which hit minorities so hard. Blame it all on the schools for not teaching those kids how to fit into society or giving them the skills they need to qualify for high-paying jobs. Fix the schools, and the problems will go away.

I'm feeling a bit hopeful that people are beginning to realize that education isn't the best way to get people out of poverty. Instead, poverty is the major reason too many children in this country are ill equipped to focus on their educations.

A holiday meditation on the "undeserving poor"

by David Safier

Unfortunately, too many people today have returned to the late 19th/early 20th century concept of deserving and the undeserving poor. Let's help those poor people who deserve to be helped, they say, people who are poor through no fault of their own and are trying to better themselves. But we shouldn't be giving money or other forms of aid to the lazy, the shiftless and the drug addled.

This is the time of year when Christians celebrate the birth of an infant they believe to be the most deserving of praise and adoration in the history of humankind. He wasn't a child of wealth. He was born into ordinary circumstances, maybe even circrumstances of extraordinary need. At this time of the year especially, people should ask themselves, is there such a thing as an undeserving child?

Every child is deserving by definition, whether they are born to parents who are rich or poor, saints or sinners. Children don't choose to live in poverty or luxury. Every child is worthy of the best break in life we can offer them.

The correlation between state school grades and income, in video form

by David Safier

On this month's episode of the cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, I have a segment showing how closely, almost exactly, state school grades correlate with the household incomes in areas around Tucson. I posted about this earlier, but the video allowed me to enhance the graphics to make the point clearer. And I added a second map which was created by Barbara Tellman that uses census data to show how Tucson breaks down by average household income. You can see both maps below the fold.

 

The video busts the conservative myth that great teachers and great schools create high test scores, and family income is only a secondary consideration. As Bill Clinton's campaign pointed out, "It's the economy [and income inequality], stupid."

In Indiana, district school test scores out-gained charters and private schools

by David Safier

Yeah, I know, Indiana is a long way from Tucson, but the conservative "education reform" juggernaut, like "Money" in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, "never sleeps," so any news that contradicts its constant myth making is worth reporting on.

Indiana's database on state school grades and test-score gains is out, and it looks like school district schools out-gained both charter and private schools that take kids with vouchers.

To be sure, there are charter schools and private schools with strong growth scores. In fact the scores are all over the map for charter schools, private schools and public schools. And among public schools, there’s no clear pattern to which schools do well and which don’t. . . . But the overall trend is clear: Schools that are part of public school districts do better.

If you've read my posts over the years, you know I don't like the national Imagine Schools chain, which has a dozen-plus schools in Arizona. The founder is a multi-millionaire who made his money on an Enron-like energy scheme, and he thinks growth is more important than quality. The four Indiana Imagine schools earned two Ds and two Fs from the state. One of the D scores is actually an improvement, since the school had an F in 2012.

U.S. universities at the top of the 2012 patents list

by David Safier

Interesting stat. On the list of the top 100 universities receiving U.S. utility patents in 2012, U.S. universities hold 15 of the top 20 spots. I'm ignorant enough not to know how much of a big deal this is. After all, it's universities all over the world filing for U.S. patents. But if people all over the world make sure to get U.S. patents for what they create, it means something. With that caveat . . .

The top four are the University of California, MIT, Stanford and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Next is Tsinghua University, followed by University of Texas and California Institute of Technology, and so on down the line, a number of U.S. universities followed by one or two from the rest of the world.

Again, not to push this too hard because of my admitted ignorance, but if our K-12 schools are so lousy, how do our universities get the intellectual power to come up with all those patents? Is it the foreign students who attend? If that's true, why the hell would they come to our universities if all the great students are back home?

Leaving my ignorance behind, here's what I know. True, our students don't score at the top of international tests. The reasons are many, but that's a fact. However, when it comes to invention -- that is, creative thinking, intellectual risk taking, entrepreneurship -- our students do very well. That's why the minister of education in Singapore, one of the reliably high scoring nations on international tests, said,

"[The U.S. has] a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well--like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

That's why educators from Asian nations visit U.S. schools, trying to figure out how we foster what the Singapore minister calls "creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition." Maybe, just maybe, that's why so much ground-breaking innovation happens in the U.S. Maybe, just maybe, that's why the brightest young tech people in the world gravitate to Silicon Valley rather than our top graduates going to . . . what's the international equivalent of Silicon Valley, anyway?

The Tucson charter link to unrest in Turkey

by David Safier

The current unrest in Turkey isn't big news in Tucson. Corruption in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government doesn't merit front page, or even inside page news here. But there's a connection. Erdogan has close ties to a Turkish Sufi preacher living in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen. And Gulen is the glue holding together a number of charter schools across the country including the Sonoran Science Academies here in Tucson, which has a number of campuses including one on the Davis-Monthan Air Force base.

There's nothing new about the news that Sonoran Schools are loosely affiliated with what is known as the Gulen movement in the U.S., or that Sonoran Science charters are affiliated with similar charters across the country. I've written about it. The Star's Tim Steller has written about it. It's been on 60 Minutes and other news programs. But with Turkey, Erdogan and Gulen back in the news, it's worth mentioning.

University High admission changes may not be a battle worth fighting

by David Safier

I'd like H.T. Sanchez and the newly constituted TUSD board to be given time to change University High's admittance process in their own way before Special Master Willis Hawley tells them what to do. But I'm not sure TUSD should fight this battle to the bitter end. Both changes to UHS's admissions process are reasonable ways to increase minority enrollment at UHS, which is the goal. There's no telling which would be more effective. TUSD taking the issue to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is an overreach, and the district's stubbornness on the issue could make later battles with Hawley harder, not easier.

TUSD wants to add a motivation test to the current UHS admissions process. It's a reasonable idea. Students who just miss the cut on the GPA and entrance exam requirements but are determined to succeed have a good chance of doing well at UHS. Even if their achievement is a bit lower than other students, if they pass fewer AP exams or end up with lower GPAs, they likely will have received a more rigorous education and be more ready for college than if they had attended another district school, which is the point of attending the school.

Hawley wants to add items you normally see on college entrance exams -- student essays, teacher recommendations, participation in activities, and so on. That's a reasonable idea too. If those things are good enough to get students into college, they'll likely be good indicators of potential success at UHS.

Give tax credit dollars to low income schools before December 31

by David Safier

Let's start this pitch with an offer you shouldn't refuse. You can, and should, give $200 -- $400 for a couple -- to a public school of your choice (it can be a district or charter school) through the state's tax credit program. Give the money before December 31 and get all of it back when you pay taxes. All of it. Every cent. If you owe at least $200 to $400 in Arizona income tax, the amount you give will be subtracted from what you owe. To put it another way, you'll give much needed money to a public school, and it won't cost you a dime.

Now let's add some detail to the pitch. As the AZ Republic points out, schools in high rent districts get a whole lot of tax credit money while schools serving the children of families living in poverty get far less (Catalina Foothills School District, by the way, tops the state in tax credit revenue). The reason is obvious. Many people in lower income areas don't owe enough in taxes to take advantage of the credit, and even those who barely qualify don't have the extra cash on hand to give away hundreds of dollars now even if they know they'll get it back later.

So your task is to try and even things out a bit. Give your money to a school that traditionally gets fewer dollars per student. How do you know which schools fit the description? Well, TUSD makes it easy. As one of its inviting and informative tax credit web pages, TUSD has a page with a list of the 26 district schools that get the least per student last year.

These schools received an average contribution ranging from $8.65 to $23.37 per student. The average contribution among all TUSD schools is $54.81 per student.

To make things even clearer, the schools at the top of the list received the least.

Though I don't know Sunnyside District school for school, I'm sure its schools can use the extra cash infusion as well.

(Hey, TUSD, Sunnyside's page has the information in English and Spanish. I don't see any Spanish on your pages. Time to fix that, right?)

Giving is easy, by the way. Just go to the website, find the page, and use your credit card or download a form and pay by check. Do it now, before you forget.

The origins of the phrase, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation"

by David Safier

I've been researching the phrase, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation" for a column I'm writing for the Tucson Weekly. I traced the concept back to the early days of the school voucher movement in the 1950s, followed it as it was used to embrace charter schools and vouchers in the 1990s and watched it become a buzz-term for the whole conservative "education/privatization/corporate reform" movement in the past few decades. Today it's a regular part of conservative phraseology. It has been used frequently by at least one (former) president and is, regrettably, on the lips of our current U.S. Secretary of Education.

The people and groups promoting this seemingly pro-civil rights phrase are often ambivalent about civil rights legislation and downright hostile to government programs that help minorities and the poor. The purpose of the phrase is to focus the civil rights struggle inside the school and remove it from the rest of society. "We've solved all the other civil rights problems," the phrase implies. All that's left to do is to push "school choice," meaning vouchers and charter schools, and we will have achieved Martin Luther King's dream of a just and equal society.

The most important word in the phrase, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation," is the tiny word, "the." That one word transforms the phrase from a reasonable statement -- that education is part of the larger push for greater civil rights -- into a pronouncement that education is the one and only civil rights issue left to be addressed. Watch what happens when the word "the" is replaced by "one of the": "Education is one of the civil rights issues of our generation." The meaning changes significantly. The revised phrase maintains that education is one of a list of civil rights issues needing to be addressed in the country, a list that can include blatant and subtle racial/ethnic discrimination, LGBT rights, immigration reform issues, inequitable salaries for women and voter suppression. But if education is "the civil rights issue of our generation," we can ignore all the others. That's why the phrase is such an effective conservative weapon; it informs us that all our civil rights problems have been taken care of -- except, of course, for education -- and we don't need any more of that meddlesome, unnecessary, expensive government intrusion.

Well funded voucher push gets even more funding

by David Safier

People don't like vouchers. Voucher initiatives have been voted down every time they've been presented to voters. Arizona's two voucher programs, Tuition Tax Credits and Education Savings Accounts, were passed by our conservative state legislature, and that's true in other states as well.

Big money conservatives like vouchers, so they keep pumping more money into the idea. Here's the latest. The Walton Family Foundation -- the WalMart fortune -- is putting $6 million into the Alliance for School Choice, a pro-voucher lobbying group working in Arizona and a bunch of other states, doubling the group's budget. For the Waltons, $6 million barely counts as lunch money. Their foundation is one of the financial pillars of the conservative "education reform" movement, and many, many millions more go into supporting charter schools as well as efforts to promote vouchers.

Let's connect a few dots. The head of Alliance for School Choice is headed by Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune. She also founded the American Federation for Children (AFC), a conservative pro-charter/voucher/privatization organization. The AFC is joined at the hip to Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a PAC that works to elect Dems in Democratic-heavy districts who support the privatization agenda, including vouchers. DFER opened a branch in Arizona this spring and along with the AFC has thrown its support behind three Democratic legislators: Sen. Barbara McGuire (LD-8), Rep. Mark Cardenas (LD-19) and the recently appointed Sen. Carlyle Begay (LD-7).

I'm not saying Japan's schools are failing or its government doesn't work, but . . .

by David Safier

It's been more than two years since a tsunami caused six reactor meltdowns and massive radiation leakage at the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, and the place is still being held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. The reactors are in critical condition, one mishap or geological event away from a second disaster that could be worse than the first.

Surprisingly, no one is spending much time blaming the problems at Fukushima on the undereducated Japanese who weren't able to avert the disaster or fix the problems once they occurred, and we don't hear much about Japan's government being inept. Because, well, we're talking about Japan, not the U.S. Everyone knows Japan's schools are wonderful. In the recent international tests, they scored 4th in Reading, 4th in Science and 7th in Math, unlike the failing schools in the U.S. that came in around 20th place overall. And, well, those Asian countries know how to get things done, unlike our inept, debt-riddled, bureaucracy-laden, Kenyan/socialist-run U.S. government.

But for a moment, let's play the blame game, like it might be played by conservatives if this were a U.S. problem, complete with bold, underlined, all-caps pronouncements.

According to an AP story, Japan lacks decommissioning experts for Fukushima:

JAPAN HAS TO IMPORT EXPERTS TO DECOMMISSION FUKUSHIMA!! EXPERTS FROM THE UNITED STATES AND FRANCE!!

Japan is incapable of safely decommissioning the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant alone and must stitch together an international team for the massive undertaking.

Imagine if the U.S. lacked the expertise to handle its technological messes and had to bring in people from other countries. That would be one more incontrovertible proof that our schools are failing.

Story about BASIS' financial secrecy in the NY Times

by David Safier

An article in today's NY Times, via the Texas Tribune, discusses the way charter schools, which are funded with taxpayer dollars, hide much of their financial information from the public. The poster child: BASIS, which recently opened a San Antonio branch. BASIS's Texas application is online, but much of the application is blacked out because the charter schools are run by Basis.ed, a private, for profit corporation, and, according to the application, much of the material is "Confidential/Proprietary Information and/or Confidential/Financial Information."

It's an important story about how nonprofit charter schools like BASIS funnel most of their taxpayer dollars to for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs), also referred to as Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), where it is hidden from public scrutiny. The publicly traded corporation, K12 Inc., which runs virtual schools including Arizona Virtual Academy, is another prime example, and there are many more.

The story of the redacted BASIS application in Texas started right here. It was first reported by Ann-Eve Pedersen on the monthly cable access show she and I do, Education: The Rest of the Story. In her segment debunking the conservative myth that the business model will improve education, she displayed the BASIS application, which looks like an FBI file where entire pages are blacked out. I used her information to write the post, BASIS Charters' educational trade secrets. Some people in Texas who are concerned about the proliferation of Arizona charters like BASIS and Great Hearts in their state saw the post and the video, relayed the information to Morgan Smith, a Texas Trib reporter, and she used it as part of her article.

Mark Stegeman praises H.T. Sanchez

by David Safier

Positive comments about TUSD's new Supe H.T. Sanchez have been coming from nearly all corners. It's been amazing to hear such uniformly upbeat appraisals for any part of TUSD, which tends to be Bad Rap Central in the Star and among detractors on the right and the left. Now we hear another encouraging voice: Board member Mark Stegeman.

Stegeman has made reasonably positive comments about Sanchez from the time he was voted in as the new superintendent, even though Stegeman was the only No vote. But in his latest constituent newsletter, Stegeman goes farther in praising Sanchez.

What TUSD does need and has sorely lacked -- for far too long --is careful decisions and strong management execution, week in and week out. . . .  From what I have seen, the quality of decisions has improved significantly since Dr. Sanchez arrived. This may be partly because Dr. Sanchez, who had a thin track record for managing a district as complex as TUSD, at least had more prior experience running a large organization than did other recent superintendents. Not only management execution but also the flow of creative ideas have improved since his arrival. If this trend continues, then the long run benefits will be enormous.

ALEC is alive and thriving in Arizona

by David Safier

It's good to see that AZ Capitol Times is on top of the ALEC story in Arizona. Not too long ago, ALEC's model legislation mill which cranks out bills for Republicans to introduce in their state legislatures was hiding in plain sight, but over the last few years, it's getting more notice in the press. Good thing. Sunlight isn't a perfect disinfectant, but it's better for people to acknowledge ALEC's power and influence than to let it do its dirty work hidden from public view.

According to the Cap Times article, AZ legislators rank high in ALEC membership (subscription only), we have the third highest rate of ALEC membership among our lawmakers -- 49%, 44 out of 90 -- and the only two states that top us, Iowa and South Dakota, pay the ALEC dues, so 100% of their legislators belong.

According to Rep. Debbie Lesko,

“I guess we’re just a free-market, less-government-regulation type of state. A majority of our legislators believe in the principles of ALEC,” Lesko said.

If by free market Lesko means allowing businesses free rein in state government, she's got it right.

Dr. Randall Friese, LD-9 Democratic candidate

by David Safier

Dr. Randall Friese, a surgeon at the UAMC Trauma Center and one of the doctors who treated victims of the January 8, 2011, shooting at Gabby Giffords' Congress on Your Corner event, has officially announced as a Democratic candidate for the AZ House in LD-9, which is one of Arizona's few split LDs, with Democratic Sen. Steve Farley and Rep. Victoria Steele holding two seats and Republican Rep. Ethan Orr holding the third.

I haven't had a chance to hear Friese speak or to talk with him personally, but he's got a terrific looking bio. Friese served four years in the navy as a surgeon and is currently associate medical director for the UAMC Trauma Center and associate professor of surgery. He's got a clever slogan, "Let's Put a Doctor in the House!" More important to me, he's putting education front and center in his campaign.

“Education is the great equalizer,” Friese said. “It levels the playing field, and it opens many closed doors.”

More when I know details of his stands on education issues.

I live in LD-9, and Orr has a "not too bad for a Republican" rep among Democrats here. That translates to someone who supports Brewer's agenda rather than being a card carrying member of the completely wacked-out right. When Brewer starts looking like a moderate voice of reason to Democrats, that's an indication of how wingnut the rest of the party has become (Orr may have a primary challenger from the right because of his Brewer-friendly votes). If Friese turns out to be the real deal, "Great to have a Democrat" will certainly trump "not too bad for a Republican."

Reflections on the international PISA test scores

by David Safier

The concern over the average U.S. scores on the latest international PISA test has been far more muted this time out than usual. I'm hopeful that the viewpoints of progressive educators have finally made their way inside the mainstream vision of education, which has been dominated by the "failing schools" story coming from the conservative "education reform" movement. The fact is, a more nuanced look at this most recent set of scores as well as U.S. scores on other international exams indicates that our schools are not failing. True, they can and should do better. But failing? Far from it.

For a moment, though, let's assume our scores on the PISA test mean we're falling behind the rest of the world educationally. Instead of allowing the corporate reform/school choice/vouchers/testing crowd to interpret the reasons for our possibly poor showing, let's look at some other ways of viewing our performance.

• Our PISA scores have remained stagnant throughout the No Child Left Behind decade. The Bush era's testing and shaming has done nothing to improve our international scores.

• If you just look at U.S. schools with less than 10% of their children on free or reduced lunch, our scores would be number one in the world in science and reading and number five in mathematics. The large number of U.S. students living in poverty brings our average scores way down.

Diane Ravitch on TPM Book Club

by David Safier

Talking Points Memo's regular Book Club feature has a piece by Diane Ravitch: Stop Doing The Wrong Things In Education. It's a short adaptation of the basic concepts in her new book, Reign of Error. She begins by discussing the conservative "education reform" narrative which has been taken up by most of the media -- our schools are failing, so we need more choice (charters and vouchers) and a stronger standards/testing regimen. But, according to Ravitch,

There is only one problem with this narrative.

It is wrong.

Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education as such is not “broken.”

On the cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, I discussed Ravitch's interesting biography -- from moderately progressive educator to advocate for the "education reform" agenda to strongly progressive educator -- and some of the ideas outlined in her book. It's a reasonably good summary of Ravitch and her ideas.

 

Another perspective on the recent international PISA scores

by David Safier

Who said this?

"The biggest criticism is that China's education has sacrificed everything else for test scores, such as life skills, character building, mental health, and physical health."

It wasn't some anti-test radical educator in the U.S. The speaker was Xiong Bingqi, a Shanghai-based scholar on education. Shanghai's students got the highest scores in the world on the recent international PISA test. Xiong also said,

"This should not be considered a pride for us, because overall it still measures one's test-taking ability. You can have the best answer for a theoretical model, but can you build a factory on a test paper?"

Shanghai, it should be noted, spends four times more per student than the national average in China.

Who said Asian countries are "examination hell" countries, where the push to teach to the test "is becoming worse and worse"? That was Koji Kato, a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo's Sophia University. Here's the quote:

"Asian countries do better than European and American schools because we are 'examination hell' countries," said Koji Kato, a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo's Sophia University. "There is more pressure to teach to the test. In my experience in working with teachers the situation is becoming worse and worse."

Ironically, the U.S. has joined the race to become an "examination hell" country while many Asian nations are trying to scale back on their test-driven curricula. In some affluent families in Asia, fathers remain at home to support their wives and children who have moved to the U.S. and Australia to escape the educational pressure cooker and get a more well rounded school experience.

This isn't to minimize the defiencies in U.S. education -- though many of them can be traced to our deplorable lack of health, economic and social services for people living in poverty. It's to say the solution isn't more teaching to high stakes tests. That may raise our international scores, though the truth is, our PISA scores have remained flat during the decade our schools have been teaching to NCLB tests. But there is no indication a standardized-test-based school culture will help create more innovative entrepreneurs or skilled workers, nor will it make our children better citizens.

Steller's informative primer on charter school funding

by David Safier

On Friday, Ann-Eve Pedersen and I recorded a story about the latest charter school funding controversy for our cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story. It hasn't aired yet, but in the meanwhile, Tim Steller has done a first rate job of covering similar material. He's got most of the information -- and got it right -- in his Sunday column, More money for charter schools should mean higher expectations.

Steller isn't a charter school basher. He has kids in a charter, a choice I respect. When parents find schools they believe are best suited for their children, that's where they should send their children. But Steller is clear-eyed about the funding issue, offering a lucid discussion of most of the important issues.

I've tried my damndest to understand the issue of equitable funding of charters and school district schools, and I've never come up with a go-to-the-bank answer. For me, the best question to ask if you want to make an apples-to-apples comparison is, how much money goes to educate the child without special needs sitting in a classroom? If the figures are similar for charters and district schools, then the system is reasonably equitable.

Interestingly, the best answer I've received is from Chris Ackerley, a physics teacher at Amphi High and a Republican who ran for state legislature. Chris and I disagree on lots of issues, but he's a smart guy who's better with numbers than I am, and he took an objective look at school funding. His takeaway was, when looking at the money that goes for students' educations -- the money that goes to that median student sitting in a classroom -- some schools get a bit more, some a bit less, but it doesn't break down into a charter/district school dichotomy. On the whole, they receive similar funding.

Special Master Hawley needs to take a few deep breaths

by David Safier

This falls into the "Be careful what you wish for" category. I mainly applauded the Unitary Status Plan put together for TUSD by the courts. It clarified and updated the desegregation plan the district has been under for decades. And it was necessary to appoint a Special Master to oversee implementation of the plan. But Special Master Willis Hawley is getting a little hyperactive about his duties. He needs to take a breath and see if TUSD can work things out before he jumps in with both feet. We've got a new Supe in town and a reconstituted board. They're on the side of deseg. These things take time.

First Hawley wanted TUSD to scrap part of its magnet program because the magnet schools aren't sufficiently integrated. H.T. Sanchez wants some time to let the district finish its efficiency audit and demographic study, then look at holistic changes to the district. Makes sense to me.

Now Hawley is telling TUSD to scrap its new admissions plans for University High School (UHS) because he doesn't think they represent the best way to bring UHS closer to the district's racial balance. The district plans to add a motivation test to allow students who don't quite make the GPA/entrance exam cut to be accepted into the school. Hawley wants something that looks more like college application material -- student essays, staff recommendations, etc. His isn't a bad idea. In fact, TUSD is looking at adding the those items for the 2014-15 school year. But once again, the district wants the chance to make a good faith effort to work things out on its own.

Blast from the past: Barry Goldwater's disappointment with the Goldwater Institute

by David Safier

I was strolling around the internet and happened on a 1999 article in the Phoenix New Times, Think Tank Warfare. It's about Barry Goldwater's hopes for what the Goldwater Institute would be and how his hopes were dashed as the institute became a propaganda and lobbying arm of business interests and the doctrinaire, libertarian far right. He was especially dismayed at G.I.'s embrace of charter schools and vouchers.

Goldwater had hoped G.I. would be a genuine policy research institute, similar to the Morrison Institute at ASU. His wife Susan, speaking after he died, said,

"He liked the idea of academics doing this thinking. What he didn't like was seeing it turn into a special-interest, big-business lobbying group."

As for G.I.'s push for charter schools and vouchers:

"Barry Goldwater was an absolute believer in public education," his widow says. "I think he was nervous about charter schools. Was he against them? I don't know. He was nervous about what they would do to the public schools. He didn't favor religious education."

Susan complains that Jeffry Flake's push for vouchers, a system that would allow parents to spend tax dollars on private school tuition, is advancing an agenda that would promote religious schools at the expense of public education.

"They're wanting to promote their religious agenda, and Barry would have gone down with the ship fighting that one," she says.

Craig Barrett and Michael Block lie by omission -- again

by David Safier

Scores from the PISA international tests came out Tuesday. If you just look at the raw scores, the takeaway is, U.S. students are far behind the rest of the world. It's a hopeful sign that many people in the media, possibly for the first time, are taking a more measured approach to the data and considering factors that add a degree of depth to their analysis and make a blanket condemnation of U.S. schools look questionable. But not Power Lunch on CNBC. Uh uh. Host Sue Herera interviewed the top two people at BASIS charter schools -- Craig Barrett, president and chairman of the board (and Gov. Brewer's educational right hand man), and Michael Block, BASIS' founder -- and asked them flat out, no nuance, why U.S. students are lagging so far behind internationally. Barrett, an intelligent man who has lots of experience in the educational field (though he's never taught at a K-12 school), answered, disingenuously,

"It's probably a combination of three things. Great education systems like Shanghai -- or BASIS -- have great teachers, high expectations and a degree of accountability, or tension, in the system. . . . You hardly find that at all in the United States."

I guess Barrett forgot to mention the fourth thing: both Shanghai and BASIS have highly selective school populations. BASIS uses a triple selection process to make sure its high school students are among the most intelligent and conscientious in the state. Shanghai is a city filled with China's elite. While 24% of China's high school graduates go on to college, the number is 84% in Shanghai. On average, Shanghai's parents spend as much on tutoring and weekend activities for their high school aged children as the average Chinese worker makes in a year. Oh, and children of immigrants aren't allowed to attend Shanghai's high schools. If they want to go to school, they have to return to the rural villages they came from.

Great campaign slogan, Andy

by David Safier

Andy Tobin has a radio hit piece out against Ann Kirkpatrick. It's boilerplate stuff: Obama-Kirkpatrick-Obamacare-Kirkpatrick-Obamacare-Obama-Kirkpatrick. The only truly wonderful part of it is the opening:

"Hello, I'm Andy Tobin, and I'm running for Congress because I'm sick of Washington, D.C."

Let me suggest a few follow-up slogans for the Tobin campaign:

"The federal government doesn't work, and I want to go to Washington to make sure it stays that way."

"I hate Washington so much, if I'm elected, I'm staying home."

No charge, Andy. My first two slogans are always on the house.

Going on the Buckmaster Show today

by David Safier

I'll be doing my regular Blogger Beat discussion with Bill Buckmaster on his radio show today. We'll be talking about TUSD, other education issues (maybe the PISA international exam whose results came out yesterday [Spoiler alert: don't get too upset over the U.S. scores]) and whatever else comes up.

The Buckmaster Show is on KVOI, 1030AM, 12-1PM.

Critical thinking is good, but Common Core didn't invent it

by David Safier

I applaud the teaching techniques spotlighted in the AP article in today's Star, Critical thinking hallmark of Common Core class. Math lessons where students perform multiple steps and have a variety of ways to arrive at their answers are good things. Literature lessons where students use critical thinking to dig deeper into the text foster stronger analytical skills. According to the story, these innovative techniques are attributable to Common Core. Except they're not. They're simply examples of good, creative teaching, the kind of thing teachers have been doing pretty much forever.

The good thing about the new Common Core standards is that they can promote a discussion about what students should learn and promote the development of strategies to help them learn it. New ideas, new techniques, new ways of looking at the classroom can be valuable. Sometimes change for change's sake is good because it shakes things up and makes teachers dig deeper and try harder. That is, so long as the change isn't destructive.

The problem is, the Common Core is being rammed down the throats of states, districts, schools and classrooms. Teachers have high stakes tests pointed at their heads, and the people with their fingers on the triggers are saying, "You will to teach to these standards, and your students will score well on these tests, or else."

Here's a better idea. Let's put these new, untested standards out there. Let's have interested states and school districts try them out. Let's see what works and what doesn't work. Let's keep the discussion and implementation fluid -- that is, let's not lock in the standards by testing them within an inch of their lives -- so they can be modified and improved. Otherwise, we end up with a new set of high stakes tests enforcing a new set of expectations. We've had 10 years of a similar regimen without seeing a significant boost in student achievement.

A correlation between attendance and achievement. Which raises a question.

by David Safier

Interesting story out of Seattle in today's Star: Schools focus on attendance, see scores climb. It's pretty obvious that students who don't come to school regularly don't do well, but the chicken-egg question is, do they skip school because they're not doing well, or is their lack of success in school caused by poor attendance? There's no simple answer -- it's not an either/or question -- but the article makes a pretty good argument that, if you can get students to come to school, their achievement on standardized tests will increase.

A few Seattle area schools have hired young college graduates to keep tabs on the poor attenders, give them tutoring and, when appropriate, offer them some "I care" hand holding. The early results have been impressive, especially when students' truancy is linked to a family situation. Talking about one specific kid who was never woken up in the morning or encouraged to get to school:

“In his family, that was the culture,” [Katrina Hunt, a coordinator of the program] said. “But we became close, and that’s what made him want to come — ‘Miss Hunt is waiting for me.’ I saw that with kids again and again.”

Assuming this is a successful approach to raising student achievement -- I don't know that for certain -- it raises an interesting issue that the conservative "education reform" folks need to address. Without firing lots of "failing teachers" and replacing them with "great teachers," without changing the curriculum, these schools saw their overall student achievement grow. If a small, unobtrusive fix like this can pay dividends, why are the "education reformers" obsessed with their disruptive, expensive "solutions" which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars and haven't shown themselves to be very effective.

Looking at TUSD's closed schools as assets

by David Safier

During the agonizing TUSD school closure process, a number of people advocated thinking of schools as multiple use facilities, where parts of a school with too few students to fill all the classrooms can be put to other community-based uses. Well, it's too late to un-close the closed schools, but the "other use" idea may be taking hold.

Superintendent H.T. Sanchez is proposing turning one or more of the closed schools into day-care centers and preschools for district employees. It's a terrific idea. The district can reopen the buildings and staff them with child care employees -- hopefully educated and trained in the best ways to educate children under 5 -- for less than most TUSD employees currently pay for child care. The Star article estimates that people are now paying as much as $800 to $1,000 a month. The district estimates it can lower that to about $300 to $350 and break even. And it can work with the unique schedules of teachers and other employees to fit their needs better than many private child care facilities.

In praise of art and music education as well as (huh?) the Walton family and Jay P. Greene

by David Safier

Art and music education, just like literary education, are vital introductions to our most human and beautiful qualities. Even if there weren't a single indicator they improve intelligence, school achievement or test scores, they would be valuable unto themselves. But the fact is, both art and music education are good for the intellect as well as the soul.

An op ed in the Sunday NY Times discusses a study in Arkansas. An art museum opened where there wasn't one before. Classes were selected at random to take field trips to the museum because there wasn't enough time for all the classes to attend. Social scientists studied the effects on the children and found significant gains among the children who attended the museum. And, very significantly,

[M]ost of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Art isn't a frill that low achieving students don't have time for. It, and other components of a comprehensive education, pay academic dividends that don't come from obsessive test prep.

Brewer's office claims there is minimal correlation between poverty and academic performance

by David Safier

The map couldn't be clearer. In greater Tucson, state school grades line up with family income. (For those more familiar with Maricopa County, take a look at a map showing the same correlation in the greater Phoenix area.) National and international research indicates that the correlation holds true across the country and around the world.

Yet Governor Brewer and Craig Barrett, Brewer's educational mouthpiece and the head of her Arizona Ready Education Council (AREC), want to create a performance funding program that rewards schools with high test scores and punishes schools with lower test scores. It's a reverse Robin Hood scheme, robbing from the poor students and giving to the rich.

Of course, Brewer & Co. deny that would happen. In an article in The Republic, Brewer spokesman Matt Benson claimed an analysis done by her office "showed minimal correlation between poverty and performance." If Brewer's staff truly has an analysis with that conclusion, they should share it with the educational scholarly community. They could use a good laugh.

Clearly, Benson was lying in an attempt to refute a study by Dr. David Garcia that was discussed in the Republic article (Garcia is running for AZ Superintendent of Education). His study demonstrates how closely students' family incomes and standardized test scores line up, and how that means performance funding would flow disproportionately toward schools with wealthier students.