So far as I can tell, no one in the media has reported on Tuesday's Classrooms First Initiative Council Meeting where school funding proposals were considered, nor has Ducey or anyone in his office made a statement about it. The minutes may be published soon, though based on minutes from earlier meetings, the document will be short and general. However, we now have an online audio of the meeting, all 2 hours, 45 minutes and 50 seconds of it. I'll try to wade though the thing, though I imagine I'll do some skipping around. If anyone else wants to venture in, please report your impressions in the comments.

As I wrote in an earlier post, this meeting is the kind of "next step" Ducey was talking about before the Prop 123 vote, which involves looking at ways to shift around existing education dollars, not add more funding. So the question is, what funding shifts will the council recommend, and since this is a zero sum game, who will be the winners and losers?

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), out of the School of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, just put out two short research papers that conclude, class size matters, and money in education matters. I believe the papers are right on both counts, but as always when I site research, whether I agree or not, I have to add that no conclusions in education research are conclusive. Education has so many moving parts, it's impossible to create perfect control groups or isolated variables. That being said . . .

The class size reduction study looks at data and research dating back to 1979, including the much-discussed Tennessee STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) study where elementary students in a number of schools were randomly assigned to small classes of 13-15 students and larger classes of up to 25 students. According to the author,

The smaller classes performed substantially better by the end of second grade in test scores, grades, and fewer disciplinary referrals.

The gains lasted. The students that had been assigned to smaller classes were more likely to graduate in four years, more likely to go to college, and more likely to get a degree in a STEM field. The positive effect was twice as large for poor and minority students, and thus narrowed the achievement gap.

The finding that small class sizes most benefit poor and minority students isn't surprising. Students who are less likely to succeed in school due to socioeconomic factors are more likely to benefit from increased academic and emotional attention from teachers than students who have stronger economic and educational support systems in their homes and communities.

According to one researcher, the improvements are both significant and cost effective.

[Alan] Krueger noted, as have many others, that class size reduction most benefits minority and disadvantaged students, and would be expected to narrow the racial achievement gap by about one-third. He also estimated that the economic gains of smaller classes in the early grades outweighed the costs two to one.

Class size in upper grades haven't been studied as closely as in the lower grades, but indications are that smaller classes lead to short term and long term gains there as well.

Finally, something to report in the continuing Ducey "Next Step" Watch. His Classrooms First Initiative Council will be meeting June 21 to discuss "school funding proposals." Note the word "new" is missing from the phrase "school funding proposals." This isn't about proposals for new funding. It's about ways to shift around existing dollars.

That bears repeating. The "school funding proposals" are a zero sum game. They're either manipulating education funding in the current budget, or the budget plus Prop 301 funding if that makes it through the court challenges. I have no doubt the governor will try to sell the proposals coming out of this meeting as the next step he was talking about. And actually, that will be accurate, in the sense that his plan for a next step has always been to step away from the issue of adding any more money to our near-bottom-of-the-barrel per student funding. Call this Ducey's "Face it, you're not gonna get any more money from the general fund, so get over it" next step.

After Prop 301 passed on May 17, education and business interests submitted funding proposals to the Classrooms First Initiative Council. Basically, they're all asking that their favorite pieces of the funding pie be saved or increased. Virtual/online schools want to make sure their funding isn't cut. Urban schools are asking that the poverty level of students be figured into the financing formula. Rural schools want their extra costs be considered. And so on.

Here are a few things you can be reasonably sure will come out of the June 21 meeting—unless it delays its decisions as it has in the past.

K12 Inc. was quick to respond to the report put out by a few charter school organizations saying virtual schools should be better regulated, which I posted about yesterday. Unfair! the press release complained. Based on old data! We've changed our ways!

Well, not so much. The publicly traded corporation is still using the for-profit model, which includes the dictum, grow or die, as well as the necessity of putting stockholders' interests over the needs of its students. It has an incredible churn rate; about a third of the students leave every year. That means it needs to use every means possible to replace those students and add more. Its recruiters use the kinds of high power, coercive sales techniques which have gotten for-profit colleges in trouble, luring in students who are unsuited to online schooling where personal motivation and parental involvement are keys to success.

Online education can be a valuable addition to classroom learning, and for a small slice of the student population it can be a substitute for brick-and-mortar schooling, but it fails when it's sold as a mass education model. K12 Inc. ends its press release by saying, "We are a company of educators dedicated to putting students first." Massive research on the corporation gives the lie to that assertion. The sooner the stockholders jump ship and the company sinks, the better.

Now this is an interesting development. Some prominent charter school organizations have published a report advocating stricter regulations to improve the performance of virtual charter schools, also known as on-line schools. This isn't an entirely new development. Charter school organizations have been trying to weed out poorly performing schools from the charter ranks, and this is their latest effort. More at the end of the post about the positives and negatives of this push.

Three organizations, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, National Association of Charter School Organizers and 50CAN, joined together to publish A Call to Action To Improve the Quality of Full-Time Virtual Charter Public Schools. The organizations support virtual charters, but they've read the reports about how poorly students at those schools perform compared to students at other public schools and believe the schools should be more carefully regulated.

The facts about the virtual schools in the report look to me to be accurate. A vital bit of information is that 70 percent of the schools are run by for-profit organizations, directly or indirectly, which means the profit motive is going to trump education whenever the two are in conflict. Some other facts: there are 135 full-time virtual schools in the country; 79 percent of their students are in virtual schools with more than a thousand students; virtual school serve more students in poverty and fewer English language learners than traditional public schools.

The report's recommendations are specific and, if implemented, could doom one of the biggest players, K-12 Inc., a publicly traded corporation (Arizona Virtual Academy, or AZVA, in one of its schools) whose many sins I've written about over the years and whose failings are being subjected to increasing scrutiny. The proposal is that enrollment be limited to hundreds, not thousands of students, and if the schools want to grow, they need to meet performance goals. That would be a stake in the heart of K12 Inc. whose profits are based on continual growth and whose stockholders are growing increasingly skittish (its stock is currently trading at about 11, down from a 2011 high of 36). AZVA has over 4,000 students. Another branch, Ohio Virtual Academy, has over 10,000 students. The corporation would crumble if it had to cut its schools' student populations dramatically.

Watching and listening for the next foot to fall. Still,


Nothing.



But.



Crickets.

An interesting-for-English-teachers article in today's New York Times talks about the changes in the way people are employing the period at the end of sentences. The change is especially notable in text messages and tweets where the punctuation mark is often dropped completely. Really, if you think about it, why do you need to use a period at the end of a short message? It's clear it's over when the last word is written, making the period redundant. And in a tweet, why waste one of your precious 140 characters? It may not even be useful at the end of a paragraph

The article points out something else I find far more interesting: that choosing to use an optional period can actually change the tone of the sentence, adding the sense that the writer is annoyed, a distinction completely lost on an old grammarian like me

If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit, six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to include a period when you respond “Fine.” to show annoyance

“Fine” or “Fine!,” in contrast, could denote acquiescence or blithe acceptance

As I've written in earlier posts, I'm not a card carrying member of the Language Police. I don't think linguistic variations from accepted usage are necessarily errors, let alone signs of the crumbling of civilization. Likewise, I don't think changes in the way people talk and write are indications of the deterioration of communication. Take "up talking," that tendency, which I find annoying, of making the ends of statements sound like questions. Linguistic scholars who have looked carefully at the nuances of "up talking" have found there are at least six different connotations of meaning, depending on the sound and the context. In other words, it's a far more sophisticated method of communication than my old ears can decipher. Or take "Dude!" As was brilliantly laid out in a standup routine a few years ago, that one word statement can have numerous, very different meanings depending on the tone and context in which it's delivered

So, long live the dropped period. Or if it has a short life, that's OK too

When I'm confronted by changes that seem to me like degradations of language, I always try to remember that old literary cretin, William Shakespeare. He didn't use anything like the punctuation we consider essential to civilized communication. I've also read he spelled his own name at least six different ways. What an idiot! Didnt he lern nothin in skul?

I wrote a long post yesterday saying, basically, that Ducey and other Republican political leaders will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into increasing funding for education. Vocal public support for education and outcries against budget cuts are the reasons we haven't had more education cuts in the last two state budgets, and it's the primary reason Ducey proposed Prop 123 instead of simply ignoring the court ruling that the state replace the money it illegally stole from the schools.

As a group, conservatives want to cut funding of public education, in Arizona and around the country. Here are two representative examples of that line of thinking. One is a paper from Matthew Ladner who used to be the Goldwater Institute's education guy and was hugely influential in formulating Arizona education legislation, including our Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on steroids. Though he's moved on to Bush's education organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education, his influence here continues. Ladner was one of three people who formed Ducey's education transition team when he became governor.

The other example is John Huppenthal, our Superintendent of Public Instruction before Diane Douglas, in a comment he wrote on one of my posts last week.

In 2015, Ladner created one of the research pieces he cranks out at regular intervals. He wrote it in his capacity as Senior Advisor for  Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, which is one of many well funded "education reform"/privatization groups, and as a Senior Fellow for the libertarian Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, named after its founder and early proponent of vouchers, Milton Friedman.

Ladner's basic thesis is, we need to spend less money on education and get better results. "We cannot sustain the current level of [education] spending," he writes. Instead, we have to create "a virtuous cycle of climbing [educational] outcomes and declining costs." His solution is to funnel more students into charter schools, which he says are cheaper and have better outcomes than school districts, assertions that are questionable at best, and into vouchers for private schools. Our current public schools are the problem, according to Ladner, and "school choice" is the magic pony that will allow us to do more with less.

I've been writing a lot lately about how, since Prop 123 passed, Ducey sidesteps the issue of education funding every time he's asked what his "next step" will be. He wants the next step to be for people to stop pestering him so he can get back to cutting education funding in next year's budget—or if he has no other choice, continue with the same bottom-of-the-barrel funding which has been the norm for too many years—but we're not likely to hear him say that out loud.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. As I've written in a number of posts, I never expected Ducey to spend a penny more on education after Prop 123 without a fight, nor did other pro-education folks like me who held their noses and voted for what we considered to be the least bad option. There's only one way to get more money for education out of the majority of elected Republicans who are dead set on dismantling our system of public education, and that's to keep up the pressure.

Remember, Ducey and his cronies didn't create Prop 123 because they liked the idea of increasing education funding. It was only when they realized public opinion was turning against them that they concocted a plan that would add some money to education without touching the budget. It'll take far more public pressure to make them actually commit to more money for education this time, because it will have to come from the state coffers, not the state land trust. Success is far from guaranteed, but if there's no fight, I can guarantee Ducey's "next step" will be to step away from the funding issue as quickly as he can.

Ducey didn't suggest Prop 123 because he wanted to put more money into education. He and his buddies were perfectly happy to continue ignoring the court's ruling that they have to replace the money they illegally stole from the schools, and to continue cutting the education budget year after year. But in February, 2015, they had the fear of God The Voters put into them courtesy of a Morrison Institute poll. The poll found that voters wanted more money for education, even if it meant more taxes.

Nearly two-thirds of Arizonans, including more than 50 percent of Republicans, would be willing to pay an additional $200 in state taxes annually to better fund K-12 education.

Those are frightening polling numbers if you're Ducey and the Republican leadership. If voters want more money for schools, and they say they're willing to pay more taxes to fund it, that threatens the Republican agenda of slashing the budget and cutting taxes for their buddies. They feared, if they continuing to stonewall the court order, they might find themselves with a voter rebellion on their hands. People might start listening to Democrats and moderate Republicans. Anti-public education conservative legislators could find their jobs threatened at the ballot box. They had to do something.

Graduation speeches are usually, well, graduation speeches. But Donovan Livingston, who received his master's degree in education from Harvard, spoke/performed a speech/poem worth listening to. It's confrontational, sometimes controversial, often right on the money and at the end, uplifting. You can read along if you wish. Here are a few excerpts.

I stand here, a manifestation of love and pain,
With veins pumping revolution.
I am the strange fruit that grew too ripe for the poplar tree.
I am a DREAM Act, Dream Deferred incarnate.
I am a movement – an amalgam of memories America would care to forget
My past, alone won’t allow me to sit still.
      ————-
At the core, none of us were meant to be common.
We were born to be comets,
Darting across space and time —
Leaving our mark as we crash into everything.
A crater is a reminder that something amazing happened here —
An indelible impact that shook up the world.
      ————-
An injustice is telling them they are stars
Without acknowledging night that surrounds them.
Injustice is telling them education is the key
While you continue to change the locks.
      ————-
I belong among the stars.
And so do you. And so do they.
Together, we can inspire galaxies of greatness
For generations to come.
No, sky is not the limit. It is only the beginning.
Lift off.