Ann-Eve Pedersen and I take a look at the three people who are advising Gov-elect Doug Ducey on education: Lisa Graham Keegan, Matthew Ladner and Erik Twist. All three have strong ties to the conservative education privatization movement. Not a school district employee or advocate among them.

Seeing as how Ducey's knowledge of education is thin and about 80 percent of Arizona's school children attend a district school, wouldn't it make sense to have one person on his Ed Transition team who knows something about school districts from the inside?

If I wrote, "The market mechanism just doesn't work in education," I'd expect two responses. Some people would nod their heads in agreement, and others would say, "Typical garbage from that America-hating socialist who doesn't think our children should be able to escape our failing public schools."

But what if the person who said that began her statement by saying, "I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn't seem to work in a choice environment for education"?

The "pro-market kinda girl" is Margaret Raymond, founding director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, usually known by its acronym, CREDO. It's part of the Hoover Institute, not exactly a wild-eyed liberal think tank, and it's funded by pro-privatization, pro-charter types like the Walton Foundation (That's the WalMart family). One of the major missions of CREDO is to study and promote charter schools. Raymond is married to Eric Hanushek, who also works at the Hoover Institute and is one of the deans of the conservative "education reform" movement.

For all her pro-market, pro-charter leanings, Raymond appears to value serious research, which is why I've read her two CREDO studies on the effectiveness of charter schools with interest. They compared similar students in charters and "traditional" — read, "school district" — schools. In the first study, charter school children came out slightly behind "traditional" school students in achievement. In the more recent study, charter school students came out slightly ahead. Actually, both studies were pretty much a wash. It's like saying charter school kids are taller or shorter than "traditional" school kids because their average height differed by a quarter of an inch.

Since the TUSD board passed a $4.4 million package of pay raises Tuesday, I've been bothered by the way the money was divided among TUSD staff, because teachers got a significantly lower percentage raise than administrators and classified staff (classified staff are, basically, everyone who's not a teacher or an administrator). Teachers got a $500 raise across the board regardless of their current salary. That means a beginning teacher received about a 1.5 percent pay boost while teachers near the top of the pay schedule got more like one percent. Everyone else, administrators and classified staff, got a 2.5 percent raise. A few people were excluded from the raises entirely, but for everyone else, that's how it worked.

Why did teachers get a significantly lower percentage raise than everyone else? That doesn't sit right with me, and based on what I've seen and heard in discussions on Facebook and elsewhere, it doesn't sit right with others either.

So I asked Superintendent H.T. Sanchez to explain the discrepancy in the raises, which he did in some detail. Since I wasn't a fly on the wall during the meetings where the raises were worked out and I don't claim to be an expert on district administrative matters (I was a classroom teacher, and I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to administrative stuff except when it affected me or my colleagues directly), I can't say whether the facts as he presented them give an accurate or complete picture of the process. So I'm going to summarize what Sanchez explained to me and leave it to commenters to discuss whether they think his explanation is adequate.

Sanchez told me the raises were negotiated with the unions representing TUSD employees: the teachers union, the administrators union and a few unions representing classified staff. No one was popping champagne corks when the deal was concluded — it's not a hell of a lot of money for anyone, especially since raises have been few and far between for years — but they all agreed to the deal.

The reason teachers got a significantly lower raise than the others, according to Sanchez, is because about 1,600 TUSD teachers had already benefited recently from fixes made to teacher salaries. There was a problem with salary compression. Some of the yearly step raises in the salary schedule were so small as to be almost insignificant, and those were increased. Also, some teachers who came into the district with previous experience ended up with higher salaries than TUSD teachers with the same amount of experience, and that problem was corrected as well. According to Sanchez, those salary adjustments — they can't be called raises since they didn't affect all teachers — added $5 million a year to the amount spent on teacher salaries. Neither administrators nor classified staff got similar adjustments.

In the latest episode of our cable access show, Education: The Rest of the Story, Ann-Eve Pedersen discusses the court decision against charter schools' suit to increase funding for charter schools and why charter supporters are incorrect when they say they receive less funding than district schools.

Diane Ravitch, education historian, author, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, co-founder of Network for Public Education, will be speaking at University of Arizona, College of Education—KIVA room, 1430 E. Second Street, Tucson (parking available for free at 2nd street parking garage), 2:30-4:00 p.m.

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation about the current state of K-12 education with Dr. Diane Ravitch.

A prolific writer, renowned researcher and one of the nation's leading public education advocates, Ravitch is the author of "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Priatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools," a New York Times best-seller. Jonathan Kozol describes the book as "a fearless book, a manifesto and a call to battle."

Last year Ravitch co-founded the Network for Public Education, a national organization to support public education as a cornerstone of our democracy, to elevate and defend the teaching profession and to protect children against the abuses of high stakes testing and data mining.

RSVP: Seating is limited, please rsvp by December 11, 2014 to
[email protected]

The Arizona State Library has become a go-to digital source for Arizona history, lore and legend. Its new Digital Arizona Library contains over 500 old and new books, pamphlets, databases and timelines related to Arizona. You can simply go to the site, find something you want and read it online, or you can sign up and get some added features.

For instance, go to Reading Arizona and choose from 12 categories, like "Arizona Cities and Towns: A Historical Collection," "Native Americans of Arizona: A Historical Collection," "University Presses: A Reading Arizona Collection" and "Poisoned Pen Press: A Reading Arizona Collection."

You'll find seven books and pamphlets relating to Tucson, like "Arizona: The Wonderful Country, Tucson its Metropolis," dating from 1881. Most of the material on Native Americans is old and written by Anglos, though the 1906 book, "Geronimo's Story of His Life" says it's Geronimo's words "Taken down and edited by S. M. Barrett."

The "Current Issues" section includes the 2014 "Aztlan Arizona: Mexican American Educational Empowerment, 1968-1978" and the 2012 "Innocent Until Interrogated: The True Story of the Buddhist Temple Massacre and the Tucson Four." If you're up for Arizona-based mysteries, you'll find the David Mapstone Mysteries by Jon Talton, the Lena Jones Mysteries by Betty Web and The Drive Saga by James Sallis.

Not for everyone, but for the interested dabbler or the serious researcher, there's a lot to chew on.

I'm gonna blame this on the schools. Whenever things happen with kids, no matter what it is, people like to say it's the schools' fault, so I might as well follow suit. I guess I've got to give a share of the blame to all the sex and violence in the media too — you name it, TV, movies, music (especially rap!), video games. They're so far over the top these days, it's gotta be affecting the kids! Oh, and don't forget parenting. You can't let the parents off the hook for their kids' behavior either.

For example, we've got to blame schools, media and parents for the rate of violence among youth these days. According to a recent op ed in the Star,

. . . arrests for serious violent offenses by juveniles have dropped about 60 percent from 1994 to 2011. Juvenile arrests have receded faster in the past 10 years than adult arrests. Property crime by youth also has sunk to its lowest point in 30 years.

Wait, what? You mean kids today are less violent than they were 20 years ago? That's not the impression I get from the media, or from adults complaining about "Kids nowadays!"

OK, but things have got to be worse in other areas, like bullying, teen pregnancy, drinking. Right?

. . . peer victimization, harassment and bullying — despite their ubiquity — have been abating in almost all of the surveys. Suicide, too, is less common.

[snip]

Not only is the rate of teenage pregnancy down to record lows in the United States, but the percentage of ninth-graders who say they have had sexual intercourse has declined from 54 percent in 1991 to 47 percent in 2013.

[snip]

The number of teenagers who have been drunk in the past year is at a record low and the drop for eighth-graders is particularly remarkable.

What the hell is going on? How can I complain about how awful and depraved today's kids are if the stats make them look so good? Haven't our schools turned into jungles? Hasn't the increase in depictions of sex and violence in the media turned kids into raging ids? Aren't parents being too permissive, or too overprotective, or too . . . something or other?

If things were going the other way, if the stats were trending for the worse, people would be quick enough to blame the usual suspects. So I guess, given the direction things are going, we've got to say, "Congratulations social, cultural and educational institutions. Way to go! Whatever you're doing, keep it up!"

Arizona is making Culture War news once again, earning us negative press from, among others, the New York Times and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show. This time the news comes from the Gilbert School District school board, where a 3-2 majority wants to black out or cut out a few pages from a high school biology book. The reason: The pages give information about contraception and morning after pills. According to the board majority, that's illegal.

A law passed two years ago in Arizona requires schools to teach “preference, encouragement and support to childbirth and adoption” over abortion, and the school board decided that those pages were in violation of this law — even though the Arizona Education Department, which examined the book for compliance, found that they were not.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Opposition to high stakes tests is growing. More parents and teachers are joining the movement to decrease the frequency and impact of those standardized tests which distort classroom education into an exercise in "teaching to the test" and can result in students being held back or not graduating, teachers and administrators being fired and schools being shut down.

The question: How do you transform concerns about the high stakes tests into action? The answer: Opt out of the test. Parents, teachers, sometimes entire schools are saying, "Hell no, we won't test or be tested." But it's not that simple. A long list of federal requirements, state laws and school district rules make it difficult for parents to pull their kids out of the test, and teachers and administrators put their jobs on the line if they refuse to give the tests.

Now there's a new opt-out strategy. Parents may be able to use existing federal law to refuse to allow children 12 years old or younger to take the test.

In 1998, the federal government enacted Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) to stop online companies from collecting information from children under 13. Parents can enter the information, but not children since they can easily be duped into giving out information like their names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses to companies that are up to no good.

How does this apply to high stakes testing? If the test is given online, parents may be able to refuse to allow their children to enter personal information on the test, and if that's true, parents probably have the right to say the teacher can't enter the information without the parent's permission.

Will COPPA allow parents to circumvent federal law, state law and school pressure and allow students 12 and under to opt out? The only way to find out is to test the idea in the real world. Student Privacy Matters, has more information.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Let's move the focus off of Ed Supe-elect Diane Douglas and check out what's happening education-wise with our Governor-elect Doug Ducey. He's chosen his three education advisers for the transition period: Lisa Graham Keegan, Matthew Ladner and Erik Twist. It's not exactly Lincoln's Team of Rivals. No one from a school district on the team — teacher, administrator or superintendent — only people from the conservative privatization/"education reform" part of town. The three are cut out of pretty much the same cloth in terms of their educational priorities, which is pretty much the same cloth Ducey is cut from. If Ducey follows their advice, here's the education agenda we'll be hearing out of the governor's office for the next four years: No more money for K-12 schools than is absolutely, legally necessary; a redistribution of education funds to favor charters and high-rent school districts; and a push for more vouchers. Most likely Ducey will advocate for Common Core as well, though it's hard to say what form that will take.

Let's take a look at the three advisers.

First, Lisa Graham Keegan. Two decades ago when Keegan was in the legislature, she sponsored a bill to create vouchers, and it had a good chance of passing. To head off the voucher bill, Democrats and teachers unions reluctantly decided to back a bill creating charter schools that made it easy to start a charter and assured that the new schools would be lightly regulated and have minimal oversight. Keegan became Ed Supe directly after and set up the system that guaranteed Arizona would be the Wild West of charter schools. When she left office, she became a mainstay of the national "school choice" movement. For the past few years, she's been pushing for a new system of distributing public education funds here in Arizona which would result in moving money in the direction of charter schools as well as school districts that serve children from high income families. That would mean less money for schools with the hardest-to-reach students. Keegan supported David Garcia in the recent Ed Supe election, not because she's become more progressive, but because she fears Diane Douglas' Tea Party education agenda, and she felt she could trust Garcia to be a reasonable actor in the job, even though she doesn't agree with him on many issues.