A Cronkite News story headline screams, "Arizona posts lowest college completion rate, highest default rate." An Associated Press headline is equally dire: "Report: Arizona tied for lowest college graduation rates nationwide." To give Cronkite News its due, after its headline grabs you with its partial truth, the article does a good job of breaking down the overall completion rate to show that our public universities graduate a higher percentage than the national average. The very short AP article, after listing the Arizona four year college completion rate at 29 percent, ends by saying "Education Secretary Arne Duncan said graduation rates are especially low, and default rates are especially high when it comes to for-profit schools." What does that sentence mean exactly? It doesn't say, no further explanation. Oh, and AP says the 29 percent figure represents students who graduate in four years. Wrong. It's the percentage of students who graduate within six years. Oops.

So let's go to the U.S. Department of Education report fact sheet that both articles draw their figures from and see how it breaks down college graduation and college loan default rates. Colleges are separated into three categories: Public, Private and For-profit. (Since it doesn't specify, I have to assume that "Private" means nonprofit, since "For-profit" colleges are also private, by definition.) Arizona's 29 percent, six-year graduation rate lumps all three types of colleges together, putting us at the bottom of the heap alongside Alaska. Looks like bad news for Arizona. But when we look at the public college graduation rate separately, it's 57 percent, just above the national average of 55 percent. Meanwhile, Arizona's for-profit college graduation rate is 23 percent, well below the 32 percent national average. You can attribute much of that rate to University of Phoenix, which has students from all over the country, yet all of them count here because they're attending an "Arizona college." The abysmal graduation rate of University of Phoenix's 213,000 students drags our numbers way, way down.

Then there's the student loan default rate. Arizona's is the highest in the nation at 18 percent. But not so fast. Our public college default rate is 9 percent, the national average for public colleges. Our for-profit default rate is 19 percent. That happens to be the national for-profit average, but since University of Phoenix is the largest for-profit college in the nation, its default rate has a larger-than-normal impact on Arizona's overall rate.

We have plenty to criticize about our public education system here in Arizona, but let's not criticize our public universities' graduation and student loan default rates by mixing them in with the results from Huckster U University of Phoenix.

When I wrote my earlier post comparing Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird with her just-released earlier novel, Go Set a Watchman, I was relying on a number of reviews and analyses I had read about the new book. I hadn't gotten my own copy yet. Since then, I've read Watchman, which reinforced the perspectives I got from others and added to them. Watchman isn't a great book—it probably isn't even a very good book in its published form—but it's an intelligent book with sharp analyses of attitudes in the south during the 50s, specifically after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The contrast between the versions of the south and the pervasiveness of racism portrayed in the two books is what most resonates for me—the glossy, airbrushed version in Mockingbird versus the wrinkles-and-all version in Watchman. My general takeaway from the contrast between the two books is, we need to grow up about the way we perceive racism in this country—how substantial it is, how much it underlies the way we as individuals perceive the world and the way our society functions. We need to look racism directly in the face, acknowledge it and do whatever we can, not to eradicate it completely since that's impossible, but to lessen its impact by working to correct its most destructive aspects.

Genuine spoiler alert: I'm going to be talking about Watchman in some detail, so if you plan to read the book and don't want it pre-summarized and analyzed, this is a good time to stop reading.

In Watchman, a 26-year-old woman who is living in New York returns to her home town in the south for a visit. At the beginning of the book, the town and its inhabitants appear to be as she remembered them, especially her father Atticus Finch whom she idolized as a child and continues to idolize as a young adult. In her eyes, Atticus was a man who transcended his time and place, someone who saw beyond race and class, whose judgement was absolutely fair and even handed unlike most white inhabitants of the town, including some wonderful but flawed adults she knew growing up.

As the book continues, she begins to see that Atticus isn't the man she believed he was. To her horror, she finds he's a segregationist and something of a bigot. He's against school integration and making it easy for southern blacks to vote—or he's against doing those things right away, anyway. He wants changes to happen in their own sweet southern time, not on the timetable set by the Supreme Court and the N.A.A.C.P. To paraphrase one of today's much-used phrases, for Atticus, White lives matter, but Black lives — or at least the quality of black lives — don't matter nearly as much, especially if improving their lives has a negative impact on the privileges he and other southern whites have come to expect as their birthright.

In an effort to end the week on a high note, here's another good thing to follow the Couple of Good Things I posted about yesterday. By the way, I was accused by a few commenters of being kinda Pollyanna-ish in that post, making too much of a  big deal about small advances. One commenter said, "Let's not step over a dollar bill to pick up a nickel," a phrase I'd never heard before but which I will repeat ten times today so it becomes a permanent part of my vocabulary (I should mention, however, a google search indicated that the phrase usually talks about dimes, not nickels. Inflation, dontcha know). But sometimes, I just gotta take good news where I can find it.

Today's good thing is our ex-Gov. Janet Napolitano, now President of the University of California, announcing that she's raising wages of some workers in the U.C. system to $15 an hour.

Napolitano announced the move a day after Los Angeles County — the nation's largest government agency — agreed to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour in all unincorporated communities by 2020. Los Angeles enacted a similar plan earlier this year, becoming the largest city in the nation to do so.

Let me mention the limits of Napolitano's move before commenters do. It will only affect about 3,200 U.C. employees, not everyone currently making less than $15 per hour. Still, it's a small step forward in the struggle against income inequality. I honestly didn't expect the movement to raise the minimum wage to gather this much momentum this quickly, but I'm happy that it has.

The U.S. Department of Education is giving Arizona a $20 million development grant for early childhood education. That's a very good thing. There's little argument that getting kids in educational situations before kindergarten is valuable for their educational and social development. Even Gov. Ducey agrees:

"Research shows that a quality early childhood education experience can yield significant long-term benefits on overall development of a child."

Yes, Ducey said that, adding, "We know that there's a good return on investment." And he's aware that Arizona has one of the lowest rates of preschool enrollment in the country. But he still won't fund it, because, well, we can't do things that are good for children and still cut business and income taxes—let alone add more beds in our for-profit prisons—can we?

So we'll have to leave it to the Feds to help us do what's right for kids.

Kelley Murphy with the Children's Action Alliance says the four-year federal grant of up to $20 million per year will be used to improve preschool services.

"This is a development grant, and it allows us to do a lot of the infrastructure work that has to be in place before we can really start expanding the number of kids that are getting into these programs," she says. "So it is a game-changer in that sense."

It may be a sin to kill a mockingbird, but is it a sin to knock a Finch off his pedestal?

It turns out Atticus Finch was a segregationist and a bigot before he was the ideal vision of a white southerner who was able to rise above the racism of his time. Of maybe he was a segregationist and a bigot after he was that ideal man. It depends on which timeline you use.

Atticus Finch, of course, is the fictional southern lawyer in Harper Lee's wonderful novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and taught many times during my career as a high school English teacher. But a few years earlier, before Lee wrote Mockingbird, she wrote Go Set a Watchman, and in that book Atticus made some statements about segregation and race you wouldn't expect from the man we learned to love in the classic novel. That means the character was conceived as a bigot before he was re-envisioned as the perfect man in Mockingbird. But Watchman is set twenty years after Mockingbird, so it was an older Atticus who showed himself to be a bigot. Before. After. The whole thing is confusing on a number of levels.

In case you haven't read any of the statements Atticus made in Watchman, which is set soon after the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation, here are two of his most often quoted lines.

“Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

And

"[The south should] be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.”

I'm sensing a pattern here.

Arizona Senate President Andy Biggs sponsored legislation to audit the Department of Child Safety, to the tune of $250,000. Must have been pretty important if a fiscal conservative wanted to spend a quarter million dollars to figure out how to fix the agency. Well, the results of the study are in, and the conclusion is, the agency needs more money to function properly. Biggs is appalled. That's not what he wanted to hear.

"They didn't really get at any of the stuff that I thought was important," Biggs said. "I could've gone out and asked all those local stakeholders what do you think, and they all would've told me we need to spend more money. And that's basically what Chapin Hall [Center for Children at the University of Chicago] put together."

Biggs wants the agency to cut back on the number of people it serves, not spend more money to increase services like the study recommends.

Governor Doug Ducey wants to build more private prisons. The recent riot at the privately run Kingman prison isn't deterring him, nor are Department of Corrections studies that say private prisons cost more than state-run prisons. Admittedly, those cost effectiveness studies are a few years old. Back in 2012, Republicans said the Department of Corrections should stop conducting the studies because weren't comprehensive enough. If the studies considered all the data, Republican private prison advocates said, they would show the private prisons cost less.

So is Ducey planning to conduct a new, better study that will factor in all the costs? Nah. I guess it's too risky. A new study might come to conclusions Ducey doesn't want to hear.

Another school year, another teacher shortage. This isn't a TUSD problem or a Tucson-area problem. One estimate says that Arizona has 1,000 fewer teachers than it needs. Another, which seems high to me, says that Maricopa County alone has 1,000 teacher slots to fill. Either way, it's a big, statewide problem. Emphasis on "statewide."

Why the shortage? Low pay, low funding for support and supplies, too many students in each classroom. And let's not underestimate the importance of the anti-teacher, anti-"government school" rhetoric that makes teachers feel less valued. Why go into, or stay in, a low paying, stressful job if everyone keeps telling you how much you suck? Arizona teachers are leaving the profession or moving elsewhere to teach. Fewer college students are choosing teaching as a profession.

I keep hearing from some quarters that teachers are underworked look at all those vacations they get!—so they don't deserve more pay, and the reason there are so many bad teachers is because the union won't let districts fire them. Now, I'm not an economist and I don't play one on The Range, but it seems to me there are a few basic economic flaws with both those arguments.

If teachers are underworked and overpaid, people should be lining up to get one of those cushy jobs. Districts should be fighting applicants off with a stick. That's the way the marketplace works, right? People gravitate toward the most attractive jobs. And once prospective teachers land their jobs, after they get through popping champagne corks and celebrating their unbelievable good fortune, they should hold onto those jobs until retirement forces them out the door.

So why aren't college departments of education turning away students who want to sign up? Why aren't districts getting more applications than they can handle? Why do young teachers leave the profession in such high numbers?

This may be one of the best lines of dialogue I've read in the paper in a long time.

According to Howard Fischer's article about Arizona's continuing effort to deny drivers licenses to Dreamers, one of the federal appellate judges got a bit testy—maybe "truthful" is a better word—with an Arizona assistant attorney general trying to make the case that the state should be able to reenact the license ban another judge threw out last December.

Judge Harry Pregerson pointed out that those in the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program have been driving legally since a trial judge ordered the state to reverse its ban and begin issuing them licenses in December.

“We know—at least I know—that no horrible thing has happened on the highways of Arizona since this went into effect,” he said during arguments here.

He then addressed Assistant Attorney General Dominic Draye, who was asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse what the trial judge had ordered.

“What is the problem?” he asked.

“Does it come down to racism?” Pregerson continued. “Does it come down to discrimination against these people? What else does it come down to?”

That suggestion left Draye confounded.

“Judge, I wish you wouldn’t say things like that,” he responded.

But Pregerson would not back down.

“I’m saying it because it’s the truth,” the judge said.

“Judge, I wish you wouldn’t say things like that." Priceless. "Please don't call our racist attempts to deny drivers licenses to Dreamers 'racism.' We prefer to refer to it as 'rule of law' when we screw over Latinos."

As a rule, I don't write "Back in the good old days" posts. Nostalgia doesn't cloud my memory enough that I forget all the bad things that went on when I was younger. The "good old days" were the bad old days in lots of ways. When I was teaching, I even refrained from shaming my high school students by telling them how much better we were back when I was a boy. I seem to remember the rallying cry of my youth was "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!" Not to mention, "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out." Makes it kinda hard to take the moral high ground over today's kids.

But here's one thing that was definitely better back in the day. College tuition. When I went to University of California, I paid in the neighborhood of $50 a semester. California state colleges were about half that, and junior colleges—that's the name California gave to community colleges—were tuition free. College students had to find a way to take care of room, board, books and miscellaneous expenses, but tuition wasn't a serious financial consideration.

Which is why the reasonably thoughtful editorial in the Saturday Star, Regents should tighten UA, ASU admissions standards, pissed me off. The editorial said university admission standards should be tightened because graduation rates are too low, which indicates that too many unqualified students are being admitted. That's a reasonable stance. I don't entirely agree, but it's reasonable. But the kicker was an admission by the editorial board that it used to feel differently until tuition went through the roof.

What has changed our thinking about admissions is the high cost of failure. Annual tuition and fees at the UA total about $10,890, up 66 percent from five years ago.

The next paragraph should have explained that tuition isn't a force of nature that goes up and down like the ebb and flow of the tides, that the legislature, in its never ending battle against publicly funded higher education, keeps cutting funding, so tuition keeps rising. But it didn't. The next paragraph jumped right back to graduation rates.

The Star's change of heart plays right into the hands of the conservative agenda: Starve the education beast; complain schools aren't doing a good job, so they don't deserve the funding they're getting; then cut education funding even more because, why should we continue to pay through the nose to support those lousy schools? Rinse and repeat.

Friday I wrote a post about the wildly unequal funding of organizations promoting progressive education and those on the privatization/"education reform" side. The big bucks are flowing to the privatization crowd, mainly from what Diane Ravitch calls the Billionaire Boys Club, while progressive educators get the little money they have through contributions from small donors and by looking for change under sofa cushions. My case in point was an online education news network being started by ex-CNN and NBC anchor Campbell Brown. She's got enough money to hire 13 people, including a former editor at Time magazine and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Her message is anti-union, anti-tenure, pro-charter and pro-voucher. And she's not alone. She's joining a network of well funded organizations that have plenty of money to get out a similar message.

The comments on that post aren't as wild and wooly as on some of my other posts—things can get pretty heated in Comments Land—but there are a few interesting points I want to respond to. A few people said, maybe the progressive education side isn't getting as much money because its ideas are tired and unpopular. Wrong. It's not about which side has the better ideas. It's about which side is favored by people with lots of money. Money may be speech according to the Supreme Court, but more money flowing to conservative politicians and ideas isn't a sign that they have the better, or even the more popular, ideas. It's just a sign of what big money wants.

Someone else's whole comment was a link to a group called the Progressive Education Network. I assume the point was to spotlight an equivalent organization to those on the privatization side. So I went to the website. Very nice looking, very professional. From the look of things, the group might very well have some big money behind it.

Next I went to the group's 2013 tax return. Total revenues for the year: $300,000, enough to maybe pay the salaries of 4 or 5 of Campbell Brown's 13 staffers. The president, secretary, treasurer and 6 directors get no compensation. They're volunteers. Under expenses on the tax form, there's no compensation—salaries—listed. Most of the money, $230,000, goes to pay for hotels, speakers, services and lodging/board.