A story from ProPublica came across my desktop today, For-Profit Schools Reward Students for Referrals and Facebook Endorsements. It's about a for-profit charter school in Florida where students get a $25 gift card for every new student they find for the school.

Such incentives are rampant among for-profit operators of public alternative high schools like North Nicholas, which serves students at risk of dropping out. These schools market aggressively to attract new students, especially during weeks when the state is tallying enrollment for funding purposes. They often turn their students into promoters, dangling rewards for plugs on social media, student referrals or online reviews, a ProPublica-USA Today investigation found. Some also offer valuable perks simply for enrolling.

It reminded me of a story Ann-Pedersen told in 2013 on the cable access program she and I used to put together, Education: The Rest of the Story (It's a three minute video if you want to watch). As her son was walking out of his Tucson Unified middle school toward the end of the school year, he was handed a flier promising him $100 if he enrolled in the new charter, Rising School.

Tucson's Rising School currently has about 80 students. So far as I can tell, it no longer offers students $100 to enroll, but it does offer them $100 if they have perfect attendance for the first hundred days of school. I don't suppose it's a coincidence that enrollment during the first hundred days is what determines schools' state funding.

And whether the money goes to students for enrolling or for having perfect attendance, that $100 comes out of the state's funding for the school.

I don't know if this kind of thing is common in Arizona, but like so many questionable charter school practices, it looks like it's perfectly legit.

The results are in. The Arizona Department of Education published a list of all the schools getting results-based funding for the 2017-18 school year. There aren't any real surprises for those of us who have been paying attention since the bill passed during the last legislative session. As expected, the list is heavy with schools filled with students from well-to-do families.

But, as skewed as this year's funding is toward more affluent Arizonans, this is likely be the most equitable spread of results-based money ever. Indications are, things will get far more inequitable starting next year. Hold that thought while I go through this year's numbers.

Just under 300 schools will receive results-based funding—about 17 percent of the state's district and charter schools. Between 35 and 40 percent of them have fewer than 30 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch even though only 18 percent of the state's schools fit into that category. On the other end of the economic spectrum, about 10 percent of schools on the list have more than 80 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch, even though over 30 percent of the state's schools fit into that category.

That means, if you're in one of the schools in the highest rent districts, you're far more likely to reap the benefits of results-based funding than if you're in a school in the poorer parts of town. You're also far more likely to be white and far less likely to be struggling with the English language or have learning disabilities.

That's what things look like at the economic extremes. If we look at all the schools on the list, the story stays pretty much the same. A majority of the state's schools—about 57 percent—have more than half their students on F/R lunch, yet they make up only about a third of the schools on the list. The other two-thirds are drawn from the 43 percent of schools with fewer low income students.

But wait 'til next year. As I said earlier, the numbers will only get more skewed toward the well-off and white.

Those are the basics for this year. Now, let's look at what results-based funding means in dollars and cents, then why the funds will favor schools in high rent districts even more in following years.

It's something of an obsession with me, writing about AzMERIT scores. A new set of scores, a new use of the scores, a new news story about the scores, and there I am with another post or two or three. So here's yet another post, a rambling discussion on why the tests, the way they're reported on and the way they're used drive me nuts.

Let me start by getting something out of the way. The tests in and of themselves aren't bad. They give a reasonably accurate reflection of students' abilities in reading, writing and math. During my last few years teaching in a district outside of Portland, Oregon, I had to give the Oregon version of the high stakes standardized tests to my sophomore English classes. I did a pretty good job of predicting what my students' scores would be based on what I had learned about their reading and writing abilities during the eight months before the tests, which means the test scores generally reflected the students' skill levels. There were a significant number of exceptions, where students got higher or lower scores than I thought they would, which tells me the tests aren't always accurate on an individual level. But when you're looking at large numbers of students, and assuming everything is on the level—no "helpful encouragement" from teachers during the tests, no erase-and-replace of students' answers by staff after the students hand in their tests — their average scores tell you something about their skill levels relative to other groups of students.

Now, with that out of the way, the problems. The first is, the high stakes nature of the tests distorts the schools' curriculum and, sometimes, the test results. Since teachers, schools and school districts are judged by their students' scores, they're compelled to do everything they can to get the best results possible. That means teaching to the test, which means spending inordinate amounts of time and energy giving students the narrow skills needed to fill in the right bubbles. The give and take of loosely directed discussions is a luxury only to be indulged in when time allows. Creative pursuits, long term projects, even time on the playground are secondary to the central focus of the classroom: preparing students for test day. Teachers become mechanical skill-and-drill sergeants, which is not what they thought they signed up for when they decided to join the teaching profession. Students are encouraged to become robotic, learning how to be successful at performing variations of one repetitive task — answering short questions by picking the right answer from a short list of possibilities. The classroom is a different place — I would say a worse place — thanks to high stakes tests. And, sad to say, all that sweat, toil and tedium generally only adds a few points to students' scores and even less to students' actual skill levels, and since pretty much everyone is doing it, it's a wash. Every class, school and district's ranking in the state stays pretty much the same as it would have been if no one paid any attention to the test until test day.

And sometimes, the pressure to raise test scores leads individual teachers, or whole schools and districts, to cheat. Some schools and districts have been caught at it. Teachers and administrators in Atlanta went to jail for changing answers on student tests year after year. Others do it but haven't been caught. A series of articles in USA Today a few years back talked about a nationwide analysis of erasures on student tests and found that in many schools, including in Arizona, the number of wrong answers erased and replaced by right answers was as likely to be random as it was likely that the school be struck by lightning on test day. Though state departments of education rarely look deeply into suspicious scores, Arizona's ADE found nine schools where the evidence is strong enough, it's highly probable students' test papers were altered. Most likely, those schools are the visible tip of a larger problem. And that's just the most easily detectable form of cheating. There are lots of undetectable ways to boost scores without increasing the students' skill levels.

Cheating can become addictive, and additive. If a teacher cheats one year, how does he/she go back to being honest the next year without having to explain the drop in scores? If third grade teachers cheat, fourth grade teachers look bad if their students score lower than they did back in the third grade—and so on, up the grades. Educators are basically an honest, moral, but not necessarily courageous lot. If you put their salaries and/or their jobs on the line, many of them are liable to do what it takes to push those scores up.

In early September, it was an article in the Star praising Catalina Foothills District for having the highest AzMERIT scores in Pima County. Last week it was the same thing in the print edition of the Tucson Weekly. Both articles gave Cat Foothills' Assistant Superintendent multiple paragraphs to pat herself and her district on the back.

From the articles, I learned the district achieved its high ratings through its "commitment to rigorous curriculum in schools, ongoing evaluations for its students and professional development for teachers." Also by "developing a curriculum that considers the end goal and works backwards from there to achieve that goal." And by using "authentic real-world scenarios." Wow. Good stuff. Other districts should consider using similar strategies if they hope to match Cat Foothills' success. Especially Tucson Unified, which apologized for its poor scores in both articles and swore it would try to do better.

But I'm not sure Cat Foothills is the district we should be looking to for pedagogical advice. Among its seven schools, the highest passing rate is 77 percent for Language Arts and 74 percent for Math. In a district outside of Pima County, three schools topped that, with Language Arts passing rates from 79 to 84 percent and Math passing rates from 77 to 85 percent. We should really be asking the superintendent in Scottsdale how the district manages to pull such spectacular achievement from its students. I know Scottsdale isn't in Southern Arizona, but listen, if it's getting results, the whole state could benefit by learning more about the secrets of its success.

And while we're at it, we should also be asking a low-scoring Phoenix-area district how it plans to improve. One of its schools has a 16 percent passing rate in Language Arts and a 17 percent passing rate in Math, and other schools are in the teens and twenties. We need to hear the educational improvement plans for . . . Scottsdale? Really? The same Scottsdale district with those 80 percent-plus passing rates?

Coming up next weekend: It's the second annual Dusk Music Festival, featuring more than a dozen acts on Friday, Oct. 6, and Saturday, Oct. 7. The Weekly is highlighting some of the performing artists ahead of the festival kickoff. Today: DJ Jazzy Jeff!

"In west Philadelphia born and raised, on the playground was where I spent most of my days."

DJ Jazzy Jeff wrote lyrics for the Fresh Prince that were true for himself. West Philly native, DJ Jazzy Jeff has has a successful career spinning records and working with Will Smith as well as opening his own production company called A Touch of Jazz. As a critically acclaimed DJ, he has won a DMC Championship and has many Grammy and American Music Awards and nominations. He will take the stage at Dusk Music Festival on Friday, October 6 at 5:55 p.m.

For more information about DJ Jazzy Jeff at Dusk Music Festival, click here!

When the Friday night lights are turned on in high school football stadiums around the country, you can bet students, parents and staff will be asking themselves, "What should we do if some players decide to take a knee during the National Anthem?"

Most probably, the right answer is, they should do nothing. Student athletes have the right to this kind of protest, according to an article in Education Week. Students cannot be forced to participate in what the school considers acts of patriotism. (I would argue that taking a knee to protest injustice and to urge the country to be a better place is a patriotic act, but that's a different issue.)

In the 1943 case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a school would violate the free speech rights of its student, a Jehovah's Witness, if it forced him to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

"To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds," Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his majority opinion.

Schools can't require students to observe patriotic rituals in the classroom, and their authority to discipline them for such acts diminishes even more at an athletic event, where behavior like shirtless cheering is "a regular occurrence," Frank LoMonte, the former executive director of the Student Press Law Center, told me last year.

And school's authority to discipline students for silent anthem protests isn't heightened if those students are taking part in a privilege, like being members of a football team, he said. Courts have held that public institutions can't withhold privileges, like employment at a public agency, if employees exercise free-speech rights, like refusing to recite an anti-communist pledge, he said, arguing that the precedent applies to student athletes.

"You can't condition a privilege on forsaking your constitutional right any more than you can condition a right or a benefit," LoMonte said.

This isn't to say that schools can't discipline, suspend or expel students for taking a knee. Schools take disciplinary actions against students for questionable reasons all the time. It's just that they're very likely to get their asses sued by a local lawyer working pro bono, or if they really get lucky, the ACLU may step in to make a Federal Case out of it—literally. Chances are good, the schools will lose.

Plastic, paint, chemicals, tires, trash, batteries, appliances, human waste and even some body parts. All of these were incinerated by the US military and private contractors in burn pits during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Thousands of soldiers who were exposed to the toxic smoke returned home and found themselves sick with respiratory diseases and rare cancers.

Delay, Deny, Hope You Die, a recently completed documentary about the burn pits and their effects on soldiers, is screening at The Loft Cinema (3233 E. Speedway Blvd.) ,at 7:15 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 12.

Director/producer Greg Lovett first heard about the story when he read Joseph Hickman’s book, The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers, two years ago.

“When I read the book, I was just really disturbed and mad and upset that this is going on, and that nobody is really doing anything about and nobody really knows about it,” he said.

Lovett started the documentary a year later, and it took about a year to complete. The film interviews doctors, lawyers, journalists and sick soldiers, like Sgt. Brian Alvarado, who was exposed to the burn pits as a Marine in in Iraq and now has cancer, hyperthyroidism and a feeding tube that leaves him unable to work.

In a promotional clip of the film, Hickman explains that soldiers were producing at least nine pounds of trash a day in the early days of the way, and the military turned to burn pits to dispose of waste. But a temporary solution became a permanent health hazard when the burn pits remained open despite new options becoming available.

“I think most people don’t understand that this is even happening,” Lovett said. “Maybe with knowledge comes change”

Here’s the thing: in order to make sure the film’s one-night-only screening at the Loft actually happens, the showing needs to sell 74 tickets by Oct. 1. Buy your ticket today here for $10 and click here to view the trailer.

Teacher shortages are a national problem. According to a recent survey, the number one reason teachers give for leaving the profession—55 percent of them—is dissatisfaction. By comparison, financial considerations are cited by 18 percent. Between the top and bottom are Financial/personal reasons, Retirement, and Pursuing another job, in that order.

This isn't new news. It's from the 2012 School and Staffing Survey put together by the National Center for Educational Statistics along with a follow-up survey in 2013. It came up again in a recent panel discussion in Washington DC, and sadly, it's more relevant today than it was five years ago. As with any survey, the numbers are approximate. General dissatisfaction covers low salaries as well as a host of other issues, and in a place like Arizona with its bottom-of-the-barrel salaries, money concerns certainly rank higher than elsewhere.

But as a teacher who retired just when our national obsession with high stakes testing was revving up and class sizes were climbing, I'm certain a growing sense of dissatisfaction pervades the teaching profession, driving many a gifted teacher out of the classroom and making potential new teachers think twice about going into the field of education.

When I went into teaching and began my 30-plus year career, it was because I wanted to teach. I wanted to be part of helping young people learn. I wanted to be part of helping young people grow. I wanted the freedom to shape my curriculum in a way that suited my interests and teaching style so I could maximize my enthusiasm and effectiveness.

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about the conservative crusade against the  Political Correctness. Then I thought about how conservatives go nuts over ideas and actions they don't think are "American" and jingoistic enough. Same idea, different targets. So I asked myself, "What can I call the conservative version of political correctness? Can I come up with a two word phrase with the initials 'P.C.'? . . . I got it! Patriotic Correctness."

If a football player takes a knee during the National Anthem, conservatives go crazy, because he's not showing the proper respect for the country. "How unpatriotic!" Could it be he thinks it's patriotic to point out problems which should be fixed to make this a better country by making a quiet, peaceful statement? "No way! You show patriotism by standing and waiting for the National Anthem to be over so the damn game can start already." People protesting the Iraq War were labeled traitors. "Why do you hate America?" conservatives screamed. And when the Dixie Chicks made a disparaging comment about President George Bush during a concert in London, their records were burned, their music was banished from country music station playlists and they got death threats. All in the name of Patriotic Correctness.

Before I congratulated myself for my creative genius, I decided to google "patriotic correctness." I found a column in the Washington Post dated Dec. 7, 2016. The writer stole my idea nine months before I thought of it.

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Conservatives use “patriotic correctness” to regulate speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

Last week, I took the Star to task for its article about Pima County districts' AzMERIT scores in the post, To Understand Pima County Test Scores, Follow the [Parents'] Money. (The post had more likes, shares and comments than most of my recent pieces, and a number of letters in the Star voiced similar criticisms, meaning the Star article bothered a lot of people.) Comparing Tucson Unified's test scores with districts whose students come from more affluent homes where parents have more formal education makes little sense, I wrote. In Arizona, around the country and around the world, children from higher income families score higher on standardized tests than children from lower income families regardless of the quality of schools they attend.

I've written often that if you want to create a reasonable analysis of Tucson Unified's AzMERIT scores, you have to compare them to scores in districts with similar demographics. Well, I've decided to put my keyboard where my mouth is. I'm beginning a rough study to see how test scores in Tucson Unified schools compare with scores of similar schools in similar districts. Why am I telling you what I'm planning to do even though I've only just finished the thinking process and haven't begun the research? To keep myself honest, for one. If I put my approach in writing, I'll be forced to stick to it and report the results as honestly as possible (which I'd try to do anyway, but it's always tempting to fudge a bit). And to let readers know what my approach is before I write about my findings so you're less likely to think I began with my conclusions and worked back to the data that "proved" what I already decided.

On my computer, I have two databases from the AZ Department of Education. One lists the total number of students in every district school in the state along with the percentage of students on free or reduced lunch. The other breaks down the 2017 AzMERIT scores of every school in detail, by gender, ethnicity, English Language proficiency and grade level. Looking at the two data sets, I can compare how schools with similar student bodies scored on the state tests, and I can compare the scores of subgroups in the schools.

Here's my methodology. Scratch that. "Methodology" is to high fallutin' a term for my crude analysis—I won't be using any sophisticated statistical tools—of a blunt instrument—a high stakes test whose validity as a measure of student achievement is questionable. So, here's what I'm gonna do.