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The high stakes tests for Common Core are supposed to emphasize thinking more than the tests for, say, AIMS. One way to do that is to emphasize written analysis as an important component of the tests. But grading papers is a slow, expensive process. You have to hire people, train them and make sure the essays are scored by multiple people to reach an acceptable level of consistency in the grading.

PARCC (part of Pearson Education), which is putting together one of the tests states can choose from, has a solution. Let computers grade the essays. From Politico:

The PARCC exams are designed to challenge students to read closely, think deeply and write sophisticated analyses of complex texts. But hiring people to read all that student writing is expensive. So Pearson's four-year contract to administer the exams bases the pricing on a phase-in of automated scoring. All student writing will be scored by real people this coming spring. The following year, the plan calls for two-thirds to be scored by computer. The year after that, all the writing is scheduled to be robo-graded, with humans giving a small sampling a second read as quality control.

This is PR at its finest. K12 Inc., the for-profit, publicly traded online school corporation has been on a serious stock market slide for the past three months, though it really began more than a year ago, as you can see on the graph above. It's been hovering in the $12 to $14 range lately, from a high of $38. So what's the news in its Monday media release?

We looked at the Education Services industry and measured relative performance to find the top stocks. Relative outperformance is a bullish sign of underlying fundamental and technical strength. We look at yesterday's price action of all companies in this peer group.

K12 (NYSE:LRN) ranks first with a gain of 5.31%; ITT Educational Services (NYSE:ESI) ranks second with a gain of 3.59%; and Apollo Group (NASDAQ:APOL) ranks third with a gain of 1.90%.

Yes! We climbed from around $12.5 to $13 Friday! We're number one (in the gains among education stocks that day)!

I don't expect to see another media release today. The stock is back down to $12.45.

Ah, last Friday. The good old days.

Here’s the latest twist in the ongoing war between Pima County Supervisor Ally Miller and the other four members of the Board of Supervisors: One of Miller’s former employees said last week that Miller pressured him into filing a bullying complaint against fellow Supervisor Ray Carroll.

Joe Cuffari, who was fired by Miller in August and now works in the county’s flood-control office, filed a complaint last April that Carroll had intimidated him after a conversation regarding Carroll’s daughter.

But on Nov. 12, Cuffari said in a letter to Human Resources Director Allyn Bulzomi that he wanted to “formally rescind my bullying allegation against District 4 Supervisor Raymond Carroll.”

“I was told to file the claim as a directive from my former employer, and I now wish to fully excuse myself from my past employment,” Cuffari wrote.

The striking resemblance actor Eddie Redmayne bears to physicist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” definitely makes you take notice.

And while the film takes great pains to show Hawking’s diminishing physical abilities as a result of a motor neuron disease that struck him almost 50 years ago, as well as Redmayne’s remarkable transformation, “Everything” is more the story of Hawking’s first wife, Jane (Felicity Jones). Now there’s a patient woman, not buckling when the man she loves is diagnosed, and marrying him and bearing three children while his body withers and contorts.

It’s a rare story of how much both people in a relationship can take, albeit from entirely different stimuli. Both young actors are wonderful, but you won’t learn much about black holes. The story’s a little soft and dewy, which you may have come to expect from tortured genius movies of Oscar seasons past.

After 18 years at the desk at KVOA, Tom McNamara will be leaving the station at the end of his contract in mid-December to pursue real estate investing.

News 4 Tucson is sad to announce that our longtime anchor Tom McNamara will be leaving when his current contract expires.

"Investing in real estate has been a passion of mine for several years now," said McNamara. "KVOA and I have been discussing my desire for change for many months. I appreciate how patient & supportive they have been through this process."

No word on whether McNamara is also leaving his recently-added gig at KUAT's Arizona Illustrated. If you're super interested, he's apparently going to discuss his future on Tuesday's 10 p.m. broadcast.

Sadly, McNamara isn't leaving to return to acting, although since his only credited appearance was as a Baseball Fury in 1979's The Warriors, he probably was wise to leave on a high note.

Back when TUSD's Mexican American Studies crisis was at its high point, the central debate was whether the MAS program was fomenting student discontent and inciting revolution or helping students learn more about Mexican-Amerian history and culture, and about themselves.

Meanwhile, in Arizona and around the country, educators were searching for ways to improve students' achievement and graduation rates, especially for poor and minority students. Successful examples were hard to come by.

MAS supporters claimed, using a combination of anecdotal evidence and some, but not enough, data, that the program boosted achievement and graduation rates. The claims made intuitive sense to people who supported the program — people like me — but they weren't strong enough to be convincing. However, if they were accurate, it meant MAS detractors were hellbent on destroying an educational program which was succeeding where so many others were failing.

At the request of the U.S. courts looking into TUSD's desegregation status, UA assistant professor of education Dr. Nolan L. Cabrera created a more rigorous, academic study of the data. His conclusion: MAS students showed a significant rise in achievement and graduation rates compared to similar TUSD students who hadn't participated in the program. Cabrera had a short window to complete his study, so he didn't have time to dig into the data as deeply as he wanted to. MAS detractors questioned the validity of his study.

Now, Cabrera and his colleagues have taken the time to add more data to the study and add complexity to their analysis. The updated study has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, which put it through a peer review process before publication. The new study reaches the same conclusions as the earlier work.

Somehow, this year is the 25th anniversary of the cinematic release of UHF, Weird Al Yankovic's attempt to expand his media empire. The film came out on Blu-ray this month, but even better, you can see the movie on the big screen this weekend at the Loft Friday and Saturday.

If you want to go even deeper into the world of Channel 62, including the insights of Roger Callard, the guy who played Conan the Librarian, The Dissolve has an oral history of the movie:

I guess I must’ve had an inside track on the audition just because I was one of the few guys that were bodybuilders and could actually act. I actually won a dramatics award for The Mouse That Roared in high school, so comedy was actually my forte, even though people didn’t realize it. Being around Arnold actually kind of hurt my career, because people thought I was just another bodybuilder who was into acting, when I was really an actor who was a bodybuilder. In fact, when Arnold first got into acting, he’d take me along because he knew I’d acted in high school and college. But I never could teach him to say “Callard” or “California” properly. [Laughs.]

I knew UHF was going to be hilarious just because Weird Al was associated with it....It’s not like it was Othello or anything. Anyone thinking that they were going to go in and get Shakespeare would have to be an idiot. It was all you could do to keep a straight face throughout the whole thing. But, you know, it was Weird Al. Anyone would jump to be a part of that opportunity.

It's been 617-ish days since the last Seashell Radio show, since multi-instrumentalist Fen Ikner left for New York City and cellist Esmé Schwall headed off for the Pacific Northwest, but hey, on Sunday, Nov. 23, the chamber pop band will be back at Flycatcher for a night with New Zealander-turned-New-Yorker LIPS. Should be a great time, and one that might not be replicated for another 600+ days (if ever), so get your $5 in hand and we'll see you at Flycatcher at 8:30.

Enjoy a song from their first album, "What Do You Have Against Happiness?":

For me, I think the best writing is when you find yourself in the middle of an article fascinated about a subject you wouldn't otherwise find interesting. Adam Sternbergh's cover story for New York magazine on the evolution of emoji falls into that category:

IT’S EASY TO DISMISS EMOJI. They are, at first glance, ridiculous. They are a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles and flags and food and symbols trying to topple the millennia-long reign of words. Emoji are intended to illustrate, or in some cases replace altogether, the words we send each other digitally, whether in a text message, email, or tweet. Taken together, emoji look like the electronic equivalent of those puffy stickers tweens used to ornament their Trapper Keepers.

Today at the Loft Cinema, a screening of "Billy Bates," a movie from director Jennifer DeLia and producer Julie Pacino will be followed by a special Q&A with DeLia and Pacino and the movie's lead actor, James Wirt, moderated by yours truly.

The Billy Bates crew are on a 10 city tour of their movie about troubled artist, Billy Bates, walking the tight rope between brilliance and madness. Sounds like writing for an alt-weekly. OK, so more madness.

From the filmmakers:

Billy seeks solace in his beautiful lover, Kaia, an angelic singer he meets at an art show. As the two together attempt to navigate his mind-bending reality, the film becomes a cacophony of voices, music, and memories that take us through Billy’s kaleidoscopic world of underground parties, a psychotic break, and on the rise as an artist. All throughout this journey, Billy creates his newest body of work and is coined ‘the Warhol of his generation.’ Billy Bates stars James Wirt and Savannah Welch and features Margherita Missoni, Josephine de La Baume, Zoe Twitt, and Sally Golan. Music by Moby’s band The Little Death, the Trishas, the late Arthur Russell, and more. Original artwork by Burton Machen and featuring works from Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat.

If you're interested in seeing today's screening, Sunday, Nov. 16, at the Loft, 4 p.m., you can go inline here to RSVP and receive a free pass.

An interview on MovieClub, with DeLia and Pacino, the partners discuss working together and the challenges, like almost all emerging filmmakers, they faced making this movie:

Jennifer: I’d say financing was something that was an ongoing uphill battle but we found the right partners in that so; it was definitely worth the struggle. But for independent film, financing is always something you wrestle with. With this one, we had several different investors put in different percentages of the budget and sometimes dealing with that takes you out of the creative phase but it also fuels the creativity, too, because you’re constantly answering questions and with their questions you question yourself to make sure you’re, kinda, on the right path… but financing is definitely big.

And then I think creatively the biggest challenge was honing in on the story; the actual heart of the story because I experimented with several different themes and, kind of, explored different ideas over the course of two years in kind of a documentary fashion so the story came together, unconventionally, in the creative process then what would be considered traditional filmmaking. It was… it was always something that I was dreaming about and thinking about for two years straight and it was so rewarding.