In an earlier post, I asked whether Huppenthal visited or made commments on the white supremacist website Stormfront.org. Stephen Lemons of the Phoenix New Times looked into it and decided the answer is, probably not. Lemons is a good journalist who was one of the first to write about Huppenthal's anonymous posts and certainly doesn't pull any punches. More likely than not, he's right on this one.

At the beginning of my earlier post, I made it clear that any connection between Huppenthal and Stormfront was based on speculation and inference, but I wasn't willing to discount the possibility. After all, before Blog for Arizona went public with the story of his anonymous comments, few people would have believed Huppenthal was capable of writing the outrageous, hateful screeds he's admitted to. The question remains, is there more of the same, or worse, still out there waiting to be uncovered? Only Huppenthal knows the answer.

Lemons got Huppenthal on the record about this through his Arizona Department of Education spokesperson Jennifer Liewer,

"The Superintendent has told me this is absolutely NOT him," she replied. "He said that he would never visit a site like that. He said that his postings were limited to policy debates."

A month ago if someone speculated that John Huppenthal was a reader of and commenter on the white supremacist website Stormfront.org, Huppenthal could have answered simply, "I won't dignify that allegation with a response." And that would have been the end of it. A number of months ago, before my former colleagues at Blog for Arizona and I realized Huppenthal was writing hateful and ignorant comments under the names Thucydides and Falcon9, I would not have written this post, because any possible connection between Huppenthal and Stormfront.org is based on speculation and inference.

But all that changed once Huppenthal's anonymous online comments became public. In the words of the old English song: Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. We have seen that a virulent, angry strain of right wing racism runs through his veins. And if he's not actually a Holocaust denier or Hitler supporter, his comments placing Charles Darwin and Margaret Sanger in the same category with the leader of the Third Reich put Huppenthal within spitting range of Hitler apologists. That's why a few people have pointed to the possibility that Huppenthal has commented on Stormfront.org and why Bob Lord and Pamela Powers wrote posts about it on Blog for Arizona.

Given the events of the past few weeks and the growing list of websites we know Huppenthal has left anonymous comments on, he needs to address these allegations directly. Actually, Huppenthal should go further and name every website where he's left comments using an assumed name. If his apology and repentance for his anonymous commenting — which he called "hateful" and said he "repudiates" and "renounces" — is genuine, he should be willing to make a clean breast of it and let the public know the full extent of his commenting activities.

The Mexican American Studies program is the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan and its teachers are skin heads, John Huppenthal wrote. A teacher who writes op eds against the Common Core is a "f*cktard," according to an email from a Department of Education employee. These wildly inappropriate comments indicate a level of hatred and intolerance toward perceived enemies at the top levels of the Arizona education system, in an agency whose mission is to promote the academic and social educations of Arizona's youth.

Huppenthal has been justly condemned for his anonymous blog posts under the pseudonyms "Thucydides" and "Falcon9." Some of the comments were pointed directly at TUSD's Mexican American Studies program, which he hated with a passion unbecoming the Superintendent of Public Instruction. He wrote that TUSD's Mexican American Studies program was the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan ("MAS=KKK in a different color"). The Klan is a post-Civil War group which terrorized, tortured and lynched African Americans [Note: The KKK also targeted Mexican-Americans, a point I should have included in the original post]. It's hard to imagine a more inappropriate, ignorant or offensive comparison. He called the MAS teachers skin heads ("MAS skin heads can’t run classrooms"), meaning the teachers deserve to be put into the same category as members of roving gangs of often racist, often white supremacist youth who use hate speech and violence against ethnic minorities. Making a comparison like that is beneath contempt.

Huppenthal, furious with the MAS program, lashed out at people he perceived as enemies using language which originated in some dark, dangerous corner of his psyche and which was meant to do injury to the Mexican American Studies program and the TUSD staff who implemented it.

Now we learn this level of hatred and demonization of those who presented a threat to the mission of Huppenthal's Department of Education extended further. Recently, it was directed at a teacher who spoke out against the Common Core. In an email written during work by Angela Escobar, an ADE employee, about Brad McQueen, a Tucson-area teacher who has written and spoken out against the Common Core, she wrote, "What a f*cktard."

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Linda Darling-Hammond could have been our Secretary of Education. She was Obama's education advisor during his 2008 presidential campaign. Instead, Obama chose his Chicago basketball buddy Arne Duncan, who was the CEO or Chicago Public Schools, overseeing one of those "groundbreaking" education reform programs which pretty much tanked. Obama made a terrible choice, and our schools are paying the price.

Darling-Hammond has a piece in Huffington Post, To Close the Achievement Gap, We Need to Close the Teaching Gap. The title makes it sound like it's going to be more of the kind of teacher bashing the education privatization crowd traffics in, but it's far from that. Instead, Darling-Hammond compares our teachers' working conditions with teachers in other countries in the industrialized world. Her basic conclusion: our teachers are expected to spend more time with students and less time working with colleagues, while they teach in classrooms with more students, often in schools with higher concentrations of students living in poverty, than other countries.

Some excerpts:

The results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), released last week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), offer a stunning picture of the challenges experienced by American teachers, while providing provocative insights into what we might do to foster better teaching — and learning — in the United States.

In short, the survey shows that American teachers today work harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers elsewhere in the industrialized world. They also receive less useful feedback, less helpful professional development, and have less time to collaborate to improve their work. Not surprisingly, two-thirds feel their profession is not valued by society — an indicator that OECD finds is ultimately related to student achievement.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Part of TUSD's desegregation order is that University High School's student population must resemble the district's student population more closely. Currently, just over 30 percent of UHS students are Hispanic, compared with over 60 percent of the entire TUSD student population. The school has made a timid expansion of its admissions requirements this year, but more will be needed.

TUSD's problem is far from unique. According to a New York Times op ed last week, NYC's eight elite public high schools are only 5 percent African American and 7 percent Hispanic, compared to a 70 percent combined African American and Hispanic student population overall. Bill de Blasio, NYC's new mayor, who has a great deal of control over what goes on in the city's schools, is working to broaden the admissions standards. He's looking to add factors like students' GPA, state exam scores and attendance to the current admissions test. None of that has happened yet.

The op ed goes on to talk about what Chicago has done to increase the diversity of its selective schools.

Under the policy we developed, 30 percent of students are admitted to Chicago’s highly selective high schools (such as Walter Payton College Prep) based strictly on the traditional criteria of grades and test scores. The remaining seats are allocated to the highest-scoring students from four different socioeconomic tiers, under the premise that students in the poorest parts of the city who score modestly lower on standardized tests have a lot to offer, given the obstacles they’ve had to overcome.

For people who like drinking games, I have a new one for you. Watch Huppenthal's complete 30 minute press conference and take a sip every time you hear the words "hurtful," "renounce," "repudiate," "apologize," "love" and "heart." Only a sip, mind. Otherwise you won't make it past the first five minutes. And be sure to have a designated driver on hand, because you players won't be able to walk, let alone drive by the time the presser is over.

I must have read a dozen articles about Huppenthal's tearful Wednesday press conference. They reported the event accurately, but they didn't convey Huppenthal's carefully conceived strategy. If you watch the whole thing, with or without libation, here's what you'll see.

Huppenthal had a few memorized statements about his blog comments he repeated throughout the press conference. His comments were hurtful. He apologizes for them. He repudiates them. He renounces them. They don't reflect what is in his mind or the love that is in his heart. That's it, over and over. The rest was him praising the wonderful work he's done as Ed Supe.

Only once did Huppenthal's carefully built facade crumble, but before he could say anything that might have genuinely come from the heart — and therefore might have been hurtful to his career — he teared up, an official said, "All right, guys, we're gonna cut it off," and it was over. That was the potentially genuine moment, the golden moment when Huppenthal might have revealed what he really felt, kind of like he did in those "hurtful blog comments" of his. But it never happened, because he walked out.

True, there's something sleazy about Ed Supe John Huppenthal's internet habits. A public, elected official who writes hundreds and hundreds of anonymous comments on blog posts and articles all over the Arizona blogosphere is the kind of guy who is willing to use his office in deceptive and underhanded ways when it suits him. Regularly defending himself by name while pretending to be someone else is one higher level of sleaze. And altering Wikipedia pages about himself, Slade Meade (who ran against Huppenthal for a state senate seat) and current Secretary of State Ken Bennett — that's more of the same.

But we've become so accustomed to sleaze from people in the political sector, we just consider it part of the territory — unless they leave an obscene photo trail behind, of course. The sleaze factor won't do more than bruise Huppenthal's reputation a little. So let's put that aside.

What's really troubling is what Huppenthal revealed about himself with his comments. His attitudes toward the poor, Hispanics, even the Spanish language itself, indicate that he shouldn't be allowed within a hundred miles of our children's educations.

Lisa Graham Keegan, a Republican who is a former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and an important part of the conservative "education reform" movement, called on Huppenthal to resign. She was concerned about his comment about Obama "rewarding the lazy pigs with food stamps," saying, "His comments are extremely disrespectful of the people the state superintendent serves." She's right. If Huppenthal feels such a deep disrespect for poor children and their parents that they deserve to be called "lazy pigs," how can he be trusted to determine the nature of their educations? But his "lazy pigs" comment is just the beginning.

Huppenthal's comment about people on public assistance pales in comparison to the vile statements he made about Hispanics in his blog comments. Someone with attitudes like his cannot be trusted to make decisions about the education of the state's Hispanic children.

For example, it's one thing to think Che Guevara is a horrible guy and not a hero as some believe. Che is a controversial figure. But it's quite another to write,

"Che Guvera (sp) is not to be afraid of, he is to be despised and his memory should be defecated upon."

What level of disgust must you feel about someone to say you want to defecate on his memory? I've never read a statement by Huppenthal close to that about anyone else, even Adolph Hitler, who he mentioned a number of times. Huppenthal's comment about Guevara was made in the context of TUSD's Mexican American Studies program, because his picture was on an MAS classroom wall. That's what raised Huppenthal's disgust to an excretory level, Guevara's connection to a Hispanic-centered curriculum.

Among the first public figures to call for Ed Supe John Huppenthal to resign are conservatives. The political distancing and damage control begins.

There's Glenn Hamer, president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. As recently as a week ago, the Chamber loved Hupp. It actually created a new award to honor his support of the Common Core, known in Arizona as the College and Career Ready Standards. No more. The award has been withdrawn. In his condemnation of Huppenthal's jaw-dropping blog comments, Hamer echoed Captain Renault in "Casablanca."

"I am shocked. I am shocked and saddened," Hamer said. "The comments that were posted should not be posted under any circumstances. I am in extreme pain over this conversation."

The Chamber's board will consider asking Huppenthal to step down, or at least withdraw from the election before the upcoming primary.

Then there's Lisa Graham Keegan. When she was a Republican state senator, she shepherded through Arizona's charter school law in 1994, then became Ed Supe in 1995. Since then, she's been McCain's education adviser during his presidential campaign and is currently a heavy hitter in Arizona's "education reform" movement, working hand in glove with Craig Barrett, ex-CEO of Intel and Gov. Brewer's right hand man on education.

Lisa Graham Keegan joined the call for Hupp to drop out of the election immediately, becoming an unlikely bedfellow with Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association. She went on to say Huppenthal should resign.

David Morales has compiled comments Huppenthal made on the Three Sonorans blog using the Falcon9 alias. Can these comments possibly be worse than what we've already seen? Take a look. These are direct quotes, so I've left in any misspellings.

"Che Guvera is not to be afraid of, he is to be despised and his memory should be defecated upon."

"Yes, MAS=KKK in a different color"
[NOTE: "MAS" is short for "Mexican-American Studies."]

"You can’t believe a word on this blog. No book whatsoever has been banned. Just that MAS skin heads can’t run classrooms. They were teaching hate in these classes, just as this blog preaches hate and revenge."

"Their having an orgasm over the claim that their book was banned. Now, maybe a student will read it."

"You have an ethnic majority, hispanics, oppressing an ethnic minority, small business owners, exacting a property tax and paying to force students to undergo a toxic indoctrination."

Ed Supe John Huppenthal's anonymous commenting and sock puppetry made Tucson's 10 o'clock news Thursday night on KGUN 9, as you can see after the jump. Blog for Arizona's Bob Lord and I were included in the story, but our words took a back seat to Huppenthal's. How could the two of us compete with Hupp writing, "Obama is rewarding the lazy pigs with food stamps" or calling TUSD's Mexican American Studies a "'We hate whitey' curriculum"?

I got a chance to "perform" Hupp's comment on a 2012 Blog for Arizona post of mine where he wrote, "You guys are frequently scum, but this article makes you a special form of scum: evil scum." (My post wasn't about Huppenthal, by the way. It was about the national charter school chain, Imagine Schools. I have no idea why that got Hupp so upset. He went equally ballistic over another post of mine about Imagine schools, writing, "You have to be kidding me. how stupid and perverted are you?" There may be a story here, but I haven't figured out what it is yet.)