Our conservative “education reform” movement loves to knock teachers, especially in what they call “failing schools” — read, schools with low income students. According to them, if only we had more “great teachers” — read, non-union teachers who don’t get pay raises unless they “perform” and who never have tenure — all our educational problems would disappear.

It’s a ridiculous notion. Not because “great teachers” don’t improve students’ learning — they do — but because teachers aren’t to blame for our educational woes, and taking after the entire profession with a club, pretending you're doing it to knock out the worst teachers, does more harm than good.

But let's go with the idea that we need better teachers. The question is, how do we get them? Here’s how Finland, one of the highest rated school systems in the world, does it. Short version: (1) Attract the best and brightest college grads; (2) Give them a long, tuition free, partly paid period of teacher education; (3) Give them lots of preparation and professional development time as teachers. Oh, and: (4) Have a powerful teachers union.

• Photo courtesy of shutterstock.com
• New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo are arguing like a couple of kids on the playground, and I'm loving it. We could use a little more — actually a lot more — of this kind of fight here in Arizona.

Here's kind of what they said. I may have altered the language a bit.

de Blasio: I don’t care what you say, I’m gonna tax the rich to raise enough money so every kid can go to pre-K classes.

Cuomo: Oh yeah? Well, I’m not gonna let you tax people. I’m gonna give you $1.5 billion to pay for it.

de Blasio: Cheapskate! I need more money than that. I’m still gonna tax all those people who make the most money so little kids can go to school.

Cuomo: Oh no you’re not! I’m gonna give you and everyone in the state as much money as it takes. So there!

de Blasio: Yeah, well, I don’t know . . .

Boys, boys, boys, please don’t fight. You’re both right. Let’s go inside and have some milk and cookies. I’m sure we can work this out.

Of course, cheating on standardized tests hasn't, and doesn’t, and couldn't happen here. At least, no one has proved any cheating in Arizona because our Department of Education doesn't think it's worth looking into. (See Carpe Diem charter school note at the end of this post.) But in Atlanta, teachers and principals have pleaded guilty to tampering with student tests, and last week, three Philadelphia Public School principals were fired.

Three Philadelphia Public Schools principals were fired last week after an investigation into test cheating that has implicated about 140 teachers and administrators, a spokesman for the district said Wednesday.

The action follows years of investigating the results of state standardized math and reading tests taken from 2009 to 2011. The investigation, conducted by the school district and the state department of education, in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General, identified 33 schools — including three public charter schools — where an analysis of test answer sheets found a suspicious number of wrong answers that were erased and made right.

Education was a major part of Dr. King’s vision. He looked forward to a time when children of all races had equal opportunity to pursue their educational goals, through high school, past high school, as far as their dreams and their abilities could carry them.

Rep. John Kavanagh, on the other hand, is pushing for a “Hey, idiot, if you’re going to be a salesman, you shouldn’t waste our money by going to university” mentality in Arizona. I wrote about his jaw-dropping pronouncement Sunday, and I haven't been able to shake my disgust with his statement since. It's especially rankling on a day honoring the memory of Martin Luther King.

So I want to try a thought experiment, looking at the consequences of Kavanagh’s vision of restricting university education to people who will, in his view, make proper use of it.

Let’s imagine a group of 100 students at Catalina Foothills High, where 77% of the students are white or Asian and 6% are on free or reduced lunch. Next, imagine another group of 100 students at Pueblo High, where 95% of the students are Hispanic, Native American or Black and 79% are on free or reduced lunch. Let’s also imagine the 100 students at both schools are an identical mix of intellectual ability. To the extent that DNA determines intellect, the genetic makeup of the two groups covers the full gamut in equal proportions.

In other words, both groups have the same biological chance of being successful students at UA. They're separated by geography, family income and ethnicity, not by native ability.

Now, imagine John Kavanagh is giving separate talks to both groups. Which of them is most likely to hear this speech?

Spanish-language e-books are flourishing, which is wonderful. The LA Times article says we have 38 millions Spanish speakers in the U.S., and their access to books in Spanish has been limited until recently. It's hard for a bookstore to stock a selection wide enough to satisfy people's reading appetites — libraries have the same problem — and the books for sale tend to be much more expensive than English-language books. Now, courtesy of Kindle and other e-readers, people all over the world can access online books no matter their points of origin. The number of available titles has skyrocketed, and costs tend to be far lower than printed versions. The trends extend to languages other than Spanish, of course.

From 2011 to 2012, the number of Hispanics owning some kind of e-reader has jumped from 1 in 20 to 1 in 5, according to the article. There's a hunger out there for written material in the Hispanic population, in Spanish and, I'm sure, in English. I'm for anything that encourages literacy in general and reading in particular. It's great for the readers themselves, and it's good for the children who are surrounded by people with their noses buried in physical or virtual books. Children who see adults reading tend to pick up the habit themselves.

I'm sure if I lived in a different country, even if I developed fluency in its language, I'd want to read books in my mother tongue. Those words I grew up with, the phrasings, the idioms have the comfort of home cooking. They defy translation. Now those books can fly across borders at internet speed.

[Satire Alert!] Rep. John Kavanagh has proposed shortening Arizona’s education requirements to completion of the sixth grade.

“Someone who’s going to work behind the counter at McDonalds doesn’t need any more than a sixth grade competency in reading and math,” he said. “It’s time to dramatically look at our entire philosophy of K-12 education.”

Kavanagh suggested students who earn his new Certificate of Sixth Grade Competency need one addition to their education before they leave school. “They all should be required to take a three week course in basic English elocution. We need to be able to understand them when they ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ or ‘Would you like to supersize that?’" He added, "If they can train people at India’s call centers to speak like Americans, certainly we can train our students to say a few key phrases so customers can understand them.”

When asked whether it makes sense to encourage people to have a high school education so they can be informed citizens and voters, Kavanagh replied, “Are you kidding? We shouldn’t let those idiots vote! I’m working on a ‘No Diploma, No Ballot’ bill that adds a high school diploma to voter ID requirements.”

OK, Kavanagh never said any of that, but I put a Satire Alert! up front because, as ridiculous as my faux-news story sounds, it’s well within the range of unreasonable discourse we’ve come to expect from conservatives.

What Kavanagh actually said was Arizona is sending too many students to our state universities. These are his words — and I’m not making this up.

“If somebody’s going to end up in a sales position or someone’s going to be a real estate agent, why are we investing all this money in a research university degree?” he said. “What’s the purpose of it?”

The latest shooting: Two children, an 11 and a 13 year old, were shot by a 12 year old with a sawed-off shotgun in a New Mexico middle school yesterday. Both of the injured children are alive — no recent reports on their conditions. A teacher talked down the shooter, so he wasn’t hurt.

In a sane world, an aggrieved, upset 12 year old should have recourse to a number of options. He can talk to his parents. He can talk to adults at school. He can be taken to a mental health professional. He can even figure out a way to get back at the kid he’s mad at, including beating the snot out of him. All of those options have their up and down sides, but none of them involve lethal force. No one should be in the hospital in critical condition because a 12 year old, rightly or wrongly, has a grudge against another child.

From the people who brought you “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards" to replace "Common Core," comes "Student Success Funding" to take the place of "Performance Funding." The more the names change, the more the programs stay the same.

Gov. Jan Brewer and Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal got all kinds of flak from the right when they got behind the national "Common Core Standards." (The left isn't happy with the standards either, for different reasons, but that doesn't bother Brewer and Huppenthal much). So Brewer issued an executive order changing the name to “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards," which changed absolutely everything nothing.

In the Brewer budget last legislative session, she proposed money for Performance Funding, which would give a bonus to schools whose students scored high on the AIMS test. One of the few things educators know for sure: no matter where you are in the world, higher income students perform better on standardized tests than lower income students. So the Brewer plan meant schools with students from high income families would get more money, and schools with students from low income families would get less. Oh, and as an afterthought, schools whose scores improved would get a little extra too. That's supposed to balance things out. It doesn't.