Here's a last minute reminder about Arizona's tax credit opportunities. You get to give money to some of your favorite causes and organizations, then get it all back—100 percent of it—at tax time if you owe enough in state income tax. The three tax credits I strongly recommend are for public schools, charitable organizations that help the working poor and foster-care organizations.

The time is drawing nigh. Most giving has to be done by Dec. 31 to qualify for this year's tax credits (though there's an exception with the public school giving). Since most organizations take credit cards online, there's still time—a few days—to make your donations. You can give $200 per person, $400 for a couple, to each of the three and get it all back at tax time if your total Arizona income tax bill is more than the amount you give. That's as much as $1,200 you can give to worthy organizations and get it back later.

Today I'll look a the public school tax credit. I'll post about the other two tomorrow.

Here are the rules about public school tax credits. You can give your money—$200 for an individual, $400 for a couple—to one school or split it up over a number of schools. Both district and charter schools qualify, and most of them make it easy by putting links to the information on their home web pages. The hitch is that the money has to go to extracurricular or character education programs. I don't 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.

My recommendation is, if you haven't already picked out a school or schools for your tax credit dollars, go with a school with low income children since they always come out on the short end when it comes to giving. When family incomes are low, parents pay little or no state income tax, so they can't take advantage of the credit. Even if they pay some income taxes, they're living from day to day and week to week financially, which makes it difficult to give money now even if they know they'll get it back later. It's another of those rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer situations. Schools in well-off communities get lots of money, and schools in lower income communities get very little.

Here's another logic-based decision from Superintendent Diane Douglas' Department of Education. Tucson will keep its teacher Certification office which, according to a media release, was scheduled to be shut down.

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas today announced that the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) will maintain its Certification office in Tucson so that it can continue to serve current and future educators in southern Arizona. Prior to the Superintendent’s arrival at ADE in January, the office was scheduled to be permanently closed at the end of this year.

“My goal as Superintendent is to increase the support our Department is providing to educators in all parts of our state, so it made no sense to me that we would stop providing critical certification services to educators in southern Arizona communities,” said Superintendent Douglas. “Our more rural areas already have unique challenges, so doing something to help simplify the educator certification process for them was an easy decision.”

The move comes as part of Superintendent Douglas’ proposal to provide enhanced services to rural communities, which was outlined in her AZ Kids Can’t Afford to Wait! Plan.

The message here is, the war waged by the Department of Education against TUSD in particular and the Tucson area in general is over, or at the very least, a cease fire order is in place. The rest of the state government may still hate "liberal Tucson," and the last two superintendents, Horne and Huppenthal, may have used their antipathy toward TUSD to further their careers (both of their careers have gone down in flames, I'm happy to say), but Douglas is doing what she can to create a level playing field across the state.

I'm poised and ready to slam Douglas when she makes policy decisions that I think are bad for Arizona's school children. Given the ideological divide separating us, I'm sure that time will come. But to this point, I continue to see her as someone who is using whatever power she has—which isn't much, since the legislature and the State Board of Education control educational policy and the budget, not the superintendent—to advocate for schools, teachers and students as best she can.

Senate President Andy Biggs must be trolling for attention from the national media. He must miss the days when Jon Stewart called Arizona "the meth lab of democracy" and showed TUSD Board member Michael Hicks warning us about the use of burritos as a propaganda tool by the Mexican American Studies program. Seems like Biggs is looking for a little love—or at least some attention—from new Daily Show host Trevor Noah.

How else can you explain Biggs elevating State Senator Sylvia Allen to the position of chair of the Senate Education Committee to replace Kelli Ward who's off fighting McCain for his senate seat? Can you think of a better subject for national hilarity? She declared that the earth is 6,000 years old, and when another Republican senator tried to shush her, she repeated it. She believes the government is poisoning us with chem-trails from airplanes (Quote from her Facebook page: "I have watched the chem-trails move out until the entire sky is covered with flimsy, thin cloud cover. It is not the regular exhaust coming from the plane it is something they are spraying. It is there in plain sight. What is it they are leaving behind that covers the sky?"). She said it would be great if going to church were mandatory, though to be fair, she used this as an example of something she'd like to see, not something she was proposing as law. And her high school diploma is the end of her formal education.

The story writes itself, doesn't it? The only problem will be coming up with a punchline strong enough to top the facts. But I trust the Daily Show writers and the writers on late night talk shows to rise to the challenge.

Like the old song says:

"We're in the money,
We're in the money;
We've got a lot of what it takes to get along!"

Last month, the state brought in $84.4 million more in revenue than it expected. That's after an equally unexpected $66.1 million extra in October. Add them together and you get a $150.5 million windfall over two months. Wow.

It's time for Governor Ducey to hold a press conference. I suggest he wear a Santa hat on his head and a big grin on his face. If he's into theatrics, he can have a goodie bag slung over his shoulder as well. His opening statement: "I have a Christmas gift for all the children of Arizona. I'm committing any unexpected revenue the state receives to furthering their educations. If there are any Scrooges in the legislature who disagree with me [pulls a candy-cane shaped pen out of his pocket], I'm telling them right now, I will use this pen to veto any budget that doesn't include a sizable funding hike for education."

That pronouncement, I'm sure, will make Ducey feel so good, he'll decide to forego tax breaks for his rich buddies and devote his energies to bringing Arizona up from the per student spending cellar—that's where the lumps of coal we've been handing out to our children for too many years are stored—and into the cozy family room filled with warmth and good cheer, where every adult loves every child and wants nothing more than to make their present and future days brighter.

It's such a lovely holiday dream, so in keeping with the spirit of giving. I expect to be jarred awake soon, but for now, I'm cherishing the moment.

I've been following the fortunes of K12 Inc., the for-profit, publicly traded, online school corporation, since 2008 when I broke the story that it had been outsourcing student essays to an essay-grading company in India without informing the parents. (K12 Inc. said it stopped the practice soon after the story broke). The corporation is the poster child for everything wrong with the for-profit education model where profits, rather than education, drive the enterprise. For awhile, K12 Inc. was flying high despite its reputation for low student achievement and high student turnover. That all changed in the middle of 2013 after the stock peaked at 36. As you can see from the chart at the top of the post, it's taken a bumpy downhill ride since them. Current stock price is in the nine dollar range.

Local angle: K12 Inc. operates Arizona Virtual Academy (AZVA) which has about 4,600 students statewide.

You never know, the stock prices could reverse themselves and head upwards again—which, after all, is the primary purpose of any publicly traded corporation—but I doubt it. K12 Inc. is facing a whole lot of obstacles, all of which help tamp down investor confidence.

A recent study concludes that online charter schools in general, K12 Inc. included, are doing a lousy job of educating their students. Three research institutions participated in the study, including CREDO out of Stanford University, which tends to be pro-privatization and whose last comparison of charter and district schools had charters coming out a little ahead. (In its previous study, district schools came out a little ahead.) The academic growth of online school students is so low that, according to CREDO, it's as if students missed half a year's learning in reading and a whole year's learning in math compared to district schools. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Online schools like those run by K12 Inc. amount to home schooling with benefits. If you have motivated students whose parents keep them on task, they'll learn from the parent-assisted curriculum. But because of the need to keep student numbers growing in the face of one-third of the students leaving every year, K12 Inc. actively recruits students who are unsuited for education that comes to them through a computer in their homes. Yet those students are encouraged to stay enrolled because, like other charter schools (and district schools as well), online charters get money from the state on a per student basis. Lose students, lose money.

Anyone who follows education nationally knows that TUSD's problems with desegregation aren't unique. You find segregated schools across the country in places where, like Tucson, there is enough of an ethnic mix to create schools with diverse student populations. The question is, what are effective ways to get more children of different races and ethnicities attending the same schools? TUSD has a court-ordered plan to increase desegregation which includes attracting Anglo students to magnet schools in predominantly Hispanic areas. It hasn't worked out well. Recriminations fly in all directions.

For me, one of the most troubling questions is, can Anglo parents with middle class incomes be convinced to send their children to schools with a majority of Hispanic children, many of whom come from families at the poverty level?

A study out of New York indicates how difficult the problem of desegregating schools is. New York is known to have some of the most segregated public schools in the country. Part of that has to do with living patterns, of course, with people separated geographically by race, ethnicity and income. But according to a study by the Center for New York City Affairs, even when geography isn't a factor, school segregation often persists.

“We see a lot of areas where income is more mixed, and ethnicity is more mixed, but the schools are not,” said Nicole Mader, an education policy analyst at the center.

The analysts’ maps provide stark evidence of something many New Yorkers know intuitively: Middle-class families, often white, are happy to live in areas where their neighbors are less well-off and are a different color; this is the very tide of gentrification. But they are less willing to send their children to schools where most of their classmates are likely to be poor and either black or Hispanic.

This impulse creates pockets of extremes. More affluent families cluster in schools with reputations for good academics. Many middle-class families zoned for high-poverty schools send their children to charter schools or gifted and talented programs, rather than to a local school.

The study cites a school where the neighborhood's average income is $69,000 and 37 percent of the people living there are African American or Hispanic. Yet the school is 96 percent African American and Hispanic, and the average income of the school's families is $36,000.

We've been wrestling with integrating schools since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. We've tried a variety of approaches with mixed results, at best. Sixty-one years later, it's hard to see much progress. Tried, tested solutions are hard to find.

When the legislature opens for business in January and Republicans stonewall the idea of a substantial increase to the K-12 education budget—a fairly safe prediction—they'll remind us how generous they were when they decided to add $350 million a year to the school budget. Actually, they haven't added the money yet. The voters have to OK the deal first. And most of it doesn't come from the state budget since the legislature plans to make a big draw on the state land trust money that belongs to the schools already. And it's not really new money, since the state is legally bound to provide it to the schools—really, it's only 70 percent of what the state owe the schools. But still, Republicans will argue, $350 million is a serious chunk of change. The schools should be happy to get such a hefty increase.

But really, how much does a $350 million addition to the Arizona school budget amount to? It's not enough to move us out of 48th or 49th or 50th place (depending on who's doing the counting) in per student funding. It amounts to a measly 5 percent increase in our woefully inadequate education budget. Still, when you look at that dollar figure, it seems like a lot of money. So let's take a look at what $350 million will buy.

There's nearly universal agreement that Arizona teachers deserve a raise. We're losing teachers who leave the profession or move to other states because our salary schedule is so low—45th in the nation. Our average teacher salary, $45,300, is more than $10,000 below the national average. Even if we limit the comparison to the eight states closest to us in per capita income, Arizona teacher salary levels are $3,300 below theirs.

So what would happen if we used some of the $350 million to increase average teacher salaries by, say, $3,000? That adds up to $180 million. And if we add in the money the districts spend on things like Social Security, Medicare, health insurance, etc.—say, an added 20 percent—we're at $215 million.

For the moment, let's forget about boosting the salaries of staff other than teachers to make up for their years of stagnant wages. We'll leave that for some other time. Let's see what else we can do with the rest of the money. We've spent $215 million of the $350 million total on the salary boost for teachers, so we have $135 million left. Let's see. There are 2,000 public schools in Arizona, counting district and charter schools. If we divvied up what's left among them, that would be $67,500 per school. That doesn't make sense, of course, since school sizes vary widely. So let's divide the money equally between the million Arizona students and give each school an extra $135 per student. A school with 200 students would get $27,000, about a half of an average teacher's salary. A 2,000 student school would get $135,000, which would buy it two-and-a-half new teachers. Using up all the $135 million to pay for more teachers would mean lowering average class sizes statewide by two or three students.

Of course, schools could spend the $135 per student on books, computers, supplies—anything on their wish list. But a small, 200 student elementary school isn't going to get much for $27,000, what with the cost of things these days, and a large high school won't be able to make $135,000 go very far either.

No matter how you slice it, $350 million spread over a million students at 2,000 schools, while it's money no school wants to refuse, doesn't move the educational needle much. Remember, our schools were hurting financially before that money was cut in 2010. This would just get them back to the sorry financial state they were in before.
 

What should Arizona do with the current state budget surplus? In a poll taken last week by Strategies 360, the number one answer was "Invest in public schools" with 72 percent. Number two was "Increase public school teacher pay" with 69 percent. Law enforcement and border security came in third and fourth, followed by funding for foster children services and all-day pre-kindergarten.

If you're keeping score, education and children took four of the top six spots, including the top two.

OK, but maybe the poll is an unrepresentative sample that skews Democrat/liberal. In fact, no. The respondents were 43 percent Republican and 33 percent Democrat. Only 18 percent called themselves liberal, while 42 percent called themselves conservative. In another part of the survey, in separate presidential candidate match-ups, they preferred Trump, Rubio and Cruz to Clinton. And yet they thought spending more money on education and children was more important than spending it on police and immigration.

Other answers make it look like these voters, who, remember, skew Republican/conservative, aren't very happy with what's going on here. More of them think we're on the wrong track—46 percent—than moving in the right direction—41 percent — and they're split evenly on what they think about the Republican-majority state legislature (though Ducey rocks with 47 percent favorable vs. 31 percent unfavorable).

I'm trying to draw conclusions from this data with my head, not my heart, even though the conclusion I'm reaching makes my heart beat faster. It looks like a strong bipartisan majority of Arizona voters think we're not spending enough on education and we have the money to spend more. It looks like they're not overly impressed with the general direction we're heading or with the legislature that's taking us there.

The National Education Policy Center just published a research brief, The Business of Charter Schooling: Understanding the Policies that Charter Operators Use for Financial Benefit. The word "brief" is probably misleading, since this detailed, informative work is 56 pages long. The two college education profs who wrote it, Bruce Baker of Rutgers University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, have created an important resource for anyone who wants to learn the intricacies of charter schools funding and the underreported ways they spend their money.

The brief isn't about the educational quality of charters, which, like district schools, varies from excellent to poor. It's about the lack of transparency in the use of government funds whose purpose is to set up and run the schools and the potential for people and organizations to abuse the system for personal gain.

As the authors explain, the way charters use state funding isn't accounted for in sufficient detail. In Arizona, the financial reports submitted to the state are general to the point of being close to useless, unlike school districts which have to account for their expenditures in detail, and the same is true in most other states. Lots of charter schools use Educational Management Organizations (EMOs) extensively, sending them as much as 90 percent of the money they get from the state. Sometimes the EMOs run nearly every aspect of the schools, but we don't know how they spend the money because they don't have any responsibility to publicly account for their finances. Charter boards often have a too-close-for-comfort relationship with the EMOs and with companies that sell supplies and services to the schools, making for inevitable conflicts of interest. And the way charter buildings are purchased or leased can mean some people or corporations siphon off a whole lot of money to pay for the buildings which is supposed to be used for the students' educations.

The brief lists eight recommendations to improve the situation. which mainly come down to increasing financial transparency and accountability of charters. Large purchases as well as contracts with EMOs should be carefully reviewed, financial reporting to the state should be more detailed and precise, the board members and staff should be at arms length from the EMOs and contractors to minimize the possibilities of misappropriation of funds, etc.

Over the years, I've written a lot about charter school operators, EMOs and property management corporations that have misused state funds, often illegally, though in some cases the misuse of funds is perfectly legal, which is part of the problem. There are plenty of well documented horror stories out there, meaning there's a whole lot more waiting to be uncovered. Charter school supporters as well as skeptics should work to put in safeguards against the bad guys who go into the education business for the wrong reasons.

It's beginning to look a lot like three-dimensional chess. Arizona's education funding battles are being worked out by a complex mix of players utilizing a variety of plans and strategies, and they're interacting with one another up, down and sideways on the chess board. While lots of interest groups are participants, basically there are three main moving parts involved in the process of adding, or not adding, education funds and moving them around, and they have to be considered together to understand how the game is being played:

1. The vote on Prop 123, which will decide whether the state can dip into the principal of the state land trust to bring school funding up to what the courts say the state owes the schools — or to be more accurate, up the 70% of what the courts ordered.
2. The legislature's state budget, which may or may not include additional funds for K-12 education.
3. The recommendations of Ducey's Classrooms First Initiative Council, which are likely to ask for a restructuring of the school funding formula that will reward schools with "high achieving" students — meaning, usually, students from high income families — as well as charter schools (and maybe private schools).

This whole thing can play out in a number of ways. I'm betting that Ducey and his cronies have a clear idea of what they want to see happening and when they want it to happen, but they're playing their cards close to the vest (Chess. Cards. I'm mixing game metaphors here, but you know what I mean), because the order in which they dribble out information and the element of surprise are key to their success. Timing, I think, is everything. The Prop 123 election has a set date — May 17, 2016. Last year the state budget was passed in a hurry on March 7 during a marathon legislative session. If the legislature plays hurry-up again this year, the budget, with or without additional funding for schools, will be passed well before the Prop 123 vote, though the vote can come later if  they think it will improve the chances of passing Prop 123. And the recommendations from the Classrooms First Initiative Council were first set to come out this month, but the date has been delayed, maybe by as much as six to nine months. I'm sure they can put together their findings pretty much any time they think it will be to their advantage. Ducey and the major players on the council already know what they want to recommend. All those meetings and press releases have more to do with political theater than decision making.

So. Will the passage of Prop 123 be jeopardized if the legislature refuses to increase education funding in its state budget and instead squanders the current surplus on tax cuts for Ducey's buddies? Is there a sweet spot where the legislature can make a token funding increase that will be just enough for voters to decide to tap the land trust funds but not enough for them to decide we don't need the extra money (and not enough to cancel out Ducey's beloved tax cuts)? Should the budget be delayed until after the vote on Prop 123? Will the Classrooms First Initiative Council release its findings in time for the legislature to rewrite some of the state's funding provisions to create the winners and losers they want but not jeopardize the shaky Prop 123 coalition that includes the teachers union and other pro-public education groups which would frown on a increase in education inequality in the state?

I'm not making any predictions right now. There are far too many moving parts, far too many variables, far too many hidden agendas for me to figure out what's going to happen. Stay tuned.