The story has a great punchline. After a metal detector was used to find and confiscate students' cell phones and secret transmitters before the test that helps determine which university Chinese students attend,

. . . an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

No, this isn't a story from The Onion. It really happened in the city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province during June of last year. I just ran into the story a few days ago. This city's students have done very well on the exam in the past. Then came some evidence that was just too obvious to overlook.

Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper.

So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.
When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county.

The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.

The students and parents were irate because, hey, everybody cheats on these tests. It's like athletes taking performance enhancing drugs because everyone else takes them, and if they don't, they won't stand a chance.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

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.

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.

Things aren't looking good for the publicly traded K12 Inc., which runs online charter schools in states around the country (Its Arizona Virtual Academy has more than 4,000 students). The schools are funded by taxpayer dollars, like all charter schools, so the corporation's profits and its CEO's $5 million salary come from taxpayer money it doesn't spend on its students' educations. K12 Inc.'s stock value has plummeted from $38 in September, 2013, to its current $12.60. The downward slide over the past few months has taken it into dangerous territory. Most stock analysts have revised their recommendations downward from Buy to Hold or Sell.

The notoriously poor education K12 Inc.'s schools provide isn't the issue, at least not directly. The problem is, the customer base hasn't grown sufficiently, stores are closing and new stores haven't opened as expected — I mean, the schools haven't picked up enough new students, some of K12 Inc.'s charters have severed ties with the corporation, and some states are balking at allowing schools to open. When you're running a for-profit school, students are customers and schools are stores, so it's really the same thing, which is the problem with for-profit education. (The best analysis of the problems with K12 Inc.'s education and its profit model comes from a wealthy hedge fund guy, Whitney Tilson.)

Can the corporation reverse its downhill slide? It's going to be tough. The brand is tarnished, and the stock market trend these days is up, not down. Unless investors think the stock has hit bottom and they can make a killing as it rises, things aren't looking good for K12 Inc.

If you look at the comments following my posts that have anything to do with TUSD, you'll read over and over that the district is a complete, abject failure. You can hear the same refrain in other venues as well, of course. It comes from the "education reform" crowd who love to declare all traditional public education a failure so it can "solve the problem" through privatization. It also comes from a contingent of folks on the left who value public education but think nothing less than "throwing the bums out" will make things better — the bums being the current superintendent and his team of administrators as well as the school board members who enable the inept (and possibly corrupt) administration by rubber-stamping its agenda.

I have a question for the "TUSD is failing crowd": Failing compared to what?

Compared to the Platonic ideal of education? By that standard, absolutely, TUSD is a dismal failure. So is every school that ever existed and every teacher who ever held forth in front of a group of students from the beginning of time. There's no satisfying Plato. We teachers are all Parable-of-the-Cave-ers, showing kids shadows on the wall and pretending it's reality — all teachers with the possible exception of Socrates, and look what happened to him.

Or are we comparing TUSD to other large urban districts across the country? Then, not so much. Urban school districts are troubled places everywhere, and many of the reasons are beyond the ability of the schools to solve. They're embedded deep inside the urban socioeconomic landscape and need intervention that's beyond the reach of educators.

Maybe David Garcia will pull together enough votes to beat Diane Douglas, but it's looking doubtful. Most likely, Arizona passed over the most qualified Ed Supe candidate in decades in favor of the least qualified. But the person sitting in the state's top education seat is only one factor in the larger Arizona education picture. We've got a Republican governor a few shades more conservative than Brewer and a few more Republican legislators than we have now. No matter who is Ed Supe, the crusade to dismantle and privatize our system of education will continue. Here are some of the things we're likely to see in the way our schools are funded and run over the next few years.

Let's start with funding. If the total dollar figure budgeted to schools increases $317 million by court order, the legislature is likely to slow-walk the procedure as long as it can. If there's another court to appeal to, the decision will be appealed. Nothing better than spending the money on court battles instead of kids, right? And if the legislature can figure out some other way to screw schools out of the money, it will.

There's more to the funding question than the total pot of dollars. There's also the question of how it will be allocated. For years, Republicans have been planning to change the funding formula to allow them to give more money to "successful" — read "high income" — schools through a combination of general funding reallocation and "performance funding." They've also been trying to give more money to charter schools. I don't see much in the way of impediments to stop them. Then there's vouchers. All the legislature has to do is pass a few bills increasing eligibility and funding for private school tuition tax credits and "Education Empowerment Accounts" to put more dollars in the voucher pot, which, of course, will come out of public school funds. It should be an easy sell. Just keep shouting "Failing schools!" and "We just want to help the poor and the disabled! You got a problem with that?" Works like a charm.

So. Less dollars for school districts with kids from low income families who need the most resources and more dollars for higher income school districts, charters and private schools. Those are givens. The only questions are when it will happen and how much they can get away with.

• Lily Eskelsen García, Attorney General candidate Felicia Rottelini, AEA President Andrew Morrill

You know that 6th grade teacher, the one who makes it onto people’s “all-time favorite teacher” lists because she wants nothing more than for you to be the best “you” you can be? The teacher you can’t take your eyes off of, because maybe she’s about to say something or do something great, and you don’t want to miss it?

That’s how the new National Education Association president, Lily Eskelsen García, comes across, probably because she was a teacher for 20 years. Now she’s turned that energy and enthusiasm, coupled with a thorough grasp of educational issues, toward making the country’s largest teachers union as effective an advocate for students and teachers as it can be.

Eskelsen García was in Tucson Thursday attending a fundraiser for Felecia Rotellini at a local home and a Get-out-the-vote rally at Tucson Magnet High School, her first stop on a multi-state GOTV tour. I had a chance to talk with her for what was supposed to be 10 minutes but stretched to 25, and it would have continued if the people whose job it is to keep her on schedule hadn’t pulled her away. She doesn’t believe in short answers when she’s talking about tough issues — and all issues pertaining to education are tough these days. She’s direct, plainspoken and opinionated, and she wants everyone, including President Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, both of whom she’s had face-to-face meetings with, to know what she means in no uncertain terms.

Eskelsen García is not your typical teachers union president, or your typical teacher for that matter. Her first school job was as a lunch lady in the cafeteria. She went on to become the first college graduate in her family (she sang in bars and coffehouses to supplement her student loans), then earned a masters degree before beginning her teaching career in Utah, where she was named Teacher of the Year and went on to become president of the Utah Education Association. She took the helm of the NEA in September of this year.

Full disclosure: I was a loyal NEA member during my 30-plus year teaching career. My main complaint then was, I wanted the union to stand up for students and teachers more strongly than it did, not be so cautious. Now, in the face of constant assaults on public education, the union's caution is being replaced by a greater assertiveness, and Eskelsen García is the kind of fresh voice it needs at a time when the stakes in education are so high. At its national convention this year, the NEA called for Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, to resign. And in her meetings with Duncan and Obama, Eskelsen García let them know how strongly she objects to our current regimen of high stakes testing.

On a campaign flier, Diane Douglas lists "Pro-Life" as one of the five reasons she's qualified to be our next Superintendent of Public Instruction. "Conservative Republican" also makes the list. The general rap on Douglas' run for superintendent is that she's a one issue candidate: Kill Common Core! But she hopes to do more than get rid of the new standards. She wants to make Arizona's schools a playground for the Tea Party. As superintendent, she would be more ideologue than educator.

Douglas is against Common Core Standards, true, but it's not really the standards which cause her the most distress. It's the "Common" part of "Common Core" she truly despises. As a devotee of the 10th Amendment, loved by states righters from segregationists to today's right wing, she wants education to be controlled by the states, without federal government involvement.

Douglas' pre-primary website was aimed squarely at her most ardent supporters, people who shared her Tea Party leanings. Since then, she's replaced it with a vanilla version better suited to the general election. On the original web pages, she wrote, "Common Core is to education what ObamaCare is to healthcare" and called it "Obama’s invasion of our children’s education." Her promise was that as superintendent, she would "Use every power of the office and all my energies to ensure the AZ Dept & our State Board of Education protect and defend our 10th Amendment right to direct and control the education of our children."

According to Douglas, from the first President Bush, to Clinton, to the second Bush, to Obama, the goal has been the same:

Our schools are under the control of the same Washington bureaucrats who have marginalized academic content — stressing culture over content, social engineering over student achievement and conspiring to rewrite the story of American pre-eminence in the world.

To Douglas the Bushes, father and son, were lefty internationalists just like their Democratic successors.

In that context, Douglas' dislike of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Program, which is used either as an alternative to or in tandem with Advanced Placement courses in schools across the country, should be no surprise. When she was a Peoria School Board member, she opposed renewing the district's IB program.

Douglas said, "I am vehemently opposed to this program. We're relinquishing our control to an international organization."

[snip]

"IB's goal is to promote world government," Douglas said, adding that it is changing children's values to think globally, telling them what to think, not how to think.

"In my opinion, the IB program has no place in American education," she said.

Douglas' view of what should be taught in our schools is limited to what the far right considers "patriotic" and "moral." Under her leadership, schools would become a battleground where curriculum, textbooks and teachers would be scrutinized to make sure they taught about the world according to the Tea Party.

Let's boil the three-candidate race for the two Legislative District 9 House seats down to essentials.

If you vote for Democrats Victoria Steele and Randy Friese, you'll be represented by two solid progressive legislators. Randy Friese emphasizes education as his most important issue. Victoria Steele emphasizes mental health issues, along with a focus on "women's issues," a term she uses to encompass a wide range of issues which benefit all Arizonans. If you lean toward supporting Democratic principles, vote for both of them. If you lean conservative, they're not your candidates.

If you vote for Republican Ethan Orr, you'll get a legislator who votes for the NRA agenda (he has a 92 percent approval rating from the gun lobby), votes against abortion (he signed a fetal personhood proclamation which states that embryos are people, meaning that abortion should be illegal, including in cases of rape and incest) and votes for expanding private school vouchers (he supports private school tuition tax credits and "Empowerment scholarship accounts," aka vouchers on steroids). You'll also get someone who occasionally votes with Democrats on health care (he was one of the Republicans who gave the Democrats enough votes to expand Medicaid), education (he believes in giving money to public schools with one hand while taking it away for vouchers with the other) and some budget items. If you like the Ethan Orr grab bag, he's your man. If you're thinking about voting for him but have trouble with his stands on gun safety regulations, abortions and vouchers, don't. The two Democrats are far better choices.