It's been awhile since I've written about BASIS schools. Most of what needs to be said has been said already, by me and others. And besides, the "BASIS education miracle"—which isn't miraculous in any way, shape or form—has become background noise in the "education reform"/privatization propaganda machine. The charter schools no longer need the intense scrutiny they did back when privatization enthusiasts used BASIS as the poster child for all that's wonderful about charters. My most recent post on the subject was on the arcane subject of the BASIS business pyramid, a nest of separate but interlocking business entities which encompass nonprofit charter schools, for-profit U.S. private schools and one international private school in Shenzhen, China.

So I was pleased to see the topic revived in a lengthy, informative overview of the BASIS enterprise in the Washington Post written by Carol Burris, the executive director of Network for Public Education. She does an excellent job of summarizing the way the schools operate. The new news for me is the possibility that the charter schools may be in financial trouble. More about that at the end of this post.

Burris' whole piece is worth a read, but if you don't want to take the time, here are the Cliff Notes.

BASIS, Burris acknowledges,"provides a challenging education" for its students. But who are the students? Burris has a chart comparing the ethnic mix of Arizona's BASIS charters to the rest of the state.
Ten times as many Asian students, a fifth as many Latino students, significantly more white students. Clearly, BASIS has a selective, non-representative ethnic population. It also has a tenth of the students with learning disabilities as Arizona schools in general and no English Language Learners. And since the schools don't have a lunch program which would provide free and reduced lunches, they don't have many low income students who would depend on that service. Add the placement of the schools in higher income areas and the lack of transportation services to bring students from other, less affluent areas, and you have a student population that sits firmly atop the socioeconomic and academic ladders.

AZ Schools Now is hosting a town hall on public school funding Thursday, March 30, 6 p.m., at the Pima Community College West Campus Center for the Arts, 2202 W. Anklam Road.

The governor's education budget proposals and the Democrats' proposals will be presented, then people in attendance will be asked to give their thoughts and ideas about education funding.

AZ Schools Now includes ten organizations which advocate for public education funding in Arizona.

Healthy Skepticism Note: Governor Ducey loves to portray himself as a  "friend of education." Ducey's no fool. He knows supporters of public education are marching forward with the wind at their backs, with a majority of Arizonans supporting increases in education funding and teacher salaries, so he wants to look like he's leading the parade. A favorite ploy is to talk about how he's working together with the education community to look for solutions. But lately when he said he's working with education groups on renewing Prop 301, the six-tenths of a cent sales tax for education which expires in 2020, AZ Schools Now was very clear, Ducey hadn't reached out to any of its groups.

Democratic legislators are also wary of Ducey's faux-Kumbaya moments with people who say we need a significant increase in education funding.

“My caveat with this governor is always the devil is in the details,” [Senate Minority Leader Katie] Hobbs said. “Yes, I’m happy that he supports the extension and possibly expansion [of Prop 301]. However, I would like to see specifically what the proposal will look like. . . . I will buy it when I see it. He’s made a lot of promises on education that he hasn’t really delivered on."

Like Hobbs said, Ducey is long on promises, short on delivery. Buyer beware.

We've already heard the Trump people's plans to cut $9.2 billion from next year's federal education budget. Now comes news they want to cut about $3 billion from the budget for rest of this fiscal year, which has five months left. From Politico's Morning Education report:

After proposing a $9.2 billion cut to the Education Department’s budget for next year, the President Donald Trump is now calling on Congress to slash nearly $3 billion in education funding for the remaining five months of this fiscal year, according to a document obtained by POLITICO. The White House on Friday sent House and Senate appropriators detailed instructions on how they should craft spending legislation to fund the federal government beyond April 28, when the current stopgap spending bill expires.

The proposed cuts include: Pell Grant money ($1.3 billion); Title II funding to provide professional development for teachers and principals and to reduce class sizes; Grants for physical education programs ($47 million); Grants for school counseling ($49 million); Money to increase math and science instruction ($152 million) [Fun fact: Ed Sec Betsy DeVos and First Daughter Ivanka Trump will be attending an event promoting STEM education today.]; and the Striving Readers program to improve literacy instruction ($189 million).

Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation has put out its budget proposal for 2018. Here's are some of its education cuts, which include phasing out Head Start entirely over the next decade and cutting the budget for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in half.

— Among Heritage’s proposals: Eliminate the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act’s job-training programs, which involves many community colleges; eliminate the Corporation for National and Community Service, which supports AmeriCorps; and reduce funding for Head Start with the intention of eliminating it completely over the next decade. The think tank also proposes to halve the budget for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and eliminate competitive and project grant programs under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Other formula grant programs for K-12 education would be slashed by 10 percent under the plan.

— The budget proposal also proposes getting rid of the Obama administration’s “gainful employment” regulation, which judges career college programs based on the ratio of graduates’ student loan debt relative to their earnings; switching to fair-value accounting for how the government tallies the cost of federal student loans; and making “major reforms to accreditation, including decoupling federal financing from the ossified accreditation system.”

Students attending a Boston public school have another world map, the Peters projection map, next to the one most of us are used to looking at.

Boston’s public schools began phasing in the lesser-known Peters projection, which cuts the US, Britain and the rest of Europe down to size. Teachers put contrasting maps of the world side by side and let the students study them.

If you haven't seen it before, take a look at the Peters projection map at the top of the post. The U.S. and Europe are pretty much the same size as they are on the Mercator map we're used to seeing, but some of the other land masses get a whole lot bigger. South America is now twice as large as Europe instead of the same size, and Africa is far larger as well. The map has a more accurate north-south arrangement, with the U.S. and Europe farther to the north instead of occupying the middle area. (Fun fact: in the standard Mercator map, Germany is pretty much dead center, except in the maps where the U.S. is moved to the central spot.)

History is written by the winners, and they get to draw the maps as well, putting themselves in the center of the world and shrinking everyone else down to size. The Peters projection map is a more proportional, less Eurocentric approximation of what the spherical world should look like when it's flattened out on piece of paper. Boston public schools are doing a little something to put the world back into its proper balance.

In an age of “fake news” and “alternative facts”, city authorities are confident their new map offers something closer to the geographical truth than that of traditional school maps, and hope it can serve an example to schools across the nation and even the world.

A map with the Mercator proportions and orientation, the one we're used to, is below.

Bullshit has become such a pervasive form of political speech in the Trump world, it deserves attention as a specific rhetorical style. Most of us use the word to mean something is incorrect: "That's bullshit!" The first time I heard the term "bullshit artist" was in the 1971 film, Carnal Knowledge, where two college students, played by Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, used it as a semi-complimentary exclamation after some amazing thing the other one said, the rough equivalent of "No way, dude!" But since American philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a short book, On Bullshit, in 2005, the term has been used to refer to a specific form of speech.

The staid and proper Fareed Zakaria talked about Frankfurt's book and about Trump as "bullshit artist" on CNN in August, 2016, during the heat of the presidential campaign and again a few days ago. They're both reasonably short and worth a listen.

Zakaria quotes Frankfurt's book to distinguish between lying and bullshitting. “Telling a lie," Frankfurt writes, "is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point." Bullshit, on the other hand, "is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false . . . [It] has spacious opportunities for improvisation, color and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art.” Frankfurt concludes that "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

Trump is a legendary bullshit artist—he's been indulging in it throughout his adult life — who piles heaping helpings of narcissism and pathology on top. Our own Doug Ducey is a lower level practitioner, but skilled nonetheless. We see him practice his art regularly when he adopts the mantle of "friend of education." He never tires of complimenting himself for pushing Prop 123, without acknowledging that it resulted in schools getting a portion of what the state owed them by law, and mostly from the schools' own money, the state land trust fund, not the state budget. That makes him less antagonistic to public education than many of his Republican colleagues, but a friend of public education? Hardly. And he's in danger of doing himself injury as he pounds himself on the back for "supporting teachers" by adding a few hundred dollars to their yearly salaries. Both assertions are half true, half false and all bullshit.

This is one of those "All I know is what I read in the papers" (cowboy hat-tip to Will Rogers) posts. The AP has an article on current ACA/Obamacare enrollment in Arizona which is full of informative facts and figures. Unfortunately, the AP headline, which is factually true, leaves a skewed impression of what's actually happened.

The AP headline reads:


That's true, but it's misleading. My longer headline, I think, summarizes the information in the article more accurately:


Let's look at the numbers in the article. Here's the overall picture for the state, according to the article.

Overall, Arizona saw a 3.3 percent enrollment decline in marketplace plans that are a key component of former President Obama’s heath care law, to about 196,000 people.

By the way, though it doesn't mention it in the article, that number is only for those buying insurance on the ACA marketplace. It doesn't include adults and children on Medicaid, which totals about 400,000.

A loss of a bit more than three percent of participants in the ACA marketplace? That doesn't sound anything like the Republican "Obamacare on life support" meme we hear so often, which often uses Arizona as a prime reason for pulling the plug. It sounds more like a reasonable yearly ebb and flow. However, the loss is far higher among those who don't qualify for tax credits. It's 23 percent. If you're a family of four, you pay the whole ACA cost when your income hits $97,000. If I'm reading this correctly, that $97,000 figure is the family's Adjusted Gross Income, which is total income minus deductions, meaning a family's actual combined salaries plus other income sources would be considerably higher, certainly over $100,000. According to the article, only the top 20 percent of Arizonans who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace pay full price. While no one wants to pay the full cost of ACA health care, which averages $611 a month, the top 20 percent who make over a hundred grand can manage it.

Some nights all we want to do after a long, exhausting day is change into that worn-out sweatshirt, grab our favorite snacks and curl up next to our furry friends on the couch for a mindless Netflix marathon. When even Netflix runs out of binge-worthy shows for your tastes, have no fear—Casa Video is here! Here are the current top ten rentals you too can snag from Tucson's favorite video store.

Moana

Need another reason to be wary of Ducey's promises? Here's one: his all-day kindergarten funding pledge. It's not quite what he said it is.

Here's what Ducey said in his 2017 State of the State address:

"My budget gives the lowest-income schools dollars to start or expand full-day kindergarten."

Note the word "schools" in the phrase "lowest-income schools." Apparently that's not what Ducey meant. He meant "lowest-income charter schools," but if the school is inside a district, that's not enough. The whole district has to qualify as "lowest income" or No Money For You.

This was news to me until someone sent me a story by Michael Hernandez, an intern at Arizona Public Media (Let's hear it for the future of journalism!): All-Day Kindergarten Funding Out of Reach for Tucson's Public Schools. For Ducey's funding pledge to kick in, 90 percent of your students qualify have to qualify for free or reduced lunch. If you're a charter school, it's just that simple—90 percent on free/reduced lunch, and you get the money. But a whole district has to meet that number to qualify. So TUSD doesn't qualify, or Flowing Wells. Even Sunnyside with 86 percent of its students on free/reduced lunch doesn't make the cut.

According to the article, no Pima County school district will get a penny from the program, but ten charters in the county qualify.

Even in this rare instance where Ducey puts together a plan that favors low-income schools, he makes sure charter schools get more than their share of the proceeds.

Full disclosure: I don't have a drop of Irish blood in me that I know of. I don't wear green on St. Patrick's Day, or drink green beer. I don't kiss people because they're Irish. But that doesn't stop me from recommending a terrific op ed in today's New York Times by Fintan O'Toole, a columnist for The Irish Times: Green Beer and Rank Hypocrisy.

Stop reading this right now and link to his column! Or, if you prefer, stick around and read what I have to say about it.

O'Toole's basic thesis is, don't forget that most of the Irish-Americans we celebrate today are descendants of reviled immigrants.

[The Irish] were nobody’s ideal of the desirable immigrant. The typical Irish Catholic arrival in New York or Boston was a peasant with little formal education and few material resources. Worse, these people were religious aliens — the papist hordes who threatened to swamp Protestant civilization and, in their ignorance and superstition, destroy enlightened democratic American values.

Today in a proclamation, Trump celebrates "the achievements and contributions of Irish-Americans to our nation . . . overcoming poverty and discrimination and inspiring Americans from all walks of life with their indomitable and entrepreneurial spirit.”

Even by the crooked yardstick of the Trump administration, the disconnect is surreal: The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish.

O'Toole says of those members of the Trump administration with Irish ancestry, like Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway:

This is too good to pass up. Kevin Eck, recently hired staffer for Betsy DeVos' Education Department, was unhappy with Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker, for his criticism of Trump. So in November Eck tweeted:

Now that Eck is at the Dept. of Ed, Hamill decided it was time to reply.
Eck is one of three recent Education Department hires who have been condemned for racist tweets, like this one.