Friday's big education news is a funding package put together by AZ Schools Now to generate $950 million in additional money for schools without increasing the sales tax. That's enough to get us even with where we were in 2008.

Arizona is spending less per student now than it was in 2008 using inflation-adjusted numbers. Exactly how much depends on how you crunch the numbers. AZ Schools Now says it would take a billion dollars, more or less, to get us back to 2008 levels.

A billion, more or less, to get us back where we were. The sad thing is, we've been beggaring our schools for so long, a billion is significantly less than we need. We're at or near the bottom of the country in per-student funding, and adding a billion dollars would only raise us two notches. We'd move past Oklahoma and pull even with Mississippi.

Even though it's not enough, an added billion would mean a hell of a lot to our teachers and students. If we boosted teacher salaries by a few thousand dollars, maybe we could hold on to teachers who are fleeing the state for better pay. And get some credentialed teachers who have left the profession to return to the classroom. And lure a few more college students into teaching programs to increase the future teacher pool. Add in a few dollars more for classroom supplies and equipment, and we'd move closer to giving our children the education they deserve.

But you can be sure our Koch-addicted Governor Ducey, who fancies himself the "education governor," will fight a substantial increase in education funding to his last breath, especially if any of the money comes from income or business taxes. In Ducey's world, if schools get any more money, it has to come from State Land Trust Funds, sales taxes or local taxes. His most solemn pledge is to keep income and business taxes moving downward. Not surprisingly, that's also the bottom line of the Koch Brothers donor network which Ducey counts on to pony up a big pot of money during campaign season.

At the end of last year, Trump and Republicans in Congress were told they had a choice: come up with tax breaks for the rich or No money for you. Ducey knows he's facing a similar ultimatum, and he also knows people are predicting a Democratic wave election in 2018. If the tsunami is big enough, even Arizona could see Republicans swallowed up, especially if they don't have dark money to keep them afloat.

The 17th and 18th centuries in Europe are often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The early 20th century in the U.S. is known as the Gilded Age, a term recently dusted off and reclaimed for use in our own period of growing income inequality.

I suggest the period beginning June 16, 2015, the day Trump announced his candidacy for president, should be referred to as the Age of "What The Fuck?!"

Thirty-plus years of teaching in a high school classroom trained me to keep it clean, in public anyway. Though my private conversations are laced with profanity, I watch my language when I'm in the public square. I broke with my normal decorum when I used "bullshit" in a post last March, but I made sure to give the word academic respectability by referring to the book, On Bullshit, by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt.

Today I'm throwing away my decades-old restraint. Nearly every night as I watch cable news, I yell, "What The Fuck?!" at the latest Trump outrage. Mornings, I growl the phrase as I pore over the paper and check the latest on the web.

Prior to the advent of Trump, I was often angered by what goes on in our political world. More than angered. Outraged. Incensed. Horrified. But I was rarely this astonished before The Donald descended the Trump Tower escalator and walked onto the political stage. I find myself doing mental double and triple takes at the unbelievable, frightening absurdity of our president's actions and utterances. Political humor on Saturday Night Live is meant to be satire. Lately it feels more like reportage.

The Koch Brothers are already deeply invested in Arizona politics and education. With the 2018 election season already in swing, it's certain the Brothers and their cronies will once again invest millions of dollars in Arizona races. That makes this a good time to step back and take a look at what they and other libertarians think of public education and, more specifically, public "government schools," so we understand what candidates whose campaigns are supported by the Brothers will advocate for if they're elected.

The Koch Brothers have invested in libertarian-themed outposts at University of Arizona and Arizona State University, and the state has upped the ante by adding $5 million worth of government funding for the centers in its recent budget. The UA bastion, the Freedom Center, created a high school course favoring libertarian views on economics and politics which is currently being offered in four Southern Arizona school districts and a smattering of charter schools, all government funded institutions. Yet the Koch Brothers invested at least $1.8 million in defeating a 2012 ballot measure which would have increased K-12 funding by a billion dollars. The Brothers also invested at least $1.4 million in the 2014 gubernatorial campaign of Doug Ducey, who bills himself as the "education governor" but rejects any substantive increase in school funding.

What are the Koch Brothers' views on education, and where do they come from?

The best place to start is with Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning economist who is much revered by libertarians. In 1955, Friedman wrote The Role of Government in Education, which put the idea of school vouchers on the map and added the term "government schools" to our political lexicon. Friedman laid out the economic justification giving parents money for their children's educations and letting them spend it where they wish. He didn't advocate for getting rid of public schools entirely, but he put them at the end of his list of schools, almost as an afterthought.

"Such schools [funded by vouchers] would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, non profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units."

His combination of "some" and "even" with schools run "by governmental units" shows he didn't think many of them would survive in a voucher-financed competition with the private sector.

Friedman thought vouchers should be limited to the amount it costs to provide what he calls "general education for citizenship." Though he didn't define the term exactly, he was clearly thinking about the minimum education needed to survive in our society and participate in our democracy. Parents would have to pay for anything beyond "general education."

One positive byproduct of limiting government's financing of education, according to Friedman, could be that families, especially poorer families, would have fewer children. Since parents would have to pay for everything beyond a minimal education, he reasoned, they would think twice about the financial burden of having to pay for educating too many children.

The only negative Friedman saw concerning his voucher plan was that, after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating the desegregation of schools, parents were using vouchers to pay for whites-only private schools. Though he writes, "I deplore segregation and racial prejudice," Friedman claims that, just as every private business should have the right to hang out a "Whites only" sign in its window, schools should be allowed to be segregated. Let the invisible hand of the marketplace work its magic on schools rather than allow the heavy hand of government to impose desegregation.

Skip ahead 25 years to the 1980 presidential election.

It was September 2011, months before the Tucson Unified school board buckled under the weight of unrelenting political and financial pressure and voted to dismantle Mexican American Studies. Then-Attorney General Tom Horne, the man who started the anti-MAS crusade when he was Superintendent of Public Instruction, was part of a panel discussion on the TUSD program sponsored by the Arizona Mainstream Project. A press release for the event described what it called MAS's "real objectives."

"[T]hese include the overthrow of our government, ethnic resentment, and the redefining of 'la familia.' The TUSD Mexican-American Ethnic Studies program is widely seen as a 'militant' model to be spread throughout the country."

Horne was asked what TUSD could do to comply with then-Education Superintendent John Huppenthal's demands that the program comply with state law. He replied that the district's only option was "to terminate the program."

Horne said the program must be “destroyed,” invoking Cato’s obsessive call for warfare as a punch line, “Carthage must be destroyed.”

Horne is an educated man, so he would have understood the implications of his Carthage analogy. Ancient Carthage, on the North African coast, posed an existential threat to Rome during the Punic Wars — think Hannibal and his elephants crossing the Alps in 218 BC. Rome eventually triumphed over the darker-skinned invaders, destroying Carthage completely and selling its remaining population into slavery. The comparison of Carthage invading from the south being driven back and destroyed by a lighter skinned civilization, to white Arizona fighting off the invasion of its education system by Mexican American radicals is too obvious, and too racist, to be coincidental.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Wallace Tashima declared that the law, § 15-112, designed to destroy TUSD's Mexican American Studies, cannot be enforced, because it

"was enacted and enforced, not for a legitimate educational purpose, but for (i) an invidious discriminatory racial purpose, and (ii) a politically partisan purpose – to shut down the TUSD MAS Program – in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution."

It's a fitting irony that the tactics used by Tom Horne and John Huppenthal against MAS were repudiated in a court of law while both men have seen their reputations tarnished — one could even say, destroyed — because of a string of personal and professional improprieties compounded by their publicly exposed racism.

It's time to give money to a public school — $200 for an individual, $400 for a couple — and get 100 percent of it back at tax time. It won't cost you a penny. It's a tax credit, meaning you deduct it from the total you owe the state. If, for example, you do your taxes and find you owe the state $950, subtract your tax credit from that amount, and that's how much you'll pay. If you gave $400, you'll only pay $550. See? No cost to you.

So, who can you give the money to? Any district or charter school. You can even divvy your credit up among a number of schools.

What is the money used for? Schools can only use it for extracurricular or character education programs, not for classroom-based education. I don't much like that restriction, but that's the way the law was written. Still, lots of important education and recreation happens in schools outside the classroom—sports, music, art, science, field trips, clubs. Especially in schools with lots of children from low income families, the donations can be the difference between the kids participating or being left out.

How do you give? Most school districts have a link on their website's home page which has all the information you need. You can pay online with a credit card or download a form and mail in a check.

How do you choose the school or schools to give your money to? The answer is probably easy for people whose children are in school. For everyone else, my suggestion is, give it to school with lots of low income students. If parents and community members pay little or no state taxes because they don't make much money, they can't take advantage of the credit, which means their schools don't get a whole lot of this extra money, while schools in more affluent areas get many times more.

Thirteen months ago, November 15, 2016, I wrote my first post after Trump was elected president. I was stunned. Horrified. Terrified contemplating the future of our country in a Trump regime. In that post, I wrote that I knew awful things would happen with any Republican president in office who had a Republican Congress and a conservative-majority Supreme Court supporting him. Millions of Americans, probably hundreds of millions, would be hurt when conservative priorities were turned into law and executive actions. But as bad as that might be, it wasn't what I most feared. Eventually the damage could be mitigated or reversed when Democrats regained some of their lost power. My worst fears had to do with a slide toward Trump-led authoritarianism which would change the very nature of our constitutional democracy. The effects could be irreversible.

I titled the post THREAT Watch, short for Trump Human Rights Erosion And Termination Watch.

But hell, I was upset over the election results. Maybe I was being irrational, a sore loser overreacting to Trump's unexpected win and exaggerating the damage he could do.

I wish I could say my predictions were an overreaction. Looking back at the post from a year's distance, I see no reason to change a word. The Trump administration started out badly. It got worse. Right now, we stand at the most dangerous crossroads of his short presidency.

Here's what I wrote about the changes I thought were inevitable once Republicans dominated all three branches of the federal government.

All kinds of terrible things are going to happen with Trump in the White House, a Republican majority in both houses of Congress and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Taxes and business regulations will favor the rich even more than they do now. Entitlement programs for the poor will be cut dramatically. Comprehensive women's health care which includes abortion will be nonexistent in many parts of the country. Obamacare, Medicare and Social Security will be savaged.

Everything on my list has either happened or is in the works. Trump and his cabinet have gutted every economic and environmental regulation they've been able to get their hands on and ignored the rest. The tax cut is a big, wet, sloppy kiss on the mouth of every one-percenter in the country. And the trillion-plus deficit created by the tax cuts will accomplish the Republican goal of starving the budget beast, giving them the excuse they need to say we simply can't afford all that entitlement spending for welfare, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The gutting and cutting will only get worse when the legislature returns in January. And yet, disasters written into legislation and regulation aren't written in stone. Like the destruction brought by hurricanes, floods and fire, much of the damage can be repaired through time and effort.

More dire is the possibility the Trump presidency will damage the fabric of our society, which is not easily restored. I wrote about that next.

Last week's big political news was the upset victory of Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore in Alabama's election for U.S. senator. There was also an important but not widely reported drama behind the drama of the election itself: the question of whether digital records of the voters' paper ballots should be saved. Featured in that drama was John Brakey, the Tucson head of AUDIT-AZ.

Jones' win was sizable enough—about 20,000 votes, a 1.5 percent margin—that everyone accepts his victory except Moore and some of his most ardent supporters. But if the margin had been narrower and a recount was called for, the digital records question could have been a significant part of the story.

In Alabama, as in Arizona, voters' paper ballots are fed through optical scanners, which then count the votes electronically. The scanners can easily save the ballot images. It's just a matter of flipping a switch. But in Alabama, when the scanners are turned off, the images are destroyed. Brakey, working together with a group of Alabama voters and a lawyer with vast experience in election recounts, fought to have the images preserved. Dec. 11, the day before the election, a judge agreed and ordered that the images be saved. Later that day, the Alabama Supreme Court stepped in and blocked the lower court ruling.

Arizona's scanned ballot images used to be destroyed as well. However, according to Brakey, "In Arizona, it's no longer permissable because we sued Pima County and won the case." The decision to save the images was adopted in ten other Arizona counties which use the same machines.

The Koch Brothers, Charles and David, have been very much in Arizona news lately, something they and their associates don't much like. They prefer to operate by stealth, under cover of dark money. Despite their wishes, a number of Koch-related dots have surfaced lately, loosely connected to one another. Let's see if some patterns emerge.

The Koch Brothers helped fund University of Arizona's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, aka the Freedom Center. They put a million dollars, maybe a little more, into the libertarian-inflected outpost. It's not such a big deal by itself. A university center can't hire its own professors or create its own degree program like a full-fledged department, meaning its influence within the institution of higher education is minimal.

The Freedom Center created a high school course, Philosophy 101: Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship. It is being taught in a few school districts, charters and private schools — though it may be taught in one less district now that Tucson Unified decided the course will not be taught next year, unless the board decides to authorize it after further study. That being said, high school students are famously resistant to internalizing what they learn in class. With the course only being offered at a few schools, it's not like Arizona will have legions of students turning into born again libertarians after a yearlong indoctrination. Then again, the ultimate goal stated by the Templeton Foundation which funds the effort is to have the course reach a quarter of the state's high school students. With numbers like that, the course could have significant sway on the thinking of Arizona's youth.

In Arizona's 2017 state budget, which was quite stingy with university spending, the legislature included $2 million for the Freedom Center and another $3 million for ASU's similarly inclined School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. That taxpayer money on top of private donations from the Koch Brothers and other like-minded donors will help extend the influence of the two libertarian-infused outposts, though it's hard to say how much.

The Freedom Center is using some of its newfound state money to create a new department, the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science. Unlike the Center, it can hire professors and create degree programs, expanding its reach and making it a far more powerful force within the university.

The Supreme Court has decided money is a form of speech. In that spirit, let's see how Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks about education when she's off the clock by looking at some of the money the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation doled out in 2016. (To be completely fair, Betsy stepped down as chairwoman of the foundation on November 22, 2016, after the election, so she wasn't in charge the last 39 days of last year.)

The Foundation gave out $14,381,000 in 2016. Of that, 45 percent, about $6.5 million, went to Education.

Below is a partial list of the foundation's education-related giving as reported by Politico. It's heavy on school choice advocacy and religious schools.

Among the recipients: Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education ($52,000); the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian law firm that has funded school choice lawsuits across the country ($35,000); the Alliance for School Choice, which Betsy DeVos previously chaired ($290,000); Success Academy Charter Schools ($150,000); and West Michigan Aviation Academy, the charter school that Dick DeVos helped create ($65,000).

— On the political front, the DeVos foundation gave $155,000 and pledged another $150,000 to the Action Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a conservative think tank in Grand Rapids, Mich. It also funded the Great Lakes Education Foundation, which advocates for school choice policies in Michigan, with a $200,000 grant. And in Washington, the foundation supported the American Enterprise Institute with a $750,000 donation.

A sampling of fourth graders in countries around the world took the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test in reading in 2016. If you want to see the numbers broken down into all kinds of subunits, here they are. But the bottom line is, U.S. scores are flat. Actually, they dropped back to 2001 levels after going up a few points—not a whole lot, just a few points—on the 2006 and 2011 tests. Twelve countries outperformed us. You can find the top twelve list at the end of the post. Another fifteen differed by a few points, but the difference isn't statistically significant.

So, we're back on the same square we were sitting on when our barrage of high stakes testing began in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. All that testing, all that test prepping, all that time taken away from other subjects, open-ended discussions and the chance for children to be children out on the playground, and we're back on the same square we started on. It's possible the whole Common Core thing brought down the small gains we made from 2001 to 2011, but that's a tough one to assess, especially with such the small upward bump. The important takeaway for me is, testing was supposed to prod teachers to teach better and administrators to administer better, and the differences would show up in the test scores. After fifteen years, that looks like a false promise.

So, do we scale back testing to a more reasonable level—say, take a snapshot at a few grade levels every few years rather than testing every student at every grade every damn year? Sounds like a good idea to me. Unfortunately, it's not likely in the short term. The educational/industrial complex makes all kinds of money from selling tests and materials related to testing, and it's not likely to give up its cash cow without a fight.

The Top Twelve: Here are the top twelve scoring countries, starting from the top and working down: Russian Federation, Singapore, Hong Kong CHN, Ireland, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland GBR, Norway, Chinese Taipei CHN, England GBR, Latvia, Sweden.