OK, so, Diane Douglas has come out with a serious, multi-faceted plan to improve Arizona education. It's not perfect, there's plenty of stuff to disagree with, but lots of it is pretty damn good. Lots of it. Douglas is an advocate for teachers. She wants to pay them more, she wants them working in classrooms with fewer students, she wants to give them more and better training when they're in college and better mentoring when they're in the classroom.  She wants to cut back on our obsession with high stakes testing. She wants the grades the state gives to schools to include a number of variables, including—and I have to pause every time I write this because it pleases me so much—including taking into account the quality of a school's art, music and PE programs. In other words, she's an advocate for comprehensive, whole child education. Her plan is more pro-education than anything I've seen out of any Arizona Republican in a position of power and authority, maybe ever.

Douglas has gotten some deservedly good press for the ideas in her AZ Kids Can't Afford To Wait plan, much of it from folks who have spend the past nine months belittling her for the squabbles she's been having with Governor Ducey and the state school board.  But some feel they need to add a caveat to their praise for her ideas. Yeah, her plan is good, they say, but because of her antics, none of the people she's pissed off are going to listen to her. From a Republic editorial:

Douglas has alienated nearly every potential reform ally, from Gov. Doug Ducey to the state Board of Education to a healthy portion of the Republican majority of the Legislature.

So, that’s a problem. Leading a parade no one wants to follow is a challenge – a challenge the irascible Douglas has worked overtime creating on her own.

And that’s a shame. Many of her ideas percolate with a wide-based constituency.

If only she had made nice with the Republican power structure, the editorial says, maybe they'd listen to her. Seriously? If Douglas had been a good Republican soldier, they'd be paying attention to her ideas that contradict the party's educational party line? Seriously? When Douglas says we need to come up with new funding to pay teachers more, they'd say, "Diane, you've been so cooperative with the board and the governor, we think, by God, we'll go along with you and push for more money to increase teacher salaries"? And they'll do the same with her testing and state grade proposals? Seriously?

Last Monday I wrote about the way teachers have been portrayed in TV and film since the 1950s. I only looked at teachers of core subjects — English, math, science and social studies — because when people talk about how good or bad teachers are, they're usually talking about those folks. What I found was a general trend. Core teachers were portrayed as good to very good from the 50s through the 70s. Starting in the late 80s and early 90s, we had a crop of super teachers who weren't just good, they were great, transformative, life changing. At about the same time, we started seeing truly bad teachers who ranged from lazy to incompetent to evil. Here's that graph. (The circles with red centers are stories where teachers are the main characters).
Portrayals of teachers reflect societal attitudes, especially in the popular arts like TV and film where the way the studios attract consumers of their products is by reflecting sense of what the world is like. We had a generally positive attitude toward teachers from the 50s through the 70s, so TV shows and films showed us competent, hard working teachers. Teachers and schools were considered part of the solution, not part of the problem. In the 80s, that began to change. Teachers and schools began to be seen in a more negative light. The Reagan administration made this attitude official when it published a document which declared that because of our failing schools, we were A Nation At Risk. The negative views of teachers were compounded by conservatives' anti-government ideology which turned "failing schools" into failing government schools. At the same time, unions were demonized, so union teachers turned into greedy, coddled government employees who only cared about their paychecks and perks, not the students. Those attitudes were reflected in stories with teachers who were anywhere from bad to awful. The super teacher portrayals during that same time might seem to contradict the general anti-teacher trend, but really, they were just the other side of the same teacher-denigrating coin. The super teachers created a perfect contrast to the run-of-the-mill lazy, incompetent teachers. "That's what all teachers should be doing," the super teacher films say. "If some teachers can make students learn, what's the matter with the rest of them?"

In the graph below, I added TV shows and films that focused on administrators (usually principals), in green, and teachers in the arts and coaching, in yellow. Here, are all three categories together.

Thursday Ed Supe Diane Douglas put out her AZ Kids Can't Afford To Wait plan. It's 156 pages long, crammed full of ideas and reasonably detailed descriptions of problems she sees and changes she hopes to see. [I was on the Buckmaster Show today discussing the plan with Bill and Sarah Garrecht Gassen during the second half of the show. The first half had some interesting discussions about our state universities.] I've only had time to give the plan a quick once over, so I can't go into great detail here. But one thing I know. Douglas has been given an undeserved bad rap by the media. They've focused on some of her antics, mainly her ongoing battles with the state Board of Education, and not the indications that she's serious about Arizona education. Those antics are a power struggle, folks. She's not simply behaving childishly and suing people for no reason. She has a very clear agenda in mind, which is to increase her power and influence. Whether her tactics make sense or not, whether they'll increase or decrease her power and influence, whether we'll like what we see if she gains more power, all that remains to be seen. 

Here's what I've learned since Diane Douglas took the helm in January. She deserves to be taken seriously. She wants to change Arizona's education in ways that she thinks will improve things for students. Though I disagree with some of her ideas, I agree with a hell of a lot more than I would have expected. During the campaign for the general election, I underestimated her intelligence and gave her too little respect as a person. People need to take her seriously, whether they agree with her or not. And educational progressives should do what they can to create strategic alliances with her, join forces so that in areas where there is agreement, they can work together and maybe put together the public relations push and the legislative votes necessary to actually move the needle, even a little bit, so we improve the education we give to our children.

Remember Douglas' statewide listening tour, where she traveled all over and listened to people's ideas and concerns about education? Well, a funny thing happened. She listened. Lots of the ideas in her plan are the kinds of things that never would have come up if she sat around the office with her staff, or conferred with principals and superintendents. Many of the ideas are there, I'm certain, because she heard them again and again from teachers and parents who spoke while she listened—when she was in Tucson, Douglas spent a minute introducing herself and gave hours of time to people who aired their views at the microphones placed around the auditorium—and she decided that many of the problems and solutions she heard are worthy of attention.

Now, to the plan. I'm going to deal with areas where Douglas and I agree, and only some of them because 156 pages of ideas can't be crammed into a single post, and I haven't had time to digest everything in the document. I want to stress areas of agreement, where people across the aisle can work together. There's plenty of time to talk about areas of disagreement later.

What are lawmakers waiting for, a gun-related disaster that's so big, so gruesome, so horrifying that the NRA and its enablers won't say, "How dare you politicize these deaths while the bodies are still warm," and "What we need to prevent gun violence is more guns"? It will never happen. Never. The increasing number of horrific shootings and the continuous onslaught of less spectacular, daily gun-related deaths should be enough to make lawmakers who support common sense gun laws state their support boldly and unequivocally. There's no sense in waiting for a better time. There will never be a better time. The financially well-armed opponents of universal background checks and the sale of assault weapons will continue to attack anyone who stands in the way of their agenda.

If there will never be a better time, if there never will be an easier time, then now is the best time. Timidity in the face of the gun lobby spells certain defeat. Elected representatives need to state their support for common sense gun laws boldly. And they need to say they know the NRA and its friends will come after them full force, and they consider attacks from people whose agenda increases the chances for gun-related deaths to be a badge of honor. They need to spotlight the attacks, show them for what they are, instead of cowering in a corner hoping the attacks will go away.

I expect negative comments on this post, some from people who never comment on my posts. The gun lobbyists always has their antennae out, and I'm sure their sensors are set at 11 right now with the latest shooting in southern Oregon. I expect the comments to be filled with vitriol, skewed logic and selective data. I will consider those comments a badge of honor.

In early August, I asked people to help me compile a list of all the TV shows and films that involved teachers in a major or somewhat important minor role. You gave me lots of titles. I scoured the internet and added more. Then, using my rudimentary database and graphing skills, I put together a rough picture of how the portrayal of teachers has changed over the years.

Back in August, before I pulled together the information, I wrote what I thought the results would show.

Let me tell you my hypothesis about the changes in the way teachers have been portrayed since the 1950s. First there were the workaday, cut-above-the-average teachers of core subjects. Think "Room 222." Next came the Superteachers who could leap tall curriculum assignments in a single class period — with poor, underprivileged kids, no less — and change the lives of everyone they came in contact with. Think "Stand and Deliver." The next step was the incompetent teacher who was ridiculed and often didn't give a damn. Think, of course, "Bad Teacher."

My hypothesis was a bit simplistic, but the results follow the basic trend I described. Here's a scattergraph of the way teachers in core subjects—English, math, science and social studies—have been portrayed over the years. I've only included public school teachers in the U.S., leaving out the portrayal of private school teachers and teachers in other countries.


Over time the chart moves from the middle—good teachers—toward the top—super teachers—then toward the bottom—bad teachers (A list of the TV shows and films along with my teacher ratings is at the end of the post).

Yesterday I posted about Arizona's new slogan, or non-slogan according to Ducey's press secretary, "AZ-AWESOME: why arizona rocks." The phrase, which comes from the Arizona Commerce Authority, may be getting off to a rocky start, according to state auditors.

State auditors are faulting the Arizona Commerce Authority for inflating the numbers they use in claiming how many jobs they helped bring to the state.

According to the audit, their job creation numbers are "based on commitments companies announce rather than the actual jobs created or capital investment made."

All that "good news" they want everyone to share appears to have a bit of smoke and mirrors mixed in. Could it be that some of the other AWESOME things mentioned in the Commerce Authority's email are a bit inflated as well?

Arizona is the best place in the entire country to live, work, play, retire, get an education, create an innovative business... the list goes on and on.

While you know that, and I know that, I encourage you to SHARE the good news with your friends, so they know what makes Arizona awesome too! 

The email, by the way, is signed "Doug."

Ducey's PR people were running some new slogans up the Capitol flagpole to see if anyone saluted. They were trying out phrases on one another to see if anyone got chills ("I'm getting chills!"). They were tossing tag lines around at three martini lunches, or whatever ad men and women drink at lunch these days. And then, there it was, a slogan that's totally awesome. It's so awesome, it rocks!

That's the slogan: "AZAWESOME: why arizona rocks" (with AZ in gold and AWESOME in red so people don't ask, "What's a zawesome?")

The Arizona Commerce Authority sent out an email with that embarrassingly cool-thirty-years-ago slogan under the state seal. How did they get there, I asked myself. How did they land on those words, those phrases? Let me offer a possible scenario.

"Awesome" reached its pinnacle of teenage usage in the 80s, around the time Ducey was in his middle to late teenage years. Think surfer dude Jeff Spicoli in the 1982 film, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, exclaiming, "Totally Awesome!" It has that "Makes me feel young and cool again" ring to the 40-to-50 year old set. And if any of them have young kids around the house, they probably know the catchy, child-friendly tune, "Everything is Awesome!!!" from The Lego Movie ("Everything is awesome/Everything is cool when you're part of a team/Everything is awesome when we're living our dream"). How can you beat that? You're a cool dude, you're a cool parent. It's edgy, it's family friendly. It's AWESOME!

So that's the word-phrase they chose to brand Arizona: AZ-AWESOME. When it started to come together, when they were batting it around to see if they hit it out of the park, I imagine someone gushed, "A. Z. Awesome. I'm getting chills! That rocks!" "Even better!" someone else exclaimed. "Arizona is not only awesome. It rocks!" [Fun fact: Ducey called The Stones one of his favorite bands in a tweet (His fave 60s Stones song: Jumpin' Jack Flash).] And so a "We're still cool even though we're middle-aged PR people and a governor" slogan is born.

Where does Mark 16:15, which I mentioned in the headline, come in?

It feels to me like we're experiencing a renaissance of brilliant, talented black writers discussing racial issues in print. Maybe people have been writing like this all along but it hasn't made the mainstream media. Or maybe it's been in mainstream media all along and I haven't been paying enough attention. Well, I'm paying attention now, to writers like Michelle Alexander whose 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, presented the fundamental arguments against mass incarceration, and Ta-Nehisi Coates whose book, Between the World and Me, is the finest discussion of racism in America I've read in decades and one of the finest examples of nonfiction as literature I've read in at least as long. (Coates, by the way, has the cover story in this month's Atlantic Magazine, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration, a long, excellent article I'm working my way through. For comic book fans, Coates is going to write the next "Black Panther" series published by Marvel Comics, a series which presented the first black superhero in 1966.)

And I'm going to be reading more work by Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker. A few weeks ago, he wrote Class Notes: What’s really at stake when a school closes? It's a first person account of the history of Jamaica High School in Queens, which he attended in the 1980s and which closed recently. It's an interesting discussion of the way Jamaica High went from a school attended by white students to a predominantly black school with diminishing enrollment. The whole article is worth a read.

The part I want to spotlight is near the end, where Cobb discusses the debate raging about our "failing schools." Are they "failing" because the teachers, the unions, the administrators and the district are doing a lousy job, or are the problems more a function of societal problems like racism and income inequality? Obviously, it's not an either-or question, but you can tell where people stand on the issue by how they answer it. Today's "education reformers" tend to be public school—or in their favored terminology, "government school"—bashers. Don't blame society, they say, fix the schools, or get rid of the "failing schools" and start over, and you'll fix the problem. The other side, which really doesn't have a name—"progressive educators" is as good as any—says you can't expect the schools to fix the injustices or heal the wounds created by the outside society all by themselves. The schools are part of the process of improvement, but they can't do their jobs effectively while societal problems are allowed to fester. Cobbs is on the "progressive" side of the argument, as am I.

I'm going to copy a long, complex passage from the article which, I think, brilliantly summarizes the history of school integration since Brown v. Board of Education, but before I do, let me pull out two salient lines.

"Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility—of blame, really—run inward. It’s not society that has failed, in this perspective. It’s the schools."

"The current language of educational reform emphasizes racial “achievement gaps” and “underperforming schools” but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened."

Ahmed Mohamed made national and probably international news when the 14 year old brought a homemade clock to his Dallas high school which some people thought might be a bomb, and when they realized it wasn't, accused him of bringing a prank bomb to school. He was detained, questioned without being allowed to talk with his parents and handcuffed. As a former high school English teacher, I've been running through the scenario in my head, thinking about what I might have done if I had been involved and how the school should have responded to the situation. I'm using the details as they were described in a NY Times article.

I'm reasonably certain that Ahmed's dark skin and Muslim faith caused a heightened reaction from the school and the police, that this situation would have been handled better if he were white, but let's neutralize that issue for the moment. This was a student in my class, his name was Ahmed or Andy, he was black or white, Muslim, Christian or nonreligious.

So. Ahmed/Andy is a student in my English class. I hear something beeping in his backpack. I ask to see what it is. This nice, shy, somewhat nerdy kid reaches into his backpack and pulls out a metal briefcase with a clock face on the front. What do I do?

The first thing that happens inside me, I'm guessing, is I experience an electric shock of panic in my chest. I think, "Oh shit, that looks like the kind of bomb I've seen in a dozen spy/terrorist movies!" What do I do? My first reaction is to protect the safety and welfare of my students and other students at the school. Whatever temporary problems I create for Ahmed/Andy are secondary, I'll worry about that later. This may be a bomb, and this seemingly nice kid may be one of those people who does some terrible thing, after which everyone says, "He was such a nice kid, I never would have suspected he would have done something like this."

My best reaction, I think, would have been to tell Ahmed/Andy to pick up his belongings and come into the hall with me, away from the other students. Then I would say, "Tell me what that device is." If he answered, "It's a clock I brought to school to show to my engineering teacher," my next best reaction would be to say we'd better take it to the office, where I would explain the situation to an administrator. When I felt comfortable the administrator understood and had things in hand, I would return to my class. If I was feeling especially panicky and feared it might be a bomb that could go off at any moment, I'd take him outside with me. We would set all Ahmed/Andy's belongings some distance away from the school, then we could move back toward the school so we would be out of potential danger. At that point, I would somehow alert an administrator or one of the campus cops to help with the situation. (Would I have reacted this calmly if I were actually in this situation? I honestly have no idea.)

Now that the potential threat is away from the school, the situation changes. My responsibility is no longer to the students in my class or in the school. It's to Ahmed/Andy's welfare. Assuming this isn't a bomb, assuming this kid did nothing wrong, he's been through a frightening experience through no fault of his own. I should do whatever I can to lessen the negative impact of his being suspected of doing something as horrible as bringing a bomb to school. "Look," I might say, "Your clock scared the crap out of me. I saw that box and I imagined what might happen if it were a bomb. Why did you bring a thing like that to school?" If he repeated the story about bringing it to show to his engineering teacher, I might smile and say, "Yeah, Mr. Stephens [or whatever his name is], did he like it?" Maybe talk a little about Mr. Stephen's class to move us emotionally out of the present situation. Then I might say, "I hope you know, what I just did, pulling you out of class, that wasn't about you, it was about the concern I felt seeing that box. I would have done the same thing with any student. That's my duty, to do everything I can to keep my students safe. I can't tell you how relieved I feel right now knowing I was worried about nothing."  I might ask, "How are you doing? Are you OK?" to gauge his mental state.

Once it's determined this was nothing but a homemade clock (which they must have decided quickly, because the bomb squad wasn't called), the well-being of Ahmed/Andy should become the school's primary focus. As much as possible, this should be a school-based action, not a police action. If it's determined that this kid brought the clock to school as a prank, some appropriate disciplinary action should be taken. It's distantly possible, I suppose, that this was a trial run for sneaking a bomb into the school. Both of those possibilities should be considered. But the higher probability is that this was exactly what Ahmed/Andy said, that he brought the clock to impress his engineering teacher. If someone in the administration went down and talked to the teacher and confirmed the student's story, that would pretty much have put an end to the situation. But that's not what happened, and that's where this situation went astray.

The Arizona education wars are turning into a series of Republican-on-Republican, tag team cage fighting matches. The whole thing is getting pretty ugly. That's what cage fighting is all about, of course, getting ugly; that's its allure. Me, I don't watch the sweaty-body grappling on cable TV, but I'm a big fan of the political variety, especially when the fighting is between the couldn't-happen-to-a-more-deserving-group-of-folks Republicans, in or out of office. The "Trump vs. The Field" primaries, the Phoenix skirmishes . . . pass the popcorn, hon, this is really good.

Ed Supe Diane Douglas' antics, mainly directed at the state school board, have been the main source of jibes and jokes in the media. She's a novice who says and does silly stuff in her pursuit of her education agenda, throwing tantrums, suing the board and seeing if she can win by taking her marbles, or her websites, and going home. That all makes for easy, eye-rolling commentary. It also makes people forget that, since she took office, Douglas has made some of the most sensible statements about education coming from a Republican in a long time, including a school funding plan that's head-and-shoulders above any other AZ Republican proposal I've heard, maybe ever. Much as people like to say she's harming our schools, so far as I can tell, she isn't. Maybe she will in the future, it's certainly possible, but not yet. She's gumming up the privatization works a bit and giving the state board fits, but I haven't seen how it has hurt kids in a way that's comparable to, say, the legislative cuts to education which have been going on for years or Huppenthal's vendetta against TUSD's Mexican American Studies program.

Douglas is an easy target, a side show, a distraction, but Doug Ducey is the big dog. While he smiles and keeps his hands clean, his political friends attack, sometimes in the light of day, sometimes leaping out of dark alleys. Ducey does not like to be challenged. His dark money henchman, Sean Noble, went after Mesa Superintendent Michael Cowan when he wouldn't behave. These days, Ducey's target is state treasurer James DeWit, who opposes Ducey's plan to tap into state land trust funds and is being ostracized and trashed by Ducey and his surrogates. My favorite surrogate attack was on the breibart.com website, written by Lisa de Pasquale. To put her comments in context, she calls Ann Coulter her mentor, loves Scott Walker and calls Ducey "the Walker of the West." De Pasquale accuses DeWit of "throwing a bureaucratic hissy fit" and "sid[ing] with unions and liberals." The graphic in the article portraying DeWit as Doctor Evil "HOLDING ARIZONA KIDS RANSOM FOR $2 BILLION!" is worth the price of admission.