I want to extend a semi-official welcome to Linda Lyon who recently began blogging about education at my old stomping grounds, Blog for Arizona. Her latest post looks at Ducey's State of the State Address from an education standpoint. Good, thorough stuff, mixing, like most of her posts, lots of facts and information with thoughtful analysis.

Linda, who I've known for a few years, comes to education from a different place than I do. She's a retired Air Force Colonel. She has served as the director of Wingspan and helped organize four of their charity golf tournaments. She serves on the Oracle School District Governing Board and is very involved in the Arizona School Boards Association.

You can look over her backlog of blog posts here or check in at Blog for Arizona now and then, where there's always plenty going on.

Each year our sister paper Inside Tucson Business sets out to celebrate Tucson's Women of Influence. A big part of that is looking to the future. While nominations for the WOI awards are now closed, ITB is still taking applications for the "Future Leaders Award." 

The Future Leaders Award is a $1,000 scholarship that will be awarded to two female high school seniors—young women who see themselves becoming influential women.

Publisher Steve Pope has this to say about the award:

In today's fast moving and internationally competitive environment, no community can keep up unless all the talent the community has to offer is put into play. The challenges are just too great to face with one arm tied behind our back. Making sure we nurture the talent of our youth of all genders and races is a fundamental requirement for Tucson to thrive as we all want and need. This scholarship is a recognition of that simple truth. 

The details are outlined here, and the deadline is Feb. 19. Good luck, ladies! You are going to be great.

The recently late, long great David Bowie was, apparently, an avid reader. As part of a 2013 exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, he included a list of his 100 favorite books. I won't print the complete list here. You can go to the LA Times article to see it.

It's a wide-ranging book list indicating eclectic tastes, not surprising for a man like Bowie who spent his life in constant reinvention. Here are a few, in no particular order, where his tastes and mine intersect:

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
"The Iliad" by Homer
"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner
The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
"Black Boy" by Richard Wright
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Waste Land" by T.S. Elliot
McTeague" by Frank Norris
"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
"1984" by George Orwell
"White Noise" by Don DeLillo
"A People’s History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"Lady Chatterly’s Lover" by D.H. Lawrence
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard
"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

And I would be remiss if I left out some of his favorites not on my reading list, like:

Toward the end of his State of the State Address, Gov. Ducey said he's going to get tough on deadbeat dads.

For fathers out there who aren't meeting their obligations, we also have a plan. I'm talking to deadbeat dads. For too long, you've been able to remain anonymous - able to skirt your financial and legal responsibilities with no shame. Not anymore.

Some people have referred to me as the "Hash-tag Governor." Well here's a new one for all the deadbeat dads out there: Effective immediately, the state is going to begin posting the photos, names and money owed by these losers to social media, with the hash-tag "deadbeat."

Earlier in the address, Ducey patted himself on the back for his support of our school children. He spoke of "a monumental, bipartisan, 3.5 billion dollar solution" that will "put our kids and teachers first." He's undeserving of the praise he heaped upon himself. What he's offering to our school children actually makes him and the leaders of the state legislature, Andy Biggs and David Gowan, worthy of being the first recipients of the #deadbeat hashtag.

Here's how Ducey's promise of educational child support should be viewed in the court of public opinion. The state is four years behind on the payment to schools the taxpayers voted for in 2000. Ducey, Biggs and Gowan say, we're not planning to make any back payments. Let's forget about that, wipe out the billion-plus dollars we owe. We'll start paying now, at seventy cents on the dollar. Actually, the payments won't start now. They'll start a year from now. And, really, we can't guarantee we'll start making payments then. That'll only happen if the voters say it's OK. If the voters approve the deal we're offering them, most of the money won't come out of our pockets: the state budget. It'll come out of early payments from the state land trust fund which was set up to help pay for our children's educations now and in the future. Oh, and we'll only keep paying if we can afford it. If in the future our income drops, either because the state economy suffers from bad times or we deplete our coffers by giving tax breaks to our rich friends, we'll stop payment.

That doesn't sound like a "monumental" solution to me. It doesn't sound like Ducey, Biggs and Gowan plan to "put our kids and teachers first." It sounds like deadbeat dads paying as little as they can get away with, and with no guarantee they'll keep making the payments.

#deadbeat. #ArizonaEducation.

Over the years, I've written many posts about the shoddy corporate practices and poor student performance at schools run by K12 Inc., the for-profit, publicly traded online education corporation (Its Arizona charter school, Arizona Virtual Academy, has 4,600 students sitting behind their computers at home, if, that is, they actually take the time and effort to log in and do the work). I wrote my most recent post about the corporations's sinking stock value a few weeks ago. And I've written a few times that Arizona's Craig Barrett sits on K12 Inc.'s Board of Directors. But this is the first time I've written about his compensation. For the fiscal year 2015, Barrett received $190,000 from the corporation. Barrett is a very, very busy man with his fingers in a whole lot of pies. You can be certain he didn't put in 40 hour weeks to earn his Board pay.

Why, you may ask, should we care about Barrett's involvement in K12 Inc.? The answer is, Barrett is a powerful voice in Arizona education, advocating for what he says are necessary reforms to improve our schools. He's not shy when it comes to talking about his connections and accomplishments. For instance, he's happy to announce that he's President and Chairman of BASIS Schools, Inc., the for-profit Education Management Organization that runs the chain of BASIS schools. But so far as I know, he never talks about his connection to the shoddy, failing K12 Inc. I've looked hard on the internet, read his op eds, listened to some of his interviews and speeches. When it comes to K12 Inc. — nothing but crickets. A man as proud of his accomplishments as Barrett should be more open about this aspect of his educational life, and more forthcoming about what he, as a board member, is doing to improve the corporate and educational culture at K12 Inc.

Craig Barrett's list of connections and accomplishments is vast. He's the retired CEO of Intel, and he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As I mentioned earlier, he's President and Chairman of BASIS Schools Inc. He's also a board member of Achieve, Inc., which was instrumental in creating and promoting the Common Core standards, as well as an influential member of any number of education-related organizations. He travels around the world promoting STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), and he's very outspoken about what he thinks is wrong with Arizona education and what should be done to fix it. His ideas fall squarely in the privatization/"education reform" camp. During Jan Brewer's governorship, he chaired her Arizona Ready Education Council which worked to steer the state's education priorities, most of which are being carried forward by Gov. Ducey's Classrooms First Initiative Council. It's fair to say he's the most powerful unelected individual in Arizona education.

This post is an homage to the famous line from Will Rogers, who died 80 years ago: "All I know is what I read in the papers." And it tips its hat to Dolores Huerta's statement, "Republicans hate Latinos." Actually, Huerta didn't assert that Republicans hate Latinos; she commented that based on the actions of Republicans in power, it sure looks like they do. I would never assert that Republicans hate children. They're not monsters. But sometimes the actions of elected Republican officials make you wonder.

Here's what I read in the papers.

In Friday's Star: "Push to reduce number of uninsured kids in Arizona set." According to the article,

Arizona’s rate of uninsured children is 10 percent, the third highest rate in the country—only Texas and Alaska are worse, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. The national rate of uninsured children is 6 percent.

The reason our uninsured rate is so high is, the legislature decided in 2009 that we couldn't afford to keep children healthy.

[I]n a series of budget-cutting decisions, the Arizona Legislature decided to end coverage for KidsCare parents in 2009 and the following year froze enrollment in KidsCare. By July 2011, the KidsCare waiting list had grown to more than 100,000 children.

A temporary KidsCare program, KidsCare II, was created in 2013, but expired when most provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect at the end of January 2014. Enrollment in KidsCare remained frozen and is expected to dwindle to zero.

Will Arizona restore the kids' insurance it wiped away? The article says a bill is being drafted, but that's a far cry from the bill passing through the legislature and making it to Governor Ducey's desk. A statement from Ducey leads me to believe it ain't gonna happen. Ducey say he's OK with the idea of giving children health coverage—"receptive" is the term his spokesman used, a word which implies he isn't eager to do it, but he's willing to listen to people talk about it—but only if it's "fiscally responsible"—which means in Ducey-speak, it can't cost any money.

“The governor is receptive to ideas to improve coverage so long as the options are fiscally responsible and provide reliability and certainty in health-care matters,” [spokesman Daniel] Ruiz said.

We can't let money for children's health interfere with tax cuts for Ducey's rich friends, now can we? It may be open to debate whether or not Republicans hate children, but there's no question, they love them some rich donors.

Also in Friday's Star: "Including teachers in reform efforts is key to retention, expert says." The article is about a meeting of 500 educators, business leaders and community members in Tucson Thursday where teacher shortages and teacher retention were discussed. Lots of factors lead teachers to leave the profession, but with Arizona's teacher salaries being so much lower than other areas, it's especially hard to keep them here.

Here's yet another national school ranking reported on in this morning's Star with expected, if a bit eccentric results. A company, niche.com, founded by some Carnegie Mellon University students over a decade ago, has developed a rating system for all the public schools in the country, district and charter. Here's the national list, and here's the Arizona top 100 ranking. Some schools are missing, I think because the company didn't have all the necessary data.

The rankings are approximate at best. Any company that tries to rate all schools across the country has to be using a crude instrument that takes a few variables and crunches them into some kind of formula. Niche.com uses factors like academics, health & safety, student culture & diversity, teachers, extracurriculars and sports to generate a number. High score wins.

But, crude though the rankings may be, they're pretty predictable. The Arizona top ten tend to be districts in high rent areas and charters with selective student bodies. Chandler Preparatory Academy in number one. It's part of the Great Hearts charter school chain, with schools parked in affluent areas which have a variety of ways to make sure they have select student bodies—except for one Great Hearts school in a less affluent area which, no surprise, isn't nearly as highly rated as the others. BASIS Scottsdale is number two, a school that the U.S. News & World Report's high school rankings left out because its student body was too selective to be included.

Catalina Foothills district comes in fourth. Other Tucson-area districts making the top ten are Amphitheater, Vail and Tanque Verde.

Here we have yet another ranking which reinforces the idea that "successful" schools have students who have been groomed for academic success by their socioeconomic status, and "less successful" schools have students who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder. What that's saying, basically, is that the students are more or less successful, not the teachers or the administration or the curriculum or the facilities. Unless, of course, you think that the faculty, administration and curricula at schools in high rent areas are vastly superior —emphasis on "vastly" — to those in poorer areas. They would have to be vastly superior to create such consistent disparities without a lot of help from the students who walk through the schoolhouse doors.

Teachers in Arizona are leaving their jobs at an alarming rate. The state simply cannot retain its educators because of low salaries and a lack of monetary investment in the school system.

These, and several others education shortfalls in our state, will be at the core of a forum tomorrow morning, primarily hosted by the organization, Tucson Values Teachers. 

The group recently conducted a survey on the reasons teachers are quitting their positions, or moving away from Arizona altogether. Two of the biggest concerns among a group of more than 6,000 educators were low wages and feeling disrespected by the state. 

Katie Rogerson, Tucson Values Teachers' interim executive director and director of marketing and outreach, as well as one of the authors of the survey, says:

The survey provided insight to the current teacher workforce crisis, and the problems go well beyond inadequate pay. Teachers also feel that they're not valued or respected by the community, that they're not being trusted to do their jobs without micromanagement, and that the time commitment has become overbearing.

The discussion, "Let's Talk Ed," is bringing together education representatives with local and national officials to talk about what is fueling this issue, and the solutions the state needs to follow to retain its K-12 teachers.

Back in the 80s, Rodney was one of my junior English students. He wasn't the smartest kid in the class by a long shot, but he tried, and he was a pretty decent, friendly guy. One day he walked into class a few minutes early wearing a T-shirt I hadn't seen before. "Ozzy for President!" he shouted, proclaimed the words written across his chest. He flashed me a big grin and strutted to his desk.

Rodney was more of a head banger wannabe than the real thing, but it wasn't hard to imagine him in his room listening to Black Sabbath cranked to full volume and shouting along with its lead singer Ozzy Osbourne.

Rodney sat down and leaned forward, elbows on his desk. He looked at me with a serious expression and said in all sincerity, "Really, wouldn't it be cool if Ozzy was president?" I looked back at him, amused, but didn't respond. More students filtered into the room, so I had other people to attend to. Our political discussion was at an end.

Donald Trump isn't Ozzy Osbourne. The Donald has significantly more working brain cells than the man who later played the pathetic clown on his family's reality show, The Osbournes. And Ozzy is British, so a presidential run was always out of the question. But a lot of Trump supporters are grown-up versions of my old student Rodney.

Rodney and I never talked about Ozzy's political future again, but I'm pretty sure what his answer would have been if I had asked him, "If Ozzy was really running for president, if there was really a chance he'd be leading the United States of America, would you vote for him?" He would have replied something like, "Well, no, probably not . . . But wouldn't it be cool if Ozzy was president?" I have a sense many proud Trump supporters, when confronted with the idea of actually voting for their man, will say the same.

Here's what pisses me off about the whole Prop. 123 thing.

On the plus side, Arizona's public schools stand to receive over $300 million a year which has been denied them for years if Prop. 123 passes and the state is allowed to dip further into the state land trust funds than is currently allowed. If it doesn't pass, we climb back on that old merry-go-round where the court orders the legislature to pay what it owes the schools and the Republican majority folds its arms and says, "You can't make me." Which is true, the courts can't literally force the state to pay up the money it owes, and it's unlikely the courts will even tighten the screws much because they know how likely it is an angry governor and legislature will bring vengeance down on their heads. If Prop. 123 fails, the stalemate will continue for years with mounting court costs on all sides and not a penny of that money the state owes going to the schools.

On the minus side, that state land trust money which will be tapped if Prop. 123 passes is already designated for children's educations, so basically, the children will be paid from their own inheritance, not from new money. That means less money in the fund for education in the future. But even though I don't like that scenario much, I'm willing to live with it, because the schools are really, really hurting for funds—need I say again that we're 48th, 49th or 50th in per student spending?—and I can't deny this current crop of students the benefit of even a small financial boost. And remember, the $300 million-plus is only a small boost in funding. Need I say again it won't lift us even one place on the per student funding list?

On the even more minus side, the pro-Prop 123 group has already raised nearly half a million dollars for its campaign and has set its sights on raising as much as three or four million total. Where do you raise that kind of money? From deep pockets, of course, the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the state. According to the Capitol Times, that includes:

•$150,000 from Greater Phoenix Leadership chaired by Sharon Harper, president and CEO of Plaza Companies
•$75,000 from the Salt River Project
•$25,000 each from Developer Edward Robson and his company, Robson Communities Inc.
•$44,500 from Sunstate Equipment President Michael Watts and his wife, Cindy
•$25,000 from the Southern Arizona Leadership Council
•$10,000 from the Arizona Lodging and Tourism Authority

Now, I'm sure all these people will tell you, with heads tilted to one side and a hint of tears glistening in their eyes, how much they support public education. And probably there's some truth in the claim, for some of them anyway. But, really? All these people are willing to spend all that money because of how much they love other people's children? Uh, uh. When lots of rich people pitch lots of money into political fights, it tends to be because they stand to benefit personally. And the way these rich folks stand to benefit is from the tax breaks Gov. Ducey has promised them. So what could be better? Give other people' kids the money up front that was being saved for their futures and free up the state budget surplus for those tax breaks, which will be worth a whole lot more than these folks are ponying up to help pass Prop. 123.