If the question is, "How do we give parents greater flexibility in selecting schools for their children?" there's one clear answer: School Choice. But if the question is, "How can we improve the quality of education in America?" we probably need to look elsewhere. School choice doesn't seem to lead to increased school achievement, based on nearly every credible study.

Here's a new study about school choice in Louisiana. A few years back, the state instituted a lottery to decide which students get vouchers to attend private schools. That's a golden opportunity for an educational researcher ever there was one. You have a significant number of students who receive vouchers to attend private schools, and you have the same number in a nearly perfect control group: students whose parents wanted them to get the vouchers for their children but lost out in a random lottery. Here's what happened, according to a study by three economists.

In 2014 12,000 students from low-income families applied for more than 6,000 vouchers to attend 126 private schools. . . . The three economists found that those who received vouchers and moved to private schools had worse test scores in maths, reading, science and social studies than those who missed out.

The study is far from conclusive. It only covers a one year period, and all kinds of other factors could have contributed to the voucher students' lower test scores. But this is only one of a string of similar studies which have been conducted in recent years.

Washington, D.C., has a significant voucher program, courtesy of the Republican-majority Congress which makes the rules for the city. Conservatives have studied the academic impact of vouchers in D.C. and haven't been able to point to a significant difference in achievement between voucher and non-voucher students. One analysis of the data was so desperate to find something positive to say about the vouchers that it praised the fact that parents of voucher students felt their children were safer at the private schools than in the public schools they left. The students, by the way, saw no difference.

The results were similar in an in-depth study of the effect of vouchers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where vouchers have been in force for over twenty years. Try as they might, a group of conservative researchers couldn't find a significant difference between the achievement of voucher students and similar students in public schools. They went over the data a second time and discovered that the high school graduation rate was higher among the voucher students, which they used as evidence that vouchers work. That's not nothing, but it doesn't say the private school students got a better education. It only says that something about the private schools made students stick it out to the end.

Here's a great tip for folks who want to look like generous parents in their friends' eyes without spending a dime. Go into your children's room and take away a few of their most expensive toys. Then when Christmas rolls around, wrap up the toys and give them back to your kids. Be sure to put a picture of the "gifts" on the annual Christmas card you send out to impress your friends.

Where did I get this great idea, you may ask. From Governor Ducey and Republican legislators, of course. Look at the JTED funding bill just passed by the lege and signed by the governor. Last year, they took away $30 million dollars in JTED funding. This year they gave back $29 million. And they want us to believe this shows they support education. Look at Proposition 123. In 2009, they took away more than $300 million a year in education funding. Now they want to give 70 percent of it back, mostly from money that already belongs to the students. And Ducey expects to be congratulated for his generosity.

When I saw the battle between Arizona's Senate and House Republicans over bragging rights for restoring the JTED funding, I almost ignored it. Typical election year posturing, I thought, nothing to see here. But this fight was unusually heated. When the Senate made a correction to the House bill, which made it a Senate bill, the House Republicans were apoplectic. "We want the credit! We demand the credit!" they screamed. So near they end of SB 1525, they added a section saying, "Restoring funding to JTEDs and implementing accountability measures to the programs was an important priority of members of the Arizona House of Representatives." And they took what is, so far as I know, the unprecedented step of putting the names of its 56 supporters in the bill—which, I should add, includes the names of Democrats as well as Republicans.

Why so much fuss about getting the primary credit for restoring JTED funds? Isn't it enough to say you voted for it? Apparently not. The Arizona voters have said education is a top priority, and they're even willing to raise taxes to increase funding. A survey of CEOs indicates they think our education system is one of the main stumbling blocks to economic growth, more important than taxes and regulations. The only thing that's more important to Republicans than appearing pro education is not spending any more on education than they absolutely have to. So they're hit on a solution. Take credit for adding JTED funding when in fact you're simply restoring the money you cut, less a million dollars. Take credit for adding $3.5 billion over ten years to education funding, when in fact you're following a court order to restore voter-mandated money to education, less 30 percent, and using money that doesn't come out of the state budget. When Ducey pats himself on the back for Proposition 123, he's always sure to add, "And we didn't raise taxes to do it." That's the point: pretend to spend more money on education but be sure not to add a penny in state taxes.

To prepare for my visit to the Bill Buckmaster Show Wednesday, I listened to Gov. Ducey talking with Buckmaster Tuesday, then listened a second time on the show's website, taking notes. Here are some of the things Ducey said, along with what lies hidden an inch behind his words.

Buckmaster asked Ducey about the upcoming vote to restore most of the JTED funding. Ducey said he was ready to sign the finished bill because "I'm supportive of JTED." In fact, Ducey pushed for the $30 million cut to JTED in the last budget, which doesn't sound very supportive. He explained the cut to Buckmaster by saying he faced a billion dollar deficit and had to make difficult decisions, but added in a classic moment of political doublespeak that he protected K-12 education in the budget. You're not protecting K-12 education when you make cuts to JTED which would have decimated the program if they weren't reversed.

As for being "supportive of JTED," in fact, Ducey proposed $30 million for JTED spread over three years, $10 million a year, for this year's budget. The money would have been used as matching funds to grants from businesses for programs they thought would help train future employees. By most accounts, his proposal would have effectively ended JTED. It was only when Republicans joined with Democrats and created a veto-proof majority for a bill reinstating JTED funds that Ducey discovered how much he supported the program.

In another statement emphasizing his support for education, Ducey said, "We're putting $106 million additional into K-12 education." In fact, half of what Ducey is taking credit for is mandatory funding based on inflation and an increase in student population. That's stay-even money, not an increase.

Next, Ducey moved on to more of his ritual back patting, praising himself for the money that will flow to schools if voters approve Proposition 123—money that's 70 percent of what the state owes the schools based on a proposition approved by voters in 2000 along with a current court order. He went all soft and squishy about school leadership as he talked about those wonderful principals and superintendents who will decide how to spend the Prop 123 money. According to Ducey, they should "have the flexibility to use the additional dollars . . . to make the decisions that are best for that school." Let it go into technology or salaries or classroom supplies or ELL, Ducey said. It's all fine with him.

I almost loved the Sunday editorial in the Arizona Republic. Even with some reservations, I liked it a whole lot. Shorter version: Ducey, we're not in a recession anymore. Stop budgeting like we are. Fund education and other state needs at reasonable levels.

Here are a few key passages.

Take off the recession-era glasses, Gov. Doug Ducey.

Look around. Those bleak days of deep deficits are over.

Arizona deserves a vision for the future.

That means restoring budgets for K-12, universities, infrastructure and other basic state needs.

It’s time to show the dynamic leadership to begin aggressively repairing the damage done during those days when slashing the budget was a matter of survival.

It’s also time to recognize that it wasn’t just the recession that put the financial squeeze on Arizona.

Repeated tax cuts since 1993 shrunk state revenue by tens of billions of dollars.

[snip]

Now it’s time to make the state competitive when it comes to funding K-12 and higher education. Now it’s time to make the state competitive when it comes to infrastructure for the 21st Century. Now it’s time to put money into quality of life amenities – like parks, which were stripped of funding during the recession.

There is no reason to create an artificial atmosphere of recession that keeps the state on a starvation diet. Arizona currently has a healthy budget surplus and rainy day fund.

[snip]

[E]ven if voters approve taking more money from the state land trust [by voting for Proposition 123], schools will not be fully reimbursed for voter-mandated inflation funding that the Legislature illegally withheld during the recession.

Passing the plan is important. It will help schools. But it doesn’t make up for recession-era losses. It doesn’t make schools whole.

The Innovate UA program is hosting the first ever TEDxUofALive event, a live-cast of the 2016 TED conference in Vancouver, Canada this week.

The University of Arizona has been issued a licence to broadcast the live talks on Wednesday Feb. 17 across the UA campus.

"What I have noticed about campus, and our culture in general, is that innovation is heavily dominated by technology," said Justin Williams of Innovate UA. "What TED does that is really great, is it's intentionally multidisciplinary so it pulls from fields, in our case, what would be all across campus."

Speakers at the TED conference are separated into sessions. The whole day of events is free but seating is limited so be sure to reserve your spot at the sessions that interest you!

Bernie Sanders got an astounding 85 percent of the vote from 18 to 29 year olds in the New Hampshire primary. By any accounting, that's an amazing stat. People have bemoaned the apathy of today's college students, but for some reason, they're Feeling the Bern, big time. Does it mean we're at the beginning of a new period of student activism and engagement? Very possibly. Look at the inroads the Black Lives Matter movement is making on college campuses, which is part of a larger surge of minority activism involving gender and sexual issues along with race. But I think there's something more. I think college students have been dragged into the political fight because of their personal concerns about their economic futures, and Bernie is talking to their concerns far more directly than Hillary.

I was at a University of California campus in the Sixties. The Civil Rights struggle had come to nationwide prominence during my high school years, and it remained a big issue for college students on the left, but it didn't lead white students like me to direct activism. If a race-based issue came up on campus, we supported the rights of black and other minority students, and we didn't eat grapes to show our support for the United Farm Workers of America, but only a few white students and young adults were directly involved in either struggle. The issues may have tugged at our hearts, but they didn't hit us where we lived.

By contrast, the escalation of the Vietnam War created a massive protest movement on campus. People marched, chanted and stopped education as usual for days and weeks at a time. Privileged white college students literally put their bodies in danger in confrontations with police during demonstrations. Why the difference? Part of it was, unlike the other issues, Vietnam put our asses on the line. We could be drafted and sent onto the battlefield. We rightly condemned the killing and environmental devastation our country was raining down on the people of Vietnam, but if we weren't in danger of being thrown in the middle of the horror, our reactions would have been quieter.

We don't have a draft today. The decision to invade Iraq was at least as outrageous and damaging as our decision to escalate our involvement in Vietnam, but college students aren't in danger of being sent to the Middle East. College students are often criticized by older people on the left for not putting themselves in the forefront of protests condemning our involvement in Iraq like we did back in the Vietnam War days. But there's an existential difference. Their asses aren't on the line like ours were.

Four billion dollars more in Arizona's state coffers would go a long way. I made the radical proposal the other day that we should add a billion dollars to our education budget to take us out of 49th place in per student funding and catapult us all the way up to 46th place, tied with Tennessee. We'd move from the bottom 4 percent in the nation all the way up to the bottom 10 percent. If we had that extra four billion in our state budget, we could add that billion and still have three billion left over for other vital state needs. Better roads and bridges, anyone? More money to give defenseless children the help they sorely need?

You might ask, "Where does Arizona come up with a king's ransom like four billion dollars?" The answer according to ASU's W.P. Carey School of Business is, we'd have that in our coffers this year and every year from now on if we hadn't been cutting taxes for the past two decades. 

Arizonans paid 30 percent less in general-fund taxes in 2015 than they did in 1992, according to the analysis by economists Dennis Hoffman and Tom Rex.

Let's take a moment to absorb that. No, Arizonans aren't being taxed within an inch of our lives. If we kept the same tax rates we had in 1992, our overall taxes would be higher, and the state would be able to meet its obligations to its citizens and stay within its budget rather than crying poor and cutting back on vital services.

Arizonans want more money for education, and a majority of them have even said they'd be willing to pay higher taxes to help foot the bill. I'm happy to hear that, but really, the majority of Arizonans don't have to shoulder the burden to increase tax revenues. The pain shouldn't be absorbed by people who are struggling to rub a nickel and a dime together. Our corporate income tax is low, 34th in the nation, and the Republican legislature voted to lower it further. Meanwhile, our regressive sales taxes are high. The rich pay a third of what the poor pay in state and local taxes as a percentage of their incomes. Those who are paying the least are those who can best afford it. They need to pay their fair share.

Does it sound like I'm waging class warfare here? Hardly. The weaponry is in the hands of those who benefit most from our increasing income inequality and from lower tax rates on the wealthy. They have the personal connections and the lobbyists. They have the money to reward office holders with large campaign contributions, direct contributions made in the light of day and hidden contributions made in the "dark money" of night. While they can give their families everything they need even as the state cuts back on spending, people who depend on government services—like public education and services for children, to name two things that are shamefully underfunded in Arizona—are being hurt, badly.

In the last Republican debate, Donald Trump said, "Right now, we're the highest taxed country in the world." I'm sure plenty of listeners shook their heads in sad agreement, and no one who shared the stage with Trump dared to disagree. But anyone who knows the numbers understands the whole crew of Republican presidential candidates are wrong on taxes. An AP fact check of the debates confirms what we already know, that our taxes are low compared to other countries with similar economic standing. And here in Arizona, we're not even paying anywhere near the highest taxes we've paid in the past few decades. 

Students live in the classrooms, all fences have been blocked off by tables. The police just gave up… it’s Mad Max in there!

-My boss

Many universities and high schools in Santiago were on strike for much of the last year. Each had different reasons for the strike, with the students striking at some, the teachers at others. The most visible effect were messages written on posters and draped over university walls. The weekends often featured large protests. While exploring Barrio Providencia, I found the mothership, Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano. It made the other protesters look like amateurs.

The first striking image was the walls. Universidad Academia’s fences and gates were completely boarded off using chairs and tables taken from the classrooms, while the outer wall was often plastered with signs and graffiti.

Another day, another story about teacher shortages. Today it's the Vail school district, a sweetheart place to work if there ever was one. Top achievement scores, kids from homes with enough income and education to arrive at school prepared and motivated, a well respected superintendent. Yet Vail has had teacher vacancies all year, and fewer people attended its job fair than usual.

Two solid reasons are given for Arizona's teacher retention troubles. One is low salaries compared to other states. The other is too many kids in each class, aging textbooks and technology along with a lack of basic classroom supplies. And yet, states that are doing both those things better than Arizona are suffering from similar shortages. So let's add the lack of respect teachers experience these days which, in my 30-plus years of teaching experience, is unparalleled.

All of those are important, but I want to add one more possibility to the mix. Every prospective teacher was once a K-12 student. What if their school experiences since the introduction of No Child Left Behind in 2001 have soured them on the idea of going from college back to the classrooms they left a few years earlier?

I have a theory based on talking with fellow teachers over the years. I think people decide to teach at a certain grade level because that was their favorite time in school. Me, I liked elementary school well enough, it was OK. I actively disliked middle school (known in my time and place as junior high). I really felt like I blossomed in high school, those were my favorite, most memorable school years. I never considered teaching elementary school, that was out, so I got a secondary credential. The year I was applying for my first teaching position, jobs were scarce, and I told myself if the only school that offered me a contract was a middle school, I'd take a year off and try again. For me, it was high school or nothing. Fortunately, I got a high school job, and the rest is history (or really, the rest was English, but that's splitting semantic hairs).

I've asked elementary teachers, "What was your favorite year when you were a student?" They'll almost always talk about a special teacher in the early grades. Middle school and high school teachers also seem to have their fondest memories in the same grades they hopped back into once they graduated college.

But what if today's students have fewer fond memories of school at any grade level than students before the No Child Left Behind era? Drill, drill, drill, test, test, test, stress, stress, stress. Art? Music? Wide ranging discussions which follow their own meandering, fascinating course? There's no time for those frivolous wastes of precious class time that can be more productively spent on drilling and testing and stressing. The score's the thing, the score is king.

Want your child's private school tuition subsidized by the state? Want your child's home schooling subsidized by the state, with the added bonus of a heap of money left over to help pay for college? You can do that right now by signing up for one of those Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids, but only if your child fits into a few specific categories. If HB 2482 passes, in a few years anyone can do it.

Private school vouchers give parents money from state funds to help them pay private school tuition. Empowerment Scholarship Accounts take the idea a step further. ESAs give parents a pot of money each year to spend on their children's educations. If they want to use the ESA money to pay private school tuition, fine. If they want to home school their kids and use some of the money to pay for educational supplies, tutoring, testing, therapy or anything else the state OKs as an educational expense, that's fine too. Any money left over from one year rolls over to the next. Anything left over when the kid is through with K-12 education can be used to pay for college.

When the Goldwater Institute originally wrote the ESA bill and the legislature passed it, only a small portion of Arizona's children qualified, basically those with an educational disability of some kind. But that was only the beginning. The ESA elephant slipped its trunk under the educational tent flap with the idea of eventually crowding its whole self in and including every child in Arizona as a potential "Vouchers on Steroids" recipient. Legislators openly said as much when the bill first passed, so I'm not guessing as to their intent.

Now HB 2482 is trying to make the "ESAs for everyone" idea a reality. Over a few years, the bill would add more and more students into the mix until every child from kindergarten through 12th grade qualifies. There's only one hitch for the parent to get the money. The newly qualified children have to spend some time in public schools. How much time? In my reading of the added language, that's not clear. Previously, a child had to spend 100 days in a public school—district or charter—to qualify. The school year is about 180 days, so that's a little over a semester. Under the new wording, it includes "any child who attends a public school." That may mean that a child only has to enroll in a public school and attend a few days of class to earn an ESA for their rest of their K-12 career.

Whether the requirement is a few days or 100 days in a public school, should the bill pass, there will be a time a few years from now when every home school or private school student in Arizona will be given taxpayer money to pay for their educations. If the child is a kindergartener, that's a thirteen years long government stipend. The only possible exceptions will be children of parents who are so rich that spending ten or twenty thousand dollars per year to send a child to school isn't worth worrying about.