If there are such things as endorsement game changers, these three endorsements qualify. As Jim Nintzel posted on the Range the other day, David Garcia, Democratic candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction, put out a media release saying he received endorsements from three past Superintendents: Republican Lisa Graham Keegan, Republican Jaime Molera and Democrat Carolyn Warner.

So, what does that mean?

Keegan is not only a former Arizona Ed Supe. She was also John McCain's education adviser during his presidential run. Her endorsement should carry significant weight with moderate Republicans who support the "education reform" agenda, and with members of the business community who might feel uncomfortable supporting a Democrat. Garcia and Keegan have significant areas of disagreement on education issues, so her endorsement sends the message that Garcia can be trusted as an honest broker, someone who people on both sides of the aisle can work with.

“I am supporting David Garcia for state school superintendent because the state needs an education leader who seeks the best in education for all students, informs his decisions with honest data, and understands integrity in office is everything,” declared Independent education advocate and former state superintendent Lisa Graham Keegan. “I have watched David bring these strengths to his work, and look forward to his leadership.”

Garcia worked in the Department of Education when both Keegan and Molera served as superintendent, so they both know him well.

In Molera's endorsement statement, he takes a dig at Diane Douglas, the Republican candidate.

“Arizona does not need someone who will bring extreme and nonsensical views into our K-12 system. David worked as a top advisor to me when I served as state superintendent. I know he has a strong work ethic and will lead based on sound research, not distorted ideological views.”

To underline how much he doesn't want Douglas as Superintendent, Molera said that he "is backing the statewide GOP ticket." Except, of course, Diane Douglas.

This race is going to be a fascinating one from the start.

Why would a Democratic member of the TUSD school board support one, or maybe two, Republicans for the two board seats coming up for a vote in November? The Democrat is Mark Stegeman, and the Republican candidates are Debe Campos‐Fleenor and Michael Hicks. True, it's a nonpartisan race, but a Democrat supporting Republicans over Democrats to sit with him on a school board is, well, unusual. But Stegeman is an unusual guy whose educational ideas lean more toward the conservative than the progressive, so he feels more at home with the two Republicans than with his Democratic colleagues.

Stegeman has already given significant financial support to Campos‐Fleenor's campaign. According to her campaign finance reports, Stegeman made a direct contribution of $45.75 to her campaign, an insignificant amount, but he also made an in-kind contribution of $1,200 to pay people to collect signatures to get her on the ballot. That's real money. So far as I can tell looking over the other candidates' finance reports, Stegeman didn't give money to any other school board candidate.

But then again, maybe he did.

In Michael Hicks' campaign finance reports, he lists no money coming in and no money going out. Every box on the form has a dollar amount of $0.00. But there's a spreadsheet of candidates across the state who used non-resident petition circulators, and Hicks' campaign made the list. He used AZ Petition Partners, the same company used by Campos‐Fleenor.

Maybe this is wishful thinking, but I'm beginning to sense that the reform/privatization movement is losing some of its momentum. Don't get me wrong, it's still going strong. The Billionaire Boys Club continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year promoting it. State legislatures, Congress, even Obama and his Ed Sec Arne Duncan are mostly in its corner. But I swear, the movement is beginning — just beginning — to show signs of wear and tear.

Case in point: a column by Joe Nocera in the New York Times. Nocera is a generalist who writes about politics, the economy and social issues, with a little education thrown in every once in awhile. Usually when generalists write about education, their columns boil down to, "Our schools are failing, so we might as well go along with the 'education reform' notions of high stakes tests, de-professionalizing teaching and privatization. They make it sound good, and let's face it, our schools are going to hell in a handbasket. We've got to do something, and we have nothing to lose, right?"

Not so Joe in this column, Imagining Successful Schools. He's discussing a report by Marc S. Tucker on education accountability. Here's the very encouraging (for me, anyway) money quote.

[According to Tucker] the American reform methods were used nowhere else in the world. “No other country believes that you can get to a high quality educational system simply by instituting an accountability system,” he says. “We are entirely on the wrong track.” His cri de coeur has been that Americans should look to what works, instead of clinging to what doesn’t.

The solution isn't charters, vouchers and test, test, test, according to Nocera's summary of Tucker's work. Here's what's important.

The main thing that works is treating teaching as a profession, and teachers as professionals.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

According to recent polling, the biggest issues in the Arizona election will be education and the economy. It would be foolish to underestimate the power of immigrant bashing, but that could come in the guise of education and the economy as well.

The education debates can go in all kinds of directions, but Common Core is sure to be somewhere at the center of the battle. How that shapes up will be worth watching, since it could sway a significant number of votes in one direction or the other. Here are some of the variables in play, as I see them.

In the Ed Superintendent race, we've got a pretty dramatic split on Common Core. Diane Douglas is absolutely against it. Absolutely. At this point, that's her whole campaign. David Garcia has been painted as pro-Common Core by the media, but that's an oversimplification. He sees the actual standards as a good starting point, but he's against the overuse of high stakes testing as an assessment tool for students, teachers, administrators and schools, and Common Core has the potential of making testing even more dominant than it is now.

In the governor's race, Doug Ducey is against Common Core, but it looks like he's left himself some wiggle room so he can take different stances in front of different audiences ("I'm all for high standards, but ...."). Fred DuVal is basically for the Core, but he's been vague enough at this point that he can also play around with his message to suit the moment.

Huppenthal went down in his primary, big time, to an unknown challenger, Diane Douglas. He might have lost anyway — Douglas has the right wing of the party sewn up, and they're dependable primary voters — but there's no question the size of his defeat can be attributed to Falcon 9 and Thucydides, Huppenthal's online aliases — or, as he liked to call them, his "sway-do-nyms."

Give the blogs, specifically Blog for Arizona, the credit. My old stomping ground did the research, wrote the stories and gave it to the mainstream media, which gobbled it up with more gusto than any of us who were involved in the story expected. Whenever Huppenthal's name was mentioned after his aliases were unmasked, Falcon 9, Thucydides and the Greatest Hits from their Comments List were never far behind. Give the major chunk of the credit to Bob Lord, whose perseverance led to uncovering Huppenthal as the phantom commenter, pulling all the pieces together and putting it out in the public eye. If he hadn't led the effort, it likely wouldn't have happened, and today we might have a strong candidate Huppenthal moving into the generals.

It doesn't happen very often that a blog, especially one unaffiliated with a larger media outlet, creates news. But it goes to show that a good story is a good story no matter where it originates, and other outlets will pick it up, expand on it and make it their own if they can. Usually when that happens, they like to leave the name of the blog that created the story in the shadows, but in this case, that was impossible, since the blogs themselves were at the center of the story.

When Michelle Rhee, ex-Superintendent of D.C. schools and serial prevaricator (which is a much nicer word than "liar"), decided to leave Students First, the education reform/privatization group she founded, it opened the journalistic floodgates. Dozens of pieces have been written about her and the health of the reform/privatization movement (It's very healthy, and well funded. Frighteningly so.) One of the best recent articles is on Salon: Michelle Rhee’s real legacy: Here’s what’s most shameful about her reign. It dovetails nicely with a post I wrote last week, Schools, Society And Snake Oil Salesmen.

I wrote that the snake oil salesmen in the reform/privatization movement either disavow poverty as a cause of low performance in school or minimize its importance so they can maintain their laser focus on replacing "failing government schools" with charters and voucher-supported private schools — which, by the way, have nearly identical records of success and failure as the schools they brand as failures.

Here's how Matt Bruenig at Salon puts it when discussing one of the "three themes" the reformers use to diminish the strong correlation between poverty and educational attainment.

This third theme usually features reformers like Rhee simultaneously admitting what is obvious — child poverty is an independent drag on educational attainment — without having to endorse doing anything about it. Instead, they insist that reforming education is the only way to do anything about poverty to begin with, so the acknowledgment that poverty is an independent harm in terms of education never inspires any direct action to repair it. Instead, only indirect action through education reform is ever advocated. This is convenient for their cause — and their fundraising campaigns — but it’s totally dishonest and harmful to poor kids.

All I did was say, when I was a guest on the Buckmaster Show, that Republican legislators and Governor Brewer should be ashamed of themselves for refusing to give the $317 million to our schools mandated by law, even though a judge says they have to — right now. Then I said something about them balancing the budget on the backs of children. Was that so wrong?

Apparently the callers who filled the rest of the show (I've never had that kind of a call-in response before) thought so. After two tinfoil hatters, the rest were more reasonable — wrong, but more reasonable. I tried to set them straight, but I wish I had the same delete and rewrite capabilities when I have a mic in front of me that I have when I put fingers to keyboard. (And then I shoulda said . . .)

The first half of the show is an interesting Buckmaster interview with Bishop Gerald Kicanas. A good man, even if I disagree with him about vouchers. I come in at about the 30 minute mark.

The answer to the headline's question — Did Arne Duncan Really Say, "Testing Is Sucking The Oxygen Out Of The Room"? — is no, he didn't really say that. What he really said was,

"I believe testing issues today are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools."

There's a Grand Canyon-sized divide between seeing "testing," and "testing issues" as the problem. Duncan's remarks Thursday, where he said states can take a year longer to use high stakes test scores in teacher evaluations, probably reflect two issues. One, he's actually taken a few baby steps toward the realization that our obsession with testing is causing some negative consequences he didn't foresee. Two, he's scared crap-less about losing teacher support for Common Core. Teachers were leaning in his direction in the early implementation of the standards, but their support has been eroding steadily, as has the support of the general population. So Duncan is listening to teachers — he said that a bunch of times in his prepared remarks — and trying to gain back their confidence and support by saying, Clinton-like, "I feel your pain" when it comes to standardized testing.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

A few days ago I wrote a post, Arizona's Economic/Education Divide, about the undeniable correlation between the state grade schools in Arizona receive and the family incomes of the students who go there. I've hammered away at the connection between family income and school achievement for years and will continue to hammer away at it in the future. Let me explain why.

For lots of people, the income/achievement connection in education is so obvious, it hardly deserves mentioning. I mean, just look around the Tucson area. Marana, Oro Valley, the Foothills and Vail are filled with "A" schools along with a smattering of "B" schools — high grades to match the areas' high incomes. The south side of Tucson is where you find the greatest concentration of "D" schools to go with the high rate of poverty in the area. You'll find the same geographic/economic distribution of school achievement across the U.S. You'll find it around the world.

Of course, some students provide stunning exceptions to the overall rule, starting out in poor families and ending up with PhDs from Harvard, and some schools manage to defy the odds and get test results higher than their students' low socioeconomic status would suggest. But those are the occasional exceptions to the rule. They're outliers in an overwhelmingly consistent pattern.

However, some people deny this fundamental correlation between family income and educational achievement. In fact, leaders of the Education Reform/Privatization movement have spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars purposely, systematically, repeatedly denying the connection, or at least minimizing its importance. Low achievement by students from low income families isn't about poverty, they maintain. It's about failing schools, bad teachers — and, of course, teachers unions which pamper their members and ignore the needs of the students. "Stop making excuses!" they shout to people who acknowledge that low income schools tend to have low performing students. "Students will do great things if you just give them great teachers with high expectations!"

Remember George Bush's line about "the soft bigotry of low expectations"? It's a beautiful phrase with at least a kernel of truth to it, but its main purpose was to bludgeon teachers and administrators who work with low income students, saying to them, "You're all a bunch of bigots who think your students are too stupid to do well in school because they're black or brown or poor! Their low test scores are your fault, because you're lousy educators who refuse to have high expectations for your students."

The leaders of the education reform/privatization movement are accomplished snake oil salesmen. Like the con men of old who used to stand on the back of wagons pitching their wares, these purveyors of educational snake oil begin by rolling out their gruesome descriptions of the aches, pains and mortal illnesses their audience is afflicted with. The only difference is, their pitch is about educational, not physical ailments.They tell horror stories about the mortal danger our country is facing due to our "failing schools" which are sapping our children of their educational potential and turning us into a second rate economic power, soon to be overwhelmed by international competition. When their audience has been sufficiently beaten down, when they've lost all hope that our system of public schooling can ever succeed, when they're ready to grasp at any solution offered up with sufficient evangelical zeal, the con men pull a bottle of magic potion off the back of the wagon and wave it in the air, guaranteeing it will cure all our educational ills. They recite the ingredients in their elixir: charter schools, vouchers, elimination of teacher tenure, elimination of teacher unions. And they promise, if the country drinks it, our educational ills will be cured.

John Huppenthal's Wednesday press conference got wide coverage, but maybe not the kind he was hoping for. Playing the Illegal Immigrant Card a few days before a primary which he could lose to a previously little known candidate sounds a bit, um, calculated. The press generally agreed.

Howard Fischer, who covers the goings on at the Capitol and whose articles are picked up by many dailies in the state, wrote an article that was edited differently in the Star and in the East Valley Tribune, but Huppenthal doesn't come off well in either version. Fischer made clear, he doesn't suffer this particular fool gladly.

The Trib version has some great lines. It begins by stating Huppenthal's case.

The state's top education official warned Wednesday that Arizona schools could be inundated with tens of thousands of immigrant children at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars if President Obama enacts some kind of amnesty.

That's followed by a classic reporterly put down.

But John Huppenthal conceded he has absolutely nothing to back that up.

Later, Fischer reports,

[Huppenthal said] his press conference was called for Wednesday because of the “imminent” threat of an Obama declaration, one he wants to impact.

[snip]

Huppenthal, who faces a tough primary challenge next week from Republican Diane Douglas — and then will face a Democrat in November if he survives — insisted there was nothing political about it.