Alright, Tucson. It's the moment you've eagerly awaited—that moment where a national study gives you the proof and validation that you knew just had to be coming. WalletHub, a consumer and finance information group, released a study recently that says Tucson is officially smarter than Phoenix.

Well, maybe not smarter, exactly, but Tucson is more educated according to their metrics. The 2015 study of the country's most and least educated cities ranked 150 major U.S. metropolitan areas based on different factors including quality of public education, average quality of universities, university enrollment based on gender and race and percentage of adults with varying levels of higher education.

Split into two categories—"Education Level" and "Quality of Education & Attainment Gap"—the factors were then ranked for each city. Tucson was rated 54 for "Education Level" and 38 for "Quality of Education & Attainment Gap," placing at an overall ranking of 51 out of 150. Phoenix and its neighboring cities, on the other hand, rated 76 overall. 

The top three cities on the list were Ann Arbor, Michigan; the Washington D.C. area; and Madison, Wisconsin. For more results on this and other WalletHub studies, you can visit the WalletHub website.

The Star had a worthwhile idea for an education story. Two writers decided to look at how districts in the Tucson area handle teacher evaluations. The interactive map on the website and the chart in the newsprint version show that some districts are more generous than others in awarding high ratings to their teachers. Interesting. Definitely worth analyzing and discussing. Unfortunately, the article loses credibility with its opening which implies that you can correlate teachers' effectiveness with their students' achievement scores. Later in the story, a more nuanced picture is presented, but the damage done in the opening paragraphs can't be undone.

And the article quotes one out-of-state "expert" to corroborate its basic thesis, Sandi Jacobs of the National Council for Teacher Quality. In the article, she's portrayed as an objective observer who is commenting from on high. And a group whose title says it's all about Teacher Quality — who can argue with that? Apparently not the authors of the article who, I'm guessing, didn't look very far into the history and conservative biases of Jacobs or the NCTQ.

Look at the opening paragraph of the article:

Nine in 10 Pima County teachers are rated good or great — but that is not always evident in their students’ achievement scores.

That's a real grabber. It pulls you right into the story. But it also perpetuates a dangerous misconception: that teachers can't be effective if their students have low scores on state tests. I guess that means the ability of teachers at schools with students from low income households, sometimes households where English isn't the primary language, should be suspect since their students don't do well on state tests. How can they possibly be as good as teachers up in the Foothills and Marana and Oro Valley where the students do so well on the same tests? Unfortunately, that's an attitude that our anti-public education Republican legislators and their compatriots in the "education reform"/privatization movement would like to perpetuate, and the Star article helps them in their mission.

In the next paragraph, the point is hammered home.

Some districts reported nearly unanimous high ratings for teachers even though their schools received low grades for student achievement and other standards.

I guess that means, logically, that a district with with an A grade from the state would have more reason to rate its teachers highly than a district with a low grade.

Didn't get the point? Then read the next paragraph.

Tucson’s two largest school districts — Tucson Unified School District and Sunnyside — rated almost all their teachers good or great despite being among Pima County’s lowest-scoring districts on the state’s math, reading and writing assessments.

Fine the legislature! That's what the Washington State Supreme Court is doing, issuing a $100,000 fine for every day the legislature ignores a court order on school funding. The decision was unanimous.

Thursday's order, signed by all nine justices of the high court, ordered that the fine start immediately, and be put into a dedicated education account.

The situation sounds very similar to what's going on in Arizona.

The ruling was the latest development in a long-running impasse between lawmakers and justices, who in 2012 ruled that the state is failing to meet its constitutional duty to pay for the cost of basic education for its 1 million schoolchildren.

Thomas Ahearne, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that the court's action "is long overdue."

"The state has known for many, many years that it's violating the constitutional rights of our public school kids," Ahearne said. "And the state has been told by the court in rulings in this case to fix it, and the state has just been dillydallying along."

The details are different. The biggest issue in the Washington case is that school districts are overly dependent on local taxes to fund the schools, which leads to big disparities in funding levels, district to district. Arizona's per student funding may be ridiculously low, but the pain is spread out reasonably evenly. Some of our districts figure out ways to get more money in their coffers than others, but it's nowhere near the disparity you find in some other states. 

Our Supreme Court should follow the example set in Washington. Start fining the legislature $100,000 a day. That would mean by the time the next legislative session starts, we'd have about $15 million socked away. It's a paltry sum that doesn't begin to cover the $300 million-plus the state owes the schools this school year alone, but it would rankle the "Rule of law" Republicans no end to see the steady drip-drip-drip of money leaving their hands by court order. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, A hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Ed Supe Diane Douglas is making headlines again in her continuing power struggle with the Arizona Board of Education. The Board represents the Ducey education agenda, and Douglas wants—it's hard to know exactly what Douglas wants. Based on her tenure on the Peoria school board and her pronouncements during the campaign, it seems like she wants Arizona education to take a hard right turn. But I don't know exactly what that means, especially since she's said some laudable things about education since taking office in January. When it comes to her long term plans, Douglas is holding her cards pretty close to her vest. What I do know is, she wants to have more power over education priorities at the state level, and she wants the State Board to have less.

They've been in court, Douglas and the Board, over the question of who controls what. The Board won the last round, so naturally, Douglas is appealing the ruling. Meanwhile, the latest is, she's threatening not to get the state's Move On When Reading web portal up and running, which is a problem, since there's $40 million in funding waiting to be spent on reading programs for elementary school kids, and it can't be allocated unless the website is working. It looks like Douglas has decided to open the Move On When Reading portal, but she says the Board has to kick in $50,000 to help it do its work, or something like that.

Yes, it would be awful if that $40 million isn't used to help kids read, but for the life of me, I can't get overly concerned about this whole Douglas/Board kerfuffle. (That $40 million will get spent on reading, by the way, very little doubt about that. Both sides want it to happen. They're just waiting to see who blinks first.) Truth be told, I find it all amusing. "Pass the popcorn, honey, this is getting good!" The "Douglas vs. the Republican Establishment" battle is the national Republican Party  writ small. We're seeing similar battles playing out in the GOP's cast-of-thousands presidential primary. For years, the Republican establishment catered to and fawned over its far right wingers to bring them into the fold as a voting force. The party power structure was playing the role of political Frankenstein, creating an ideological monster out of bits and pieces of the Republican platform. [Literary note: Frankenstein isn't the monster. Mary Shelley created the fictional character Dr. Frankenstein, who then created the monster. When referencing the story, always say, "Frankenstein's monster" or simply "The monster." Never say, "They created a Frankenstein."] But the Republican Frankenstein wanted its far right wing monster to be all mouth and fingers. It was just supposed to make noise and vote Republican. Instead, the monster escaped, ran amok and took control. The people who are supposed to be in control don't know how to put the monster in chains and get him back into the laboratory where they can tell him what to do, instead of the other way round.

Tucson Unified School District is getting some national recognition for its renewable energy usage.

The Environmental Protection Agency ranked the Old Pueblo's largest school district number 2 of the country's top 30 K-12 schools generating the most green power. The district also placed 12 on the top 30 for green power production in  the entire country.

TUSD currently generates about 20 million kilowatt-hours of green energy every year from the solar energy systems scattered at various schools. That meets 20 percent of the schools' electricity use, according to a TUSD press release. The EPA says it is the equivalent to the electricity use of nearly 2,000 average American homes annually.

The district began installing solar rooftop panels—they hoped for a total of 38,000—last spring.  They anticipated to save $170,000 in the first year and more than $11 million in energy costs over the 20-year life of the 11-megawatt project, the district says. 

"Over 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions will be averted from local power plants in the project's first full year of operation, along with 23.5 tons of nitrous oxides," the district says on its website.

Others on the list include Apple and Google.

Governor Ducey hopes to eliminate the income tax. He wants to continue cutting business taxes, which, according to him and fellow conservatives, will bring businesses streaming to Arizona by the U-Haul-load. He wants to change the school funding formula to reward "success," a term he hasn't defined.

Same with Kansas. An article in this week's NY Times Magazine, The Kansas Experiment, puts Arizona's conservative agenda items in national perspective. Kansas, under the leadership of Governor Sam Brownback, who took the helm in 2011, is moving in the same direction, and is probably farther along in the process. The two states aren't identical, but the similarities are strong enough that you can almost see Ducey and his fellow state conservatives leaning over Brownback's shoulder to read his playbook.

Here are some excerpts.

With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.

[snip]

The march to zero, which includes an already-passed provision that exempts the owners of 330,000 businesses and farms in Kansas from income tax, was designed, Gene said, to turn Kansas into a different sort of tourist attraction. As he and his fellow conservatives see it, it’s an ‘‘open for business’’ sign, one they hope will draw free enterprise to the state.

[snip]

[State Rep. Gene Suellentrop, vice chairman of the Tax Committee in the Kansas House] brainstormed with Dave Trabert, the president of the small-government Kansas Policy Institute, about whether there was a way to isolate the administrative costs in the state education budget, so Republicans could cut them without reducing classroom spending.

[snip]

The first shoe has dropped. The unofficial AzMERIT scores for the state have been released, and, as most people expected, fewer students made it above the cut score—were declared Proficient—than with the earlier AIMS test. We were told AzMERIT was going to be a tougher test, so it makes sense that the proficiency rate would go down. But there's another shoe yet to drop when the individual district and school scores are released. Here's what you should expect: the percent of students declared Proficient will fall in all schools and districts, but it will fall less in high performing schools than in low performing schools. That means the gap between high achieving and low achieving schools and districts will appear to increase, but the change will have more to do with the way the test is scored than with any change in student achievement.

New York City was the first in the nation to give its students a test aligned with the Common Core. Passing rates dropped all over the city, but the drop was greatest among students who scored low on the previous test. That  didn't mean the achievement gap increased. The raised cut score made the increased gap in passage rates a virtual certainty.

If the proficiency gap increases in Arizona as I expect it will, the new AzMERIT test itself won't be the main reason, and it certainly won't mean the differences in students' achievement levels have grown. It will be due to the raised expectations about what it means to be proficient. When you raise the cut score, raise the dividing line between Proficient and Partially Proficient, the apparent achievement gap is going to increase even if students' academic abilities remain constant. That has to do with the nature of tests and cut scores. More or less the same thing would have happened if we kept AIMS and set a new, higher bar on the old test.

If I'm wrong, if the percentage of students declared Proficient drops more-or-less evenly school to school and district to district or the differences don't have any relation to whether the schools are high or low achieving, then I'm wrong. But if I'm right, anyone who uses the new scores to slam "failing" students and schools by saying things have gotten worse since last year, that the test's increased proficiency gap means that low achieving students and schools are achieving at a lower level than they did before, is wrong.

I asked readers to name movies and TV series with teachers in prominent roles or important secondary roles. Here's what you've offered so far, in chronological order (the TV show dates are when they first aired).

More! More! Keep 'em coming.

Boy’s Town (1938)
Good-bye Mr. Chips (1939)
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Our Miss Brooks (1952)
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Miracle Worker (1962)
Mr. Novak (1963)
To Sir With Love (1967)
Up the Down Staircase (1967)
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
Good-bye Mr. Chips (1969)
Room 222 (1969)
Paper Chase (1973)
Conrack (1974)
Welcome Back, Kotter (1975)
Fame (1982)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Head of the Class (1986)
Stand and Deliver (1988)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
Saved By The Bell (1989)
Kindergarten Cop (1990)
Boy Meets World (1993)
Renaissance Man (1994)
Dangerous Minds (1995)
Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995)
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Election (1999)
Miracle Worker (2000)
Mean Girls (2004)
Freedom Writers (2007)
Breaking Bad (2008)
Bad Teacher (2011)
Rita (Swedish)( 2012)

CBS 5 - KPHO

KPHO Phoenix has the kind of report about BASIS charter schools I've wanted to see in the MSM for a long time. Yes, it says, BASIS schools are strong academically and have a rigorous curriculum, but they shouldn't be compared directly to other public schools because of their selective student bodies. It's a point I've made many times before, as have others, a point BASIS has worked hard to refute. Now it looks like other are beginning to catch on, and BASIS is being forced to change its "We're simply doing a better job than all those other schools" tune a bit.

Watch the whole five minute piece. It's quite good and lets both sides have their say. The intro summarizes the report well:

"They are ranked among the top public schools in the country, and they're located right here in Arizona. The BASIS schools are also facing some criticism, that they fudge the rankings by graduating only a fraction of the students who enroll."

A few of the statements in the report that come from BASIS are defensive half truths, but they're actually closer to honest and accurate than what I'm used to hearing hear from the schools' spokespeople.

My feeling about the charter school chain is, Let BASIS be BASIS. Let students who benefit from the school reap the benefits. But don't use BASIS as a way to trash other public schools by saying, "Look, we're doing it, why can't they do the same?" Graduates from BASIS are an academic elite, probably even more so than at most top ranked private high schools. They're the kind of kids who would thrive academically wherever they went to school. If BASIS schools had student bodies like most other Arizona public schools, they would find their sky-high academic expectations would cause frustration and failure for a sizable portion of their students.

Craig Robinson will be playing a music teacher in a new NBC show, "Mr. Robinson." If it were a movie, this is what the voiceover would sound like. Cue the deep, authoritative "In a World . . ." voice.

"Craig Robinson. He fought off the apocalypse with his friends, James Franco. Seth Rogen. Jonah Hill. Jay Baruchel. . . . But does he have what it takes to face a classroom filled with [deep, ominous voice] REBELLIOUS. HYPER-ACTIVE. OVER-GLANDULAR  TEENAGERS? A-L-O-O-O-N-E?"

(Hollywood promo guys, this one's on the house, no charge. But if you want more, contact me through the Weekly.)

Readers, I need your help. I want the name of every TV show or movie that either has a teacher in a lead role or in a reasonably prominent secondary role. As many as you can think of, as far back as you can go ("Our Miss Brooks" with Eve Arden, anyone?).

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." Now, when we see teachers, they're sports coaches or music teachers who don't teach those essential, No Child Left Behind core classes. Think, a TV show like "Glee" or a movie like "McFarland, USA."

The best way to prove, disprove or alter a hypothesis is to put it to a real world test. So help me out. The more examples, the better.