When I wrote my earlier post comparing Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird with her just-released earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman, I was relying on a number of reviews and analyses I had read about the new book. I hadn't gotten my own copy yet. Since then, I've read Watchman, which reinforced the perspectives I got from others and added to them. Watchman isn't a great book—it probably isn't even a very good book in its published form—but it's an intelligent book with sharp analyses of attitudes in the south during the 50s, specifically after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The contrast between the versions of the south and the pervasiveness of racism portrayed in the two books is what most resonates for me—the glossy, airbrushed version in Mockingbird versus the wrinkles-and-all version in Watchman. My general takeaway from the contrast between the two books is, we need to grow up about the way we perceive racism in this country—how substantial it is, how much it underlies the way we as individuals perceive the world and the way our society functions. We need to look racism directly in the face, acknowledge it and do whatever we can, not to eradicate it completely since that's impossible, but to lessen its impact by working to correct its most destructive aspects.

Genuine spoiler alert: I'm going to be talking about Watchman in some detail, so if you plan to read the book and don't want it pre-summarized and analyzed, this is a good time to stop reading.

In Watchman, a 26-year-old woman who is living in New York returns to her home town in the south for a visit. At the beginning of the book, the town and its inhabitants appear to be as she remembered them, especially her father Atticus Finch whom she idolized as a child and continues to idolize as a young adult. In her eyes, Atticus was a man who transcended his time and place, someone who saw beyond race and class, whose judgement was absolutely fair and even handed unlike most white inhabitants of the town, including some wonderful but flawed adults she knew growing up.

As the book continues, she begins to see that Atticus isn't the man she believed he was. To her horror, she finds he's a segregationist and something of a bigot. He's against school integration and making it easy for southern blacks to vote—or he's against doing those things right away, anyway. He wants changes to happen in their own sweet southern time, not on the timetable set by the Supreme Court and the N.A.A.C.P. To paraphrase one of today's much-used phrases, for Atticus, White lives matter, but Black lives — or at least the quality of black lives — don't matter nearly as much, especially if improving their lives has a negative impact on the privileges he and other southern whites have come to expect as their birthright.

In an effort to end the week on a high note, here's another good thing to follow the Couple of Good Things I posted about yesterday. By the way, I was accused by a few commenters of being kinda Pollyanna-ish in that post, making too much of a  big deal about small advances. One commenter said, "Let's not step over a dollar bill to pick up a nickel," a phrase I'd never heard before but which I will repeat ten times today so it becomes a permanent part of my vocabulary (I should mention, however, a google search indicated that the phrase usually talks about dimes, not nickels. Inflation, dontcha know). But sometimes, I just gotta take good news where I can find it.

Today's good thing is our ex-Gov. Janet Napolitano, now President of the University of California, announcing that she's raising wages of some workers in the U.C. system to $15 an hour.

Napolitano announced the move a day after Los Angeles County — the nation's largest government agency — agreed to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour in all unincorporated communities by 2020. Los Angeles enacted a similar plan earlier this year, becoming the largest city in the nation to do so.

Let me mention the limits of Napolitano's move before commenters do. It will only affect about 3,200 U.C. employees, not everyone currently making less than $15 per hour. Still, it's a small step forward in the struggle against income inequality. I honestly didn't expect the movement to raise the minimum wage to gather this much momentum this quickly, but I'm happy that it has.

The U.S. Department of Education is giving Arizona a $20 million development grant for early childhood education. That's a very good thing. There's little argument that getting kids in educational situations before kindergarten is valuable for their educational and social development. Even Gov. Ducey agrees:

"Research shows that a quality early childhood education experience can yield significant long-term benefits on overall development of a child."

Yes, Ducey said that, adding, "We know that there's a good return on investment." And he's aware that Arizona has one of the lowest rates of preschool enrollment in the country. But he still won't fund it, because, well, we can't do things that are good for children and still cut business and income taxes—let alone add more beds in our for-profit prisons—can we?

So we'll have to leave it to the Feds to help us do what's right for kids.

Kelley Murphy with the Children's Action Alliance says the four-year federal grant of up to $20 million per year will be used to improve preschool services.

"This is a development grant, and it allows us to do a lot of the infrastructure work that has to be in place before we can really start expanding the number of kids that are getting into these programs," she says. "So it is a game-changer in that sense."

It may be a sin to kill a mockingbird, but is it a sin to knock a Finch off his pedestal?

It turns out Atticus Finch was a segregationist and a bigot before he was the ideal vision of a white southerner who was able to rise above the racism of his time. Of maybe he was a segregationist and a bigot after he was that ideal man. It depends on which timeline you use.

Atticus Finch, of course, is the fictional southern lawyer in Harper Lee's wonderful novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and taught many times during my career as a high school English teacher. But a few years earlier, before Lee wrote Mockingbird, she wrote Go Set a Watchman, and in that book Atticus made some statements about segregation and race you wouldn't expect from the man we learned to love in the classic novel. That means the character was conceived as a bigot before he was re-envisioned as the perfect man in Mockingbird. But Watchman is set twenty years after Mockingbird, so it was an older Atticus who showed himself to be a bigot. Before. After. The whole thing is confusing on a number of levels.

In case you haven't read any of the statements Atticus made in Watchman, which is set soon after the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation, here are two of his most often quoted lines.

“Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

And

"[The south should] be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.”

I'm sensing a pattern here.

Arizona Senate President Andy Biggs sponsored legislation to audit the Department of Child Safety, to the tune of $250,000. Must have been pretty important if a fiscal conservative wanted to spend a quarter million dollars to figure out how to fix the agency. Well, the results of the study are in, and the conclusion is, the agency needs more money to function properly. Biggs is appalled. That's not what he wanted to hear.

"They didn't really get at any of the stuff that I thought was important," Biggs said. "I could've gone out and asked all those local stakeholders what do you think, and they all would've told me we need to spend more money. And that's basically what Chapin Hall [Center for Children at the University of Chicago] put together."

Biggs wants the agency to cut back on the number of people it serves, not spend more money to increase services like the study recommends.

Governor Doug Ducey wants to build more private prisons. The recent riot at the privately run Kingman prison isn't deterring him, nor are Department of Corrections studies that say private prisons cost more than state-run prisons. Admittedly, those cost effectiveness studies are a few years old. Back in 2012, Republicans said the Department of Corrections should stop conducting the studies because weren't comprehensive enough. If the studies considered all the data, Republican private prison advocates said, they would show the private prisons cost less.

So is Ducey planning to conduct a new, better study that will factor in all the costs? Nah. I guess it's too risky. A new study might come to conclusions Ducey doesn't want to hear.

Another school year, another teacher shortage. This isn't a TUSD problem or a Tucson-area problem. One estimate says that Arizona has 1,000 fewer teachers than it needs. Another, which seems high to me, says that Maricopa County alone has 1,000 teacher slots to fill. Either way, it's a big, statewide problem. Emphasis on "statewide."

Why the shortage? Low pay, low funding for support and supplies, too many students in each classroom. And let's not underestimate the importance of the anti-teacher, anti-"government school" rhetoric that makes teachers feel less valued. Why go into, or stay in, a low paying, stressful job if everyone keeps telling you how much you suck? Arizona teachers are leaving the profession or moving elsewhere to teach. Fewer college students are choosing teaching as a profession.

I keep hearing from some quarters that teachers are underworked look at all those vacations they get!—so they don't deserve more pay, and the reason there are so many bad teachers is because the union won't let districts fire them. Now, I'm not an economist and I don't play one on The Range, but it seems to me there are a few basic economic flaws with both those arguments.

If teachers are underworked and overpaid, people should be lining up to get one of those cushy jobs. Districts should be fighting applicants off with a stick. That's the way the marketplace works, right? People gravitate toward the most attractive jobs. And once prospective teachers land their jobs, after they get through popping champagne corks and celebrating their unbelievable good fortune, they should hold onto those jobs until retirement forces them out the door.

So why aren't college departments of education turning away students who want to sign up? Why aren't districts getting more applications than they can handle? Why do young teachers leave the profession in such high numbers?

I was about to write a completely different post, about an article maintaining that disadvantaged kids have less access to top quality teachers than kids from higher income families. But then I came across a very long paper by David Berliner, a highly regarded, much-published emeritus professor of education at ASU and a fellow at the National Education Policy Center, and I decided to go another way and look at Berliner's assertion that problems related to income inequality and poverty have more impact on students' educational achievement than schools and teachers. So I'll save the "problem with schools" post for another day and focus on the argument that the major source of our educational problems originate outside the school walls.

There are two basic schools of thought about why children from low income families tend to achieve at a significantly lower level than higher income children. One school of thought says failing schools are to blame. If we just figure out how to get these kids into "successful" schools—maybe set up a bunch of great charter schools or give kids vouchers to private schools that can succeed where "government schools" fail, maybe "fix" the problems with schools that are part of our traditional education system, maybe combine both approaches—student achievement will soar and our educational problems will be solved. The other school of thought says schools can't fix the educational problems that are linked to children living in poverty. We need to address the economic and social issues plaguing our society to see a significant improvement in achievement in lower income kids.

Obviously, these two views aren't diametrically opposed. People who think "failing schools" are the problem acknowledge the fact that kids living in poverty have educational disadvantages, and people who think the problems are more societally based acknowledge that better schools lead to better outcomes. But the decision about where to put our energies and resources is determined by which aspect we think is more important.

Right now, the "good schools are the answer" side is winning, big time. The whole conservative privatization/"education reform" movement is based on the idea that all we need is better schools. And that's the basic direction Obama and many other somewhat progressive Democrats have gone as well, even if they don't emphasize privatization as much as the conservatives.

David Berliner disagrees, and I'm on his side of the argument. Here are some passages from his paper, Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth, which summarize his ideas.

As a rule, I don't write "Back in the good old days" posts. Nostalgia doesn't cloud my memory enough that I forget all the bad things that went on when I was younger. The "good old days" were the bad old days in lots of ways. When I was teaching, I even refrained from shaming my high school students by telling them how much better we were back when I was a boy. I seem to remember the rallying cry of my youth was "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!" Not to mention, "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out." Makes it kinda hard to take the moral high ground over today's kids.

But here's one thing that was definitely better back in the day. College tuition. When I went to University of California, I paid in the neighborhood of $50 a semester. California state colleges were about half that, and junior colleges—that's the name California gave to community colleges—were tuition free. College students had to find a way to take care of room, board, books and miscellaneous expenses, but tuition wasn't a serious financial consideration.

Which is why the reasonably thoughtful editorial in the Saturday Star, Regents should tighten UA, ASU admissions standards, pissed me off. The editorial said university admission standards should be tightened because graduation rates are too low, which indicates that too many unqualified students are being admitted. That's a reasonable stance. I don't entirely agree, but it's reasonable. But the kicker was an admission by the editorial board that it used to feel differently until tuition went through the roof.

What has changed our thinking about admissions is the high cost of failure. Annual tuition and fees at the UA total about $10,890, up 66 percent from five years ago.

The next paragraph should have explained that tuition isn't a force of nature that goes up and down like the ebb and flow of the tides, that the legislature, in its never ending battle against publicly funded higher education, keeps cutting funding, so tuition keeps rising. But it didn't. The next paragraph jumped right back to graduation rates.

The Star's change of heart plays right into the hands of the conservative agenda: Starve the education beast; complain schools aren't doing a good job, so they don't deserve the funding they're getting; then cut education funding even more because, why should we continue to pay through the nose to support those lousy schools? Rinse and repeat.

My knowledge of stock market terminology pretty much begins and ends with "bear market" and "bull market," but I only had to hear the term "dead cat bounce" once for it to stick in my metaphor-friendly ears. Here's the definition of the term: "A temporary recovery from a prolonged decline or bear market, followed by the continuation of the downtrend." It comes from the phrase—sensitive cat lovers, avert your eyes—"Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height."

K12 Inc.'s stock value has been following what looks like a classic dead cat bounce over the past year — a general decline punctuated by a few small upsurges. If that's what's going on, if it's heading toward oblivion, it couldn't happen to a more deserving for-profit, publicly traded education corporation, with the possible exception of the Apollo Education Group that runs the University of Phoenix, which has gone through a similarly deserved decline.

The similarities between the two for profits are revealing. Both make their money off taxpayers. K12 Inc. runs online charter schools in a number of states, including our Arizona Virtual Academy, so it gets state funding for every student it enrolls. University of Phoenix gets most of its money from student loans and grants from the Feds. Both need to continue growing to make a profit, so they use any means necessary to attract students. They depend on hard sell recruiting, where lying to students and their parents is an acceptable tactic. Both are far less concerned about the quality of education the students receive than the money they bring in. University of Phoenix is notorious for its poor instruction which is often valueless for the future employment the school promises. K12 Inc. schools tend to be among the lowest achieving schools in the state. Some of its schools have closed or are in danger of closing because they're below the states' required thresholds.

K12 Inc.'s stock may rise again, just like the University may, true to its namesake, rise like a Phoenix from the ashes. But the world of education would be better off if both continued on their downward trajectories and ended in oblivion, leaving wealthy stockholders with costly holes in their portfolios. No more students would fall victim to their shoddy economic and educational practices, and the wealthy backers of education privatization might realize that for profit education is as bad for their wallets as it is for the students it serves.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has upheld most of the Arizona law that ended up banning the Mexican-American studies program. However, the ruling did say that portions of the statute violate the First Amendment, and that there are "genuine" issues regarding whether the enforcement of the law was "motivated at least in part by discriminatory intent."

The court ordered the latter to go to trial in the near future.

The law, enacted by the state Legislature in 2010, prohibits a school district or charter school from offering courses that: "1. Promote the overthrow of the U.S. government; 2. Promote resentment toward a race of class of people; 3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; 4. Or advocate for ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals." 

Part 3 was declared unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment, while the court said parts 2 and 4 "are not overbroad in violation of the First Amendment," and "are not vague in violation of the due process clause."

The case was originally filed in 2010 by ten Tucson Unified School District teachers and the director of TUSD's MAS program. The suit was later picked up by TUSD students, Maya Arce, Korina Lopez and Nicolas Dominguez (Lopez and Dominguez withdrew their appeal after they graduated high school, according to court documents).

Attorneys for both sides presented their arguments in January. At the time, I spoke with a member of the defense team, Anjana Malhotra, who said she felt they did well.

She said the court was concerned that the law was enforced regardless of the positive effects MAS has had on students. Several reports have proven that MAS accelerated student achievement and lowered drop-out rates.