By now you’ve likely heard the news that refugees coming to Greece are being sold fake life jackets.

I’ve personally seen this, and it’s every bit as despicable as your gut reaction tells you it is. Unfortunately, the life jackets are the tip of the iceburg. If smugglers sell water-absorbent life jackets for only 45 euro (roughly 45 U.S. dollars), imagine what they’ll do for real money.

I hate writing this, but the media seems to ignore everything except the headline-grabbing life jackets. Someone has to tell it…

Bademli, Turkey and Lesbos, Greece are separated by less than 10 kilometers. The Aegean Sea lies between the two, with generally calm water and a mild climate. This short trip between Turkey and the European Union has been the most common route into Europe for refugees, with over 500,000 refugees arriving on Lesbos in 2015. A raft can make the trip in less than two hours on a clear day.

The trip is almost always done on a dinghy boat. These are made of rubber and will pop like a balloon if they hit a rock. These inflatable boats come from China and cost smugglers 1,200 euros. An average of 40-60 refugees are packed into each raft. 40-60 people on any of these rafts is far beyond any safe limit, with refugees sitting in the middle and hanging off the sides of the raft. Most arrive to Greece with only what fits in their pockets, as any bags on the raft with them are tossed into the sea to make room for more people. On top of all of this, refugees are told to steer the ship themselves. The price for all of this? 1,000 euros each.


The tickets are so expensive that many refugees wait in Turkey for up to a year, working under the table until saving enough money to be smuggled. This makes them easy targets for gangs and human traffickers. Or sweatshops. Sweatshops where they make fake life jackets. Once you’re able to save 1,000 euro, you are able to be smuggled into Europe with only the clothes on your back.

Here's yet another national school ranking reported on in this morning's Star with expected, if a bit eccentric results. A company, niche.com, founded by some Carnegie Mellon University students over a decade ago, has developed a rating system for all the public schools in the country, district and charter. Here's the national list, and here's the Arizona top 100 ranking. Some schools are missing, I think because the company didn't have all the necessary data.

The rankings are approximate at best. Any company that tries to rate all schools across the country has to be using a crude instrument that takes a few variables and crunches them into some kind of formula. Niche.com uses factors like academics, health & safety, student culture & diversity, teachers, extracurriculars and sports to generate a number. High score wins.

But, crude though the rankings may be, they're pretty predictable. The Arizona top ten tend to be districts in high rent areas and charters with selective student bodies. Chandler Preparatory Academy in number one. It's part of the Great Hearts charter school chain, with schools parked in affluent areas which have a variety of ways to make sure they have select student bodies—except for one Great Hearts school in a less affluent area which, no surprise, isn't nearly as highly rated as the others. BASIS Scottsdale is number two, a school that the U.S. News & World Report's high school rankings left out because its student body was too selective to be included.

Catalina Foothills district comes in fourth. Other Tucson-area districts making the top ten are Amphitheater, Vail and Tanque Verde.

Here we have yet another ranking which reinforces the idea that "successful" schools have students who have been groomed for academic success by their socioeconomic status, and "less successful" schools have students who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder. What that's saying, basically, is that the students are more or less successful, not the teachers or the administration or the curriculum or the facilities. Unless, of course, you think that the faculty, administration and curricula at schools in high rent areas are vastly superior —emphasis on "vastly" — to those in poorer areas. They would have to be vastly superior to create such consistent disparities without a lot of help from the students who walk through the schoolhouse doors.

President Obama just finished giving a speech about measures he plans to take using executive action to try and lower the incidence of gun violence in this country. I'm not going to outline his plans. You can read and hear about them all over the media. If you want, you can learn how terrible "Emperor Obama's decrees" are from the NRA, the right wing press and Republican presidential candidates. The fact is, Obama isn't doing much. He can't do much without Congress passing laws, and the NRA is holding enough members of Congress at electoral gunpoint that nothing is going to happen there for a long while. What Obama proposes won't create any major changes in the availability of guns, and it won't bring down the level of gun violence significantly. But it will make some difference. It's something. It's what he can do. It's a small but important step.

I lock my doors when I leave the house. That won't stop someone who is serious about wanting to rob me. Anyone who has the necessary skill and determination can stake out my house, figure out when it's empty, then either pick a lock or use a hardware store glass cutter to get in and take what they want. It's not that difficult. I take security measures to make it harder for the casual thief to bust in, grab a few items and run. If the doors are locked and the windows are closed, that should be enough to discourage someone who isn't absolutely bound and determined to get in.

Making it harder for bad actors and people with mental illnesses to get guns won't keep guns out of all their hands, but it will stop a shooting here and a shooting there, which means a few people who otherwise would be injured or killed by gunfire will be spared. It's not going to reduce the 30,000 annual deaths from firearms significantly. But it's a start. And it will help keep the conversation going, maybe bend it enough that people realize the right for decent people to bear arms won't be impeded by measures designed to keep firearms out of the hands of people who plan to harm others.

Back in the 80s, Rodney was one of my junior English students. He wasn't the smartest kid in the class by a long shot, but he tried, and he was a pretty decent, friendly guy. One day he walked into class a few minutes early wearing a T-shirt I hadn't seen before. "Ozzy for President!" he shouted, proclaimed the words written across his chest. He flashed me a big grin and strutted to his desk.

Rodney was more of a head banger wannabe than the real thing, but it wasn't hard to imagine him in his room listening to Black Sabbath cranked to full volume and shouting along with its lead singer Ozzy Osbourne.

Rodney sat down and leaned forward, elbows on his desk. He looked at me with a serious expression and said in all sincerity, "Really, wouldn't it be cool if Ozzy was president?" I looked back at him, amused, but didn't respond. More students filtered into the room, so I had other people to attend to. Our political discussion was at an end.

Donald Trump isn't Ozzy Osbourne. The Donald has significantly more working brain cells than the man who later played the pathetic clown on his family's reality show, The Osbournes. And Ozzy is British, so a presidential run was always out of the question. But a lot of Trump supporters are grown-up versions of my old student Rodney.

Rodney and I never talked about Ozzy's political future again, but I'm pretty sure what his answer would have been if I had asked him, "If Ozzy was really running for president, if there was really a chance he'd be leading the United States of America, would you vote for him?" He would have replied something like, "Well, no, probably not . . . But wouldn't it be cool if Ozzy was president?" I have a sense many proud Trump supporters, when confronted with the idea of actually voting for their man, will say the same.

Senate President Andy Biggs must be trolling for attention from the national media. He must miss the days when Jon Stewart called Arizona "the meth lab of democracy" and showed TUSD Board member Michael Hicks warning us about the use of burritos as a propaganda tool by the Mexican American Studies program. Seems like Biggs is looking for a little love—or at least some attention—from new Daily Show host Trevor Noah.

How else can you explain Biggs elevating State Senator Sylvia Allen to the position of chair of the Senate Education Committee to replace Kelli Ward who's off fighting McCain for his senate seat? Can you think of a better subject for national hilarity? She declared that the earth is 6,000 years old, and when another Republican senator tried to shush her, she repeated it. She believes the government is poisoning us with chem-trails from airplanes (Quote from her Facebook page: "I have watched the chem-trails move out until the entire sky is covered with flimsy, thin cloud cover. It is not the regular exhaust coming from the plane it is something they are spraying. It is there in plain sight. What is it they are leaving behind that covers the sky?"). She said it would be great if going to church were mandatory, though to be fair, she used this as an example of something she'd like to see, not something she was proposing as law. And her high school diploma is the end of her formal education.

The story writes itself, doesn't it? The only problem will be coming up with a punchline strong enough to top the facts. But I trust the Daily Show writers and the writers on late night talk shows to rise to the challenge.

The people over at our long-time sister paper Inside Tucson Business are wrapping up their annual call for Women of Influence nominations.

I've said it before: Tucson women are endlessly inspiring. ITB's event has 18 different award categories, celebrating women for their business prowess, their mentoring skills and their career-long accomplishments. The honorees are decided by reader nominations, and finalists and winners are selected by an independent panel of judges.

Get a look at the categories, do some brainstorming and take the time to include thoughtful notes about the people you're nominating.

Tucson is filled with incredible women. Help ITB honor someone you know makes a difference in the Old Pueblo—Nominations close Friday. 

Time Magazine has a special treat for us today. Last year, in a photoshoot for the magazine Donald Trump posed with a bald eagle. It went very well.

The eagle's name is Uncle Sam, and I love him.

Attention everyone with desk jobs, mindlessly staring into their computers and helplessly waiting for 5 p.m.: Season 2 of Serial started today, and Episode 1 is online now. 

After much speculation it turns out, yes, Season 2 is going to focus on Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. solider who was held prisoner by the Taliban for five years after leaving his Army outpost in eastern Afghanistan.

Here's Serial's description of Season 2: 

Imagine I'm a public school math teacher, and I just gave my students a test worth 100 points. These classes of mine don't have strong math skills. With the students needing 50 points to pass, only 14 percent of them make it, and most of the passing students squeaked by just above the cut line, with between 51 and 59 points.

Next year I give the same test to my classes, which are basically identical in math skills to last year's batch. But this time I decide, damn it, 50 points shouldn't be enough to pass. I'm going to set the passing cut score at 60. That moves most of the students who would have passed with the previous cut score into the ranks of the failing. Only 2 percent pass.

The question is, should I be more concerned about the math skills of my classes with 2 percent passing rates than the previous classes where 14 percent passed? Obviously not. Their skill levels are basically identical. Only the score it took to pass changed. But while a 14 percent passing rate is met with shaking of heads and clucking of tongues, a 2 percent passing rate makes people crazy. Contact the media! Call out the public school haters! It's time to scream, "Oh my God, look at these scores! What happened? Shame on those kids! Shame on their schools! Shame on their parents!"

That, in a nutshell, is what's happening with the AzMERIT scores and the soon-to-come tsunami of shaming.

The process has already begun, though, believe me, it's only in its infancy. An article in Friday's AZ Republic, AzMERIT: Poor, rural districts feel burden of new test, is an example. It's a sympathetic, hand-wringing forerunner to the upcoming onslaught of shame. The article looks mainly at the AzMERIT scores on the San Carlos Reservation and in the Baboquivari Unified School District. In the San Carlos schools, 6 percent of the students passed the English section and 2 percent passed the math section. In Baboquivari Unified, 7 percent passed the English and 8 percent passed the math. The article talked about how difficult it it is for the districts to deal with these results, how hard both school systems have worked to boost their students' achievement. And yet, look at these disappointing passing rates, so much lower than the previous year.

But if you look back on last year's AIMS scores, you'll see that these new low scores are perfectly predictable. They're not a sign the students' achievement levels are lower this year, and they don't mean the students did worse on the AzMERIT test than on AIMS. What they mean is, the passing level — the cut score — was raised for the new test. If the students had been given one of the old AIMS test and the cut score was raised, like I raised the scores on my imaginary math test at the beginning of the post, pretty much the same thing would have happened. It's not about the students and it's not about the new test. It's all about raising the tests' cut scores.

In San Carlos, 14 percent of the students passed the 2014 AIMS math test, compared to 2 percent passing the AzMERIT. But if you look at the breakdown of the AIMS passing scores, you find that 13 percent simply met the math standard and only 1 percent exceeded it. So when you moved that bar up on the new test, what happened basically is, 12 of the 13 percent who just met the standards fell below the new line and only 1 percent joined that 1 percent that exceeded. If you go through the AIMS math and reading scores for the two districts, you find the same situation, between 10 and 47 percent meeting the standards and between 1 and 3 percent exceeding.

I've been off for the past few weeks, but the world of education decided to continue turning in my absence, and TUSD is no exception. So here's a quick catch-up on TUSD-related events and decisions: The Good, the Bad and the Arrogant.

TUSD decided to rework its student code of conduct. It's a good idea, especially if, as Superintendent Sanchez said, “The student code of conduct as it exists now is templated off of the penal code and speaks to student disciplinary actions as a law enforcement officer would." That's school-to-prison pipeline territory, and it needs to change. Helping students has to take priority over punishing them. Hiring consultant Jim Freeman looks like a good move, especially if he's as capable and experienced as his resume suggests. He should bring a wide variety of possible approaches with him, which he can mix and match to create a disciplinary policy best suited to TUSD students. I don't see how the district, or any district, has enough in-house knowledge and expertise to do the job itself. If Freeman comes through with an improved new disciplinary policy, it will be $35,000 well spent. [Note: a just-published study on suspensions in California schools maintains that lowering district suspension rates correlates with higher district achievement.]

The approval of a plan to change the student makeup of five schools, mainly adding middle school grades, is a mixed bag. The big question is how the move will impact the district's desegregation status, which is why it has to be approved by the courts before it's put into action. Overall, the plan is a good idea if it's anywhere from neutral to moderately positive in its effect of the district's racial and ethnic mix. As central as the deseg plan is to nearly every important decision TUSD makes, a district's mission is to provide the best education possible for its students, and if the changes increase the quality of education for the students attending those schools—and if it also encourages some parents to leave their children in TUSD rather than fleeing to charters or neighboring districts—those are good things regardless of whether they further the deseg cause. It's worth noting that the board was unanimous in its approval of all the changes except for the plans at Sabino High, which were opposed by Michael Hicks and Mark Stegeman. We haven't seen lots of unanimous board votes on important issues lately.

The controversies over TUSD's magnet schools, which haven't succeeding at their deseg missions, have moved in a positive direction with an agreement between the district and some of the plaintiffs in the deseg lawsuit. More money will be flowing to the magnet schools, recruiting efforts outside of the schools' neighborhoods are supposed to be stepped up, and permanent teachers are supposed to take over the classrooms which have been taught by long term substitutes. But the longstanding problems with the magnet schools, some of which will be addressed, show that the district has dropped the ball for years. And even with the positive changes, Sanchez, the board majority and their supporters in the magnet school communities continue to partake in mind-boggling doublespeak when they say the schools should be able to keep their deseg funding even if they continue to have Hispanic student populations far above the 70% maximum required by the court-ordered deseg plans. Magnet schools are called "magnets" because their unique programs are supposed to draw a wider variety of students from beyond the neighborhood. Any school that doesn't succeed at that is a failed "magnet" school, even if its program is a success with the students who attend. Call it a "specialty" school if you want, but not a "magnet." The district and parents have every right to believe a "specialty" school which enriches the educations of neighborhood students is a terrific idea, that it doesn't need to have a diverse student population to be valuable for its students, but they lose the right to call it a "magnet" school worthy of deseg funding if it doesn't try to attract students from outside the neighborhood and isn't interested in desegregation.