Over 400 people gathered at the Network for Public Education's first annual conference held at the University of Texas, Austin. It had to be the first NPE conference because the organization is just a year old. Eight Tucson-area folks joined the other attendees, including Robin Hiller, NPE's executive director (she also runs Tucson's Voices for Education) and TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez.

The conference deplored the spread of the conservative "education reform"/"school choice" agenda, but the atmosphere was more uplifting than negative. Activists from around the country, educators and parents who knew each other from news articles and blog posts, shook hands, hugged, talked and shared the feeling, "We're not alone."

The two day conference hosted 30 panels and workshops over six sessions. Sanchez sat on a panel with other superintendents discussing the challenges of “Leading schools and districts in an era of high-stakes accountability.” Hiller was part of a panel looking into the "Opt out" movement, where parents refuse to let their children take high stakes tests and teachers defy their districts by refusing to administer them. I was a member of a panel looking at charter schools, virtual schools and vouchers. (I referred to Arizona as the Meth Lab of Democracy without crediting John Stewart with the line as I should have, but I figured, mistakenly, that everyone had heard it before. The line was tweeted and re-tweeted by participants as if I invented it. Oops.)

[UPDATE: After I wrote this post, SB1310 was voted down in the Senate, 18-12.]

Is it possible Sen. Al Melvin and I agree about Common Core? Well, not exactly. That would just be wrong. Let's say we share a common interest in halting its full implementation.

Cap'n Al's bill, SB1310, prohibiting Arizona's use of the Common Core standards and tests passed the Senate Education committee 6-3 on a straight party line vote. Melvin made his usual mess of things during discussion of the bill.

Melvin, pressed in floor debate Tuesday to identify what in the Common Core standards he does not like, provided no answer.

“I leave it to you to find them,’’ he told Sen. David Bradley, D-Tucson. Instead, Melvin said he was simply reflecting what he said is the will of a majority of Arizonans who said they do not want Common Core.

“We can do a better job at the state level than the federal government dictating standards,’’ Melvin said.

Earlier Melvin talked about "borderline pornographic" reading material and "'fuzzy math,' substituting letters for numbers." He said he hadn't really read the standards, but “I’ve been exposed to them." (Hope he got his immunization shots so he doesn't catch anything.)

I'd like to see the Common Core subjected to some serious scrutiny, and a sizable contingent of folks in the progressive education camp agree. We're worried that schools are turning into testing factories where students, teachers and schools are at the mercy of their standardized test scores, and any classroom experiences that don't raise scores are viewed as frills that need to be pushed aside to allow more time to teach to the test.

Your household income dropped 20% over the past few years. You want to do everything you can to spare your family from absorbing the pain, so you try your damndest to save money elsewhere.

How about lowering home or rent payments? Sorry, those letters you sent asking to cut your payments 20% gave everyone in the office a good laugh. Cut back on car payments? Same hilarity when the loan company received your letter. Utility bills? Maybe you can shave off a few dollars by keeping the house colder in winter and warmer in summer and by flushing less often, but it's not going to amount to a 20% savings.

The only sure places to cut back are on expenses for food, clothing, family enrichment and entertainment. You don't want to deny your family, especially your children, but what choice do you have? And so the percentage of your overall budget you spend on your family decreases along with your income.

Schools are faced with the same problems. K-12 education funding has gone down 20% per student over the past few years — that's in real dollars — courtesy of the Republican budget cutters in Phoenix. Yet districts have fixed costs that don't budge when the money gets tight — buildings to operate, utilities to pay, buses to run. You can cut back a bit on some of those expenses, but 20%? That's not possible. Arizona already spends a lower percentage on administrative costs than all but a few other states, so there's not much room for savings there either.

As participants left the final workshops at the Network For Public Education Conference at University of Texas, Austin, we walked into a press conference in the building's entry room organized by NPE leaders Diane Ravitch, Robin Hiller and Anthony Cody calling for "Congressional hearings to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s K-12 public schools."

It's a valid suggestion. Members of Congress need to learn more about high stakes testing which determines school curriculum, takes up an inordinate amount of classroom time and is of questionable educational value. Bring a few cameras and some news coverage into the hearings, and the nation can begin a much needed conversation about the growing emphasis on testing in our schools.

Here's the NPE Media Release.

AUSTIN, TX The Network for Public Education (NPE) closed out its first National Conference here with a call for Congressional hearings to investigate the over-emphasis, misapplication, costs, and poor implementation of high-stakes standardized testing in the nation’s K-12 public schools.

In a Closing Keynote address to some 500 attendees, education historian and NYU professor Diane Ravitch, an NPE founder and Board President, accused current education policies mandated by the federal government, such as President Barak Obama’s Race to the Top, of making high-stakes standardized testing “the purpose of education, rather than a measure of education.”

I'm winging my way to the Network for Public Education (NPE) National Conference at the University of Texas, Austin. A few days of panels, speakers and getting together with some of the heavy hitters in progressive education. I'll be sitting on a panel, "Charters, Virtuals and Privatization." TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez will be joining other superintendents in a discussion about district leadership. Tucson's Robin Hiller (Voices for Education), one of the founders and directors of NPE, will also be participating in a panel (Sorry, can't remember which.)

The Conference will be live streamed, so interested folks can tune in 9:30am-5:30pm Saturday and 9am-2:15pm Sunday. Keynote speeches: Saturday, 1-2:15pm (John Kuhn and Karen Lewis) and Sunday 10:30am-noon (Diane Ravitch). That's all in Austin time. Adjust accordingly.

As I read details of the new GOP tax plan in an AP article in the Star, it sounded, well, not too bad — grading on a Republican curve, anyway.

Then I read elsewhere the plan would hit blue state taxpayers harder than red staters. I shoulda guessed.

Politico has a good, short breakdown of how the tax plan would affect teachers, students and people carrying student loans. The first two items sound OK. It gets pretty grim after that.

EDUCATION IN TAX REFORM IN 30 SECONDS: The House Ways and Means proposal for tax reform would (take a deep breath): make the American Opportunity Tax Credit more refundable; stop taxing Pell Grant refunds as income; end tax deductions for tuition, student loan interest and teachers’ classroom supplies; tax student loan forgiveness for public servants, “section 127” programs that contribute to paying for employees’ higher education, and tuition discounts for college employees; and kill Coverdell savings accounts and zone academy bonds. In all, it would slim 15 higher ed tax provisions down to five. Teachers would be particularly hard-hit, losing two special set-asides, although the plan’s author, Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), says the classroom deduction would be more than offset by lower rates and overall simplification. All the details in this document: http://politico.pro/1kkPdcK.

—The NEA isn’t convinced of the plan's wisdom: Mary Kusler said collectively last year, teachers spent $1.6 billion on classroom materials out of their own wages. “We see the elimination of this deduction as a direct harm to public school students in this country.” And the student loan proposal “defeats the purpose of using loan forgiveness as a way to attract teachers,” Kusler said. And, she said, Camp's plan shouldn't be so quickly dismissed, as some have already done, because it could be the point of conversation in the future.

Craig Barrett, ex-CEO of Intel, is the most powerful person in Arizona education policy nobody's ever heard of, or anyway, not nearly enough people have heard of. You can read some background on Gov. Brewer's go-to, back-room adviser on education here.

Barrett is a huge supporter of education privatization, and he's deeply involved in the charter school movement. He's president and chairman of the board of BASIS charters, whose name is ever on the lips of the well funded, nationwide charter school cheerleading squad. ("Charter schools are great! Look at BASIS. And then of course there's BASIS. Did I mention BASIS?").

Barrett was interviewed recently and was asked about Common Core, which he supports, promotes and helped create. He's chairman of the board of Achieve, the nonprofit organization largely responsible for developing Common Core. A very well connected guy. In the interview, he brought up BASIS to explain why high stakes tests, an important component of Common Core, don't lead to "teaching to the test."

“I'm a CEO of a charter school organization here in Arizona. We've got two of the top five high schools in the United States. Our teachers teach subject matter. They don't teach to the tests. The kids can pass any test."

Yes, BASIS kids can pass any test, because the charters use a three-pronged selection process to guarantee their schools are filled with the best, brightest and most motivated students in the area. I've taught kids like that. The question is whether they'll simply pass the state test or score so high it's scary.

Here's what Mr. Barrett doesn't mention. He's also on the national board of K12 Inc., a for-profit, publicly traded company that runs a string of online charters including Arizona Virtual Academy. Those kids can't "pass any test." Far from it. The schools have racked up more negative press across the country than any schools I've read about, and they've earned every scathing word. You can read multiple stories about low achieving students, failing schools, the outsourcing of student essays to India to be graded, huge "churn rates" — about a third of the students leave every year — gigantic student-to-teacher ratios and stockholder suits as a result of the corporation lying about student achievement.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

I've referred to the folks who write the headlines as the Star's Creative Headline Writing Team and even held a "Worst Star Headline of the Year" contest. The paper's headlines have gotten better since then, but today they slipped back into their old bad ways, with an assist from reporter Alexis Huicochea.

Here's the headline blasted from the top right hand of today's front page: Ground is familiar at TUSD's $92K event. A snark followed by a misstatement. It's a twofer.

First the misstatement. It wasn't a $92,000 event. The consultants were hired for a variety of duties. The Tuesday event was one of them. That’s in the contract language. I’m sure the contract is available to the Star. I’ve read it.

I can't really blame the headline writers, since Huicochea included the same twofer in her opening sentence:

A team of outside consultants, brought in at a cost of $92,500 yesterday, didn’t tell Tucson Unified School District leaders anything they didn’t already know or that hasn’t been said before:

The sentence says, the consultants were "brought in at a cost of $92,500 yesterday." Huicochea may have deniability here — she didn't exactly say the $92K was for that event only — but good writing is about clarity, and the clear message in her opening is, TUSD spent $92,000 for eight hours work. Later she reports that the consultants will provide some school board training and compilation of the feedback as well. Even that's incomplete. Read. The. Contract.

My opinion: TUSD's all day strategic planning meeting Tuesday was pretty good.

Let me put "pretty good" in perspective. I hate meetings. Hate them. When I was a teacher and I had to suffer through an after school staff meeting that was especially dismal or depressing, I'd stand up and walk out the minute my 8 hour day was over, even if the principal was speaking. Hate meetings. So if I say being locked in a meeting room from 8am to 3pm was a "pretty good" experience, you should bump that up a couple notches. Here's a start. The meeting was pretty damn good.

First an overview, then some random thoughts. (NOTE: The nice thing about a post like this is that other participants can chime in with comments to agree with, disagree with or elaborate on my impressions of the day. Please feel free.)

All the invitees were placed at round tables with about 8 other folks, including community members, parents, teachers and administrators. One of the visiting consultants would give a 20 minute talk on an issue, then the people at the table would discuss it for about 30 minutes. Each table had a facilitator who fed us open-ended questions and a secretary who recorded what we said on a laptop wired to a central computer, meaning all our input was gathered instantaneously. We took a 15 minute break, then we had another speaker and discussion, and so on.

No grand conclusions were reached or specific plans created, since the discussions were free ranging and different at each table. We didn't coordinate with the other tables or learn what they talked about. What happened to me was, as the day went on, I felt myself buying into the process more and more, taking personal ownership and responsibility for the issues and suggestions the group chewed over. And that was the point, I think. To get the participants involved in the planning on a personal level, to begin a dialogue, which will be followed with further input by participants at the meeting — and by others, I'm sure — resulting in the creation of a five year strategic plan. If that was the idea, the process worked for me.

"Who is this person?" I asked myself as I read Vicki Alger's op ed, Education improves when parents can bypass clueless bureaucrats, in today's Star. It segues from a diatribe against the U.S. Department of Education to a fact-challenged advocacy of vouchers into one of those states rights, 10th Amendment statements so popular on the far right. Who is this uninformed, unhinged character?

It's worse than I thought. Vicki Alger is actually a "very serious person" in the world of ed privatization: research fellow at the Independent Institute (a libertarian organization with lots of money and questionable integrity), former director of the Goldwater Institute's Center for Educational Opportunity and on and on. Oh, and she sits on the board of BASIS charter schools in Chandler and Phoenix. Alger is widely published and according to her blurb, working on a book about the U.S. Dept. of Ed. Meaning she's a cog in the vast, well funded "education reform"/privatization/corporatization machine, where facts are optional and research begins with the conclusion and works back to the data.

Let's take a walk through some of Alger's statements in the op ed.