Maybe the Star got conned, I don't know. If so, it shouldn't have. Even a sleepy-eyed editor should have seen through the deception. When I gave today's "Special to the Arizona Daily Star" op-ed in defense of the Common Core a sleepy-eyed reading this morning, I could tell a few paragraphs in it was a widely distributed column. It took me two minutes of googling to find it in five other papers, most of them dating from October, 2013.

The column was written by the Fordham Institute. To be fair, the versions aren't identical. In the Star, for instance, there's a phrase in the second paragraph, "including in Arizona." In other papers, it reads, "including in Indiana," "including in North Carolina," "including in Mississippi, "including in Florida" and "including in Georgia." Other direct references to the states have similar changes and, of course, there are minor differences in editing.

When the Fordham Institute wrote the op-ed and distributed it to papers across the country, it made an unusual admission in the copy. It identified the Institute as a "conservative think tank where we examine policy issues and promote reforms in K-12 education." It's rare for a group like this to identify its political leanings, but there's a reason in this case. The column is openly trying to woo conservatives to support the Common Core by warning them against joining with Common Core opponents on the left.

I went down to Davis Bilingual Elementary Magnet School Saturday morning to join in the Adopt-A-School program and see if I could help put "some added sparkle to the historic school," like it said in the TUSD press release. Lots of people were there when I arrived — district employees, parents and children.

After they administered an extensive skills inventory to assess my ability and agility, I was given a rag and some rubber gloves, pointed toward a bucket of cleaning solution and told to join my crew, pictured above, whose job was to clean and disinfect walls, doors, doorknobs, stair rails — pretty much any solid surface we could reach. Though I was badly outmatched in the skills department, especially by the smaller members of the crew, I was able to put my superior height to use in the hard-to-reach areas.

Floors one and two thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, the next step was to put a fresh coat of paint on the walls. When I showed the painting crew my skills inventory printout, they quickly hid the paint rollers, smiled and asked me to put masking tape around the doors and floorboards.

Saturday morning, from 8am to noon, TUSD administrators as well as other district employees and volunteers will gather at Davis Bilingual Elementary Magnet School (500 W. St. Mary's Road, just north of downtown and east of I-10) to bring, in the words of the media release, "some added sparkle to the historic school." Anyone who wants to lend a hand is invited. Wear work clothes. Work gloves and simple garden tools are optional.

Davis is the second site chosen for the Adopt-A-School program. TUSD launched Adopt-A-School in November to bring together district employees, parents and members of the community to take on projects not covered under general maintenance. Holladay Magnet School was the first school to undergo a transformation.

Work at Davis will include painting in hallways, repainting sidewalk games such as hopscotch and sprucing up the school grounds and gardens.

Volunteers don’t need to have experience, just a willingness to help. Bring work gloves and simple garden tools if you would like. TUSD operations staff members will be on hand to guide the work.

Tom Danehy is on a two week tear writing about charter schools. In an earlier post, I quoted last week's column about charters "spend[ing] public money like drunken sailors with almost no official oversight." Now Tom has put together an Arizona charter school quiz, with good questions and on-the-money answers.

I won't give away the answers, but you'll learn about charter financial corruption, the relative quality of charter and district school education, charter administrative costs, and how to find out what charter teachers are paid.

I'm often accused of being against charter schools. It's more accurate to say I'm against false, inflated praise of charter schools by the conservative "education reform" movement in its relentless drive to demonize what "reformers" like to refer to as "government schools" and to promote school privatization. I try to burst their inflated bubble whenever I get the chance. When the charter cheerleaders start telling the truth about their schools, I won't have to expend so much time and effort countering their propaganda.

The truth is, charter schools are a mixed bag with good schools and bad schools — kind of like those much maligned "government schools." The vast majority of studies have concluded that when you compare similar students, there's about a dime's worth of difference between their performance in school district schools, charter schools and private schools, and that dime of difference shifts back and forth between one type of school and another year by year. If you want to see examples of quality education, look for schools offering quality education. Don't look for labels or categories.

It’s been said before in greater depth, complete with facts and figures, but the Weekly's Tom Danehy cuts right to the chase, as usual, in this week’s column.

Records show that charter schools spend public money like drunken sailors with almost no official oversight, with protection from having to make full financial disclosure almost gleefully provided by the Legislature, and virtually no public outcry from those who claim to give a crap about where taxpayer money is going. It's hypocrisy, plain and simple.

Charter schools say they’re not getting as much money as district schools, and they’ve gone to court to get what they think is their fair share. It would make it a whole lot easier to figure out if charters are getting what they should if we knew the specifics of where and how they spend their money the taxpayers’ money.

I’ve done my damndest to sort out the funding equity issue for charters and district schools. I’m pretty good with numbers. I’ve listened to the arguments. I’ve looked at the spread sheets. But I haven’t found anyone who has sorted this thing out to my satisfaction. The problem is, there are too many slippery variables: providing transportation for students or not; providing food services or not; providing adequate special ed and ELL programs or not. Then there’s the different types of bonding charters and districts have available to them. This isn’t just a problem of trying to compare apples and oranges. We’re trying to compare a couple of banquet-sized financial smorgasbords here.

For this old classroom teacher, the money issue boils to one question. How much is being spent to educate that average kid in the average classroom? That’s got be the starting point for any discussion of funding equity. If the money allocated to charters for educating that middle-of-the-pack kid is significantly more or less than what district schools get, we should look at making some adjustments. But if the amount is close to the same, then we can leave that discussion aside and shift to other questions about special needs education, outside-of-class services and the like, while districts and charters get together and lobby the legislature to bring our education funding out of the cellar for all public schools, district and charter.

On February 3rd, 1967 Jimi Hendrix recorded his second hit single Purple Haze. The left-handed guitarist performed at the Woodstock concert and is known for his stage antics like lighting his guitars on fire. Hendrix is also known for playing the guitar backwards and upside down. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. - Jimi Hendrix

Today marks the 90th anniversary of Former President Woodrow Wilson's death. The 28th president served from 1913-1921 and under his leadership, congress was able to pass laws such as the Federal Reserve Act. Wilson was also president for a section of the First World War. Wilson asked congress to declare war after Germany tried to curtail Mexico into attacking the United States. The former president was also President at Princeton and Governor of New Jersey.

Incredible story in today's column by EJ Montini, ‘Lost’ tape of MLK at ASU in 1964 haunts us in 2014. Mary Scanlon, a graphic designer, found a trove of reel-to-reel tapes in a Goodwill, recordings of a radio show by Lincoln Ragsdale, who was one of the Tuskegee airmen, and the only known tape of a speech Martin Luther King gave at ASU in 1964.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

That headline must be a joke, right? Paying parents to take their children out of school? Unfortunately, the headline's for real. It’s an incentive built into Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA)— aka Educational Savings Accounts, aka (according to me) Vouchers on Steroids. ESAs were created by the Goldwater Institute, passed into law in 2011 and expanded in 2013; they're up for another expansion this legislative session. Encouraging parents to take their kids out of school isn’t an ESA bug; as they say in the tech world, it’s a feature. Almost a third of parents used the money to homeschool their kids.

The ESA concept is pretty simple. A “savings account” is set up by the state for a qualified child who opts out of the public school system. The parent or guardian draws on that account to pay for the child’s education. Anything left over at the end of the school year rolls over to the next year.

So far it sounds like just another work-around (see, Tuition Tax Credits) to make vouchers legal in Arizona where the constitution forbids the use of public money for religious instruction (something like 70% of Arizona’s private schools are religious). ESAs give the money to parents rather than the school, and somehow that makes it legit. But when you look further into the legislation, things start getting weird.

Along with paying for tuition, ESA money can be used to pay for books, educational therapies, tutoring, curriculum, online classes and standardized test fees. In other words, pretty much anything that sounds educational. The base ESA amount is $5,300 a year, which barely covers tuition at the lowest priced private schools. For the mid- and high-priced schools, it doesn’t come close. Really, there’s only one way to take advantage of all those other perks. You have to take your child out of school. Then, if you want, you can shop around for curriculum, maybe pay for a little tutoring, maybe buy an online class or two. The savvy educational shopper can make that $5,300 go a long way if there’s no tuition to pay.

The Goldwater Institute has an op-ed pushing Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) — aka Educational Savings Accounts, aka (according to me) Vouchers on Steroids — in Friday’s Arizona Republic and another in Saturday’s Sierra Vista Herald. It’s no wonder G.I. loves the vouchers-on-steroids program. The Institute created it and babied it through the Arizona legislature. And it’s no wonder G.I. is making a big ESA push right now. Republicans, under G.I.’s watchful eye, are pushing a bill to expand the program.

Whenever you read something from the Goldwater Institute — an op ed, one of its emails if you’re on the mailing list, a quote from one of its six-figure-salary spokespeople — remember: G.I. is a conservative lobbying organization, lawsuit mill and propaganda factory, not a think tank as it likes to bill itself. No think tank worthy of the name begins with the conclusion it wants to reach, then thinks back to figure out how to “prove” it. That’s G.I.’s M.O. That’s how G.I. works.

Both op-eds are penned by Jonathan Butcher, the Institute’s education point man. Do you know ALEC, the corporate funded conservative organization that brings business leaders and Republican legislators together in fancy hotels, creates conservative model bills on all kinds of issues, then sends the legislators home to pass them in their home states? Butcher is co-chair of ALEC’s Education Task Force. That’s pretty much tells you what you need to know about him.