"Sock-puppet-gate." You read it here first (at least I think you did, since I just made it up). It's getting increasing attention around the state, and it's starting to go national. This morning, it's the lead story on Talking Points Memo.

Not getting nearly enough coverage, however, is the sock puppet aspect of the comments. Huppenthal is emphasizing his right to free expression. But he's not mentioning that he's playing the guy behind the curtain shouting about "Hupp the Great and Powerful," while he's pretending someone else is singing his praises.

John Huppenthal fessed up to the Arizona Republic.

Late Tuesday, June 17, Huppenthal issued a statement exclusively to The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com about the reasons he commented on blog posts under the names "Falcon9" and "Thucydides" instead of his own. He also apologized, saying in the statement, "I sincerely regret if my comments have offended anyone."

No surprise here, including his politician's non-apology apology: "I sincerely regret if my comments have offended anyone." In typically clueless fashion, Huppenthal's statement is more of a defense of his actions than an apology, citing the anonymity of the Federalist Papers (which I mentioned in a post a few days ago) to justify his use of "Thucydides" and "Falcon9" to express his ideas in public. Yes, the Federalist Papers were anonymous, and yes, writing anonymously is fine. But Huppenthal went beyond mere anonymity and used the posts to defend and promote himself, frequently writing about himself in the third person. That's deception, pure and simple. It's so despised on the web, it's got its own name: sock puppetry.

The statement Huppenthal sent to the Republic didn't refer to his serial editing of Wikipedia in 2006, or at least it wasn't mentioned in the excerpts in the article. Also not mentioned was Huppenthal's own defense of his Wikipedia editing, saying it was "honest" because it wasn't anonymous.

Wikipedia has an option for posting anonymously. I chose not to do that. That's the honest man's trademark. He leaves his signature.

The man who's in charge of superintending our children's education needs to be a decent role model for children, not to mention the adults who voted for him, and issue a true apology for his ongoing deceptive practices.

Before he was indulging in sock puppetry on left and right wing blogs as well as more traditional media outlets, before he was Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal was selectively editing his Wikipedia bio, as well as the bios of current Secretary of State Ken Bennett and a former political opponent, State Senator Slade Meade, who Huppenthal defeated in the 2004 senate primary.

That's two cardinal internet sins Huppenthal has indulged in: posting comments as someone else to praise and defend himself, and altering Wikipedia pages to make them more favorable to himself and unfavorable to his opponents. Neither action is illegal, but both indicate Huppenthal has a shaky grasp of the concepts of honesty and integrity.

You can learn more about Huppenthal's sock puppetry here (a Brahm Resnik news clip) and here (my first post on the subject). And you can go to Blog for Arizona for continuing updates.

The newly discovered information is that Huppenthal was actively altering Wikipedia pages in 2006 (recently brought to light in this BfA post), and admitted as much in an email which contains a truly hilarious passage in light of his current anonymous commenting. Geo wrote a November 24, 2006, post on the now-defunct blog, Precinct 134: Senator Huppenthal, you're BUSTED! Geo describes and details the thorough sleuthing process he used to show that Huppenthal went onto Wikipedia at least 28 times to edit entries. He began by editing "Merit pay" and "Standardized testing" pages, then went on to edit his own page 10 times, Ken Bennett's page twice and Slade Meade's page twice.

Huppenthal didn't respond to a request for comments from Resnik, but his implausible deniability is becoming more implausible daily. And the story is far from over. With hundreds of comments spread over a number of Arizona blogs and news outlets, there's no telling what gems are yet to be uncovered. Oh, and Huppenthal did some Wikipedia editing of his own bio back in 2006, another big internet no-no. More on that later.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Too many stories are piling up in the "good intentions" corner of my desktop. I know I'm not going to get to them individually as I always plan to, so here they are in brief, with links so you can learn more if you wish.

• Paper is alive and well for AZ high stakes testing. High tech is creeping slowly into Arizona's schools, so slowly that an estimated 50 percent of kids will take their high stakes tests with paper and pencil. It'll cost more for the paper version, something like $5 to $10 extra per student. Of course, all of this is for a test to be named later, since Arizona hasn't chosen which test it's going to subject its children to give to its students.

• Bill Gates: Let's not count the tests for two years. Common Core's sugar daddy is pulling one of those high tech company moves where they delay the roll-out of a new product for months or years. In this case, the product is already out there — the Common Core standards and the high stakes tests to measure them — but now the Gates Foundation is saying, let's put a two year moratorium on using the results of the tests for evaluation. I guess he decided this is the beta version.

• Bill Gates, Common Core sugar daddy. The Gates Foundation combined more than $200 million with marketing guile to make Common Core into an inevitability and turn most states into early adopters of standards and tests they knew little about. It's one example of the way money is distorting the direction K-12 education is moving. The $160 million a year from the Walton (Walmart) Foundation is another example, and there are plenty more (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to New Jersey to fund a questionable educational scheme). Because after all, who knows more about education than billionaires?

When I was writing at Blog for Arizona, we had two regular and very prolific anonymous commenters on many of our posts, Thucydides and Falcon9. It's looking very much like they're both the same person, and that person is Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal. Bob Lord began hinting at this on BfA awhile back, but he has a post up today where he writes,

Okay, for the few of you who have not figured this out yet, by all indication our friend Thucky [Thucydides] is John Huppenthal, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which is the fifth highest elected office in the state.

We BfA bloggers suspected both Thucycides and Falcon9 might be Huppenthal for some time. The more we read over the hundreds of comments — yes, hundreds of comments — the more it looked like it was true. Today at the end of Bob's post, commenter Thucydides came pretty close to admitting it. Talking about Bob's use of the term "troll" in the post, Thucydides wrote,

Bob,
Who is the blog troll? All of my posts take policy seriously. I bring ideas and evidence to the marketplace. All of the columnists on this blog, mostly you, have dipped in the blog troll pool more deeply than I ever have.

The commenter continues, expounding at some length, but he doesn't distance himself from the allegation that Thucky is Hupp. I suppose he has some implausible deniability left, but not much.

I need to say before I go further, this isn't a condemnation of anonymous posters. This country has a long and honorable tradition in this area that goes all the way back to the Federalist Papers, where the writers used pseudonyms. It's a perfectly fine thing to do. But using a handle to defend or praise yourself is something else entirely. It's a much despised web tactic usually referred to as sock puppetry. And for someone in public office to be foolish and compulsive enough to ramble, sometimes semi-coherently, about a number of topics on a number of websites, including both liberal and conservative sites . . well, that's strange and disturbing behavior, to say the least.

Full disclosure: I support David Garcia for Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and recently had an event for him at my home. Clearly, I want more people to know about and support this excellent candidate. But I'm also interested in educating voters about the candidates running for the office. If any of the other three candidates have a similar introductory video they want on The Range, please contact me.

The Star ran an AP story in its Sunday edition, Inner-city charter school applauds its first batch of college graduates. It's about a Chicago charter school, Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men, where 100% of the graduates are admitted to college. Since these are young black men from the inner city, that's a significant accomplishment.

Before I go into some background that puts the school's success in perspective, let me say that I'm all for programs like this if they increase the likelihood of student success. Whenever a student from a minority group which is underrepresented in higher education succeeds in college, especially when that student likely wouldn't make it that far, it's a terrific success for that individual, and it will probably have a positive multiplier effect on the next generation. I don't have any stats to back this up, but my guess is that every one of these unlikely students who succeeds educationally will result in three to ten others succeeding in the next generation who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks.

Having said that, I want to take a look at why Urban Prep Charter can't be compared directly with district-run schools in Chicago, especially if the purpose of the comparison is to make a pitch for greater privatization. Toward the end of the post, I also want to take a look at what other schools can learn from Urban Prep's success.

Let's start with money. Urban Prep spends about 50% more per student than Chicago's school district: $12,000 per student at Urban Prep compared to $8,000 in the Chicago school system. The difference comes from private donations. People who say money doesn't matter need to understand how many charter schools that rack up successes, especially with poor and minority students, spend significantly more than neighboring district schools.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Are school bus drivers "bureaucrats"? The Goldwater Institute insists they are, even though no reasonable person or respectable dictionary would agree. More on that later.

Tuesday, Goldwater Institute's Communications Director Lucy Caldwell contacted me about "clearing up some factual inaccuracies in a story you published last week." I had a perfectly cordial conversation with Ms. Caldwell, and we swapped a few emails. She asked me to correct what she said were two factual errors in my post, Fraud At A Goldwater Institute-Run STO.

I'm more than happy to correct any factual errors I make. I included a correction of one error on the post and stood by my statement on the second point, based on information on the G.I. website. Caldwell then let me know that the Institute's website is incorrect, meaning the second mistake was G.I.'s, not mine. But I included a correction for that as well. You can read all the details on the post, and while you're there, watch Ann-Eve Pedersen's excellent video about the fraud. Caldwell didn't question its accuracy.

But frankly, I'm amazed that the multi-million-dollars-a-year Goldwater Institute thinks a few inaccuracies in a minor blog post written by a retired high school English teacher deserve so much time and attention — a total five emails, a phone message and a phone call. Clearly, the Institute is holding me to a higher standard than it holds itself, since the folks at G.I. are not exactly sticklers for accuracy in their own work. Their M.O. is to begin with the conclusion they want, then work backwards to find facts, half truths and, if necessary, lies they can use to "prove" their preconceived notions.

I've encountered plenty of examples of fact-challenged information coming out of G.I., but my favorite is the "bus drivers are bureaucrats" whopper which I challenged when I was writing on Blog for Arizona. The more I pushed against that ridiculous assertion, the further G.I. went down the self-parody rabbit hole.

In 2010, then-G.I.-education-guy Matthew Ladner wrote that Arizona schools have ""an almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio." It was an astoundingly absurd claim. To get there, Ladner had to lump together every school district employee who is not a teacher under the label, "bureaucrat." That would make bus drivers bureaucrats. Likewise cafeteria workers and custodians and everyone else who earns a salary by doing something other than directly teaching students.