As I was leaving the studio of the Bill Buckmaster Show Thursday, Bill told me that TUSD's new superintendent, Dr. Gabriel Trujillo, was on the show last week, and Trujillo mentioned that the district is rebranding itself as Tucson Unified in place of the longstanding tradition of referring to it as TUSD. It's not a huge deal, obviously. It doesn't change the way the district operates or educates its students. But I like it. Words matter, and the feeling the public has about the district matters.

The words "Tucson Unified" have a nice, positive ring to them. They link our city name with a sense of togetherness, indicating that Tucson is unified in our pursuit of education for our children.

The rebranding process has been going on for awhile. It began before Trujillo was chosen as interim superintendent, then superintendent, but I hadn't noticed it until Bill pointed it out to me. From this point forward, I'll use "Tucson Unified" instead of TUSD in my posts.

If you haven't had a chance to hear Dr. Trujillo, the interview on the Buckmaster Show is a good place to start. You can listen to it on the show's website. He comes across as smart, positive and personable. Early indications are, the board made a good pick.

I've been out of town for three weeks. Did I miss anything?

Let's see. TUSD has a new superintendent, Dr. Gabriel Trujillo. Looks like a pretty smart choice. He's getting stamps of approval from people on various sides of district issues, which is promising. And board member Mark Stegeman has voted against him twice so far, which makes Trujillo sound even better to me. Best of luck, Dr. Trujillo. You'll need it.

Then there was the Mexican American Studies decision from Judge Tashima, a clear-the-bases, grand slam home run for MAS supporters. Ex Ed Supe John Huppenthal didn't like the program because it taught students they were victims of a racist system; the judge said Hupp's dismantling of the MAS program was the result of racial animus. Hupp didn't want Mexican American youth to think of themselves as oppressed; Hupp suppressed a program which used historical facts to show ways Mexican American students and their ancestors have been oppressed. Earlier Ex Ed Supe Tom Horne was upset that MAS taught ethnic chauvinism; he went around the state telling white people their privileged status was threatened by the program. One term to describe the Hupp and Horne statements in light of the judge's decision is "irony." MAS supporters are probably more fond of the term "vindication."

And then there's the statement by Jim Swanson, the leader of Ducey's Classrooms First Initiative Council, that our schools need an additional billion dollars in added tax revenue. It's not exactly new news. Other business leaders raised the idea in June. But for Swanson, Ducey's hand-picked head of his council to explore ways to improve education, to say Ducey isn't doing enough to fund schools, and to go into such detail about the reasons why the extra money is needed, that's really something. The public already supports increased education funding. A statement from Swanson and other business leaders helps build a statewide consensus which will make it harder for Republicans to pretend to be pro-education while saying they don't want to "throw money at schools."

Concern and complaints abound over U.S. students' low scores on international tests compared to other industrialized countries. The favorite culprits accused of causing the disparity are, in no special order: (1) Failing schools; (2) Failing teachers; (3) Failing parents (4) Low expectations; (5) Lack of common curriculum; (6) Too much common curriculum; (7) Inadequate funding; (8) Socioeconomic inequality. I'm sure I missed a few.

But one possible culprit that doesn't come up as often as it should is lack of opportunities for quality early childhood education. The U.S. sits near the bottom of the list when it comes to the percentage of 3 and 4 year olds enrolled in educational programs. Is that one reason for our low scores on the international tests? Maybe so, maybe no, but it should be a larger part of our national discussion, even among the privatization/"education reform" crowd, who are all about charter schools and vouchers for private schools. If they care more about education than privatization, maybe those folks should be more into promoting early childhood education.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) administers the PISA international student testing, and it analyzes the results as well as other relevant educational information. It recently published Starting Strong 2017, a 200 page document focusing on early childhood education and care. Starting on page 128, it compares the enrollment rates of 3 and 4 year olds in pre-primary education in 2014 in about 35 countries. In the U.S., 40 percent of three year olds were in educational programs compared to an OECD average of 70 percent. Only five countries had lower numbers. Among four year olds, the U.S. enrollment was 70 percent compared to an OECD average of 85 percent. Only three countries had lower numbers.

The Star's front page story about Pima county school districts' scores on the AzMERIT test has its facts right, but it doesn't include all the relevant information. As a result, readers are likely to draw the wrong conclusions—that TUSD and Sunnyside are doing a terrible job educating their students, while Pima county's suburban districts are shining stars in Arizona's educational firmament.

Hank Stephenson, the new education reporter at the Star, is a good journalist who does the necessary leg work and phone work to get the story—far, far more of it than I do as a humble blogger—but with this article, he's earned a spot at the top of the front page by telling only part of the story, which does a serious disservice to our two districts with the lowest income students. Unintentionally, I believe, Stephenson has followed one of the Star's unwritten maxims: If TUSD bleeds, the story leads. So let it bleed.

TUSD must be doing a terrible job educating its students, or so the story makes it sound.

Southern Arizona’s largest school district is dragging down the county’s results. Students in the Tucson Unified School District performed well below the state average on the standardized test and were also outperformed by students in eight of Pima County’s nine major school districts.

Sunnyside must be doing even worse, according to the story.

The test results were even worse for Sunnyside Unified School District, which scored the lowest of any of Pima County’s nine major districts.

Voucher supporters don't believe in a fair fight. Pro-voucher legislators don't trust the voters they work for. They're trying to quash a referendum on the vouchers-on-steroids-for-everyone law passed last session, using any means necessary. If that effort fails, expect them to repeal and replace their own voucher law next session, rendering the referendum null and void.

If the referendum actually does end up on the ballot in 2018, it will make for an interesting battle. There's no way to predict which way the vote will go.

When Republicans first passed the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts law—aka Educational Savings Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids—a limited number of Arizona families were able to use the ESAs. But from the beginning its advocates said their plan was to make vouchers universal so everyone from welfare recipients to billionaires could get government money to pay for private schools, or pretty much any other form of non-public education. "Eventually" came in the last legislative session. They got what they wanted. If the law stays in effect, it will take twelve years for every child who isn't attending a district or charter school to receive between $5,000 and $30,000 a year to pay for their educations.

Along came a group, Save Our Schools, which began a quixotic quest to overturn the law. The effort should have been doomed from the start. Logic says you can't collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the state ballot without lots of funding. But the group's shoe-leather-driven volunteer effort worked. The referendum got the signatures it needed. Clearly, lots of Arizonans want the vouchers-for-all law off the books.

Coincidence once again placed me in D.C. at a historic moment. A little more than two years ago, I stood in front of the Supreme Court and witnessed the joyous moment when the Court moved the country forward, deciding gay marriage is legal everywhere in the U.S. Today I stood in front of Trump's White House protesting his alarming decision to move the country backward, tossing out DACA and putting its fate in the hands of a deeply divided, ineffective Congress, leaving 800,000 Dreamers and their families walking a razor's edge for the next six months as they wait to see if they will be allowed to remain in the country legally.

Except for the White House in the background, the march and demonstration could have been in Tucson or pretty much any city in the country.

We gathered at Lafayette Park across from the White House, walked along H Street, then down 15th Street.

Tucson will be voting on Strong Start, an initiative to fund a preschool program through a half cent sales tax. San Antonio, Texas, has created a similar system, with significant differences. A long Politico article has the details. Here's a brief summary.

San Antonio voted in a 1/8-cent tax to fund a pre-K program, with 54 percent voting yes. The size of the sales tax increase was the product of necessity; it was the most state law would allow. The city set up four pre-K centers, three of them built from scratch, to teach 2,000 children a year, a tenth of the city's 4-year olds (Strong Start Tucson's goal to place 8,000 three and four year olds).

The centers open at 7:15 a.m. for breakfast. The regular school day ends at 3 p.m., but about 40 percent of the kids stay for an extended day program for children of working parents, which goes to 6 p.m. Many parents say they couldn’t enroll their children in pre-school without the extended day, says Sculley. Pre-K 4 SA is free for 80 percent of the families, who qualify under the Texas law for disadvantaged or military households. The other 20 percent are middle-class families with an income of more than 185 percent of the poverty line—$44,000 for a family of four. They pay tuition based on a sliding scale.

Education Next published the results of its latest poll on education issues. As with all polls and studies, these results should be taken with many grains of salt. But Education Next is a serious publication and it has been conducting these polls for awhile, so its numbers are worth a serious look. For me, the most surprising result is that the support for charter schools is down, significantly. More on that, and other findings.

When Education Next first asked the charter school question in 2013, 51 percent supported charters and 26 percent opposed them. In the most recent poll, the numbers converged: 39 percent supporting, 37 percent opposed. The results held pretty steady until this year, when both sides changed about 12 percent. Why has support weakened? I have no idea, but interestingly, it's not connected to political party. Republicans tend to like charters more than Democrats, but both groups' support slipped by nearly the same amount. If this is a real trend which continues over the next few years, the charter movement's growth could slow considerably.

Support for vouchers went up a bit this year, and opposition declined. Lumping together tuition tax credits and government-funded vouchers, support is about 50 percent and opposition is about 35 percent. But a funny thing happens when the question refers to the use of "government funds" to pay for the vouchers. Support drops to 37 percent, and opposition rises to 49 percent. The public likes the idea of helping people pay for private school until they realize they're the ones footing the bill.

The state has released scores on the AzMERIT tests given this spring, meaning we can compare TUSD's 2017 scores with its scores two years ago when students took the first AzMERIT tests, and with the state scores. I'll lay out the results the numbers first, then I'll try to figure out what they mean, and don't mean.

But first, let me repeat my intense dislike of our obsession with high stakes, standardized tests. They only test what's testable in a fill-in-the-bubble format. They're susceptible to being gamed, meaning the better teachers are at teaching to the test, the better their students' results. That means the reliability of the results as a measure of student achievement is questionable. Also, the emphasis on the tests distorts the curriculum at the same time it stifles teachers' creativity and their ability to tailor their teaching strategies to their students' needs. The yearly tests make the education we give our students worse, not better. Nonetheless, the tests are out there, and people will talk. So with these caveats in mind, I'll talk too.

Here's a summary of the AzMERIT results, without analysis or interpretation. Statewide, fewer than half the students passed the test in every grade. The passage rates range from 25 percent to 48 percent. However, the average passing rate rose about 4 percentage points since the first test was given in 2015. TUSD's passing rate is considerably lower than the state's, averaging 11 points lower in Language Arts and 13 points lower in Math. The district's average passing rate didn't change in Language Arts from 2015 to 2017 and went up one percent in Math, meaning TUSD's scores showed less improvement than the state as a whole. White and Asian students scored considerably higher than Hispanic, Native American and African American students at the district and the state level.

Now, some analysis. First, the passing rates. As any teacher knows, you can create tests that are easier and harder, and you can move the grade curve up or down depending on where you set the cut scores. The old AIMS test was thought to be too easy and too many students passed it, so the state created a harder test and set the passing scores at a level that fewer students passed. So the fact that far fewer students passed AzMERIT than AIMS doesn't mean our students know less than they did a few years ago. It just means we have a tougher curve on a tougher test.

Fewer TUSD students passed than the state average, and at both the TUSD and state levels, White and Asian students scored higher than Hispanic, Native American and African American students. That information is about as surprising and revelatory as saying the yearly temperature in Tucson is higher than it is in Seattle. Of course Tucson is warmer, that's how the global climate is structured! Of course Whites and Asians outperform Hispanics, Native Americans and African Americans on standardized tests, that's how the households' economic and educational status is structured! And of course the state outperforms TUSD on standardized test scores, the district has a lower percentage of high scoring White and Asian students and a higher percentage of Hispanic, Native American and African American students than the state as a whole.

None of this is a judgement on any group. Far from it. It's a judgement of our society's shameful economic, racial and ethnic inequality. If we lower the levels of inequality, the gaps in student scores will close as a result. It's overstating things, but not by much, to say we could learn as much about student achievement, and save ourselves a whole lot of money, by getting rid of the tests and just looking up students' zip codes.

My last post was about the likely distribution of the new results-based funding which will go to 17 percent of Arizona's schools. The details are in the earlier post. Here's the short version: Only 35 percent of the state's district schools cater mainly to higher income students, but they represent 65 percent of the schools getting results-based funding for the 2017-18 school year. The economic inequity is even greater for charter schools.

Results-based funding is a very big deal. The lucky schools getting the money will boost their teachers' pay by between $2,000 and $4,000 a year and still have lots left over to buy educational extras other schools can't afford.

Thanks to results-based funding, increased educational inequity will be added to our growing income inequality. But as bad as things are the first year, they'll be far worse after that, with an even bigger piece of the pie going to schools in high rent areas. The details of how this works get a bit complicated, but they're important. Without knowing what the future will bring beyond year one, people will underestimate how truly awful the new results-based funding law is.

When results-based money is given out this school year, 2017-18, it will be based on schools' average AzMERIT scores. Since the standardized test scores correlate so closely with students' family incomes, that could mean that nearly all the money would go to schools in higher rent areas, but an added stipulation guarantees that about a third of the schools are in lower rent areas. According to the current projection from the Arizona legislature's Joint Legislative Budget Committee, 114 district schools with higher income students and 61 schools with lower income students will get the funding.