Ed Supe Diane Douglas is making headlines again in her continuing power struggle with the Arizona Board of Education. The Board represents the Ducey education agenda, and Douglas wants—it's hard to know exactly what Douglas wants. Based on her tenure on the Peoria school board and her pronouncements during the campaign, it seems like she wants Arizona education to take a hard right turn. But I don't know exactly what that means, especially since she's said some laudable things about education since taking office in January. When it comes to her long term plans, Douglas is holding her cards pretty close to her vest. What I do know is, she wants to have more power over education priorities at the state level, and she wants the State Board to have less.

They've been in court, Douglas and the Board, over the question of who controls what. The Board won the last round, so naturally, Douglas is appealing the ruling. Meanwhile, the latest is, she's threatening not to get the state's Move On When Reading web portal up and running, which is a problem, since there's $40 million in funding waiting to be spent on reading programs for elementary school kids, and it can't be allocated unless the website is working. It looks like Douglas has decided to open the Move On When Reading portal, but she says the Board has to kick in $50,000 to help it do its work, or something like that.

Yes, it would be awful if that $40 million isn't used to help kids read, but for the life of me, I can't get overly concerned about this whole Douglas/Board kerfuffle. (That $40 million will get spent on reading, by the way, very little doubt about that. Both sides want it to happen. They're just waiting to see who blinks first.) Truth be told, I find it all amusing. "Pass the popcorn, honey, this is getting good!" The "Douglas vs. the Republican Establishment" battle is the national Republican Party  writ small. We're seeing similar battles playing out in the GOP's cast-of-thousands presidential primary. For years, the Republican establishment catered to and fawned over its far right wingers to bring them into the fold as a voting force. The party power structure was playing the role of political Frankenstein, creating an ideological monster out of bits and pieces of the Republican platform. [Literary note: Frankenstein isn't the monster. Mary Shelley created the fictional character Dr. Frankenstein, who then created the monster. When referencing the story, always say, "Frankenstein's monster" or simply "The monster." Never say, "They created a Frankenstein."] But the Republican Frankenstein wanted its far right wing monster to be all mouth and fingers. It was just supposed to make noise and vote Republican. Instead, the monster escaped, ran amok and took control. The people who are supposed to be in control don't know how to put the monster in chains and get him back into the laboratory where they can tell him what to do, instead of the other way round.

Governor Ducey hopes to eliminate the income tax. He wants to continue cutting business taxes, which, according to him and fellow conservatives, will bring businesses streaming to Arizona by the U-Haul-load. He wants to change the school funding formula to reward "success," a term he hasn't defined.

Same with Kansas. An article in this week's NY Times Magazine, The Kansas Experiment, puts Arizona's conservative agenda items in national perspective. Kansas, under the leadership of Governor Sam Brownback, who took the helm in 2011, is moving in the same direction, and is probably farther along in the process. The two states aren't identical, but the similarities are strong enough that you can almost see Ducey and his fellow state conservatives leaning over Brownback's shoulder to read his playbook.

Here are some excerpts.

With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.

[snip]

The march to zero, which includes an already-passed provision that exempts the owners of 330,000 businesses and farms in Kansas from income tax, was designed, Gene said, to turn Kansas into a different sort of tourist attraction. As he and his fellow conservatives see it, it’s an ‘‘open for business’’ sign, one they hope will draw free enterprise to the state.

[snip]

[State Rep. Gene Suellentrop, vice chairman of the Tax Committee in the Kansas House] brainstormed with Dave Trabert, the president of the small-government Kansas Policy Institute, about whether there was a way to isolate the administrative costs in the state education budget, so Republicans could cut them without reducing classroom spending.

[snip]

I asked readers to name movies and TV series with teachers in prominent roles or important secondary roles. Here's what you've offered so far, in chronological order (the TV show dates are when they first aired).

More! More! Keep 'em coming.

Boy’s Town (1938)
Good-bye Mr. Chips (1939)
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Our Miss Brooks (1952)
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
Miracle Worker (1962)
Mr. Novak (1963)
To Sir With Love (1967)
Up the Down Staircase (1967)
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
Good-bye Mr. Chips (1969)
Room 222 (1969)
Paper Chase (1973)
Conrack (1974)
Welcome Back, Kotter (1975)
Fame (1982)
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
Head of the Class (1986)
Stand and Deliver (1988)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
Saved By The Bell (1989)
Kindergarten Cop (1990)
Boy Meets World (1993)
Renaissance Man (1994)
Dangerous Minds (1995)
Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995)
Good Will Hunting (1997)
Election (1999)
Miracle Worker (2000)
Mean Girls (2004)
Freedom Writers (2007)
Breaking Bad (2008)
Bad Teacher (2011)
Rita (Swedish)( 2012)

CBS 5 - KPHO

KPHO Phoenix has the kind of report about BASIS charter schools I've wanted to see in the MSM for a long time. Yes, it says, BASIS schools are strong academically and have a rigorous curriculum, but they shouldn't be compared directly to other public schools because of their selective student bodies. It's a point I've made many times before, as have others, a point BASIS has worked hard to refute. Now it looks like other are beginning to catch on, and BASIS is being forced to change its "We're simply doing a better job than all those other schools" tune a bit.

Watch the whole five minute piece. It's quite good and lets both sides have their say. The intro summarizes the report well:

"They are ranked among the top public schools in the country, and they're located right here in Arizona. The BASIS schools are also facing some criticism, that they fudge the rankings by graduating only a fraction of the students who enroll."

A few of the statements in the report that come from BASIS are defensive half truths, but they're actually closer to honest and accurate than what I'm used to hearing hear from the schools' spokespeople.

My feeling about the charter school chain is, Let BASIS be BASIS. Let students who benefit from the school reap the benefits. But don't use BASIS as a way to trash other public schools by saying, "Look, we're doing it, why can't they do the same?" Graduates from BASIS are an academic elite, probably even more so than at most top ranked private high schools. They're the kind of kids who would thrive academically wherever they went to school. If BASIS schools had student bodies like most other Arizona public schools, they would find their sky-high academic expectations would cause frustration and failure for a sizable portion of their students.

Craig Robinson will be playing a music teacher in a new NBC show, "Mr. Robinson." If it were a movie, this is what the voiceover would sound like. Cue the deep, authoritative "In a World . . ." voice.

"Craig Robinson. He fought off the apocalypse with his friends, James Franco. Seth Rogen. Jonah Hill. Jay Baruchel. . . . But does he have what it takes to face a classroom filled with [deep, ominous voice] REBELLIOUS. HYPER-ACTIVE. OVER-GLANDULAR  TEENAGERS? A-L-O-O-O-N-E?"

(Hollywood promo guys, this one's on the house, no charge. But if you want more, contact me through the Weekly.)

Readers, I need your help. I want the name of every TV show or movie that either has a teacher in a lead role or in a reasonably prominent secondary role. As many as you can think of, as far back as you can go ("Our Miss Brooks" with Eve Arden, anyone?).

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." Now, when we see teachers, they're sports coaches or music teachers who don't teach those essential, No Child Left Behind core classes. Think, a TV show like "Glee" or a movie like "McFarland, USA."

The best way to prove, disprove or alter a hypothesis is to put it to a real world test. So help me out. The more examples, the better. 

We learned last week that Arizona colleges have a lousy graduation rate. Except it turns out our state colleges' graduation rates rank pretty well nationwide, but our for-profits, like the huge Huckster U University of Phoenix, drag down the average. This week we learn that TUSD needs lots more teachers—tons more!—than other Tucson area districts, which gives people one more reason to cluck their tongues at the district lots of people are sure is failing compared to other local districts. Except that the raw numbers only tell part of the story.

The Star has a good, long, thoughtful article about Arizona teacher shortages, local and statewide, including one of those fun, informative interactive data pages online. The story gives teacher shortage numbers for all the local districts. TUSD needs a whopping 116 teachers while Marana needs 16.5, Sahuarita needs 16, Catalina Foothills needs 3. Even Sunnyside only needs 40. It looks like the Tucson district is in the deepest of teacher shortage doo-doo compared to its neighbors. But the article leaves out one essential bit of information: the student enrollment for each district. And it leaves out another less essential but important bit of information: each district's state grade. So let's put that information into the mix and see what we find.

TUSD needs 116 teachers while Marana only needs 16.5. But TUSD has 49,000 students while Marana only has 12,500 students. If TUSD had the same student population as Marana, it would need 30 teachers. That's still almost twice as many teachers as Marana when the enrollments are evened out, but it no longer looks like there's a 7-to-1 gap between the districts. If TUSD were Foothills-sized, it would need 12 teachers. Foothills, however, only needs 4. And if TUSD were Sahuarita-sized, it would need 14 teachers. Sahuarita needs 16, so TUSD actually needs fewer teachers than Sahuarita when enrollments are considered.

I looked at districts' enrollment figures and the number of teachers they need, then figured out how many teachers each needed for every 1,000 students. There's still a significant difference. Vail needs .4 teachers per 1,000 students. Foothills needs .6. Both TUSD and Sunnyside need 2.4 teachers per 1,000 students, between four and six times more than Vail and Foothills.

Next I looked at each district's state grade. With the exception of Sahuarita, districts with the highest state grades need proportionately fewer teachers, and districts with lower state grades need more. It's not hard to figure out why. If you took a random group of people looking for teaching jobs in the Tucson area and asked where they'd most like to teach, districts like Vail and Catalina Foothills, where family income and student achievement are high, would come up more often than TUSD, where family income and student achievement are far lower. K-12 teaching is a tough job no matter where you are, but it's less stressful—and for many teachers, more rewarding—working in high rent districts, and there's a certain prestige value in saying, "Yes, I teach at (ahem) Catalina Foothills High." The high rent districts will always have an easier time finding teachers just because of who they are, not because they're doing something right and the low rent districts are doing something wrong. [Note: Flowing Wells is the exception to the rule, with its low income student population, high state grade and low number of teachers needed relative to its size.]

The table below has compiles the information for local districts.

Just in case you forgot (or convinced yourself it was just a bad dream), here's a reminder: Jon Stewart's last night hosting the Daily Show is Thursday, August 6.

Thursday's show is, unsurprisingly, a bit of a mystery. The network did, however, release the names of the guests for the three episodes leading up to Stewart's finale.

Amy Schumer, who broke my little heart by turning down the opportunity to take Jon's spot on the show, will be on the show Monday, followed by Denis Leary and Louis C.K. on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Trevor Noah, Stewart's replacement, will host his first show on Sept. 28. Noah has recently talked a bit about changes coming to the show, so that's ... happening. 

Here are three interesting state-of-Arizona-education articles I've read this week.

Low marks for Arizona in education study. Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services.

In a WalletHub report, Arizona ranked 48th overall in the quality of its schools. Like most WalletHub studies I've looked at, this one has a quick-and-dirty feel, but the criteria it uses to arrive at its conclusions are reasonable. The problem is, it doesn't take socioeconomic factors into account—family income, ELL students, etc. That's a huge omission.

Can you guess which sectors gained and lost the most jobs in Arizona since the recession? Eric Jay Toll, Phoenix Business Journal.

Construction lost the most jobs—no surprise there—followed by education. Hmm. The recession meant a big cutback n building, so we could have fewer construction workers with no loss of quality. But we're educating the same number of students as before the recession, so to keep quality up, we need as many people in education as before. Cuts in education are definitely going to hurt the children.

Phoenix moves up in Forbes' 'best places for business' list, but education drags down region. Eric Jay Toll, Phoenix Business Journal.

Phoenix moved up 12 positions in the Forbes "Best Places for Business and Careers" ranking, from 56 to 44, but it came in at 103 for education. "[E]ight of the top 10 metros in education all ranked in the top 50 for best places for business and career." Though it's not mentioned in the article, Tucson ranked #103 overall in the Forbes ranking—far lower than Phoenix—but #91 in education, a bit higher than Phoenix.

This is a follow up to yesterday's post where I discussed the AZ Republic coverage of Tuition Tax Credits. The Republic's anchor article for the series has a terrific interactive map showing private schools around the state and how much tax credit money each gets in the form of scholarships for students. You can move around the map and resize it to look at schools in any area in the state. The graphic at the top of this post is a screen shot of the map's Tucson area, with an example of the information given for one school. It's not the real thing. If you want to use the interactive map, go to the Republic article.

The color of each dot indicates how much money a school receives in tuition tax credit scholarships. I made a list of the top two categories. Schools with red dots get over $1 million. Schools with dark orange dots get between $300,000 and $1 million. Here are the five red dot schools in order of money received.

Salpointe Catholic High School: 3,092,476.63
Pusch Ridge Christian Academy: 2,119,947.33
San Miguel Catholic High School: 1,372,303.94
Desert Christian Schools: 1,130,907.33
St John the Evangelist School: 1,006,454.60

All of them are religiously affiliated. Among the 16 schools with dark orange dots, only two are nonsectarian. [Note: The Gregory School was named St. Gregory's until recently. It's always been nonsectarian and changed its name to avoid confusion.] [Correction: The Gregory School was connected with the Episcopal Church until it separated in 1987.]

Santa Cruz Catholic School; 971,419.81
Tucson Hebrew Academy :876,273.80
The Gregory School: 845,407.76
St Ambrose Catholic School: 789,289.29
Our Mother of Sorrows Catholic School:723,504.59
Casas Christian School: 690,544.92
St Augustine Catholic High School: 652,422.21
Imago Dei Middle School: 637,396.00
Green Fields Country Day School: 627,263.59
St Elizabeth Ann Seton School: 589,792.63
St Cyril Catholic School: 475,511.09
St Michael's Parish Day School: 475,039.35
SS Peter & Paul Catholic School: 473,179.01
St Joseph Catholic School: 375,418.45
Calvary Chapel Christian School: 350,753.25
Immaculate Heart School: 316,679.88

The AZ Republic recently published at least six articles and columns about Arizona's Tuition Tax Credit program, and there may be more coming. Reporter Alia Beard Rau deserves credit for being at the forefront of the Republic's work on the issue. For anyone who wants to dig deeper into the issue, I link to the Republic pieces at the end of the post.

Tuition tax credits are sometimes referred to, accurately, as backdoor vouchers. An Arizona taxpayer "contributes" money to one of the state's private School Tuition Organizations which give out private school scholarships, then the taxpayer gets 100 percent of the "contribution" back in the form of a credit on income taxes. "Contribute" $1,000, pay $1,000 less in state taxes. The result is, the taxpayer foots the bill. It's a private school voucher program by another name. Like the more recent Education Savings Accounts, aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids, tuition tax credits are carefully crafted to get around the state constitution's prohibition against using state funds for religious education. If, unlike me, you like private school vouchers, you probably like the programs. If you think the tax credits are a good idea because they help poor kids go to private schools, well, they help rich kids go to private schools too. These programs continue to grow, with the goal, stated by many Republican legislators, of offering vouchers to every student in the state.

The longest and most comprehensive piece in the Republic is Arizona private-school families cash in on state's tax-credit program, which includes a great interactive map that shows every Arizona private school that receives the tax credit money and how much they get. The others focus on specific issues.

I could go on almost endlessly about tuition tax credits as I have in the past, mainly on Blog for Arizona when the topic was first spotlighted in 2009. I won't, especially since the Republic has done a good job exploring the topic. Instead, I'll focus on a few issues I think are especially interesting.