The Arizona education wars are turning into a series of Republican-on-Republican, tag team cage fighting matches. The whole thing is getting pretty ugly. That's what cage fighting is all about, of course, getting ugly; that's its allure. Me, I don't watch the sweaty-body grappling on cable TV, but I'm a big fan of the political variety, especially when the fighting is between the couldn't-happen-to-a-more-deserving-group-of-folks Republicans, in or out of office. The "Trump vs. The Field" primaries, the Phoenix skirmishes . . . pass the popcorn, hon, this is really good.

Ed Supe Diane Douglas' antics, mainly directed at the state school board, have been the main source of jibes and jokes in the media. She's a novice who says and does silly stuff in her pursuit of her education agenda, throwing tantrums, suing the board and seeing if she can win by taking her marbles, or her websites, and going home. That all makes for easy, eye-rolling commentary. It also makes people forget that, since she took office, Douglas has made some of the most sensible statements about education coming from a Republican in a long time, including a school funding plan that's head-and-shoulders above any other AZ Republican proposal I've heard, maybe ever. Much as people like to say she's harming our schools, so far as I can tell, she isn't. Maybe she will in the future, it's certainly possible, but not yet. She's gumming up the privatization works a bit and giving the state board fits, but I haven't seen how it has hurt kids in a way that's comparable to, say, the legislative cuts to education which have been going on for years or Huppenthal's vendetta against TUSD's Mexican American Studies program.

Douglas is an easy target, a side show, a distraction, but Doug Ducey is the big dog. While he smiles and keeps his hands clean, his political friends attack, sometimes in the light of day, sometimes leaping out of dark alleys. Ducey does not like to be challenged. His dark money henchman, Sean Noble, went after Mesa Superintendent Michael Cowan when he wouldn't behave. These days, Ducey's target is state treasurer James DeWit, who opposes Ducey's plan to tap into state land trust funds and is being ostracized and trashed by Ducey and his surrogates. My favorite surrogate attack was on the breibart.com website, written by Lisa de Pasquale. To put her comments in context, she calls Ann Coulter her mentor, loves Scott Walker and calls Ducey "the Walker of the West." De Pasquale accuses DeWit of "throwing a bureaucratic hissy fit" and "sid[ing] with unions and liberals." The graphic in the article portraying DeWit as Doctor Evil "HOLDING ARIZONA KIDS RANSOM FOR $2 BILLION!" is worth the price of admission.

We have a moment here. In a Media Release, Diane Douglas has declared that Arizona needs to add $400 million to its K-12 funding right away, during a special session, and she wants the extra funding to continue in perpetuity. Douglas has ideas about where the money can come from, but she's not making her proposal contingent on a specific funding stream. She says do it, beginning now and with a guarantee the funding will continue.

There are details to her proposal that I'll look at soon, but first, this is an important proposal, especially coming from the conservative Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction. It's as surprising and as encouraging as Jan Brewer's support of Medicaid expansion. Brewer, of course, had a hell of a lot more power than Douglas, who only has the superintendent's bully pulpit on the funding issue. But remember, Brewer didn't convince many Republican legislators to support her. She managed to get her Medicaid expansion passed with support from the health community, some of the business community, Democrats and a minority of Republicans. For Douglas' proposal to go anywhere, it needs full-throated support from the education community and Democrats. If some of the business community joins in, along with a number of her strong supporters during her campaign and some Republican legislators, it's possible, just possible, something good might happen to boost K-12 funding.

Now, let's take a closer look at what Douglas is proposing. First, here's an important point that's not spelled out in the Media Release but which Howie Fischer got from her spokesman Charles Tack. According to Fischer, Tack said that the $400 million Douglas is proposing has no connection to the court ruling about the yearly $330 million the state owes the schools or the $1 billion it owes from past years. It's in addition to whatever comes from the court ruling. So Douglas isn't proposing just another way to come up with the court-ordered money. She's talking about $400 million on top of that. That's a strong affirmation that the schools need far more than the legislature already owes them.

With $9 billion in the state's general fund "and revenues increasing," Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas says Arizona can afford increasing funding to education. She's calling on the state Legislator and Gov. Doug Ducey to immediately appropriate at least $400 million that would specifically be invested on teachers in the classroom, according to a press release from Douglas' office.

The proposal is one of many Douglas plans to unveil during her  "AZ Kids Can't Afford to Wait!" campaign. 

“As I traveled the state during the campaign, and then for several months on my 'We Are Listening' tour, the number one concern I heard was the lack of funding and support for teachers,” Douglas said in a media statement. “After seeing revenues so far above forecasts just a few months into this fiscal year, I believe that Arizonans can no longer afford to wait to provide higher quality education to our children."

She suggests using Proposition 301 (in 2000, Arizona voters passed an initiative that allows for a sales tax to contribute to education funding. The money would go towards increasing teachers' salaries, reward "high performing" teachers, among other areas) to identify which teachers are "eligible recipients." The $400 million, she says, could be spent on teacher salaries, hiring more teachers to reduce classroom sizes, or a combination based on local needs.

“We don’t need court cases and lawsuits to fund our school system, we need commitment and leadership. I applaud the efforts of the Governor and the Legislature to increase overall funding and to focus on classroom spending. However, the 8-year-olds who were trying to read when the 'temporary' cut to the 2 percent increase was made in 2009 will all graduate or drop out before having their funding restored under all the current plans being considered," Douglas says. “We have an entire generation of children for whom over $1 billion dollars of education was not provided. We can never go back and provide that education to them. How many more children must suffer the same fate before the leaders of our state truly prioritize education?"

From the press release:

The proposal calls for $400 million from the general fund to be appropriated by the Legislature and the Governor in a special session. It does not count any current funding against that number, nor does it envision any changes to First Things First funding. If the Governor’s state land trust plan is approved by the Legislature and the people in some form, any land trust education revenues in excess of 2.5 percent would count toward the figure, so long as the State Treasurer verifies the expenditure would not deplete the corpus of the land trust.

The Superintendent will also be working with Arizona’s Congressional delegation over the next several years to return federal lands to our state, so that the state land trust corpus can grow through land use leases and the sale of new lands. However, the core of the proposal is that under any circumstances, the entire $400 million must be made available every year with no drop off in the future. Schools cannot hire teachers and make plans if they cannot count on having the money available.

[Satire alert, in case anyone reading this thinks I'm being serious.]

The results are in, and the conclusions are clear. The Pew Research Center administered a test on science knowledge (you can take the test here), and it demonstrated a distinct difference in science knowledge based on people's age, gender and race. I've used those results to draw the following conclusions.

1. Science education in U.S. K-12 schools reached its peak during the years between 1980 and 2000. People between the ages of 30 and 49 earned the highest scores on the test, and they would have received their middle and high school science educations during the years roughly between 1980 and 2000. During those years, the Reagan administration's 1983 Nation at Risk report concluded that our schools were suffering from a "rising tide of mediocrity" and declared, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Peak science education continued through the post-Nation at Risk years when the improvement in our schools was said to be so minimal that we needed to impose a new educational model, No Child Left Behind, based on strict educational standards and yearly high stakes tests.

2. Science education in the U.S. has deteriorated since the advent of No Child Left Behind. People between the ages of 18 and 24, who received their middle and high school science educations since NCLB was passed in 2001, scored lower than people who went to school during the previous two decades. Whether that indicates a general deterioration of our schools or indicates that the increased emphasis on the tested subjects of reading, writing and math meant less emphasis on science instruction is unclear and will need to be examined further.

3. The worst time for post-World War II science education in K-12 schools was in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s. The poorest performers on the test were people over 65, followed by people between the ages of 50 and 64.

4. More women attended failing schools and had poorly quality science teachers than men. Men scored higher on the test than women, indicating that women's science education was inferior to that received by men.

5. Science teachers in schools with predominantly African American and Hispanic students are inferior to teachers in schools with predominantly white students. Test takers who are African American and Hispanic scored lower than White test takers.

Someone better trained in statistics and polling than I may draw more sophisticated conclusions from this rich data source, but based on the quality of my analysis, the state's Department of Education should consider hiring me to help analyze the results of the AzMERIT tests.

Until recently, The Feminist Wire—a pro-feminism, social justice publishing company—has exclusively shared content (from poetry and novels to political articles) online. Now, they're partnering up with the University of Arizona Press for a new book series that'll showcase critiques on anti-feminist representations in U.S. popular culture, media and politics. 

The UA Department of Gender and  Women's Studies plans to incorporate the book series into the classroom. The department is actually collaborating with the School of Journalism in developing an online master's program in social justice publishing, where students will learn about acquiring, editing, producing and marketing books, a press release from UA Press says.

"Activism. Policy work. Writing. The work that I do has always been about connecting to academic and nonacademic audiences," says Monica Casper, professor in the Department of Gender and  Women's Studies and managing editor of The Feminist Wire, in a press release. "This partnership is just a logical extension of that. We are reaching across the university/public life divide."

There is going to be a celebration for the launch of this new project on Friday,  Sept. 11 at noon at the UA Libraries Special Collections, 1510 E. University Blvd. Casper, co-founder of The Feminist Wire Tamura Lomax and Darnell Moore, senior editor at Mic will be among the speakers. 

I think this caught most people by surprise. It certainly surprised me. The Washington State Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that charter schools are unconstitutional. The reason they gave is, charters don't fit the definition of "common schools" and so they can't be publicly funded.

In the ruling, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote that charter schools aren’t “common schools” because they’re governed by appointed rather than elected boards.

Therefore, “money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools,” Madsen wrote.

Charters weren't allowed in Washington until they were approved, barely, by the voters in 2012. The ruling puts the nine charters which have been set up, and their students, in jeopardy.

I'll be surprised if this ruling stands for long. People are already clamoring for a special legislative session to fix the problem. And some heavy hitters put up lots of money to help pass the charter school referendum, including Bill Gates ($3 million), Alice Walton of the Walmart family ($1.7 million) and Amazon's Mike Bezos ($750,000), and they'll likely bring some serious pressure to bear. Just today, the schools stated they'll stay open this year using private donations if necessary.

It looks like SAT scores are down this year. That sounds bad, like our education system is doing worse, but it doesn't really mean much. Taking the SAT is voluntary, so it's not a random sampling of students. More people took the test this year, which means the average score included more people who were in the lower levels of academic achievement. Generally, the more people who opt to take the test, the lower the scores will be.

Case in point: Arizona's SAT scores are higher than the national average. But only 34 percent of Arizona's 2015 graduates took the test. By comparison, in Texas and California, 60 percent of seniors took the test. If we could get the Arizona number down to 25 percent, we'd look great! [Note: I didn't find the national percentage of SAT test takers. If anyone locates that, add it to the comments—with a link—and I'll put it in the post. Thanks.]

And take a look at the scores on the ACT, a similar college readiness test. They were basically unchanged. The ACT had a different sampling of students, with different results.

Mark Twain once said — or almost said — "Everybody talks about Arizona school funding but nobody does anything about it." Actually, Twain was talking about the weather, and even more actually, he may have said those words during one of his lectures, but he was probably quoting Charles Dudley Warner, a contemporary who cowrote the novel 'The Gilded Age' with Twain. (Your friendly local retired English teacher says, "You're welcome for those exciting tidbits of literary trivia.")

Here in Arizona, we seem to be equally helpless when it comes to doing anything about the weather and education funding. I'll give us a pass on this extraordinarily hot summer, which may be related to climate change but can't be laid directly at Arizona's feet. However, when it comes to education funding, the fault is not in our stars [or changing climate conditions], but in ourselves, as Cassius said to Brutus in Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar.' (Once again, you're welcome). And by "ourselves," I mean our Republican elected officials.

Right now, we have three options for increasing education funding.

Behind Door Number One is the most straightforward and doable of the three options. The legislature simply does what the courts have told them to do and increases school funding by around $330 million for this school year. (There's also that pesky $1.3 billion the lege owes the schools for past years when it refused to follow the law and raise funding for inflation, but that's a separate matter.) If Republicans choose Door Number One — which they could do during a special session, like, tomorrow — all they have to do is open the door and pick up the money stacked on a table in neat million dollar bundles, courtesy of unexpected tax revenues which have poured in recently. They can hand it to schools with smiles on their faces, and it can be used right away to help educate this year's crop of students.

The Republican-dominated legislature has decided it doesn't like Door Number One. Settlement talks over a funding fix, which could have been resolved by agreeing to pay the money, broke down recently. And, according to Jim Nintzel who knows far more about the state's legislative history than I ever will, the lege may not comply with the court order any time soon.

[L]awmakers have been known to let these things drag on rather than resolve them, even when a court order is involved. In the 1990s, a more moderate legislature allowed a lawsuit over school construction and repair to drag on for eight years before resolving it. (And the state still isn't taking care of needed repairs at many schools.)

I guess Republicans can fold their arms across their chests like petulant children, say, "You're not the boss of me!" and get away with it. 

Governor Ducey has a plan on his own behind Door Number Two. He wants to take money from the state land trust fund and use it to boost spending on schools. Open that door and you'll find a maze filled with winding paths, some of which lead to dead ends. First the legislature has to decide to put the funding idea on the ballot, which it may not do. Dead End. And once it's on the ballot, the voters may not pass it. Dead End. Meanwhile, working diligently inside the maze is Jeff DeWit, the man who holds Ducey's previous job as state treasurer. DeWit is building a few additional roadblocks of his own as he tries to convince people that taking money from the land trust fund is a bad idea.

Then there's Senate President Andy Biggs and House Speaker David Gowan's plan behind Door Number Three. They want to add around $500 million a year to school funding by stealing money from the First Things First funds which are supposed to be used for early childhood education, adding additional school funding in the next years' budgets and taking some money from the state land trust fund. The light is burnt out behind that door, so it's hard to see anything, but if you look closely, you'll find a confused cluster of arrows pointing in a dozen different directions and a few large question marks hanging from the ceiling.

The big problem with Door Number One, the straightforward plan that involves using some of the state surplus to give schools the money the courts say they should have, is that it actually would be doing something. Republicans would rather talk about the weather school funding endlessly that do anything to increase it.

Last May I wrote about the mayoral election in Newark, New Jersey, because it was, among other things, a referendum on the "education reform"/privatization movement. The former mayor, now Senator Cory Booker, is pretty much in the ed reform camp. So was one of the two candidates, Shavar Jeffries. On the other side was a somewhat radical Ras Baraka, a public high school principal who grew up in the city and is a firm believer in retaining, restoring and improving public education.

Baraka won.

Newark has one of the most interesting education stories in the country. A weird triumvirate came together to "reform" the Newark schools: Republican Governor Chris Christie, who basically ran the school district because it was under state control; Democratic Mayor Cory Booker who worked together with Christie at the same time he hoped the schools would eventually be returned to local control; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who contributed $100 million to Newark schools. The result was underwhelming, to say the least. Most of Zuckerberg's money was wasted and very little was accomplished. The details are interesting enough, they're the subject of a new book, “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools,” by Dale Russakoff (If you want a shorter, online version, Russakoff had an excellent article on the subject in the New Yorker last year).

So how are things going now that Baraka has been in office for a year? According to the New York Times, they're going surprisingly well.

Mayor Ras J. Baraka came into office last summer practically taunting his doubters.

“Yeah,” he said in his inaugural address, “we need a mayor that’s radical.”

They had predicted that he would be anti-business and anti-police, that Mr. Baraka, the son of Newark’s most famous black radical, would return a city dogged by a history of riots and white flight to division and disarray.

A year later, Mr. Baraka is showering attention on black and Latino neighborhoods, as he promised he would. But he is also winning praise from largely white leaders of the city’s businesses and institutions downtown. He struggles with crime — all mayors here do — but he has also championed both the Black Lives Matter movement and the police, winning praise for trying to ease their shared suspicion.

Supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and the police isn't incompatible, he's shown. As many people in black communities have said, they want a visible and effective police presence, but they want it there for help and support, not to intimidate and incarcerate.

Nevada has a new Education Savings Account law. It's pretty much the same as Arizona's law, with one difference. Every student can use it, so long as the student has been in a public school at least 100 days. In Arizona only a limited number of students qualify. The Arizona folks who pushed our ESA want the same universal access as Nevada, but they decided to start small, then expand the law to include more students each year until everyone qualifies.

The ACLU is taking the Nevada law to court, saying it violates the separation of church and state because ESAs are basically vouchers which use government funds to pay for private school tuition. There's nothing illegal about using government funds to pay for private school so long as the schools don't have religious affiliations. The problem is, across the country 70 to 80 percent of private schools are connected to a church, and the constitutions in Arizona, Nevada and many other states forbid the use of government funds for religious education. 

It sounds like the ACLU should have a strong case against the Nevada law, but Arizona's ESA law was challenged on the same grounds, and the court ruled that the program is constitutional. But you never know. Different state, different court, different people making the argument against the law. Anything can happen.

Congratulate the Goldwater Institute for how cleverly it designed the ESA's work-around to the church-state problem. True, the tuition money comes from state funds, and true, it often goes to pay for tuition at religious schools. But using a green-eyeshade sleight of hand, the funds are moved from the general funds column of the state ledger into a special "savings account" box with a student's name on it. That somehow makes everything OK because the state isn't actually paying for the religious school tuition, it's just giving the money to the parents who then use it to pay for their children's educations. That one degree of separation launders the money, somehow washing it clean of any government connection and making it all legit. ESAs clearly violate the spirit of the state constitution, but the courts have decided they manage to stay within the letter of the law.

My bet is, the ACLU will lose its Nevada battle against the ESA, especially since some of the big pro-voucher guns are in town to defend the law. But if the ACLU prevails, we may see the ESA fight revived in Arizona.