I almost loved the Sunday editorial in the Arizona Republic. Even with some reservations, I liked it a whole lot. Shorter version: Ducey, we're not in a recession anymore. Stop budgeting like we are. Fund education and other state needs at reasonable levels.

Here are a few key passages.

Take off the recession-era glasses, Gov. Doug Ducey.

Look around. Those bleak days of deep deficits are over.

Arizona deserves a vision for the future.

That means restoring budgets for K-12, universities, infrastructure and other basic state needs.

It’s time to show the dynamic leadership to begin aggressively repairing the damage done during those days when slashing the budget was a matter of survival.

It’s also time to recognize that it wasn’t just the recession that put the financial squeeze on Arizona.

Repeated tax cuts since 1993 shrunk state revenue by tens of billions of dollars.

[snip]

Now it’s time to make the state competitive when it comes to funding K-12 and higher education. Now it’s time to make the state competitive when it comes to infrastructure for the 21st Century. Now it’s time to put money into quality of life amenities – like parks, which were stripped of funding during the recession.

There is no reason to create an artificial atmosphere of recession that keeps the state on a starvation diet. Arizona currently has a healthy budget surplus and rainy day fund.

[snip]

[E]ven if voters approve taking more money from the state land trust [by voting for Proposition 123], schools will not be fully reimbursed for voter-mandated inflation funding that the Legislature illegally withheld during the recession.

Passing the plan is important. It will help schools. But it doesn’t make up for recession-era losses. It doesn’t make schools whole.

Bernie Sanders got an astounding 85 percent of the vote from 18 to 29 year olds in the New Hampshire primary. By any accounting, that's an amazing stat. People have bemoaned the apathy of today's college students, but for some reason, they're Feeling the Bern, big time. Does it mean we're at the beginning of a new period of student activism and engagement? Very possibly. Look at the inroads the Black Lives Matter movement is making on college campuses, which is part of a larger surge of minority activism involving gender and sexual issues along with race. But I think there's something more. I think college students have been dragged into the political fight because of their personal concerns about their economic futures, and Bernie is talking to their concerns far more directly than Hillary.

I was at a University of California campus in the Sixties. The Civil Rights struggle had come to nationwide prominence during my high school years, and it remained a big issue for college students on the left, but it didn't lead white students like me to direct activism. If a race-based issue came up on campus, we supported the rights of black and other minority students, and we didn't eat grapes to show our support for the United Farm Workers of America, but only a few white students and young adults were directly involved in either struggle. The issues may have tugged at our hearts, but they didn't hit us where we lived.

By contrast, the escalation of the Vietnam War created a massive protest movement on campus. People marched, chanted and stopped education as usual for days and weeks at a time. Privileged white college students literally put their bodies in danger in confrontations with police during demonstrations. Why the difference? Part of it was, unlike the other issues, Vietnam put our asses on the line. We could be drafted and sent onto the battlefield. We rightly condemned the killing and environmental devastation our country was raining down on the people of Vietnam, but if we weren't in danger of being thrown in the middle of the horror, our reactions would have been quieter.

We don't have a draft today. The decision to invade Iraq was at least as outrageous and damaging as our decision to escalate our involvement in Vietnam, but college students aren't in danger of being sent to the Middle East. College students are often criticized by older people on the left for not putting themselves in the forefront of protests condemning our involvement in Iraq like we did back in the Vietnam War days. But there's an existential difference. Their asses aren't on the line like ours were.

Update Feb. 8, 6 p.m.:

It turns out that the Return of Kings meet-ups weren't actually ever advertised by the group to be pro-rape, according to an article posted by ROK member Rob Berne yesterday. From the horse's mouth:

Media reports resulted in a shut down of the meet ups planned among our followers...The Establishment intentionally took one article written by Roosh in which he proposed a thought experiment to increase the safety of women by 'legalizing rape on private property.' The elites took a gamble that taking that article out of context and exaggerating it to the fullest extent would create a firestorm—notice that few of the slanderous articles actually linked to the piece in
question, where any reasonable person could see that it was not written earnestly.

The media twisted the followers of ROK and Roosh into 'rape supporters' simply because of one article that was obvious satire. Jonathan Swift once wrote that poor children should be eaten by the wealthy. Back in the 18th century, no one was stupid enough to take Swift’s essay seriously.

So, Return of Kings's didn't intend to host a series of meetings advocating rape. My bad. The article written by Valizadeh—the one that apparently made everyone think the ROK meetings were pro-rape—was labeled as a "satirical thought experiment" in a note at the top of the page. According to Snopes, this thought was added after he initially received backlash for the article in Feb. 2015.

Based off ReturnOfKings.com's content and the fact that the meet-ups were aimed at heterosexual male readers, I  think it's pretty safe to say the meetings would have attracted a group of men who support rape culture and pro-rape attitudes.

Last Friday, Jan. 29, Coldplay released a new music video for their song, "Hymn for the Weekend." In more important news, said video features Beyoncé. Beyhive members everywhere rejoice.



As a long-time Beyoncé fan myself, I too rejoiced. I was elated to learn Bey would make her first video appearance since "Feeling Myself" with Nicki Minaj. But when I realized a sari, henna tattoos and traditional Indian jewelry made up her "Hymn" look, my excitement quickly dwindled. Vanity Fair described her costuming that of "a Bollywood princess," but I couldn't help but wonder: 

Could Beyoncé, a self-proclaimed feminist and social justice advocate, be appropriating Indian culture? 

I'm not one to say yes or no, obviously—I'm a white girl from Scottsdale. I know it's not my place to speak for other cultures. But Indian and non-Indian people alike have voiced their opinions regarding Beyoncé's getup on Twitter.

A powerful online campaign is collecting examples of blatant objectification of women and reminding us all what "sex sells" advertising is really saying. 

The campaign, championed by the hashtag #WomenNotObjects, was started in an attempt to fight sexism in advertising by woman-led, New York, advertising agency Badger and Winters.

Their viral campaign video features real women holding offensive ads. Each woman describes what the ad's not-so-subtle innuendo is implying about the pictured models.

The agency's website says, "In 2016, Badger and Winters made a commitment to never objectify women in our work."

The campaign video, created by Madonna Badger and her business partner Jim Winters, features popular ads from Tom Ford, Balmain, Burger King, Carl’s Jr. and others. The video has accumulated more than 1.2 million views so far.

Take a look and join the conversation on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook.

In honor of School Choice Week (yes, that's really a thing), I'll be writing a few posts about charter schools. Today' post: The Walton Family Foundation plans to spend $1 billion on charter schools and other items on the school choice menu over the next five years.

Don't worry about the foundation funded by the Walmart fortune going broke spending all that money. It's already putting out about $200 million a year to promote the privatization/"education reform" agenda. Over the years, about one-quarter of the nation's charter schools have been recipients of Walton Foundation startup money. The foundation may be deciding to focus more of its regular expenditures on the charter sector, or maybe it's planning to pitch in a little more on top of what it's already giving.

The Foundation says it's planning to target low income communities in urban areas like Los Angeles and new Orleans, meaning it has a dual purpose of expanding charters in places like L.A. (the Waltons aren't the only philanthropists working on that, they have company) and tweaking the program in places like New Orleans which are already dominated by charters.

Which makes me wonder. Lots of big-bucks philanthropists along with mid-level players like hedge fund multi-millionaires and billionaires (yes, in today's wonderful world of growing income inequality, just having a billion or two makes you a minor player) are giving lots and lots of money to charters and the groups that support them. Yet one of the original selling points for charter schools was that they can do more than the bloated school districts, with their administrative overload and teacher union bosses, with less money. But if you look at the charters that get press for their accomplishments (some deserved, some not), they all get money beyond their state allotments, sometimes lots of it. Do charters, even successful charters, have any right to claim they're getting more educational bang for the buck, or are they proof that you can't do education on the cheap?

Ducey can spin his budget priorities however he wants in his pronouncements, but a budget is a moral document. It indicates what you value. And Ducey, contrary to his pronouncements, does not value education, or children in general, especially poor children.

Lots of ink and pixels have been spilled talking about Ducey's proposed budget, its priorities and deceptions. I'm going to narrow-focus on his statements about K-12 education versus his actual budget proposals, but there's so much more to look at. Howard Fischer gave us a sense of the whole budget picture in his opening paragraph about the budget plan Saturday:

Gov. Doug Ducey proposes to restore less than 10 percent of what was cut last year from state universities, give the Department of Child Safety just two-thirds of what it requested, but add another 2,000 beds to house inmates.

Today, Fischer notes that Ducey has decided to "ignore what, for the moment, is free money from the federal government to provide care to more of the children of the working poor." If you're turning down free money from the Feds for children's health, knowing you can cancel the program in the future if you think it's costing the state too much money, that speaks volumes.

But back to K-12 education. Let's look at how Ducey described that part of his budget in his op ed published Friday, the same day he released his budget proposal. First statement:

On Friday, I announced an additional $106 million for K-12 education – that is on top of the $224 million supplemental for fiscal year 2016, which was part of our $3.5 billion funding package.

Question: When is additional education money not additional education money? Answer: When it's a mandatory increase based on inflation and the increase in our student population. That accounts for $47 million of the $106 million. Almost half of Ducey's "additional" money is really stay-even money.

Here's another statement from the op ed.

But not every child plans to go to college – their K-12 experience also needs to prepare them for life. Which is why we’re targeting high-need employment sectors with a new, $30 million investment in career and technical education.

A "new, $30 million investment"? It's hardly new, when that's exactly the amount Ducey and his legislative enablers cut from JTED (Joint Technical Education District) programs last year. So it would be slightly more accurate to call it a restoration of funds—except that would be wrong too. The "new, $30 million investment" is actually $10 million a year spread over three years, and instead of restoring the money to existing JTED programs, it's a matching funds grant for programs sponsored by businesses to train people for jobs the businesses think they need. The general consensus is, if the cut JTED funds aren't restored, the program will die.

I want to extend a semi-official welcome to Linda Lyon who recently began blogging about education at my old stomping grounds, Blog for Arizona. Her latest post looks at Ducey's State of the State Address from an education standpoint. Good, thorough stuff, mixing, like most of her posts, lots of facts and information with thoughtful analysis.

Linda, who I've known for a few years, comes to education from a different place than I do. She's a retired Air Force Colonel. She has served as the director of Wingspan and helped organize four of their charity golf tournaments. She serves on the Oracle School District Governing Board and is very involved in the Arizona School Boards Association.

You can look over her backlog of blog posts here or check in at Blog for Arizona now and then, where there's always plenty going on.

The recently late, long great David Bowie was, apparently, an avid reader. As part of a 2013 exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, he included a list of his 100 favorite books. I won't print the complete list here. You can go to the LA Times article to see it.

It's a wide-ranging book list indicating eclectic tastes, not surprising for a man like Bowie who spent his life in constant reinvention. Here are a few, in no particular order, where his tastes and mine intersect:

"A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
"The Iliad" by Homer
"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner
The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
"Black Boy" by Richard Wright
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Waste Land" by T.S. Elliot
McTeague" by Frank Norris
"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
"1984" by George Orwell
"White Noise" by Don DeLillo
"A People’s History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
"Lady Chatterly’s Lover" by D.H. Lawrence
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard
"The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

And I would be remiss if I left out some of his favorites not on my reading list, like:

Over the years, I've written many posts about the shoddy corporate practices and poor student performance at schools run by K12 Inc., the for-profit, publicly traded online education corporation (Its Arizona charter school, Arizona Virtual Academy, has 4,600 students sitting behind their computers at home, if, that is, they actually take the time and effort to log in and do the work). I wrote my most recent post about the corporations's sinking stock value a few weeks ago. And I've written a few times that Arizona's Craig Barrett sits on K12 Inc.'s Board of Directors. But this is the first time I've written about his compensation. For the fiscal year 2015, Barrett received $190,000 from the corporation. Barrett is a very, very busy man with his fingers in a whole lot of pies. You can be certain he didn't put in 40 hour weeks to earn his Board pay.

Why, you may ask, should we care about Barrett's involvement in K12 Inc.? The answer is, Barrett is a powerful voice in Arizona education, advocating for what he says are necessary reforms to improve our schools. He's not shy when it comes to talking about his connections and accomplishments. For instance, he's happy to announce that he's President and Chairman of BASIS Schools, Inc., the for-profit Education Management Organization that runs the chain of BASIS schools. But so far as I know, he never talks about his connection to the shoddy, failing K12 Inc. I've looked hard on the internet, read his op eds, listened to some of his interviews and speeches. When it comes to K12 Inc. — nothing but crickets. A man as proud of his accomplishments as Barrett should be more open about this aspect of his educational life, and more forthcoming about what he, as a board member, is doing to improve the corporate and educational culture at K12 Inc.

Craig Barrett's list of connections and accomplishments is vast. He's the retired CEO of Intel, and he's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As I mentioned earlier, he's President and Chairman of BASIS Schools Inc. He's also a board member of Achieve, Inc., which was instrumental in creating and promoting the Common Core standards, as well as an influential member of any number of education-related organizations. He travels around the world promoting STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), and he's very outspoken about what he thinks is wrong with Arizona education and what should be done to fix it. His ideas fall squarely in the privatization/"education reform" camp. During Jan Brewer's governorship, he chaired her Arizona Ready Education Council which worked to steer the state's education priorities, most of which are being carried forward by Gov. Ducey's Classrooms First Initiative Council. It's fair to say he's the most powerful unelected individual in Arizona education.