Let me see if I have this straight.

Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Diane Douglas, so feared by her fellow Republicans that many of them jumped ship and endorsed Democrat David Garcia, won the general election and almost immediately fired two State Board of Education staffers, claiming they were are too liberal. Ducey, who dips his toes regularly into Tea Party waters, disagreed that they're too liberal, said she didn't have the right to fire Board employees and reinstated them. Douglas accused Ducey of plotting to push Common Core on Arizona children and moving money from traditional public schools to charters.

Pause a few months while the legislature is in session. Then the Board up and left the Department of Education building and headed for the building the Governor lives in, saying Douglas is impossible to work with. Oh, and they set up their own website and gave themselves new email addresses to make the break complete. Douglas decided to take them to court, saying they have to come home and do as she says, because, Rule of Law.

Which takes us up to Monday, when the Board threatened to sue Douglas because she won't let board employees access teacher records, which they need to do their jobs, unless they come to the Department of Education and work from there.

My question is: Who's going to be at the head of the line to pick up the Recall Diane Douglas petitions, the left or the not-quite-as-Tea-Party-as-Douglas right?

This is a story about charter school funding that flew below my radar until now. The new state budget cut a money stream for some charters, saying it would be a $6.5 million cutback during the first year of the phase-in. Now the Department of Ed is saying it'll be closer to $15 million, which will grow to $24 million in 2017 and $32 million in 2018. The privately funded Arizona Charter School Association wasn't very happy before, but now it's really, really unhappy.

What's happening is, a loophole some charters were exploiting for extra cash is being closed. The lege was right to close it, but given Republican majority's pro-charter orientation, I'm surprised it happened. Basically, charter groups with lots of schools have been getting extra money which is only supposed to go to individual schools and districts with fewer than 600 students, and the new legislation stops that from happening.

The small schools allocations makes sense. If a district has fewer than 600 students, its per-student costs are higher than bigger districts which have the advantage of economies of scale, so the state gives those small schools some extra money—even more if a district is in an isolated area. Multiple-school charter organizations have gamed the system by pretending the schools are separate entities and scrupulously keeping each school's enrollment below 600.  Senate Bill 1476 closes that loophole. If the charters are run by a single management company, if they have identical board members, if they are subsidiaries of a corporation with other subsidiaries in the state—if any of those hold true, the schools' enrollments are added together. If the total is larger than 600, they get no extra small schools money.

The change will affect BASIS, Great Hearts and Imagine charters as well as a number of other schools which are connected to other schools.

(I haven't been able to pin down how much the small school allocation amounts to per student. I know it differs by total enrollment and grade level, and I know it's got to be a sizable chunk of change if, once it's completely phased in, the total is $32 million just for those charters that are part of a larger group, but I don't know the actual amounts. I'm looking into it.)

I already mentioned I was surprised that the AZ lege would allow a cut to charter funding like this one to pass. I guess if the target is education funding, they'll even take money from their buddies, and I guess Ducey was OK with it as well. But with the new, higher number, some of them are having second thoughts.

I'm speculating here, but I wonder if the higher number had something to do with the feud between Diane Douglas and Ducey over Common Core and control of the Board of Education. It was Douglas' Department of Ed that announced the new, higher figures. My bet is, if Huppenthal were still in control, he would have figured out how to fudge the numbers down to what had been promised to the legislators. After all, he played fast and loose before when he spent more state money on the vouchers-on-steroids, aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, program than he was supposed to. But there's no love lost between the Governor and the Ed Supe, not to mention her running battles with the Board of Ed, which she said s conspiring with Ducey to move students from district schools to charters. So I'm thinking, when she and her staff crunched the numbers and found the cuts were more than double what the legislators had been promised, she decided to go with the higher figure. Maybe she plans to hold firm on that number, or maybe she wants to see what kind of concessions she can wring from Ducey and the Board that might help her change her mind. Can you say Bargaining Chip, boys and girls? (Does it show how much I'm enjoying this education-leadership cage match? Maybe they'll be so busy going after each other, they won't have time to do as much damage as they want to.)

We have a brand new 2015 "Best High Schools" List from U.S. News & World Report, not to be confused with the recent Washington Post "Most Challenging High Schools" list that came out a few weeks ago. Except that, in the words of an old Herman's Hermits song, "Second verse list, same as the first." Well, not the same exactly, but pretty damn close. Both lists are created from some combination of the frequency of students at the schools taking either the Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses and how well they do on the tests. Not surprisingly, a BASIS school makes the list—BASIS Scottsdale is number 2—as does Tucson's University High at number 17. BASIS Tucson North most likely would have made the list as well, except that its move from the BASIS Tucson campus meant it didn't fit into the scoring formula.

The methodology the magazine used to create the list makes it sound like it's important how well economically disadvantaged students do at the school compared to similar students at other schools. That's not exactly true. A school's "economically disadvantaged score" doesn't have anything to do with where schools place on the list. Doing reasonably well with those students is a hurdle you have to jump over, a door you have to pass through, before you're allowed to compete. Once you've proven your economically disadvantaged students are doing well enough, your placement on the list is purely an AP/IB thing.

However, even that isn't entirely true. If you're most charter schools—and that includes BASIS charters—it doesn't matter how well you do with economically disadvantaged students, or even if you have any in your student population.

U.S. News determines a school's percentage of "economically disadvantaged students" by looking at state records and finding out what percentage of students at a school qualify for free or reduced lunch. The problem is, most charters don't serve lunches for their students, so they don't submit tallies of qualifying students to the state.

This bears repeating whenever the subject of high stakes testing comes up. There’s a very strong correlation between standardized test scores and family income. Test scores are higher in areas with high family income and lower in areas with low family income. It’s true in Tucson. It’s true in Phoenix. It’s true across the United States. It’s true in developed countries around the world (and probably even more true in undeveloped countries).

Based on information from international testing, we know that test score inequality is higher in the U.S. than other developed countries, but so is income inequality.

I created a few maps of the Tucson area awhile back with schools' state grades and median household income to demonstrate how neatly the test score/family income correlation works out.

The map at the top of the post shows the state grades of all the schools in the Tucson area. Since state grades are mostly a reflection of the schools’ AIMS scores, a high grade generally means high test scores. I generated the map from the Department of Education website, then added colored clouds to emphasize the grade clusters. As you can see, Marana, Oro Valley, the Foothills and Vail have mostly A schools with a smattering of B schools thrown in. The B schools cluster just below the Foothills, the C’s are scattered from the center to the east of the city and the D schools are mainly in the south and southwest areas.

Anyone who’s lived around here for awhile doesn’t really need the second map to understand how closely the school scores align with the incomes of families living in those areas, but in the map below, the distribution of median family incomes lays any questions to rest.

The day after we published the article Escape Goat—where former Cholla High culturally relevant educator Corey Jones offers his insight on the significant CR curriculum, classroom and attitude changes he witnessed during the Arizona Department of Education/TUSD anti-Mexican-American studies law ordeal—the district sent us some documents pertaining to an investigation TUSD conducted into Jones and the events that led to Jones' removal from the classroom. 

The first is a letter dated Feb. 23 from Cholla principal Frank Armenta to Jones (the other two are summaries of the district's investigation and findings), where Armenta explains the reasons for assigning Jones home.

It begins like this: After Jones was told to leave the school on Monday, Feb. 9 (not Friday, Feb. 6 as I wrote in the article), the students in his second period "U.S. history from a Mexican-American perspective" class were interviewed, as the district and school were trying to figure out what had been happening inside those walls, since the notice of noncompliance arose. 

"The purpose...was to gain clarity on the following: What you informed the students regarding directions on how you were to deliver the CRC course content; if students were walking out of your class; and if students were possibly walking off campus to district offices," the letter says. (The day ADE representatives were supposed to visit Jones' class, he says students planned to walk out as a form of protest.)

Then, there is a chunk of "complaints" and "concerns" regarding Jones' "conduct and actions." Among the list are allegations that Jones did not provide accurate information about the CR curriculum's status to his students (such as changes in the reading list and the freedom of bringing in additional resources), and that he told students and parents he was instructed to stick to the textbook "The American Vision" and other material attached to that book (I will get to that later).

Monday I wrote about seven Arizona schools that have been accused of cheating on the high stakes AIMS test. I decided to look at the percentage of students on free/reduced lunch at the schools, and here's what I found.

Two schools have more than 90 percent of their students on free/reduced lunch—Wade Carpenter Middle School and James Sandoval/Crown Point High School. One has over 75 percent—Integrity Education Centre. One has over 50 percent—Red Rock Elementary School.

Two—Edge and Children's Success Academy—are charter schools that don't report their free/reduced lunch percentage, like lots of charters which don't furnish student lunches. The Star's Tim Steller wrote about Edge in 2013.

Edge High School in Tucson takes in students from difficult backgrounds - about one out of 10 is homeless, many are parents or pregnant, some are sixth- or seventh-year seniors - and helps them graduate.

Last year the state recognized each of Edge's three charter high schools - with a D grade. Two more years of D's and the schools will be on the road toward a failing status.

All I can find about Children's Success Academy is that it's on E. Bilby near S. Nogales Hwy in Tucson with about 80 students and a B state grade. It's in a low income area, and most of the nearby schools have C and D grades, which means its students are likely from low income families, though I can't say for certain.

The outlier here is Metcalf Elementary with 34 percent of its students on free/reduced lunch. It's a new school with no state grade I could find.

Here are a few schools not—repeat, not—on the list, along with their free/reduced lunch percentages: Copper Ridge Elementary in Scottsdale Unified (3 percent); Sonoran Trails Middle in Cave Creek (7 percent); Catalina Foothills High (12 percent).

Diane Douglas' Department of Education has asked the Attorney General to investigate suspicious erasures on AIMS tests from seven Arizona schools. There's a whole lot to unpack in this story, more than I want to write about in one post. I'll probably write more about it later in the week.

The ADE found that AIMS tests at the seven schools had an unusual number of wrong answers erased and correct answers bubbled in. Though it's always possible that the schools are full of unusually diligent students who looked over their tests, found mistakes and corrected them, it's extremely unlikely—wildly improbable, statistically—that's what happened. It's far more likely adults took the tests after they were handed in and changed wrong answers to right answers. Who those adults are—teachers, administrators, support staff or a combination—is an unanswered question at this point.

The seven schools are Edge, Children's Success Academy, Integrity Education Centre, James Sandoval/Crown Point High School, Metcalf Elementary School, Red Rock Elementary School and Wade Carpenter Middle School. They're a mixture of district and charter schools from around the state. The last on the list, Wade Carpenter Middle School in Nogales, has gotten a reasonable amount of press for the probable cheating. I wrote about it in March. The others are new to me.

But there's nothing new about the problem, and it's likely not limited to those seven schools. We've known for years that cheating on high stakes tests is going on around the country. A USA Today study done a few years ago found erase-and-replace patterns in lots of schools, and an AZ Republic study found instances here in Arizona. Most of them haven't been confirmed because, who wants to dig deep enough to find out if adults in some schools changed answers on high stakes tests? Not the schools, certainly. And not the state departments of education in most cases. Things like this are embarrassing and cause lots of bad publicity. Better to ignore the cheating entirely or take care of the problem behind closed doors.

This looks to me like one of those "Democracy is messy" issues, where some people claim they want to clean up the mess a bit. The problem is, proposed solutions often subvert the democratic process, which is messy by design. That's what's wrong with the latest policy revision suggested for the TUSD board.

Here's the basic story. Right now, TUSD board meetings begin with a call to the audience where people can stand up and say what they want to say, praising or condemning TUSD policies and people, making suggestions for district changes or, in some cases, blathering incoherently. After the audience members are finished having their say, board members can respond to what's been said. The change, proposed by board president Adelita Grijalva, is to keep the call to the audience as is, but eliminate the responses from board members. It's a wrong-headed idea. If it comes up for a vote, the board should vote it down.

[Full disclosure: I hate meetings, at least meetings with large groups of people and formal agendas. I'm less an agoraphobe than an agenda-phobe. Having to sit through the endless noodling, pontificating, extemporizing and self-aggrandizing makes me crazy. That's why I only show up at board meetings when there's something going on I'm really interested in. I know some people enjoy these things. Not me. So I only occasionally witness what goes on at the meetings first hand.]

[Worth noting: Approximately 3,000 teachers and 4,000 support staff in TUSD don't give a damn whether the board members talk or don't talk after the call to the audience. They're out there where the rubber meets the road, in the classrooms, the buildings, the grounds and the buses, going about the district's day-to-day business of teaching and supporting kids. Issues like this one make the news and are chewed over endlessly by me and others, and they can have lasting consequences, but they're not directly related to the good, often great, work going on in the schools every day.]

Yesterday was a good day for Dario Andrade Mendoza. His mom's deportation order was removed, and when the family returned home after court, they heard news that the Arizona Board of Regents had granted DREAMers in-state tuition at the three universities.

Both issues took many years to overcome.

"I haven't quite processed it, yet," he says. 

Andrade Mendonza graduated from Pima Community College—where DACA recipients have been paying in-state tuition since 2013—last May, with plans to transfer to the UA's College of Engineering. He applied and was accepted as an honors student (he's gotten outstanding grades since high school). The problem was that, at the time, DREAMers were considered nonresidents and had to pay the about $30,000 out-of-state tuition.

Alejandra Salazar was surprised to hear a Maricopa County Superior Court judge had ruled DREAMers are entitled to in-state tuition.

The decision Tuesday settled a two-year lawsuit former attorney general Tom Horne filed against the Maricopa County Community College District for granting students under Obama's 2012 DACA program in-state rates. 

Horne's suit argued the district violated Prop 300, a referendum approved by voters in 2006 that says non U.S. citizens and legal residents don't get in-state tuition or financial aid funded by the state. 

From an article on The Arizona Republic:

Judge Arthur Anderson ruled the Arizona law doesn't bar benefits to immigrants lawfully in the country, and that under federal law, the DACA students are lawfully present.

"Federal law, not state law, determines who is lawfully present in the U.S. ... The circumstance under which a person enters the U.S. does not determine that person's lawful presence here," the ruling says.

Maricopa County's 10 community colleges charge $84 per credit for in-state tuition, compared with $325 per credit for out-of-state tuition.

In years past, undocumented students had been able to attend community-college classes for $91 per credit as long as they took six or fewer credits per semester under a program originally intended for snowbirds. In 2012, the district's governing board ended that program and began charging the full out-of-state tuition rate.

"This has to do a lot with the work we have been doing," says Salazar, who is graduating from Pima Community College on May 21 with an associate's degree in business. (PCC gives DREAMers in-state tuition since fall 2013.)

She's right. DREAMers have been making a lot of noise for the past three years. And, especially now, as they anticipate the Arizona Board of Regents to vote on lower tuition for DACA recipients at the three state universities.

ABOR has chosen to follow the Prop 300 guidelines thus far, so DREAMers who want to attend the University of Arizona, Arizona State University or Northern Arizona University pay out-of-state rates, which at the UA totals more than $30,000 a year. 

In their June meeting, ABOR is scheduled to vote on a new proposal that would OK DREAMers to pay 150 percent of what undergraduate, in-state tuition is. But DREAMers demand for tuition equity.

"I think this is really going to influence the desision (ABOR) makes, because of the way the judge worded it, 'DACA recipients are lawfully in the country so they should be able to get in-state tuition.' It is the fair thing to do," she says. Salazar was 12 years old when her family moved to Tucson from Guaymas, Sonora. She has a younger brother who also attends Pima—they are fighting this side-by-side.

From the Republic:

Regents President Eileen Klein said Tuesday she expects to schedule a regents meeting soon to discuss the ruling. The regents are not a party in the lawsuit.

"We respect the court's decision around Maricopa Community College students, and we want to now read that court decision and figure out what it means for Arizona universities. ... We are going to move very quickly," Klein said.

She added that the regents will comply with state and federal law.

"From a financial point of view, we are going to be giving back to our state, getting higher paying jobs, we are going to be paying more taxes...it makes sense to make education accessible," she says. 

If that happens, Salazar hopes to transfer to the UA's Eller College of Management. Still, she's been maintaining good grades to apply for scholarships.