In recent news, we learned of allegations that seven Arizona schools cheated on AIMS tests in past years by erasing wrong answers and replacing them with correct answers. Oops, make that eight as of a week ago.

Now we have what looks like the first report of a school cheating on the new AzMERIT test which replaced AIMS. 

Allegations of cheating on standardized tests have prompted an investigation at a Phoenix elementary school.

ABC15 Investigators have learned charges there was cheating on the AzMERIT statewide achievement test at a local elementary school have prompted a formal outside investigation.

The Isaac School District #5 confirms they're looking into allegations that answers were altered at the J.B. Sutton Elementary School in Phoenix.

The school is part of the Isaac Elementary School District #5 .

It should come as no surprise that 94 percent of the school's students are on free or reduced lunch. Cheating by an adult on high stakes tests is a high risk endeavor, and the stakes are rarely high enough to warrant the risk at schools with kids from affluent families. Those students are likely to do well on the tests no matter what, and the schools are likely to get A and B state grades, so why take the chance of getting caught to gain a few points? J.B. Sutton, on the other hand, has a D rating, and its math and writing scores went down in 2014. You can bet the pressure was on at the school, big time.

Here's something interesting. It's not the AZ Department of Education that's initiating the investigation this time, according to ABC15 Investigators. It's the school district.

So we have nine schools where there's a strong possibility that adults altered tests to increase student scores. Does that indicate an increase in dishonesty by teachers and administrators? I don't think so. It's more likely an increase in honesty at the state level. Education Superintendent Diane Douglas isn't a big fan of high stakes tests, unlike previous superintendent John Huppenthal, so she's very likely decided to be more aggressive about the cheating that's always been there but Huppenthal decided to hush up (See Carpe Diem charter school). Posssibly—I'm just guessing here—the changed atmosphere at the Ed. Dept. led the Isaac Elementary School District to be proactive and pursue the possible cheating problem itself before it became an issue at the state level.

I pointed out in a recent post that there's a very strong correlation between state school grades—which are based on student AIMS scores—and family income. (One of the two maps I used is at the top of this post.) Ed Supe Diane Douglas, who, as you know, I don't always agree with, was right on the money on this one when she said, “Standardized and high stakes testing measure demographics, not student achievement or teacher performance.” And now, we have a new article by a promising young journalist that covers similar ground.

The New York Times has a Student Journalism Institute that's convening right here at UA, and one of its journalists, Ben Bartenstein, just published a story, Critics of State’s School Funding Plan Say It Will Favor Charters. If you skip to the bottom, you'll find an interactive map that's far niftier than mine, showing the A-rated schools in the Tucson area along with the family income in the area. (I really need to learn how to do that!)

Most of the article is about Arizona school funding in general, along with a discussion of charters. Bartenstein pulls together lots of good information and a wide variety of quotes from people on different sides of the issue. And he gets it about BASIS. While he acknowledges the accomplishments of BASIS students, he also points out that they're a very select group. (If only the charter chain will admit to its selectivity instead of suggesting that it takes unformed hunks of student clay and turns them into academic world-beaters, I'll stop writing about BASIS so much. But as long as they continue mythologizing their schools and making other schools look like failures by comparison, I'll keep pointing out the truth.)

There's really no reason for anyone to know that Holsteiner Agricultural School, a charter school in Maricopa, exists, except for the families it serves. It's a tiny school, 50 to 60 students max, and it appeared from the outside to be completely unexceptional until Diane Douglas added it to her erase-and-replace AIMS cheating list—possible cheating list, I should say, though the evidence against this and the other seven schools is pretty damning. I began hunting around the web to see what I could find out about Holsteiner charter, and what I found led me to look for more, then more, all of which led me to ask a number of questions I can't answer.

First the [possible] cheating story. Holsteiner Agricultural School's state grade made an almost unbelievable jump from a "D" in 2013 to an "A" in 2014. It turns out, the jump very likely shouldn't be believed. On the 2014 tests, an unlikely number of wrong answers were changed to right answers.

"(S)tudents in the fourth grade corrected their responses to the right answer 83 percent of the time in reading and 85 percent of the time in mathematics," a letter from the Education Department states.

The school superintendent's answer to the cheating allegation raised a huge red flag for me.

Holsteiner Superintendent Tanya Graysmark, however, told The Arizona Republic in an e-mail Friday that her school has done nothing wrong.

"We worked with our students all year on best test practices (to go back and check their answers and make any necessary changes to their test — to do the best they can) prior to turning it in," she said. "This may have caused a lot of erasure marks," she wrote.

Graysmark should have said, "I'll look into it," instead of denying there was any wrongdoing and suggesting that the school's eagle-eyed fourth graders made mistakes on their first pass through the test, then went back, found the mistakes and came up with the right answer over 80 percent of the time.

I decided, if Graysmark would make a comment that questionable and self serving, she and the school deserved a closer look. Here's what I found.

Tucson's incorrigible Steve Gall won't give up. State bills he's worked on to mandate structured recess in Arizona schools, or recommend structured recess, or recommend a certain amount of weekly physical activity for kids during school hours, have gotten close but never made it into law in recent legislative sessions. He's volunteered for years in TUSD, organizing physical activity with kids in a number of schools. His urging helped lead the district to recommend 90 minutes of physical activity a week in its schools.

Steve is one of the voices in an article, Active 'Brain Breaks' Increase Focus, Leaning, Teachers Say, in the Arizona School Boards Association newsletter, AZEDNEWS. We shouldn't need an article to tell us that kids' brains go numb after sitting in class too long, and there's nothing like moving the body for a few minutes to get their brains moving again. What group of people should be least in need of that reminder? Educators, of course. But in today's "skill building," test-driven educational world, seat time is too often equated with learning time, and recess, or even stretch, jump and run-in-place exercises in the classroom, are considered time wasters.

It's a good article with lots of links to other resources, including GoNoodle.com, a site devoted to helping teachers create quick, fun brain breaks for their kids.

The battles between Diane Douglas and the Ducey-supported state Board of Education have been all over the papers and The Range recently. What's going on is a power struggle. The outcome will help determine the kind of policy that comes out of the state education administration, but right now, the two sides are jostling for position, not policy.

In most reports, we hear more about Douglas' agenda than about the Board's. This video is a bit of a corrective. Remember back when, when Douglas said Ducey and the board president, Gregory Miller, want to move money from district schools to charters? You'll learn more about that, and about President Miller, in the video by Ann-Eve Pedersen, my cohost on the cable access show, Education: The Rest of the Story (which, by the way, may end its run shortly if Access Tucson is forced to close its doors).

Fun fact: Gregory Miller is CEO and Superintendent of Challenge Charter School in Glendale—population, about 530 students. His salary is $122,000. His wife, Pamela, the Executive Director and Vice President, also gets a $122,000 salary. Their daughter, Wendy, is principal and secretary of the school. Her salary is $99,000. Watch the video to find out who determined their salaries.

Here are a few interesting stories from places other than Arizona.

Minnesota Governor Pledges to Veto a $400 Million Increase in School Funds. The problem, according to Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, is that a $400 million increase in school funding isn't enough. He's demanding that the Republicans add another $125 million to the total.

Newark, NJ, Mayor Joins Mob, Blocks Major Thoroughfare. It wasn't actually a mob Newark Mayor Ras Baraka joined. He came together with hundreds of teachers, parents and students who were protesting the control of Newark schools by the "education reform"/privatization leadership in the state capitol.

Bank Robbers Who Stole Billions From Citizens and Communities Go Free. These aren't people who rob banks. They're bankers who rob people. "Five big banks have agreed to pay about $5.6 billion and plead guilty to multiple crimes related to manipulating foreign currencies and interest rates, federal and state authorities announced on Wednesday." No one, so far as I know, is going to jail.

Los Angeles Takes Money From Businesses, Gives It to Employees. The L.A. city council voted 14-1 to phase in a $15-per-hour minimum wage by 2020. L.A. joined Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and other cities by ratifying the raise.

First Lady Kicks Butt, Thinks She's a Good Role Model for Children. Actually, it was a heavy bag Michelle Obama kicked, and punched (rather convincingly, I might add). It was part of her “#GimmeFive” campaign on healthy living, showing kids that exercise can be both fun and good for you.

This is a story about charter school funding that flew below my radar until now. The new state budget cut a money stream for some charters, saying it would be a $6.5 million cutback during the first year of the phase-in. Now the Department of Ed is saying it'll be closer to $15 million, which will grow to $24 million in 2017 and $32 million in 2018. The privately funded Arizona Charter School Association wasn't very happy before, but now it's really, really unhappy.

What's happening is, a loophole some charters were exploiting for extra cash is being closed. The lege was right to close it, but given Republican majority's pro-charter orientation, I'm surprised it happened. Basically, charter groups with lots of schools have been getting extra money which is only supposed to go to individual schools and districts with fewer than 600 students, and the new legislation stops that from happening.

The small schools allocations makes sense. If a district has fewer than 600 students, its per-student costs are higher than bigger districts which have the advantage of economies of scale, so the state gives those small schools some extra money—even more if a district is in an isolated area. Multiple-school charter organizations have gamed the system by pretending the schools are separate entities and scrupulously keeping each school's enrollment below 600.  Senate Bill 1476 closes that loophole. If the charters are run by a single management company, if they have identical board members, if they are subsidiaries of a corporation with other subsidiaries in the state—if any of those hold true, the schools' enrollments are added together. If the total is larger than 600, they get no extra small schools money.

The change will affect BASIS, Great Hearts and Imagine charters as well as a number of other schools which are connected to other schools.

(I haven't been able to pin down how much the small school allocation amounts to per student. I know it differs by total enrollment and grade level, and I know it's got to be a sizable chunk of change if, once it's completely phased in, the total is $32 million just for those charters that are part of a larger group, but I don't know the actual amounts. I'm looking into it.)

I already mentioned I was surprised that the AZ lege would allow a cut to charter funding like this one to pass. I guess if the target is education funding, they'll even take money from their buddies, and I guess Ducey was OK with it as well. But with the new, higher number, some of them are having second thoughts.

I'm speculating here, but I wonder if the higher number had something to do with the feud between Diane Douglas and Ducey over Common Core and control of the Board of Education. It was Douglas' Department of Ed that announced the new, higher figures. My bet is, if Huppenthal were still in control, he would have figured out how to fudge the numbers down to what had been promised to the legislators. After all, he played fast and loose before when he spent more state money on the vouchers-on-steroids, aka Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, program than he was supposed to. But there's no love lost between the Governor and the Ed Supe, not to mention her running battles with the Board of Ed, which she said s conspiring with Ducey to move students from district schools to charters. So I'm thinking, when she and her staff crunched the numbers and found the cuts were more than double what the legislators had been promised, she decided to go with the higher figure. Maybe she plans to hold firm on that number, or maybe she wants to see what kind of concessions she can wring from Ducey and the Board that might help her change her mind. Can you say Bargaining Chip, boys and girls? (Does it show how much I'm enjoying this education-leadership cage match? Maybe they'll be so busy going after each other, they won't have time to do as much damage as they want to.)

As you should already know (because you should have already read the introduction and started your ballot—you only have until June 15 to participate in the first round!), this year's Best of Tucson® theme is Our Ink Stained Heart. 

In case you missed it:

Tucson leaves an impression. It doesn't matter if you grew up picking cholla out of your shins or if you just stopped by for few years at the UA, Tucson pens itself on everyone. And, like the tattoos so many of us desert rats bear, we carry our Tucson with us—through the holes in the road, the sweaty summers and that gentrification our commenters love to complain about.

The fact is, Tucson has an ink stained heart—fragile, strong, in love, in pain, but definitely covered in ink. Our ink. It's true, we newspaper folk have ink-stained everything... but Tucson stains souls. We'll show you in this year's Best of Tucson®—that's the theme of our annual guide to all things good and loved in the Old Pueblo.

Now, we want to see your ink. We need to illustrate our Best Of edition and we thought, hey, maybe our readers have some tattoos that might do the trick. Now, we are specifically looking for heart tattoos (what have you got? Maybe something anatomical? Something a little abstract? Textual?)  that we might be able to use to pair with the ballot but we're also looking for some cool tattoos for the issue as well. (You have a pizza tattoo? We have a pizza category! Literary tattoo? We have several book categories! Tooth/Lisa Frank/color-by-numbers tattoos? We have—well, nothing, but we might still want them in the paper).

We have a brand new 2015 "Best High Schools" List from U.S. News & World Report, not to be confused with the recent Washington Post "Most Challenging High Schools" list that came out a few weeks ago. Except that, in the words of an old Herman's Hermits song, "Second verse list, same as the first." Well, not the same exactly, but pretty damn close. Both lists are created from some combination of the frequency of students at the schools taking either the Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses and how well they do on the tests. Not surprisingly, a BASIS school makes the list—BASIS Scottsdale is number 2—as does Tucson's University High at number 17. BASIS Tucson North most likely would have made the list as well, except that its move from the BASIS Tucson campus meant it didn't fit into the scoring formula.

The methodology the magazine used to create the list makes it sound like it's important how well economically disadvantaged students do at the school compared to similar students at other schools. That's not exactly true. A school's "economically disadvantaged score" doesn't have anything to do with where schools place on the list. Doing reasonably well with those students is a hurdle you have to jump over, a door you have to pass through, before you're allowed to compete. Once you've proven your economically disadvantaged students are doing well enough, your placement on the list is purely an AP/IB thing.

However, even that isn't entirely true. If you're most charter schools—and that includes BASIS charters—it doesn't matter how well you do with economically disadvantaged students, or even if you have any in your student population.

U.S. News determines a school's percentage of "economically disadvantaged students" by looking at state records and finding out what percentage of students at a school qualify for free or reduced lunch. The problem is, most charters don't serve lunches for their students, so they don't submit tallies of qualifying students to the state.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement released a new set of "reforms" to its detention facilities on Wednesday for families and children (the ones they created to "respond" to influx of unaccompanied minors and women from Central A merica) as they wait for their immigration hearings. In line with that, The New York Times' Editorial Board published a beautiful piece that, again, brings more attention to the inhumane conditions of these places—really, the treatment of people as cattle in a really shitty slaughterhouse, except we're talking about human beings fleeing extreme poverty and violence—and the wastefulness that stems from maintaining them.

Here are some highlights, and check out the write up for the rest of it:

Of all the malfunctioning parts in the country's broken-down immigration machinery, probably the most indefensible is the detention system.

This is the vast network of jails and prisons where suspected immigration violators are held while awaiting a hearing and possible deportation. Immigrant detainees are not criminal defendants or convicts serving sentences. They are locked up merely because the government wants to make sure they show up in immigration court. 

Detention is intended to help enforce the law, but, in practice, the system breeds cruelty and harm, and squanders taxpayer money. It denies its victims due process of law, punishing them far beyond the scare of any offense. It shatters families and traumatizes children. As a system of mass incarceration—particularly of women and children fleeing persecution in Central America—it is immoral.

...

But committees and cubicles won't touch the heart of the problem. It's time to end mass detention, particularly of families. Shut the system down, and replace it with something better. 

...

Ending mass detention would not mean allowing unauthorized immigrants to disappear. Supervised or conditional release, ankle bracelets and other monitoring technologies, plus community-based support with intensive case management can work together to make the system more humane. But neither Congress nor the Homeland Security Department has embraced these approaches, which would be far cheaper than locking people up. 

LGBT immigrants should also be included in that—last week Hillary Clinton shared some of her views on that (whether she'll stand by her words or not, we'll see).