No one would be foolish enough to give me a couple million to start an online education news network. I'm the wrong guy for the job, in spades. But it would be nice if someone on the progressive side of education got that kind of money to put together a slick, comprehensive website to cover education news, staffed with serious, experienced journalists.

I don't see that happening. But ex-CNN and NBC anchor Campbell Brown is getting big money to start an online news network with a privatization/"education reform" slant. It must be nice to have friends in high financial places.

Brown's nonprofit news site is supposed to go live in mid July. She's hired 13 people so far, including a former editor at Time magazine and a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. It takes a decent chunk of change to pay 13 quality staff members while also taking care of general startup costs. But money isn't really a problem when your funding comes from the likes of Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Walton Family Foundation, among others.

As in the world of politics, there's a financial imbalance between the people supporting conservative and progressive education agendas. In education, the big money is on the anti-union, anti-tenure, pro-charter, pro-voucher side. They have the means to package and disseminate their message. There's just not the same kind of money on the progressive side.

This isn't Brown's only educational venture. She also runs another nonprofit with deep pockets devoted to fighting teacher tenure and seniority laws in court. And she's hardly a lone voice crying in the wilderness. A number of well funded organizations push a similar agenda. For instance, there's Students First, the group started by Michelle Rhee who built her educational reputation on lies and half truths about her successes as a teacher and as chancellor of the Washington, D.C. schools. She raised lots of money before she got kicked out of her own organization. Students First also has a high powered Board of Directors. One of the board members is Dan Senor, who was an aide to President George W. Bush, chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, foreign policy advisor for Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential bid — and Campbell Brown's husband.

A layoff of 600 workers isn't good news, usually. But if, say, they're working the phones to scam people out of their money, it's not such a bad thing when they lose their jobs. That's a big part of the story behind the layoffs at the Phoenix-based Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix.

The Republic has an article about the layoffs that's full of facts and figures—drops in enrollment, revenue, and stock prices (the graphic at the top of the post shows the stock values for the past eight months)—but it misses the real story. There's a hint of what's going on when the story mentions who lost their jobs. It was mostly enrollment counselors, the people who call prospective students and try to talk them into signing up. The high pressure sales pitches, often filled with lies, got University of Phoenix and lots of other for profit colleges into trouble over the years. They conned students into enrolling in programs which often had little merit, and even when the coursework was potentially valuable, all too often the people who were talked into enrolling lacked the basic skills needed to benefit. As a result, students pile up costly loans they can't pay back. And when they default, it's usually the taxpayer who's stuck with the bill. University of Phoenix gets almost 90 percent of its revenue from U.S. student grants and loans, and it gets its money whether or not the students pay back the loans.

An AP story, Why the gov't let many trade schools become diploma mills, does the subject more justice.

Get ready for a self-indulgent, socio-political travelogue. Here we go.

Months ago, my wife and I planned a trip to the east coast which included a few days in Washington, DC. By chance, our DC stay included last Thursday and Friday, which gave us ringside seats to two history-making events.

Thursday morning, we wandered down toward the Supreme Court steps to see if anything was going on. Maybe there would be a decision on one or more of the cases yet to be announced by the court, or maybe everything would wait for Friday, or Monday. No one knew.

Something was going on all right. We arrived just before 10 a.m., so the crowd had already gathered with no room for us to squeeze into the center of things. Most of the flags flying over people's heads were pink-on-red and yellow-on-blue equal sign banners. The gay marriage issue was clearly front and center in people's minds.

We were too late to really join the crowd, so we did some star newscaster gazing. An alphabet soup of networks occupied half the area in front of the court. As a former photography teacher who has done some studio portrait work, I was fascinated by the number of umbrellas, reflectors and outdoor-balanced lights it takes to make the newscasters look "natural" standing in front of the appropriate landmark. And unless you're right there watching and waiting, you don't get a sense of the amount of time the commentators and pontificators just kind of stand around waiting for someone back in the studio to give them their few moments on air. It reminded me of  Andy Kaufman's classic "Mighty Mouse" routine. Standing, fidgeting, waiting, then, "Here I come to share the n-e-w-w-w-w-s!" Then standing around fidgeting some more and having a drink of water until their next news-sharing moment arrives.

Ten o'clock. A little more tense waiting, newscasters poised, then a half dozen young network employees came running madly down the courthouse steps, carrying piles of papers in their outstretched hands like relay runners clutching batons, ready to pass them on. The decisions! Newscasters took the pages, laid them on the stands in front of them just out of camera range, read and talked into the camera simultaneously, read and talked some more, hoping they would be the first on the air with the news, fearing they would be the last.

A cheer erupted from the crowd. Obamacare was intact! A 6-3 decision! Including Chief Justice John Roberts! Then quiet. The crowd was waiting for another decision.

Nothing. No more decisions today. People wandered away, happy because the ACA was intact, but it wasn't the gay marriage case most of them were waiting for. Not today. Maybe Friday. Maybe Monday.

Friday we arrived earlier, a little after 9 a.m., early enough to see a car pull up filled with equal sign banners, buttons and cards in the back. Pull 'em out, carry 'em over to where the crowd was beginning to gather, hand 'em out. We wandered into the gathering crowd, half way to the front, near the barriers between the crowd and the newscasters.

This is one of the sadder education columns I've read in awhile. The title asks, Is Special Education Racist? — in other words, are too many black children given special education designations? The authors' answer is no. In fact, they say, despite the fact that a proportionately larger number of blacks are labeled as needing special ed than other children, there should probably be more black children enrolled in the programs.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the authors are racists who believe that blacks are naturally inferior intellectually. In fact, the authors are college professors from Pennsylvania State University and University of California, Irvine, who have published a study concluding that black children "are far more likely to be exposed to the gestational, environmental and economic risk factors that often result in disabilities." Because more black children are exposed to these risk factors than children in the rest of the population, more of them are likely to have traits that qualify them for special education.

Here is the authors' analysis of exposure to lead, which has terrible effects on children.

Thirty-six percent of inner-city black children have elevated levels of lead in their blood. The figure for suburban white children is only 4 percent.

Continuing to list risk factors:

Black children are about twice as likely to be born prematurely and three times more likely to suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome.

I've been following the Charleston massacre and its aftermath on TV and in the print media, and I've been amazed at the capitulation by Republicans on the Confederate Flag issue. They've generally tried their damnedest to steer clear of making negative comments about the Civil War era flag. When they were forced to discuss the topic in front of a general audience, they stuck to the party line, saying it's a symbol of the valiant struggle of their ancestors and a symbol of regional pride that has nothing to do with slavery or racism. Now all of a sudden, these same politicians, normally so careful about protecting their right flank, are saying, "Take the flag down from public buildings and off of license plates. It's a divisive symbol of racism and hate."

Why have they given in? No question, they would have preferred to maintain the status quo. Sending dog whistles to racists has been part of the Republican Southern Strategy since the passage of Civil Rights legislation. Why was this event so powerful that it made the walls of resistance come tumbling down so quickly and dramatically? To try and answer that question for myself, I posed a few hypotheticals.

What if Dylann Roof, a raging racist who wrapped himself in the Confederate Flag, had attacked an NAACP gathering at a meeting hall down the street from Emanuel AME Church and killed nine people — upstanding black Charleston citizens similar to those killed in the church? Here's what we would have heard from conservative media. "There's no excuse for what Dylann Roof did, but you can understand some of his anger, given the track record of the NAACP over the years." Then they'd be off to the races, trotting out video of statements made by NAACP leaders at rallies and chewing over some of the positions the organization has taken over the years. That's the classic strategy when faced with difficult truths. Divert and confuse. Soon Roof would be pushed to the background, and the NAACP would be front and center. "Is the NAACP a radical hate group, maybe even a racist organization?" And Republican leaders would breathe a sigh of relief. Dodged another bullet. Another political crisis averted.

This post is about an article that appeared in Monday's Star: "Republicans can't stick to no-new-tax pledge" (I can't find the Star online link, so here's the original article on Bloomberg Politics). But first, a digression to something I remember from a Reagan campaign stop in California when he was first running for president. What happened, or what I remember happening since I'll never find a reference to it anywhere (but it's indelibly etched in my memory), is this.

Reagan was talking about changing the federal funding that goes to states into a block grant rather than earmarking the money for specific purposes. He didn't want to mention that he planned to cut the total amount going to the states, but a reporter asked him the question, which went something like, "Your plan would give less money to the states. How do you expect them to pay for all those programs?" His answer was a classic of Reagan-style, earnest flimflammery. He shrugged his shoulders and said, "They can raise taxes." The reporter who asked the question looked stunned, dumbfounded. He didn't ask a follow-up because, what could he possibly ask?

Reagan, of course, went on to raise taxes when he was president. So did George Herbert Walker "Read-my-lips-no-new-taxes" Bush. And Governor Ducey is acting like Reagan when he was on the campaign trail, expecting cities and counties to raise taxes to make up for the shortfalls in the current state budget. Republicans are situationally anti-tax. When push comes to shove, when there's a hole that absolutely has to be filled, they know someone has to fill it.

Which brings us to the article in Monday's Star.

Republican leaders who control U.S. states are confronting the consequences of no-new-tax pledges as they face shortfalls and try to preserve education and infrastructure.

Nevada, Kansas and Alabama have enacted or are debating increases in taxes on sales, tobacco, corporate income and other items, and six others have passed higher fuel levies despite a small-government dogma. In Louisiana, Republican lawmakers and Gov. Bobby Jindal are engaged in a near-theological debate about what constitutes a tax increase as they seek to close a $1.6 billion budget gap.

With the horror of the shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, a little more than 24 hours old, and with the racial hatred that led the murderer to fire on the members of a devout Bible study group so palpable, I feel that it's more important than usual to point out that today, June 19, is Juneteenth—actually, the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth. It's a celebration of the end of legal slavery in the U.S. and a reminder of how great the resistance was at the time and how jagged the path to racial equality was and continues to be.

This old white man, who considers himself reasonably well educated, knows very little about Juneteenth. I hadn't even heard of it, I believe, until the posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison's novel, Juneteenth, in 1999, and I might not have paid attention even then if Ellison's Invisible Man wasn't one of my all-time favorite novels. Juneteenth: it seemed like a strange word and an odd title to me at the time. I put the blame partly on myself for not digging deeply enough into the history of race relations in the U.S., but I can't blame myself for not having the holiday even mentioned in the history textbooks I read in school or in the mainstream media I absorbed all my life. That omission, as well as the omission of so much of the history of racial oppression in this country from slavery to the present day, is part of that same jagged path, with all its switchbacks and washed-out bridges, we are taking in our attempts to increase our knowledge and understanding of our shared history and to move toward greater racial equality. That the road is so torturous is one of the great shames of our nation.

Here are two descriptions of the history of Juneteenth you can read if you wish. One is on the Juneteenth.com website. The other, a more caustic and cynical view titled The Hidden History Of Juneteenth, appeared on the Talking Points Memo website yesterday.

Here's a very short history of the events leading to the holiday, which I'm quoting directly from the juneteenth.com website so I don't put my shameful ignorance on further display:

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.

Is that a scalpel or a butcher's knife in Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas' hand?

This is something to watch, warily. From today's Capitol Times Yellow Sheet (actually this is the teaser, since I don't have access to the Yellow Sheet itself):

Douglas told our reporter she has chosen the group that is going to comb through Title 15 in an effort to rid schools of unnecessary mandates and administrative burdens, and it won’t include any lobbyists or “alphabet soups,” a reference to the many education groups that are generally known by their initials.

This isn't new news. María Inés Taracena reported in The Range in April about a News Release Douglas put out saying she was planning to form the committee, which is supposed to come up with its findings in December, to be presented to the legislature when it begins its 2016 session.

I took a look at Title 15 in the Arizona Revised Statutes. The titles of the sections alone take 16 computer screens to get through. That's just the titles. I scanned through the screens—18 chapters, divided into Articles, further broken down into specific items. The mind reels.

Looking over Title 15 is probably a good idea. Putting the task in the hands of anti-regulation conservatives, however, is dangerous. One person's necessary regulation is another person's onerous attack on freedom.

To this point in her tenure, Douglas has taken a measured approach to her job. Compared to my worst fears and expectations, she's been a pleasant surprise. If she and the committee adopt a "Do no harm" approach to evaluating the rules and regulations, things might turn out OK, or at least not too bad. But I can already see Republican anti-"government schools" legislators sharpening their axes, looking for "burdensome regulations" to chop to pieces and turn into kindling. This is worth watching, and watching carefully. It could have a significant impact on the already problematic future of Arizona education.

I don't believe Douglas has published a list of committee members. When we know who's sitting on the committee, we'll have a better idea of her intentions.

I didn't read this in The Nation or some other lefty journal. It was on the CNN Money website. The observation didn't come from some pinko/socialist/Harvard-teaching/Vermont-living/Kenyan-born Democratic politician. It came from research conducted by the International Monetary Fund. Its conclusion, in the words of the CNN Money subhead:

Wealth does not trickle down from the rich to the poor. Period.

In fact, concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich, the report concludes, is bad for the economy. In the words of the report itself:

[I]f the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth. The poor and the middle class matter the most for growth via a number of interrelated economic, social, and political channels.

So, income inequality is a problem, not just for the people at the lower portion of the income ladder, but for the entire economy. And here are the report's general recommendations for lessening inequality.

Irrespective of the level of economic development, better access to education and health care and well-targeted social policies, while ensuring that labor market institutions do not excessively penalize the poor, can help raise the income share for the poor and the middle class.

Interesting. Maybe the notion that making the rich richer is good because they're the "Job Creators" (The word "creator" in that term was carefully chosen to evoke God-like images of The Creator) and their wealth will trickle down to others is a self serving myth created by those at the top of the heap and their enablers. And maybe, if wages were higher and social/educational programs were stronger, we'd all be better for it—except, of course, the folks who have benefitted the most from our current robber-baron levels of income inequality.

When I first read about TUSD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez's new contract that extends through 2018, I defended it as being on the high side of normal for a superintendent in a district of this size but within a reasonable range for a newly negotiated contract. After following and participating in the vigorous, wide-ranging discussion in the comments section, I modified my support, writing that the raise sends a bad message to the rest of the staff, which has gotten small salary boosts (engineered, I should add, by Sanchez) but not anything close to what he has received. After reading more opinions about the contract and looking over its language as carefully as this lay person can, I've come to the conclusion the salary package and benefits are excessive to the point of being indefensible.

Executive compensation has skyrocketed over the past decades while salaries for the vast majority of the population have stagnated. That's wrong in every possible way. At the same time, we've developed a Cult of the Executive, especially in the private sector but also including the public sector, where we assume they have nearly supernatural powers and attribute every rise in fortunes to their genius while we forgive them for downturns and gift them with golden parachutes. Seeing the same attitudes carried over into the public sector is troubling, to say the least.

The new contract puts Sanchez's salary at $280,000 for the 2017-18 school year. The actual figure, with the add-ons, is well over $300,000, not even figuring in money that goes to pay for his business costs. A starting teacher in TUSD makes about $34,000, and it's unlikely to be much higher in 2018. That makes Sanchez's salary almost nine times higher than a first year teacher's. If we put the salary of the lowest paid full time district employee at about $20,000, that means there's a 15-to-1 ratio between the top and bottom salary. While that doesn't come anywhere near the inequities in the private sector, it's too great a gap for a public institution.

I read through the contract last night, and most of it confirmed what I already knew. There's the one time, 50 percent-of-salary bonus for completing the third year of the original contract, somewhere between $115,000 and $130,000 depending on how you do the math (At least that's how I figure it). There's the $25,000 per year bonus for each of the last two years of his new contract he completes. There's the extra 6 percent each year for meeting goals set by the board, which adds something like $16,000. All that, on top of the annual raises built into a salary which tops out at $280,000, is pretty hard to stomach in these tough economic times, especially in comparison to the shamefully low teacher salaries. It's important to point out that cutting Sanchez's salary and benefits wouldn't have any impact on teacher salaries since there's one of him and 3,000 of them, so that shouldn't be part of the discussion. However, that doesn't make the comparison any less troublesome.