The Koch Brothers are already deeply invested in Arizona politics and education. With the 2018 election season already in swing, it's certain the Brothers and their cronies will once again invest millions of dollars in Arizona races. That makes this a good time to step back and take a look at what they and other libertarians think of public education and, more specifically, public "government schools," so we understand what candidates whose campaigns are supported by the Brothers will advocate for if they're elected.

The Koch Brothers have invested in libertarian-themed outposts at University of Arizona and Arizona State University, and the state has upped the ante by adding $5 million worth of government funding for the centers in its recent budget. The UA bastion, the Freedom Center, created a high school course favoring libertarian views on economics and politics which is currently being offered in four Southern Arizona school districts and a smattering of charter schools, all government funded institutions. Yet the Koch Brothers invested at least $1.8 million in defeating a 2012 ballot measure which would have increased K-12 funding by a billion dollars. The Brothers also invested at least $1.4 million in the 2014 gubernatorial campaign of Doug Ducey, who bills himself as the "education governor" but rejects any substantive increase in school funding.

What are the Koch Brothers' views on education, and where do they come from?

The best place to start is with Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist who is much revered by libertarians. In 1955, Friedman wrote The Role of Government in Education, which put the idea of school vouchers on the map and added the term "government schools" to our political lexicon. Friedman laid out the economic justification giving parents money for their children's educations and letting them spend it where they wish. He didn't advocate for getting rid of public schools entirely, but he put them at the end of his list of schools, almost as an afterthought.

"Such schools [funded by vouchers] would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, non profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units."

His combination of "some" and "even" with schools run "by governmental units" shows he didn't think many of them would survive in a voucher-financed competition with the private sector.

Friedman thought vouchers should be limited to the amount it costs to provide what he calls "general education for citizenship." Though he didn't define the term exactly, he was clearly thinking about the minimum education needed to survive in our society and participate in our democracy. Parents would have to pay for anything beyond "general education."

One positive byproduct of limiting government's financing of education, according to Friedman, could be that families, especially poorer families, would have fewer children. Since parents would have to pay for everything beyond a minimal education, he reasoned, they would think twice about the financial burden of having to pay for educating too many children.

The only negative Friedman saw concerning his voucher plan was that, after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating the desegregation of schools, parents were using vouchers to pay for whites-only private schools. Though he writes, "I deplore segregation and racial prejudice," Friedman claims that, just as every private business should have the right to hang out a "Whites only" sign in its window, schools should be allowed to be segregated. Let the invisible hand of the marketplace work its magic on schools rather than allow the heavy hand of government to impose desegregation.

Skip ahead 25 years to the 1980 presidential election.

It was September 2011, months before the Tucson Unified school board buckled under the weight of unrelenting political and financial pressure and voted to dismantle Mexican American Studies. Then-Attorney General Tom Horne, the man who started the anti-MAS crusade when he was Superintendent of Public Instruction, was part of a panel discussion on the TUSD program sponsored by the Arizona Mainstream Project. A press release for the event described what it called MAS's "real objectives."

"[T]hese include the overthrow of our government, ethnic resentment, and the redefining of 'la familia.' The TUSD Mexican-American Ethnic Studies program is widely seen as a 'militant' model to be spread throughout the country."

Horne was asked what TUSD could do to comply with then-Education Superintendent John Huppenthal's demands that the program comply with state law. He replied that the district's only option was "to terminate the program."

Horne said the program must be “destroyed,” invoking Cato’s obsessive call for warfare as a punch line, “Carthage must be destroyed.”

Horne is an educated man, so he would have understood the implications of his Carthage analogy. Ancient Carthage, on the North African coast, posed an existential threat to Rome during the Punic Wars — think Hannibal and his elephants crossing the Alps in 218 BC. Rome eventually triumphed over the darker-skinned invaders, destroying Carthage completely and selling its remaining population into slavery. The comparison of Carthage invading from the south being driven back and destroyed by a lighter skinned civilization, to white Arizona fighting off the invasion of its education system by Mexican American radicals is too obvious, and too racist, to be coincidental.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Wallace Tashima declared that the law, § 15-112, designed to destroy TUSD's Mexican American Studies, cannot be enforced, because it

"was enacted and enforced, not for a legitimate educational purpose, but for (i) an invidious discriminatory racial purpose, and (ii) a politically partisan purpose – to shut down the TUSD MAS Program – in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution."

It's a fitting irony that the tactics used by Tom Horne and John Huppenthal against MAS were repudiated in a court of law while both men have seen their reputations tarnished — one could even say, destroyed — because of a string of personal and professional improprieties compounded by their publicly exposed racism.

It's time to give money to a public school — $200 for an individual, $400 for a couple — and get 100 percent of it back at tax time. It won't cost you a penny. It's a tax credit, meaning you deduct it from the total you owe the state. If, for example, you do your taxes and find you owe the state $950, subtract your tax credit from that amount, and that's how much you'll pay. If you gave $400, you'll only pay $550. See? No cost to you.

So, who can you give the money to? Any district or charter school. You can even divvy your credit up among a number of schools.

What is the money used for? Schools can only use it for extracurricular or character education programs, not for classroom-based education. I don't much like that restriction, but that's the way the law was written. Still, lots of important education and recreation happens in schools outside the classroom—sports, music, art, science, field trips, clubs. Especially in schools with lots of children from low income families, the donations can be the difference between the kids participating or being left out.

How do you give? Most school districts have a link on their website's home page which has all the information you need. You can pay online with a credit card or download a form and mail in a check.

How do you choose the school or schools to give your money to? The answer is probably easy for people whose children are in school. For everyone else, my suggestion is, give it to school with lots of low income students. If parents and community members pay little or no state taxes because they don't make much money, they can't take advantage of the credit, which means their schools don't get a whole lot of this extra money, while schools in more affluent areas get many times more.

The Koch Brothers, Charles and David, have been very much in Arizona news lately, something they and their associates don't much like. They prefer to operate by stealth, under cover of dark money. Despite their wishes, a number of Koch-related dots have surfaced lately, loosely connected to one another. Let's see if some patterns emerge.

The Koch Brothers helped fund University of Arizona's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, aka the Freedom Center. They put a million dollars, maybe a little more, into the libertarian-inflected outpost. It's not such a big deal by itself. A university center can't hire its own professors or create its own degree program like a full-fledged department, meaning its influence within the institution of higher education is minimal.

The Freedom Center created a high school course, Philosophy 101: Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship. It is being taught in a few school districts, charters and private schools — though it may be taught in one less district now that Tucson Unified decided the course will not be taught next year, unless the board decides to authorize it after further study. That being said, high school students are famously resistant to internalizing what they learn in class. With the course only being offered at a few schools, it's not like Arizona will have legions of students turning into born again libertarians after a yearlong indoctrination. Then again, the ultimate goal stated by the Templeton Foundation which funds the effort is to have the course reach a quarter of the state's high school students. With numbers like that, the course could have significant sway on the thinking of Arizona's youth.

In Arizona's 2017 state budget, which was quite stingy with university spending, the legislature included $2 million for the Freedom Center and another $3 million for ASU's similarly inclined School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. That taxpayer money on top of private donations from the Koch Brothers and other like-minded donors will help extend the influence of the two libertarian-infused outposts, though it's hard to say how much.

The Freedom Center is using some of its newfound state money to create a new department, the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science. Unlike the Center, it can hire professors and create degree programs, expanding its reach and making it a far more powerful force within the university.

The Supreme Court has decided money is a form of speech. In that spirit, let's see how Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks about education when she's off the clock by looking at some of the money the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation doled out in 2016. (To be completely fair, Betsy stepped down as chairwoman of the foundation on November 22, 2016, after the election, so she wasn't in charge the last 39 days of last year.)

The Foundation gave out $14,381,000 in 2016. Of that, 45 percent, about $6.5 million, went to Education.

Below is a partial list of the foundation's education-related giving as reported by Politico. It's heavy on school choice advocacy and religious schools.

Among the recipients: Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education ($52,000); the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm that has funded school choice lawsuits across the country ($35,000); the Alliance for School Choice, which Betsy DeVos previously chaired ($290,000); Success Academy Charter Schools ($150,000); and West Michigan Aviation Academy, the charter school that Dick DeVos helped create ($65,000).

— On the political front, the DeVos foundation gave $155,000 and pledged another $150,000 to the Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a conservative think tank in Grand Rapids, Mich. It also funded the Great Lakes Education Foundation, which advocates for school choice policies in Michigan, with a $200,000 grant. And in Washington, the foundation supported the American Enterprise Institute with a $750,000 donation.

A sampling of fourth graders in countries around the world took the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test in reading in 2016. If you want to see the numbers broken down into all kinds of subunits, here they are. But the bottom line is, U.S. scores are flat. Actually, they dropped back to 2001 levels after going up a few points—not a whole lot, just a few points—on the 2006 and 2011 tests. Twelve countries outperformed us. You can find the top twelve list at the end of the post. Another fifteen differed by a few points, but the difference isn't statistically significant.

So, we're back on the same square we were sitting on when our barrage of high stakes testing began in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. All that testing, all that test prepping, all that time taken away from other subjects, open-ended discussions and the chance for children to be children out on the playground, and we're back on the same square we started on. It's possible the whole Common Core thing brought down the small gains we made from 2001 to 2011, but that's a tough one to assess, especially with such the small upward bump. The important takeaway for me is, testing was supposed to prod teachers to teach better and administrators to administer better, and the differences would show up in the test scores. After fifteen years, that looks like a false promise.

So, do we scale back testing to a more reasonable level—say, take a snapshot at a few grade levels every few years rather than testing every student at every grade every damn year? Sounds like a good idea to me. Unfortunately, it's not likely in the short term. The educational/industrial complex makes all kinds of money from selling tests and materials related to testing, and it's not likely to give up its cash cow without a fight.

The Top Twelve: Here are the top twelve scoring countries, starting from the top and working down: Russian Federation, Singapore, Hong Kong CHN, Ireland, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland GBR, Norway, Chinese Taipei CHN, England GBR, Latvia, Sweden.

Since I write about education, I try to see everything written about schools and schooling that pertains to Arizona. (You can too. It's easy! Just create a Google alert: Arizona + Education. You'll have dozens of links emailed to you every day.) So I might be overstating things when I say the major focus of Arizona's 2018 elections will be education, but not by much. Unless Arizona Republicans can distract the white electorate by making them fear everyone who doesn't look like them—Trump figured out how to do it, and I'd say he's just following Arizona's lead—schools are going to play big in the minds of voters. And that gives Democrats an opportunity to close the numbers gap between Democratic and Republican voters and pull out a few narrow wins in close races. Education is a Democrat-friendly issue, especially in a state like Arizona where Republicans have starved the schools for years.

Doug Ducey may talk about education even more than he talks about the economy. He knows he has to get in front of a losing political issue so it doesn't spin out of control. Voters put K-12 education at the top of their list of priorities A majority have said they're willing to spend a few extra bucks to raise the amount we spend on students and teacher salaries. And they know Republicans are responsible for our bottom-of-the-barrel per-student funding.

So what does Ducey do in response? He dubs himself the "education governor" and demonstrates his commitment to our children by sprinkling a little budget money over a few high-profile education programs, then acts like he's Santa Claus. Every time he visits a school, he makes sure the story, accompanied by a picture of him surrounded by children, makes it into the local media. And he's full of promises about all the money schools are going to get in the next budget. He tends to be short on the details of his intended largesse, like how much he plans to spend and where he plans to spend it, but he wants everyone to know he cares. Especially when facts give the lie to his promises.

Ducey was furious recently when a report showed the state's spending on education is down since the recession. Taking a page out of the Trump playbook, Ducey complained it was "a false report by a left-wing public interest group." Except that it's true. Even the governor's press aide Daniel Scarpinato had to admit we're spending less per student than in 2008. Then he quickly added, “We think we’ll be back at 2008 at some point." At some point. No idea when.

For me, the three most important books I've read in the past few years are The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed. I won't say they are the best books I've read, though the Coates book may qualify. He's arguably our country's most influential public intellectual as well as a brilliant stylist, and this short book brought him to the attention of an audience beyond the readers of his magazine articles. I call them the most important books for me because they shook me out of my complacency about racial progress.

I'm an old white guy who lived through the Civil Rights Movement in the 50's and 60's and believed I had seen a gradual but significant improvement in the lives of African Americans since then. I mean, look at the increase in the number of prominent black professionals over the past few decades, who are prevalent enough they are thought of more as "professionals who are black" than people for whom "black" is the defining adjective. And Obama? What better proof of how far we've come as a country! But the history traced by these three books from the early days of our nation to the Obama presidency — and with Coates' latest article, The First White President, the early days of the Trump presidency — helped me understand that while it's increasingly possible for exceptional black men and women to reach the social level of less exceptional whites by working three times as hard, social and economic progress has not made its way to the rest of the black population. There are plenty of explanations ranging from reasonable to racist, but one which deserves more prominence than it receives is, simply, the white power structure stood in the way of black advancement.

As I began reading The New Jim Crow, my initial reaction was to think its basic thesis was overstated. But when the author, a lawyer who is the former director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, admitted in her introduction that she too would have scoffed at the validity of her argument if she had heard it before she began her own research, I decided to give the book a careful read. I'm glad I did. Her basic thesis, which has become more accepted and widespread since she wrote the book, is that after civil rights legislation undermined the foundation of segregationist Jim Crow laws, which were a racist response to the progress made during the post-Civil War Reconstruction, new laws and enforcement practices were put in place which disproportionately target blacks, disrupting communities and disenfranchising thousands of individuals. She refers specifically to the War on Drugs which began a few years after the passage of civil rights legislation, law enforcement which targeted blacks for drug and other legal offenses more forcefully than others, and a legal system with its outsized penalties for minor offenses, all of which led to mass incarceration, affecting black people and communities more negatively than any other group. That is what she refers to as "the new Jim Crow."

Eight Tucsonans gathered in Washington, D.C. Tuesday to try and persuade Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake to vote against the tax bill working its way through Congress. One version of the bill passed the House. Senate Republican leaders are wheeling and dealing with on-the-fence Republicans, all but two of whom are needed to pass the bill. As I write this, as many as eight senators, including Flake and McCain, haven't made a firm commitment.

Alma Hernandez, senior organizer of Arizonans United for Health Care, brought five people with her from Tucson, many of whom were visiting D.C. for the first time. Joan and I, who were already in D.C., joined them. In the group were teachers, graduate students, retirees, a small business owner and a public defender. Our day was organized by the Center for American Progress, who set up the events, shepherded the group through the labyrinthine corridors of power and arranged for us to attend the CNN Town Hall on the tax bill Tuesday evening.

Neither Flake nor McCain were available to meet with the group, so we met with staffers. Individuals shared their stories. Julie Simmons, a cancer survivor and small business owner, said that her personal health insurance and her ability to provide insurance for her employees depends on the existence of the Affordable Care Act, which will take a serious hit if the tax bill passes and the individual mandate is eliminated. Tony Zinman also survived cancer and understands the huge expenses which can be associated with combating the disease. As a public defender, he works with many Tucsonans on the margins of society who depend on the kind of social services which could be endangered by the budget cuts which would inevitably follow the Republican tax cuts. Ellen Stark and Alma Hernandez, both in graduate school, spoke of the student loans they need to complete their degrees. They worried that eliminating the graduate student tuition waiver would make it more difficult for students and discourage potential students from entering degree programs in the future. Hernandez said Latinas like her are underrepresented in her graduate school program, and increasing students' debt burdens would make the situation that much worse. Sunni Lopez and other teachers complained that low salaries were already driving teachers from classrooms. Eliminating the $250 tax deduction for purchasing classroom supplies would make it even harder for teachers to make ends meet.

Many in the group expressed admiration for courageous stands both senators have taken. McCain is famous for bucking his party leadership. Though Flake has voted with Trump consistently, he has demonstrated moral courage in recent statements about the many troubling aspects of Trump's presidency. The group expressed hope the Arizona senators would recognize the fatal flaws in the tax bill and vote No.

Facebook is facing the possibility of a $59 million fine if it allows hate speech to remain on its site for more than a week. Not here. In Germany. As a result, the company is adding 500 new contractors to the 700 it already hired to review posts for illegal content.

I did the money math. Give 1,200 workers something like $60,000 in salary and benefits, and it costs Facebook $72 million. Get fined twice and it costs $118 million, and you still haven't dealt with the problem. The new German hires are a no-brainer for Zuckerman & Co.

The situation in Germany doesn't translate easily to the U.S. We have First Amendment protections they don't have in Germany, and given the anonymous interference in our elections, hate speech on Facebook is far from our biggest worry. But the point is, if Facebook can ramp up diligence on its site for fear of losing money in another country, it can do the same kind of thing here because it's the right thing to do—or because it fears people will get pissed enough at the company that they'll take their posts and find a new home at another internet social provider.

At the end of the year, Facebook is planning to roll out a new tool here which will let users find out if they liked or followed Russia-based content over the past few years. The move is a hint of what the company can do if it wants to, but it's not nearly enough. The listing will only show if you had contact with the ads or posts. It won't show the content. Better would be to create pages filled with the actual posts divided by topic so everyone can get a sense of the kind of disinformation they were subjected to. That should be doable. And it still isn't enough if the company doesn't use what it has learned to prevent a similar proliferation of propaganda during the 2018 election cycle. Times a-wastin'. We're already well into the next election cycle.

C'mon, Mark, you're an immensely talented guy surrounded by some of the best cyber talent in the country. Do it right this time. Don't Zuck it up.