State Sen. Steve Farley and state Reps. Sally Ann Gonzales and Victoria Steele attended the Tucson Unified School District board meeting this evening to give a legislative update on a bill that seeks to defund desegregation programs at several state school districts, including TUSD, which would take the "biggest hit" at $64 million cut from the annual budget.

While Farley, who is a TUSD parent, expressed his discontent at the fact that TUSD board member Michael Hicks sent a letter to legislators urging them to pass that bill, Hicks stood up and, pretty much, threw a handout on the podium and told Farley to read it, which the state senator did not. But it wasn't until Farley suggested Hicks to resign his position that the board member lost it.

He slammed his chair and mumbled that he was leaving, but then less than 10 seconds later he changed his mind. "You know what, I'm not leaving," Hicks said while some meeting attendees laughed at his shenanigans. 

On Feb. 11, SB 1371 passed a Senate Finance Committee hearing, which TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez attended to defend the hell of the desegregation programs' funding. The committee's chairwoman, state Sen. Debbie Lesko, who is also the sponsor of the bill, agreed to add an amendment accommodating to TUSD's special needs, according to a phone interview I had with Sanchez while he drove back to Tucson from Phoenix that afternoon. The district still has to obey a federal court order and is under the Unitary Status Plan. Sanchez says without those funds, the programs they offer to reach unitary status wouldn't survive.

Farley thanked Sanchez for attending the hearing. 

But, "Our purpose was undercut severely when I noticed that one of your board members, Mr. Hicks had signed in a testimony to the members of the committee asking for the bill to pass, asking us to cut $64 million from our own district," Farley said. "Giving comfort to those who would shut down public education in Arizona, and, in my mind, compromised his oath of office to protect and defend the students, teachers and parents of (TUSD)..."

Right in the middle of that, Hicks stood up and grabbed that handout or sign I mentioned earlier.

"You do not believe that your oath of office for the TUSD board involves protecting and defending students and parents of the district? You have damaged those efforts, and frankly Mr. Hicks, your signs are cute, but if you are going to damage our children like this, you are not for kids and I believe you should resign your position," Farley continued. The crowd started clapping.

Hicks said that was an attack not a legislative update like it was described on the meeting's agenda. 

Before Farley arrived, Hicks had already gotten it during the call to the audience, including one of the attendees who said Hicks wants to screw children in low-income neighborhoods out of a good education. And someone else called Hicks a racist. 

When it was time for board members to respond to criticism, Hicks had an essay to read.

He thanked the speakers who shared their views.

"I do support the concept of schools receiving desegregation funding, what I don't support is the mismanagement and the misappropriation of the desegregation funding that TUSD has been receiving for over 30 years...but I am more than willing to compromise on this issue," Hicks said. But right in the middle of his remarks, the speakers in the room mysteriously let out a very loud noise that sounded like a phone off the hook or like when you call someone and the line is busy.

"Really?" Hicks said. He kept reading but that noise was quite loud until nearly the end of Hicks' defense so I'm unclear of how that ended.

He tried to argue that while he is outside, in the real world, he had been told that he is not representing the board. However, the note he sent to legislators supporting the bill was signed, "TUSD Board Member Michael Hicks."

"We always represent TUSD because that is the oath that we took," TUSD Clerk Kristel Foster said. 

The bill isn't due for a vote for now. Farley said the process on that has slowed down, but until the state Legislature officially kills the bill, it means that it could get picked up again any time.

"This is a bill being pushed by the Arizona Tax Research Association. ATRA is funded entirely by the big utilities...their entire purpose is to reduce property tax burden from their funders," said Farley, a member of the Senate Finance Committee. (The TUSD desegregation money comes from a local property tax.) "You might want to have a word with (Tucson Electric Power) as to why they are supporting this effort to undercut school districts...they do this in a number of bills that come forward every year and they are not concerned with the effects of reducing this funding."

(Added after publication) The Goldwater Institute is also behind the legislation, and at the meeting, Farley said the group wants to get rid of public schools and base education completely on private institutions.

Democratic state Reps. Stefanie Mach, Bruce Wheeler , Randy Friese and a few others called into the meeting to also weigh in on the issue.

From the $64 million TUSD gets for desegregation programs, about $11 million go to magnet schools' programs, students outreach and recruiting services. Then there's about $8 million for things like translation and interpretation (ESL, etc.); another close to $8 million go to drop-out prevention and programs that aim to close the academic achievement gap.

Here's the thing about adjunct faculty and working graduate students who are teaching assistants: they save the University of Arizona good money.

Last week, I reported that merely about 25 percent of the UA's budget expenditures goes toward instruction: wages to TAs, adjunct staff, and others at the forefront of students' education, who oftentimes work equally as much and as hard as an actual professor whose salary could be near or in the six digits.

These groups are stronger than ever, especially after news of more budget cuts coming to the UA (could be about $22 million if Gov. Doug Ducey's wish is granted), demanding the UA administration transparency to know where the hell the remaining 75 percent of the money is going. 

Classrooms feel these budget cuts the most, so why not include adjunct, TAs, or undergrads trying to make ends meet, in the conversations of how the shortfall absorption plays out within the institution?

In the meantime, the Arizona Board of Regents approves bonuses for UA President Ann Weaver Hart, who's salary package is already near the $500,000 realm, as thanks for her "accomplishments." Last year, she got a $40,000 bonus. ABOR is also put in a difficult position, where they propose a budget for the universities, but the state Legislature has the last word on the cuts...It's just a mess.

This is exactly the reason I ignore all envelopes I get from the UA asking me to donate money as a former student, because it doesn't end up in the classrooms. A lot of it ends up in big, fat salaries for the administration, and they couldn't be more detached from the reality of adjunct, grads and undergrads.

Tomorrow is National Adjunct Walkout Day, a form of protest that's been greatly promoted by the Service Employees International Union—a group fighting for better wages, benefits, among other demands in academic jobs—and the UA adjunct is officially participating, as well as graduate students and all other allies.

From the event's Facebook page:

We know the University of Arizona greatly values its students and recognizes the direct link between student learning outcomes and teachers’ working conditions. Let’s come together to re-commit to education and all Wildcats.

Please join your fellow faculty, staff, students, and community members and don’t forget to wear red to show your support!

The event is happening from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Alumni Plaza, near the UA Mall.

The state and the UA have to meditate on the priorities...is it education or is it administrative pay or is it a nice REC Center? 

Also, here is a list of all UA salaries. Have fun. 

Conservatives have been talking for years about how our "failing government schools" waste money, but they didn't start cutting K-12 education budgets in earnest until they had the 2008 financial crisis to blame. "It's not our fault. We can't afford to keep funding schools at the current level with our state revenues plummeting." The implicit promise was that school funding would increase when the economy turned around. But now that things are trending upward, the new message is, "We're going to keep cutting money for schools. Get used to it."

We've been getting hints from conservatives that they want to keep cutting education funding in Arizona and elsewhere, but now things are moving into a new phase: explaining why, no matter what happens to the economy, we have to continue cutting. Here's a new document that puts a pseudo-academic face on the idea: Turn and Face the Strain: Age Demographic Change and the Near Future of American Education. It's another steaming pile of bad data and worse conclusions from Matthew Ladner, who had the honor of receiving the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award for shoddy educational research from the National Education Policy Center in 2011. Ladner was the education guy at the Goldwater Institute, where he was instrumental in shaping bad education policy in Arizona, until he became Senior Advisor at Jeb Bush's conservative education reform/privatization organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education. And Ladner was one of the three privatization experts who formed Ducey's education transition team where, I'm sure, he whispered this idea in Ducey's ear more than once.

Here's Ladner's thesis in a nutshell: We have a growing number of old people and young people in our future, so face it, we're going to keep cutting funding for education—and if we're going to cut funding, we should put more of it into charter schools and private school vouchers.

For the first 25 pages of Ladner's report, he barely mentions education. It's all about the growing number of old people and young people in the country and the put-upon workers who have to shoulder the load of taking care of them. No mention, of course, of income inequality or the shrinking tax burden on corporations and the rich. It's all about how regular folks will see their taxes go up if we don't curtail our extravagant spending on all those dependent young and old people.

What we need, according to Ladner, is "a virtuous cycle of climbing [educational] outcomes and declining costs." In Ladner's form of magical thinking, we can cut costs and increase achievement at the same time. He didn't suggest we should give everyone a magic pony—because, I guess, that would be ridiculous. At one time not too long ago, Ladner suggested—I'm not making this up—that we could save money if we rounded up all the great teachers, who he called "rock stars," paid them six figure salaries, then put 40 or 50 kids in each of their classes, because Ladner, who has never taught, believed a great teacher can get great results with 40 to 50 first graders in class. I haven't heard him talking about that since he started pushing Education Savings Accounts (aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts), so I guess he decided it was a ridiculous idea. As usual, he's sure his latest idea is a winner, proven by the studies he puts together citing facts carefully tailored to fit his conclusions.

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman is an economist and a college prof, so he's very qualified to talk about the intersection of education, economics and the job market. He gets it right in today's column. His basic thesis: today's weak job market and low wages aren't the fault of a broken education system.

Just to be clear: I’m in favor of better education. Education is a friend of mine. And it should be available and affordable for all. But what I keep seeing is people insisting that educational failings are at the root of still-weak job creation, stagnating wages and rising inequality. This sounds serious and thoughtful. But it’s actually a view very much at odds with the evidence, not to mention a way to hide from the real, unavoidably partisan debate.

As an educator, I'm expected to proclaim, "Education is the answer." Just give people excellent schools, I'm supposed to say—from quality kindergartens through a strong undergraduate degree and throw in the possibility of grad school—and people's vocational problems will take care of themselves. Good paying jobs will always be there for the well schooled. But I won't say it, because it ain't so. A good education is  necessary, almost essential, to land most good paying, personally rewarding jobs, but it's not sufficient. Wages have stagnated for the highly educated as well as the under educated, and there simply aren't enough jobs paying solid middle class salaries out there for everyone to have a nice, tasty piece of the economic pie. These problems are in the marketplace, not the schools.

Is there a skills gap, too few educated people to fill open jobs? No, says Krugman.

[T]here’s no evidence that a skills gap is holding back employment. After all, if businesses were desperate for workers with certain skills, they would presumably be offering premium wages to attract such workers. So where are these fortunate professions? You can find some examples here and there. Interestingly, some of the biggest recent wage gains are for skilled manual labor—sewing machine operators, boilermakers—as some manufacturing production moves back to America. But the notion that highly skilled workers are generally in demand is just false.

Earlier today, Gov. Doug Ducey got rid of the requirement to pass the AIMS test in order to graduate high school, and this might have officially ended the beef for now between Ducey and Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas, because she was very happy about that decision.

"I congratulate the Legislature and Governor Ducey for removing this last vestige of high stakes testing," she said in a statement. "I hope this decision relieves much of the stress that parents and their children face when a high stakes test determines whether or not a student can graduate from high school. High academic standards and tests that provide information and accountability are very important, but placing all the responsibility and stress on individual students for the success of our educational system is unfair."

Either way, the state had replaced the AIMS with the AzMERIT (which Douglas isn't a fan of), but students still had to pass the reading, math and writing portion of the AIMS to get a high school diploma through Dec. 31, 2016. Since Ducey signed the legislation into law, as of immediately that is no longer the case. But they do have to pass a civics test, which was also signed into law by Ducey last month.

"Testing will still be available next week for those students wishing to take AIMS for scholarship eligibility or other personal reasons. Parents or families with questions about testing availability in these situations should contact their student's school," the Arizona Department of Education said in a release.

Now, Douglas is proposing legislation to review all state academic standards. There is a bill in the state Senate, SB 1305, which would establish a committee of teachers, parents and other education stakeholders to annually evaluate targeted standards. 

“As we move away from Common Core, it is important to do so in a deliberate fashion so that we stop the pattern of creating new standards only to abolish them every few years,” Douglas said in a statement. “This endless cycle leaves schools in a constant state of upheaval and causes undue stress for students and teachers.”

From ADE:

As part of the proposed review process, members of the committee would hold public meetings across the state. All public comment received at those meetings would be analyzed and used to generate proposed changes. Before submitting final recommendations to the State Board of Education, the committee would seek feedback at an additional series of public hearings.

“This process will ensure that the academic goals created for students are set by Arizonans, for Arizonans,” Douglas said. “I hope to partner with legislators, parents and educators to ensure as smooth a transition as possible so that teachers can get back to teaching and students can get back to learning.”

That bill made it through the Senate Education Committee on Feb. 12, and is now on hold until the entire Senate considers it.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas was in Tucson yesterday to meet, for the second time since stepping into office, with Tucson Unified School District Superintendent H.T. Sanchez and do some classroom visiting at Rincon High School.

I imagine the visit was related to the notice of noncompliance sent to the district in January by former schools chief and anonymous angry blogger John Huppenthal, since Douglas sat in a history class taught from the Mexican-American perspective.

TUSD is supposed to clear by March 4 all issues the state has with how certain teachers are implementing history and English from a Mexican-American and African-American perspective.

As we know by now, if the district doesn't comply, they could lose 10 percent of monthly state aide. 

The pair originally met last month in Phoenix to discuss a plan and the reasons TUSD was found in violation of the state's anti-Mexican-American studies law. During that meeting,  Douglas invited Sanchez to be a part of the Latino Education Advisory Committee, which will ensure state courses and programs have a Latino presence. 

“I continue to be encouraged that Superintendent Sanchez is working with the state to bring coursework into compliance with the law,” Douglas said in a statement. “It was very valuable for both of us to make an unannounced visit together to monitor the progress of these changes in one of the classrooms. I hope we can continue our cooperation, bring the coursework into legal compliance, and build a strong and lasting relationship with TUSD.”

Sanchez had similar words.

“Our conversation was very positive and constructive,” he said. “I feel our teachers are on the right path. The students at Rincon were engaged in learning and the teacher whose class we visited had prepared and delivered a thoughtful lesson.”

Douglas also went to Florence, and today she will visit Fort Huachuca and Hereford. 

Two people told me they took a robocall poll a few days ago. Apparently there were four questions. Two were a variation on the question, "Do you think the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction position should be elected or appointed?" The other two asked what the respondent thinks of Diane Douglas and Doug Ducey.

Well, that was fast. The poll is clearly a response to the fight over last week's firing and reinstatement of two Board of Education employees, which means it must have been created over the weekend. My understanding is, robopolls are cheap, quick and easy to put together, meaning they don't take much in the way of time, effort or deep pockets, so lots of people could be behind it. Logic tells me it's people in the Ducey camp. They would be most interested in testing the waters to see if they could make the Ed Supe a gubernatorial appointee, as the position is in many states, so they would never again have to face choices like, say, the anti-Common Core and loose cannon Douglas or the progressive, Democratic David Garcia.

So, is Ducey money behind the poll? Is it the Arizona Chamber of Commerce? The Lisa Graham Keegan/Craig Barrett coalition? The "shadow faction of charter school operators" Douglas wrote about, headed by Board of Ed president and founder of Challenge Charter School Greg Miller working in tandem with the Arizona Charter Schools Association? All of the above?

It would be very interesting to learn the answer.

Pass the popcorn, folks—or maybe the nachos and beer, depending on your choice of couch-side refreshments as you watch your favorite sport. For political junkies like me who prefer political sparring to sports, this looks like the first few minutes of a classic matchup.

Ed Supe Diane Douglas fired two Board of Education employees. Then Ducey reinstated them and the Board of Ed agreed, with Douglas casting the only dissenting vote. Douglas made a semi-conciliatory statement in a press conference, and some people reported that as a sign she was backing down. How they got that impression after reading her bare-knuckles press release accusing Ducey of refusing to take her calls, saying he'd created a "shadow faction of charter school operators" and claiming he was hoping for low state test scores to drive students to charters, I'll never know. Them's fighting words, not the statement of someone who's making nice.

The reinstated employees returned to work Tuesday. Douglas could have blocked the door like George Wallace when he tried to stop school integration, or she could have barred them from their computers, but she didn't. Instead, she let the board employees in, then insisted that they couldn't discuss education matters with the rest of the staff and, more important, had to report directly to her, not to the board. That's not backing down. Backing down would have been if she tried to block their way and failed. That's changing tactics in an attempt to better her position.

It turned out to be a clever tactical move, because it forced the Board of Education to react.

In a response delivered Tuesday evening, attorney Mary O’Grady, who represents the board, told Douglas attorney Steve Tully that the board has concerns with Douglas’ requests of the two employees. She emphasized that Thompson and Vazquez work for the board and that Douglas cannot direct their work in a way that undermines the board’s duties and authority.

“Just as you noted that you will oppose efforts to undermine the Superintendent’s statutory authority, the Board will also oppose efforts to undermine its authority or any failure to adhere to the Superintendent’s responsibilities to implement the policies established by the board,” O’Grady wrote.

O’Grady emphatically rejected Douglas’ insistence that Thompson and Vazquez must report directly to her.

“The Feb. 16 letter asserts that Ms. Thompson and Ms. Vazquez ‘report to Superintendent Douglas.’ No, they don’t,” O’Grady said, referencing Tully’s letter to her on Monday.

Among the many inflammatory statements in the press release Ed Supe Diane Douglas shot off after the Board of Education employees she tried to fire were reinstated by Ducey, was this line:

"Clearly [Ducey] has established a shadow faction of charter school operators . . ."

Sounds very conspiratorial, which fits with Douglas' Tea Party mindset. But here's the question. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton's assertion during the 90s: Is there a Vast Charter School Conspiracy in Arizona and around the country? Well, if hundreds of millions of private dollars spent creating astroturf groups pushing charter schools, more millions spent on election campaigns to buy candidates' loyalty and still more millions spent directly on financial support of charter schools to give them a financial edge over "government schools" amount to a conspiracy, the answer is yes. And if the troika who formed Ducey's education transition team is any indication — all very pro-charter, none of them a strong advocate for the school districts which educate 80 percent of our children — Ducey is deep in the bowels of the conspiracy.

Some charter schools are perfectly legit and are spending every dollar of their resources to educate their students the best way they know how, and doing a good job of it. But other people running charters are making a killing off the tax dollars they receive from the state to run their schools, and the moneyed and politically influential people who cheerlead for charter schools are aiding and abetting these profiteers by trying to hush up stories about the money machine and making sure the regulatory system is as weak and ineffectual as possible.

Here's one example which came to my attention through a long conversation thread I participated in on a Facebook post: Primavera Online High School (not to be confused with Primavera Foundation of Tucson. There's no connection between the two). Primavera Online High is one of those virtual schools without buildings, where students work on computers out of their homes. The student-teacher ratio is 40 to 50 students per teacher. Should online schools with half as many teachers as most other schools and no school buildings get more-or-less the same amount per student from the state as other charter schools or district schools? Well, they do, and that leaves them with a lot of money left over to play around with.

It's a variation on the old joke. "An Arizona Republican walks into a Fox News studio. So, he says to the bartender newscaster..."

Mark Brnovich went on "Fox and Friends" on January 13 talking about Obama's executive action on immigration, and in the course of the interview he said,

"I know in states like Arizona it's estimated that 10 percent or more of the students in our public schools are here in the country illegally."

Big number, 10 percent. One in ten students. The Republic put the assertion to the test in one of its Fact Checks and gave it No Stars: Unsupported. Most probably our attorney general, whose job description, I'm guessing, includes being factually accurate, mixed up the immigration status of children with the status of their parents.

For Arizona, the [Pew Research Center] report estimates children with at least one undocumented immigrant parent make up 11 percent of the public-school population.

According to the Republic, the progressive Urban Institute puts the number of undocumented students in Arizona at closer to 2.2 percent. The conservative anti-immigration group, Federation for American Immigration Reform, puts it at about 5 percent. If Brnovich's number is twice what the mad dogs at FAIR say, that means he's got it really, really wrong.

But, you know, he said it on Fox News, so it's sure to become part of the legend repeated ad infinitum by the right. "On Fox News they said..." "Our attorney general said..." So it's gotta be true.