Add one more to the current list of education funding plans.

There's a plan from Doug Ducey to take money from the state land trust funds—if he can get his plan through the legislature to put it on the ballot, then get the ballot measure passed by voters. Timeline: 2017. Then there's the non-plan plan from Senate President Andy Biggs and House Speaker David Gowan that wants to take less from the land trust funds than Ducey, but still take funds, and supplement that with money stolen from First Things First which is earmarked for early childhood education—that theft was blocked by the courts when it was tried before—and add a bit from the budget. Timeline: Somewhere between 2017 and never. Ed Supe Diane Douglas has a plan as well, to come up with $400 million more this year and every year from now until forever, though she's not specific about where the funds will come from. Timeline: Now, since she's calling for a special session, but she won't get very far shouting from her bully pulpit at the Dept. of Ed without a whole lot of support from elsewhere.

And now comes a Democratic plan. It's for $400 million a year, the same as Douglas' number. But the Democrats only have a ten year target and are more specific about where the money comes from. Timeline: Now, during a special session, though Democrats need some Republicans to work with them if they hope to pass anything.

Here's the Democratic education funding plan. It includes $74 million from state land trust money (I'm not sure how much of that is the standard yearly amount and how much is added), between $250 million and $278 million from the state's budget surplus, and money that will be generated by a freeze on the ceiling of the corporate private school tuition tax credit, which is scheduled to rise from a maximum of $51.6 million in 2016 to—hang onto your hats—$662.5 million in 2030. Thanks to the miracle of compound interest, the law allowing a 20% yearly hike in the ceiling for total tuition tax credit contributions from corporations results in a twelve-fold increase over 15 years.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is pitching a bold proposal this afternoon at the National Press Club. The gist of it is, we can save $15 billion by finding ways other than incarceration to deal with people convicted of nonviolent crimes, and we can use the money to increase teacher salaries in the twenty percent of schools with students from the lowest income families. He's not talking about a token increase. Duncan is talking about increasing salaries in those schools by an average of 50 percent nationwide. The size of the increase varies from state to state. In the case of Arizona, it would amount to a 70 percent boost.

Though Duncan hasn't given his speech as I write this, he's published a state-by-state table indicating how much money can be saved on incarceration and how it would be allocated. Here are the numbers for Arizona.

• $1,545,345,000: Current state and local spending on correctional facilities
• $320,804,508: Approximately 21 percent of the total spend on correctional facilities
• $457,841,161: Total teacher salaries in the 20% of Arizona schools with the highest percentage of students on free/reduced lunch (387 schools)
• 70 percent: Increase in teacher salaries in those schools.

Duncan's pitch is that this is a way to slow down what's called the school-to-prison pipeline. Since low income areas produce a disproportionate number of prison inmates, improving their educations might be the best way to reduce those numbers.

Is this a good idea? I'm not sure. The idea is to attract the best and the brightest teachers to those schools by giving them a financial incentive. Increasing teacher salaries in low income schools has had some success in the past, but it's been minor. And if you keep the same class sizes in Arizona, you haven't addressed a serious problem with reaching hard-to-reach students. But the idea is bold, and it's right-headed. We need bold ideas like this to get the discussion going and to address the dual problems of improving education and lowering incarceration. I've been a critic of Duncan over the years—and of Obama for sticking with the guy and his agenda—but I compliment him for this proposal.

Here's a tidbit that's not likely to make the next edition of AZAwesome: WalletHub has released a new survey that ranks Arizona as the third-worst state in the nation for teachers.

The survey took into account several factors, including teacher pay, class size and per-pupil spending.

Here's how Arizona shaped up in each of the categories, according to WalletHub:

41st: Average Starting Salary for Teachers
49th: Median Annual Salary for Teachers
48th: WalletHub “School Systems” Ranking
42nd: Unemployment Rate
45th: 10-Year Change in Teacher Salaries
49th: Pupil-to-Teacher Ratio
51st: Public School Spending per Student 

Julie Erfle of Progress Now Arizona said the survey showed that "it’s no wonder Arizona teachers are fleeing the profession and leaving our schools with a shortage of teachers and experience."

“The future of hundreds of thousands of Arizona students as well as the economic future of our state is at risk,” Erfle added in a statement to the media. “The time is now to switch course and put funding for our educators and schools at the top of our legislative priority list.”

In early August, I asked people to help me compile a list of all the TV shows and films that involved teachers in a major or somewhat important minor role. You gave me lots of titles. I scoured the internet and added more. Then, using my rudimentary database and graphing skills, I put together a rough picture of how the portrayal of teachers has changed over the years.

Back in August, before I pulled together the information, I wrote what I thought the results would show.

Let me tell you my hypothesis about the changes in the way teachers have been portrayed since the 1950s. First there were the workaday, cut-above-the-average teachers of core subjects. Think "Room 222." Next came the Superteachers who could leap tall curriculum assignments in a single class period — with poor, underprivileged kids, no less — and change the lives of everyone they came in contact with. Think "Stand and Deliver." The next step was the incompetent teacher who was ridiculed and often didn't give a damn. Think, of course, "Bad Teacher."

My hypothesis was a bit simplistic, but the results follow the basic trend I described. Here's a scattergraph of the way teachers in core subjects—English, math, science and social studies—have been portrayed over the years. I've only included public school teachers in the U.S., leaving out the portrayal of private school teachers and teachers in other countries.


Over time the chart moves from the middle—good teachers—toward the top—super teachers—then toward the bottom—bad teachers (A list of the TV shows and films along with my teacher ratings is at the end of the post).

Republican Congressman Paul Gosar says it is "unthinkable" that some states have granted undocumented immigrants in-state college tuition, so he's sponsoring legislation that would ensure this doesn't happen anymore. 

"...other legal American citizens, playing by the rules, have to pay out-of-state tuition to attend public universities," he said in a statement to the media. "With a stagnant economy, American students are facing enough challenges upon graduating from college and shouldn't bear more financial burdens as a result of loopholes crafted by attorneys that pull illegal aliens not in lawful immigration statues ahead of  U.S. citizens."

In May, the Arizona Board of Regents voted to grant undocumented students, also known as DREAMers, in-state tuition at the three public universities. It marked a big win for DREAMers, who'd been demanding that benefit for at least the past three years. (Mind you, most of them have lived in Arizona since they were children and graduated high school or got a GED in the state. Also, in 2012 President Obama gave them a two-year renewable work permit and permission to be in the country—an executive action called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.)

In past years, ABOR followed Prop 300—a referendum approved by Arizona voters in 2006 that says university students who are not U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents do not qualify for in-state tuition or financial aid "funded or subsidized by state monies." Among Prop 300's required documents to prove residency in the state are driver's licenses, a W-2, an employee ID badge with photo, etc. DACA recipients have been getting driver's licenses since December 2014, and, ever since DACA went into effect in 2012, they've had work permits, which means a job, which equals paying taxes, which equals a W-2. 

Tuesday was the day Ducey's Classrooms First Initiatives Council was scheduled to release its preliminary recommendations for changing Arizona's school funding formula (Final recommendations are supposed to be presented December 22). The news out of the council is, there's not much news, only wisps and smoke trails. The council made some general pronouncements, but if the devil is in the details, the old trickster is hiding behind a curtain. The predictions I made yesterday hold up pretty well, but that's not saying much because, well, the council didn't have much to say.

Here are some take-aways.

Changing the funding formula to create "equity" between district and charter schools is one of the key goals of the group. How are they going to do it? No clue. Equity is very much in the eye of the beholder on this issue. The charter folks definitely want more money while the district folks know more for charters means less for them.

There's no telling where the issue of special education funding is going. Maybe the council wants more funding overall. Maybe it wants to recalibrate the formula to make sure districts are properly reimbursed for the extra costs of educating these students. Maybe it wants to remove the targeted special funding for students who have less severe special needs like high functioning students with dyslexia or speech impairment and just fold that money into the overall per student funding. When the council talks about "special education," is it including funding for ELL students? It doesn't say.

The council is definitely pushing for more money for schools with an "A" grade from the state. Oh, and if "B" or "C" schools are showing progress, they can get some extra money too. This is the most blatant funding shift from schools in low income areas to schools in high income areas, since the schools in high rent districts get the vast majority of the "A" ratings, not because their staffs are better or harder working but because their privileged students tend to be high performers by definition.

It feels to me like we're experiencing a renaissance of brilliant, talented black writers discussing racial issues in print. Maybe people have been writing like this all along but it hasn't made the mainstream media. Or maybe it's been in mainstream media all along and I haven't been paying enough attention. Well, I'm paying attention now, to writers like Michelle Alexander whose 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, presented the fundamental arguments against mass incarceration, and Ta-Nehisi Coates whose book, Between the World and Me, is the finest discussion of racism in America I've read in decades and one of the finest examples of nonfiction as literature I've read in at least as long. (Coates, by the way, has the cover story in this month's Atlantic Magazine, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, a long, excellent article I'm working my way through. For comic book fans, Coates is going to write the next "Black Panther" series published by Marvel Comics, a series which presented the first black superhero in 1966.)

And I'm going to be reading more work by Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker. A few weeks ago, he wrote Class Notes: What’s really at stake when a school closes? It's a first person account of the history of Jamaica High School in Queens, which he attended in the 1980s and which closed recently. It's an interesting discussion of the way Jamaica High went from a school attended by white students to a predominantly black school with diminishing enrollment. The whole article is worth a read.

The part I want to spotlight is near the end, where Cobb discusses the debate raging about our "failing schools." Are they "failing" because the teachers, the unions, the administrators and the district are doing a lousy job, or are the problems more a function of societal problems like racism and income inequality? Obviously, it's not an either-or question, but you can tell where people stand on the issue by how they answer it. Today's "education reformers" tend to be public school—or in their favored terminology, "government school"—bashers. Don't blame society, they say, fix the schools, or get rid of the "failing schools" and start over, and you'll fix the problem. The other side, which really doesn't have a name—"progressive educators" is as good as any—says you can't expect the schools to fix the injustices or heal the wounds created by the outside society all by themselves. The schools are part of the process of improvement, but they can't do their jobs effectively while societal problems are allowed to fester. Cobbs is on the "progressive" side of the argument, as am I.

I'm going to copy a long, complex passage from the article which, I think, brilliantly summarizes the history of school integration since Brown v. Board of Education, but before I do, let me pull out two salient lines.

"Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility—of blame, really—run inward. It’s not society that has failed, in this perspective. It’s the schools."

"The current language of educational reform emphasizes racial “achievement gaps” and “underperforming schools” but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened."

Tucson Unified School District's Palo Verde High School has been an eventful little monster these past few days: In the beginning of last week, six students were arrested for fighting in the school's parking lot; and on Friday, there was a lock down over alleged sightings of a young man with a gun on site. At the end of it all, no suspect or gun were found. 

TUSD critics, or so-called whistleblowers, are blaming the district's leadership for the Palo Verde mess, saying a series of events that went undisciplined led to what took place last week. 

Here are their thoughts on the situation:

Tuesday is the day we hear how Gov. Ducey's Classrooms First Initiative Council wants to change the way the current school funding is handed out. I have no inside information about what they'll be presenting, but, at the risk of making a fool of myself, let me predict the nature of the group's approach and proposals.

Three things you have to know before we play the proposal guessing game. First, the council's task isn't to recommend more education funding. It's to take what's already out there and redistribute it. Since every school is a loser right now with our bottom-of-the-barrel per student funding, re-dividing the pie will mean some schools and students will be even greater losers and others will be in a bit better shape. Second, the board appointed by Ducey is evenly divided between charter and school district people, even though charters educate less that 20 percent of the state's students. You can be sure that the charter school complaint that they get less money per student than districts, a complaint that doesn't hold water if you look at the numbers carefully, will get careful and thoughtful consideration. Third, the groups offering "technical and policy assistance" to the council lean heavily toward the "education reform"/privatization end of the spectrum, including: the libertarian Reason Foundation, the conservative/libertarian Goldwater Institute, Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Arizona Charter Schools Association. There are also some less privatization-friendly groups offering assistance, but they're in the minority.

Here are two things I expect from the council's recommendations: (1) They will do their best to make it sound like the funding changes are designed to help the lowest achieving students from the poorest families; and (2) More money will flow in the direction of districts with students from high income families, and to charter schools.

Right now, Arizona has a complex education funding formula where a basic amount of state money flows to each student, then more money is added for students who have needs beyond those of most students. That means extra money goes to districts with more ELL students, special education students and other students needing more educational attention and enrichment. It's likely that, say, TUSD and Sunnyside get more of that extra funding than, say, Catalina Foothills. That's the funding formula the council wants to change.

Ducey says he wants to "assemble one funding formula that every school can use and understand." That's a deceptive way of saying he wants to cut back on all those complicated formulas for giving more money to districts with high needs children. Think of it as a funding version of the flat tax, where its proponents say it's a way to make paying taxes simpler and fairer but the result is that the rich end up paying less while the poor and middle class pay more.

Ahmed Mohamed made national and probably international news when the 14 year old brought a homemade clock to his Dallas high school which some people thought might be a bomb, and when they realized it wasn't, accused him of bringing a prank bomb to school. He was detained, questioned without being allowed to talk with his parents and handcuffed. As a former high school English teacher, I've been running through the scenario in my head, thinking about what I might have done if I had been involved and how the school should have responded to the situation. I'm using the details as they were described in a NY Times article.

I'm reasonably certain that Ahmed's dark skin and Muslim faith caused a heightened reaction from the school and the police, that this situation would have been handled better if he were white, but let's neutralize that issue for the moment. This was a student in my class, his name was Ahmed or Andy, he was black or white, Muslim, Christian or nonreligious.

So. Ahmed/Andy is a student in my English class. I hear something beeping in his backpack. I ask to see what it is. This nice, shy, somewhat nerdy kid reaches into his backpack and pulls out a metal briefcase with a clock face on the front. What do I do?

The first thing that happens inside me, I'm guessing, is I experience an electric shock of panic in my chest. I think, "Oh shit, that looks like the kind of bomb I've seen in a dozen spy/terrorist movies!" What do I do? My first reaction is to protect the safety and welfare of my students and other students at the school. Whatever temporary problems I create for Ahmed/Andy are secondary, I'll worry about that later. This may be a bomb, and this seemingly nice kid may be one of those people who does some terrible thing, after which everyone says, "He was such a nice kid, I never would have suspected he would have done something like this."

My best reaction, I think, would have been to tell Ahmed/Andy to pick up his belongings and come into the hall with me, away from the other students. Then I would say, "Tell me what that device is." If he answered, "It's a clock I brought to school to show to my engineering teacher," my next best reaction would be to say we'd better take it to the office, where I would explain the situation to an administrator. When I felt comfortable the administrator understood and had things in hand, I would return to my class. If I was feeling especially panicky and feared it might be a bomb that could go off at any moment, I'd take him outside with me. We would set all Ahmed/Andy's belongings some distance away from the school, then we could move back toward the school so we would be out of potential danger. At that point, I would somehow alert an administrator or one of the campus cops to help with the situation. (Would I have reacted this calmly if I were actually in this situation? I honestly have no idea.)

Now that the potential threat is away from the school, the situation changes. My responsibility is no longer to the students in my class or in the school. It's to Ahmed/Andy's welfare. Assuming this isn't a bomb, assuming this kid did nothing wrong, he's been through a frightening experience through no fault of his own. I should do whatever I can to lessen the negative impact of his being suspected of doing something as horrible as bringing a bomb to school. "Look," I might say, "Your clock scared the crap out of me. I saw that box and I imagined what might happen if it were a bomb. Why did you bring a thing like that to school?" If he repeated the story about bringing it to show to his engineering teacher, I might smile and say, "Yeah, Mr. Stephens [or whatever his name is], did he like it?" Maybe talk a little about Mr. Stephen's class to move us emotionally out of the present situation. Then I might say, "I hope you know, what I just did, pulling you out of class, that wasn't about you, it was about the concern I felt seeing that box. I would have done the same thing with any student. That's my duty, to do everything I can to keep my students safe. I can't tell you how relieved I feel right now knowing I was worried about nothing."  I might ask, "How are you doing? Are you OK?" to gauge his mental state.

Once it's determined this was nothing but a homemade clock (which they must have decided quickly, because the bomb squad wasn't called), the well-being of Ahmed/Andy should become the school's primary focus. As much as possible, this should be a school-based action, not a police action. If it's determined that this kid brought the clock to school as a prank, some appropriate disciplinary action should be taken. It's distantly possible, I suppose, that this was a trial run for sneaking a bomb into the school. Both of those possibilities should be considered. But the higher probability is that this was exactly what Ahmed/Andy said, that he brought the clock to impress his engineering teacher. If someone in the administration went down and talked to the teacher and confirmed the student's story, that would pretty much have put an end to the situation. But that's not what happened, and that's where this situation went astray.