[Satire alert, in case anyone reading this thinks I'm being serious.]

The results are in, and the conclusions are clear. The Pew Research Center administered a test on science knowledge (you can take the test here), and it demonstrated a distinct difference in science knowledge based on people's age, gender and race. I've used those results to draw the following conclusions.

1. Science education in U.S. K-12 schools reached its peak during the years between 1980 and 2000. People between the ages of 30 and 49 earned the highest scores on the test, and they would have received their middle and high school science educations during the years roughly between 1980 and 2000. During those years, the Reagan administration's 1983 Nation at Risk report concluded that our schools were suffering from a "rising tide of mediocrity" and declared, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Peak science education continued through the post-Nation at Risk years when the improvement in our schools was said to be so minimal that we needed to impose a new educational model, No Child Left Behind, based on strict educational standards and yearly high stakes tests.

2. Science education in the U.S. has deteriorated since the advent of No Child Left Behind. People between the ages of 18 and 24, who received their middle and high school science educations since NCLB was passed in 2001, scored lower than people who went to school during the previous two decades. Whether that indicates a general deterioration of our schools or indicates that the increased emphasis on the tested subjects of reading, writing and math meant less emphasis on science instruction is unclear and will need to be examined further.

3. The worst time for post-World War II science education in K-12 schools was in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by the 1970s. The poorest performers on the test were people over 65, followed by people between the ages of 50 and 64.

4. More women attended failing schools and had poorly quality science teachers than men. Men scored higher on the test than women, indicating that women's science education was inferior to that received by men.

5. Science teachers in schools with predominantly African American and Hispanic students are inferior to teachers in schools with predominantly white students. Test takers who are African American and Hispanic scored lower than White test takers.

Someone better trained in statistics and polling than I may draw more sophisticated conclusions from this rich data source, but based on the quality of my analysis, the state's Department of Education should consider hiring me to help analyze the results of the AzMERIT tests.

Right now, the country is having the most public, detailed discussion about race and racism we've had in decades, which is a good thing. The heat generated by the discussion is intense on both sides, or I should say on all sides, since you hear such a wide range of viewpoints. Look at the passionate and wildly different reactions to the deaths of black men and boys at the hands of police. Look at the contrasting reactions to the controversy over the Confederate Flag. With controversy flying and tempers flaring, you might conclude the divisions are deeper now than they were before. I don't know if that's true. More likely, the divisions are just more out in the open.

Lately, I've felt an increasing need to understand the history of race and racism in this country and the way it manifests itself today. Along with trying to keep up with the events and analyses in the media, I've read a few books that have given me a deeper understanding of a subject which, being a white man, I can only know secondhand. A few days ago I recommended the book, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, an important, beautifully written book I believe will be read and talked about for decades. Today I want to recommend a very different book: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The book, published in 2010, discusses the War on Drugs, the policing of black communities, our legal system, and mass incarceration, subjects that were talked about far less five years ago when the book came out than they are today. It's reasonable to say that Alexander's book brought focused attention to those problems and laid the groundwork for the way we're talking about them now. It's still the best text on the subject I've read.

Alexander is a Civil Rights lawyer, and she writes the book like a lawyer arguing a case. She brings together numerous incidents and witnesses, creating an overwhelming preponderance of evidence to prove her point. Alexander creates a complex thesis which is hard to summarize in a few words. Basically, she shows how the crackdown on drugs and crime has been directed disproportionately toward black people and black communities and how harmful it has been to black lives, comparable in ways to the Jim Crow laws which legalized segregation and discrimination before the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.

I can't help it. I find the AZ Board of Ed vs. AZ Dept. of Ed train wreck endlessly fascinating. Diane Douglas is so much fun to watch. If someone can show me how she's done harm to Arizona education during her tenure, how, say, things would be better for our children, teachers and schools if John Huppenthal were still in power, maybe I'll start taking her shenanigans more seriously. Until then, I'll continue getting the same perverse pleasure from her antics that I get watching the Republican presidential race.

The one spasm of guilt I feel over my guilty pleasure is that I'm pretty sure Douglas is up to no good in her attempt to wrest power from the Board. Her dogged persistence makes me pretty certain that others are telling her, "If you can get the power to hire and fire more staff, then you can hire your own people and put some of our Tea Party agenda in motion, so keep fighting them at every turn." If she wins this struggle with the Board, it could mean trouble down the road. But it's hard for me to take the side of Doug Ducey's Board of Education against her. Look, if the two keep fighting, if the hatred between the two sides continues to grow, maybe they'll neutralize each other. With Ducey and his minions in power, I prefer inaction to action.

With that in mind, here's the latest. During the most recent Board meeting, where Douglas forms a minority of one, she kept talking when Board President Greg Miller wanted her to stop. According to Douglas, Miller grabbed her arm, and when she still didn't stop talking, he pushed away her microphone. Douglas claims Miller assaulted her, so she called the cops  on him. The thing is, she was right. He was way out of line touching her, grabbing her, in anger.

I'm not a student of Roberts Rules of Order, but I'm reasonably certain it doesn't tell the chair of a meeting to grab someone or push away her microphone when she's out of order. I'm guessing there's a procedure the chair is supposed to follow. Miller's impulsive action was a small act of violence against Douglas, but an act of violence nonetheless. It was an attempt to scare and bully her into silence. He had absolutely no right to touch her, especially in such an aggressive manner. I would think every advocate for woman's rights should feel indignant right along with her.

Should she have made this a police incident? From a political standpoint, absolutely, even if she didn't think Miller's action rose to that level of aggression. Douglas goaded Miller into an impulsive act, then she used political judo to turn his action against him. It was a very clever maneuver for a novice.

I rarely read a book that I find to be transformative, that not only adds to my knowledge and understanding of an issue but significantly alters my way of thinking about it. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those works. It's a new book and currently sits at number two on the New York Times' nonfiction best seller list. 

Coates' book is presented as a letter to his teenage son. It's his attempt to describe what it's like growing up black in present-day America from the inside out, using his own life as his touchstone. He presents his world from a personal, subjective point of view. This isn't a sociological or political text. In the book Coates renders his confusion, his questions, his grief, his anger and his joys with literary clarity, and with a depth that can't be captured in a dry, "objective" discussion of the issues.

It would be incorrect for me to say I "understand" the book. You can only understand the world he's trying to capture if you've lived it, if you've felt it in your psyche and your nerve endings. Intellectual understanding, even combined with valiant attempts at empathy, can't substitute for being there on a day by day, minute by minute basis. I'm an older, white, privileged male who does his best to comprehend the nature of racism in this country, but I know I'm looking at that world from the outside. Coates grants me the ability to get as close to what the life of a black man is like as any recent work I can think of.

People compare Coates' book to James Baldwin's electrifying 1963 work, The Fire Next Time. It's a valid comparison, but for me, the experience of reading Between the World and Me is more like what I felt when I read Ralph Ellison's great 1952 novel, Invisible Man. That's the only other book I can remember that gave me the momentary sense of living the black experience, and helped me understand how distant it is from my experiences and how limited my understanding will always be.

This book deserves to join the literary canon alongside works by Baldwin, Ellison and Toni Morrison. So let me end by quoting what Morrison wrote about Between the World and Me.

“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading."

I was so late to the Serial* bandwagon. I listened to the entire series in two days, only taking a break when coworkers would approach my desk demanding attention. When I finished the final episode, I was unsatisfied. I, having been a big reader/television watcher all my life, wanted a satisfying answer. A well throughout, all encompassing final chapter. But this is "real life" and this story isn't over just because we're ready for a Law & Order-style recap. 

Though Serial is done with the story that kept us so entranced last season, the story is still developing. Through Undisclosed, more details of the case are being discovered. This time around, there's no This American Life level production and the narrator is firmly on Team Anon. Its content will be interesting for Serial fans, but Undisclosed is absolutely a different experience. 

Entertainment Weekly has been kind enough to keep up with this for us and wrote something up giving us a Serial recap, the facts relevant to each claim and (!!!) five new things that have come up since the original podcast ended.  

Head over to EW to read the whole thing, but I'll leave you a taste here: 

3. The cell phone tower pings mean nothing

If Gutierrez had paid closer attention to an AT&T cover sheet that included information about the cell phone towers pinged by Adnan’s phone on Jan. 13, the trial may have ended differently. The cover sheets stated, “outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location.” One of the reasons for this disclaimer was due to a glitch with AT&T at the time, which had incoming calls ping the tower near the person making the call rather than the person on the receiving end. The two key phone calls in the case, at 7:09 p.m. and 7:16 p.m., pinged the tower that covers Leakin Park and the surrounding areas. The State claimed the pings from those calls placed Syed in the park, where he allegedly buried Hae. However both of those calls were incoming calls, thus making it impossible to determine the location status. According to Syed’s current attorney, C. Justin Brown, the fax cover sheet was included in Gutierrez’s file, but she “simply failed to act on it.”

*I'm not going to summarize it for you, you just have to listen to it. I'm obsessed with it, everyone is obsessed with it, just do it. You've put it off long enough.

When my principal first introduced high stakes testing for sophomores at the Oregon high school where I taught—it was 2000 or just before—he told teachers, "Don't wait around for this to go away. Trust me, this one isn't going away." He was referring to the tendency of teachers to slow walk some changes suggested by higher-ups, especially ones that seem unproductive or counterproductive, expecting that they'll lose momentum and end up on the ash heap of ineffective school change ideas. But this time, my principal was right. High stakes testing had legs, and it's only grown stronger. Until, maybe, now.

A new poll from Phi Delta Kappa International, administered by Gallup, shows that people are starting to shift their ideas about the value of high stakes testing. Some 64 percent of people polled said they thought there was too much emphasis on standardized testing in public schools. Among people whose children were in public schools, the number was slightly higher, 67 percent. When asked if standardized test scores should be part of teacher evaluations, 55 percent said no. Among people whose children were in public schools, the number went up to 63 percent.

Gallup's analysis of the survey breaks down the data further. When people were asked the best ways to measure the effectiveness of a public school, student engagement with their classwork was at the top of the list and testing was at the bottom. Testing also placed at the bottom both in ways to create an accurate picture of a student's progress and ways to improve schools.

Arizona is getting ready to go all in on last year's AzMERIT scores. We already know the overall passing rates for the state. Scores are down from the AIMS test. And we know why: because the bar was intentionally set higher. But we have yet to learn the individual school scores. Before we see the scores, though, we have a pretty good idea which schools will be the high fliers—schools that draw students from high income families—and which will be criticized for failing their children—schools that draw students from lower income families. But which schools will beat the odds? We won't know that for awhile, nor should we feel confident those "Why can't other schools be that successful?" results actually reflect student achievement.

Here's something that, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, is a known known: Attaching high stakes to standardized tests decreases whatever validity the tests might otherwise have. If the test results are important enough, schools and teachers will find all kinds of legitimate ways to help students get higher scores than if they weren't coached. Take, for an example, oh, say, me. When I was teaching in Oregon during the first few years of our high stakes state tests, I'm reasonably sure I helped a number of students just make it over the passing line on their 10th grade writing tets by teaching them the best way to approach the writing sample. I tried to make them better writers in the process, but if I hadn't given them approaches focused on boosting their scores, some passing students wouldn't have made the cut.

And then there are the illegal ways of raising student scores that involve cheating, not by students but by teachers and/or administrators. How often does it happen? The probable answer is, it happens far more often than we know about.

Here are some cases of proven and possible cheating which have made the news:

Atlanta, Georgia. The biggest cheating scandal in the country was in the Atlanta schools, where eleven educators were found guilty of cheating and eight of them went to prison. That should have been enough to scare every other Atlanta teacher straight, but it doesn't looks like it did.

When a jury convicted 11 former Atlanta educators in a test-cheating conspiracy in the spring, some education experts thought it may signal the end of high-profile academic misconduct cases for the 49,000-student school system.

But the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported on multiple cases of possible improper grading practices in recent months, "including cases of principals pressured to alter grades; retaliation against those who balked; and supervisors allegedly ignoring or implicitly approving the signs of cheating," the Associated Press writes.

Why would the latest group of cheaters be so stupid after seeing what happened to some of their colleagues? Well, if they had cheated before and didn't do it this time, the significantly lower test scores would be a smoking gun pointing to earlier test fixing, and maybe they were under so much pressure to get those scores up and keep them up, they felt they had to continue regardless of the risk.

Before the scandal broke, I should add, Atlanta schools were considered some of the most successful in the country because of their high test scores. They got an award from Ed Sec Arne Duncan.

This story, well reported by KVOA News, is disturbing on a number of levels. Let's start with the facts.

During a class lesson, Spanish teacher Kristen Maurer at Vail's Empire High School used a picture of Obama, distorted to mimic the crassest of racist stereotypes. The picture shows Obama with gigantic lips, exaggeratedly big ears and crossed eyes, the kind of portrayal found on the worst emails, websites and posters from Obama haters who want to add a racist flavor to their rants. (I won't put the image in this post. You can see it in the news report.) It was part of a lesson where Maurer showed a series of pictures and asked students to describe in Spanish the emotions portrayed in the pictures. Among the other photos was one of Oprah Winfrey with a startled expression on her face and her head pulled into her neck in a way that created double chins. According to the student who complained about the use of the images, Maurer said Winfrey looked terrible and counted her neck rolls in Spanish. The other two photos shown in the article are of Jennifer Aniston with a big nose and Ronald McDonald.

One more detail. The class laughed loudly when the picture of Obama came on the screen.

The teacher was obviously going for shock value and laughs to spice up to her lesson and get her students involved. Racist stereotypes, as well as mockery of someone's looks, can elicit laughs, in a picture or a well told racist, sexist or homophobic joke. Her use of the racist exaggeration of Obama's face and her mockery of Winfrey's looks, inappropriate anywhere, are wildly inappropriate coming from a teacher in a classroom setting. I have no idea if Maurer is especially racist or if she dislikes Obama, frequents websites and receives emails from the hate groups that spread these distorted pictures. If the images express her personal attitudes, then the racist stereotype she depicted is dipped in venom. If not, she's clueless, unaware of her own latent racism and oblivious to the terrible message she's sending when she legitimizes portrayals like this in her classroom. It's OK to trot out racist portrayals in public, she's telling her students, especially when they're used in fun. As a teacher, she's giving students license to accept these kinds of portrayals, even embrace them. When the students get to college, Maurer's lesson will help them feel comfortable attending a come-in-blackface-and-wig frat party where fried chicken and watermelon are served because, "Hey, it's all in fun, and besides, I really like hip hop music. When I was in high school, my Spanish teacher showed us this picture of Obama with big lips, it was hysterical!" She's also telling them that ugly woman jokes and fat woman jokes are just fine.

The Star had a worthwhile idea for an education story. Two writers decided to look at how districts in the Tucson area handle teacher evaluations. The interactive map on the website and the chart in the newsprint version show that some districts are more generous than others in awarding high ratings to their teachers. Interesting. Definitely worth analyzing and discussing. Unfortunately, the article loses credibility with its opening which implies that you can correlate teachers' effectiveness with their students' achievement scores. Later in the story, a more nuanced picture is presented, but the damage done in the opening paragraphs can't be undone.

And the article quotes one out-of-state "expert" to corroborate its basic thesis, Sandi Jacobs of the National Council for Teacher Quality. In the article, she's portrayed as an objective observer who is commenting from on high. And a group whose title says it's all about Teacher Quality — who can argue with that? Apparently not the authors of the article who, I'm guessing, didn't look very far into the history and conservative biases of Jacobs or the NCTQ.

Look at the opening paragraph of the article:

Nine in 10 Pima County teachers are rated good or great — but that is not always evident in their students’ achievement scores.

That's a real grabber. It pulls you right into the story. But it also perpetuates a dangerous misconception: that teachers can't be effective if their students have low scores on state tests. I guess that means the ability of teachers at schools with students from low income households, sometimes households where English isn't the primary language, should be suspect since their students don't do well on state tests. How can they possibly be as good as teachers up in the Foothills and Marana and Oro Valley where the students do so well on the same tests? Unfortunately, that's an attitude that our anti-public education Republican legislators and their compatriots in the "education reform"/privatization movement would like to perpetuate, and the Star article helps them in their mission.

In the next paragraph, the point is hammered home.

Some districts reported nearly unanimous high ratings for teachers even though their schools received low grades for student achievement and other standards.

I guess that means, logically, that a district with with an A grade from the state would have more reason to rate its teachers highly than a district with a low grade.

Didn't get the point? Then read the next paragraph.

Tucson’s two largest school districts — Tucson Unified School District and Sunnyside — rated almost all their teachers good or great despite being among Pima County’s lowest-scoring districts on the state’s math, reading and writing assessments.

Fine the legislature! That's what the Washington State Supreme Court is doing, issuing a $100,000 fine for every day the legislature ignores a court order on school funding. The decision was unanimous.

Thursday's order, signed by all nine justices of the high court, ordered that the fine start immediately, and be put into a dedicated education account.

The situation sounds very similar to what's going on in Arizona.

The ruling was the latest development in a long-running impasse between lawmakers and justices, who in 2012 ruled that the state is failing to meet its constitutional duty to pay for the cost of basic education for its 1 million schoolchildren.

Thomas Ahearne, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that the court's action "is long overdue."

"The state has known for many, many years that it's violating the constitutional rights of our public school kids," Ahearne said. "And the state has been told by the court in rulings in this case to fix it, and the state has just been dillydallying along."

The details are different. The biggest issue in the Washington case is that school districts are overly dependent on local taxes to fund the schools, which leads to big disparities in funding levels, district to district. Arizona's per student funding may be ridiculously low, but the pain is spread out reasonably evenly. Some of our districts figure out ways to get more money in their coffers than others, but it's nowhere near the disparity you find in some other states. 

Our Supreme Court should follow the example set in Washington. Start fining the legislature $100,000 a day. That would mean by the time the next legislative session starts, we'd have about $15 million socked away. It's a paltry sum that doesn't begin to cover the $300 million-plus the state owes the schools this school year alone, but it would rankle the "Rule of law" Republicans no end to see the steady drip-drip-drip of money leaving their hands by court order. To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, A hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.