I have a story in this week's print edition. You can read it here. This is the short version.

The Koch Brothers put up a million dollars. Ken and Randy Kendrick (he owns the Arizona Diamondbacks) pitched in even more. They funded UA's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, usually shortened to the "Freedom Center," which opened in 2011. From the beginning, the Freedom Center folks had their eyes on training high school teachers in their special brand of libertarian economics and creating courses to be used in high schools.

Starting last year, "Phil 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship” is being offered in Tucson Unified's high schools. This year it's being taught in four of the district high schools as well as schools in the Amphitheater, Vail and Sahuarita school districts and at least seven private and charter schools in Pima and Maricopa counties.  The course was created by the Freedom Center, members of its faculty wrote the textbook, and it offers workshops to instruct high school teachers on how to teach the class. They plan to spread the course to high schools across the state and the country, the more the merrier.

This isn't someone at the Freedom Center saying, "Hey, I have an idea, let's spread our ideology to the high school classroom!" It's part of a carefully conceived plan by the Koch Brothers which began in the 1980s and includes universities across the country, think tanks (the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation are two of the best known examples) and dissemination to the general public, including high school students.

If you want the details, read the article.

Update:
In a letter dated Oct. 11, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry sent an email to Oro Valley town manager Mary Jacobs regarding District 1 Supervisor Ally Miller's alleged statements on the Let Oro Valley Excel blog.

Responding to Miller's statement that he misleads voters on bond propositions, Huckelberry has this to say:

"I can assure you that neither assertion is true. In 1997, voters approved $52.65 million for parks and in 2004, $96.45 million. It is verifiable that Pima County never proposed $1 million for every county or municipal park and it is verifiable that in neither election did all of the parks money approved by voters end up being used for a single park."

Huckelberry goes on to write that he is "at a loss" as to why Milelr would "disseminate such false and misleading information" regarding the bond.

"The only logical reason is that it was done to affect the outcome of the Proposition 454 bond election," Huckelberry wrote.

The county administrator ended his letter by suggesting that Jacobs refer the issue to the town attorney for review as to "whether any state election laws have been violated."

Both Let Oro Valley Excel and Supervisor Miller have not returned requests for communication regarding the issue, though the blog did post an update since this story was originally published.

Original Story:
In the weeks leading up to Oro Valley’s Nov. 7 election to decide the fate of a $17 million bond to improve Naranja Park, elected officials and residents have been weighing in via a variety of media: newspapers, web commercials, blogs and more.

It appears that District 1 Supervisor Ally Miller has had her say in the debate on Proposition 454—in the form of a blog post. Uploaded on Tuesday, Oct. 11, on the Let Oro Valley Excel blog site was an email allegedly sent from Miller detailing some of “her thoughts on the Naranja Park Bond.”

Within the excerpts of the letter uploaded to the blog, Miller—who did not return phone calls to confirm that she actually wrote the note—states that there are “issues” with the recently released publicity pamphlet on the bond and takes aim at one of her favorite targets, Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry.

Miller said in her email that because the sample ballot contains the words “Parks, open space, recreational bonds” within the “purpose” section, that the funding could be used “on any parks, for purchase of open space, and any recreational purpose.”

But in an email sent to an town resident by Oro Valley senior office specialist Tara Barry, that claim is refuted.

“Supervisor Miller’s assertion that proceeds from the bonds may be used for any Town of Oro Valley park is incorrect,” Barry wrote in her email.

Barry elaborated by saying that the “purpose” listed on the sample ballot is “a summary caption” that does not expand, limit or contradict the specific ballot question asked of voters.

On the sample ballot, the following paragraph is listed after the “purpose”:

“Shall the Town of Oro Valley, Arizona, be authorized to issue and sell general obligation bonds to the Town in the principal amount of $17,000,000 to provide funds to design construct, improve, furnish and equip multi-purpose fields, diamond fields, playgrounds and associated infrastructure and amenities for Naranja Park…”

While Barry’s email did contradict one of Miller’s statements, her communication did support another.

“Supervisor Miller’s assertion that the renderings and list of amenities to be constructed at Naranja Park is non-binding is correct; however, the Town was very specific in its description of amenities and intentions, and provided cost estimates for what will be constructed at Naranja Park should the Oro Valley voters approve the bond,” Barry wrote.

According to Arizona Revised Statutes 35-455, a governing body which utilizes bond funding may only use that revenue “for the purposes stated in the ballot and for the necessary costs and expenses of the issuance and sale of the bonds.”

When looking at the per annum interest rate utilized to calculate the fiscal impact for the bond if passed, Miller correctly pointed out that the rate included in the bond could be as high as 7 percent, but town calculations were performed at 5 percent.

“Ask the Town for the calculations at the 7 [percent] interest rate that voters are being asked to approve. [2 percent] will make a huge difference,” Miller wrote.

According to Barry’s email, the interest rate calculations were completed “in accordance with current Arizona statutes and reflect a reasonable expectation of interest rates based on bond market conditions and is common practice.”

Barry listed the November 2015 Pima County Bond Voter Information Pamphlet, in which the county stated that it had a maximum interest rate of 8 percent, but that an interest rate of 2.78 percent was used for first 5 years, 3.20 percent for next five years and 3.45 percent per year thereafter.

“Therefore, the Town of Oro Valley states a maximum interest rate of 7 [percent], but utilized a 5 [percent] calculation as a ‘reasonable expectation,’ and could actually see lower interest rates based on actual market conditions as stated in the historic numbers provided by Pima County stated above,” Barry wrote in her constituent email.

A story from ProPublica came across my desktop today, For-Profit Schools Reward Students for Referrals and Facebook Endorsements. It's about a for-profit charter school in Florida where students get a $25 gift card for every new student they find for the school.

Such incentives are rampant among for-profit operators of public alternative high schools like North Nicholas, which serves students at risk of dropping out. These schools market aggressively to attract new students, especially during weeks when the state is tallying enrollment for funding purposes. They often turn their students into promoters, dangling rewards for plugs on social media, student referrals or online reviews, a ProPublica-USA Today investigation found. Some also offer valuable perks simply for enrolling.

It reminded me of a story Ann-Pedersen told in 2013 on the cable access program she and I used to put together, Education: The Rest of the Story (It's a three minute video if you want to watch). As her son was walking out of his Tucson Unified middle school toward the end of the school year, he was handed a flier promising him $100 if he enrolled in the new charter, Rising School.

Tucson's Rising School currently has about 80 students. So far as I can tell, it no longer offers students $100 to enroll, but it does offer them $100 if they have perfect attendance for the first hundred days of school. I don't suppose it's a coincidence that enrollment during the first hundred days is what determines schools' state funding.

And whether the money goes to students for enrolling or for having perfect attendance, that $100 comes out of the state's funding for the school.

I don't know if this kind of thing is common in Arizona, but like so many questionable charter school practices, it looks like it's perfectly legit.

With just two women among the five Democrats seeking to unseat Republican Congresswoman Martha McSally in Southern Arizona’s Congressional District 2, EMILY’s List had to make a choice between a former congresswoman in Ann Kirkpatrick and a retired Pentagon accountant in Mary Matiella.

The D.C.-based fundraising titan is going with Kirkpatrick.

Emily List President Stephanie Schriock called Kirkpatrick “a trailblazer who loves Arizona. Arizonans need her leadership and courage so she can continue fighting for opportunity, shared economic prosperity, and safe and thriving communities.”

It’s another sign—beyond Kirkpatrick’s third-quarter fundraising haul of $350K and her recent endorsements from former Southern Arizona representatives Gabby Giffords and Ron Barber—that the D.C. establishment is coming together to back Kirkpatrick, who previously represented another competitive Arizona district, the sprawling CD1.

But Matiella, who grew up in Tucson and beat the odds to build a long career as an accountant for the federal government, peaking as a United States Assistant Secretary of the Army in the financial arena during the Obama administration, has picked up her share of endorsements from Southern Arizona Democrats, including Congresswman Raul Grijalva, Pima County Supervisors Sharon Bronson and Richard Elias, Tucson City Councll members Regina Romero and Paul Cunningham.

The other Democrats vying for the nomination are former lawmakers Matt Heinz and Bruce Wheeler and political rookie Billy Kovacs.

Democrats hope to take back Congressional District 2 next year from McSally, who is in her second term. The former A-10 squadron leader is a rising Republican star who has been one of the top fundraisers in Congress, but also represents one of the most competitive seats in the nation. She won her seat by just 167 votes in 2014 when she unseated Barber, but easily cruised to reelection against Heinz last year.

Ann Kirkpatrick, one of five Democrats vying to unseat Congresswoman Martha McSally next year, has raised $350,000 since entering the race two months ago.

Team Kirkpatrick boasted that the "haul is a record-breaking amount for a Democratic challenger in Arizona in an off-year third quarter."

Kirkpatrick, who previously represented Congressional District 1 until last year (when she stepped down to unsuccessfully challenge Sen. John McCain), will report more than $270,000 cash on hand when she files her FEC report, according to Team Kirkpatrick.

"I am humbled by the outpouring of support, especially from grassroots donors in the first months of the campaign," said Kirkpatrick. "I am ready to hold Martha McSally accountable for her reckless vote for the deadly Republican health care repeal that would kick more than 400,000 Arizonans off of their health coverage. Southern Arizona deserves better."

The news is yet another sign that the battle over Southern Arizona highly competitive Congressional District will be a hard-fought race. The DCCC announced early this week that it would launch a TV and radio campaign tagging McSally over her health care vote. In addition, House Speaker Paul Ryan's Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, has set up office in Tucson to boost McSally's fortunes.

Kirkpatrick, who recently landed the endorsement of former member of Congress Gabby Giffords and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly,  is vying against fellow Democrats Matt Heinz, Mary Matiella, Bruce Wheeler and Billy Kovacs for the Democratic nomination in next year's primary.

All five Democrats are scheduled to attend a forum at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 26, at Rincon High School. I will be moderating the panel.

The results are in. The Arizona Department of Education published a list of all the schools getting results-based funding for the 2017-18 school year. There aren't any real surprises for those of us who have been paying attention since the bill passed during the last legislative session. As expected, the list is heavy with schools filled with students from well-to-do families.

But, as skewed as this year's funding is toward more affluent Arizonans, this is likely be the most equitable spread of results-based money ever. Indications are, things will get far more inequitable starting next year. Hold that thought while I go through this year's numbers.

Just under 300 schools will receive results-based funding—about 17 percent of the state's district and charter schools. Between 35 and 40 percent of them have fewer than 30 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch even though only 18 percent of the state's schools fit into that category. On the other end of the economic spectrum, about 10 percent of schools on the list have more than 80 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch, even though over 30 percent of the state's schools fit into that category.

That means, if you're in one of the schools in the highest rent districts, you're far more likely to reap the benefits of results-based funding than if you're in a school in the poorer parts of town. You're also far more likely to be white and far less likely to be struggling with the English language or have learning disabilities.

That's what things look like at the economic extremes. If we look at all the schools on the list, the story stays pretty much the same. A majority of the state's schools—about 57 percent—have more than half their students on F/R lunch, yet they make up only about a third of the schools on the list. The other two-thirds are drawn from the 43 percent of schools with fewer low income students.

But wait 'til next year. As I said earlier, the numbers will only get more skewed toward the well-off and white.

Those are the basics for this year. Now, let's look at what results-based funding means in dollars and cents, then why the funds will favor schools in high rent districts even more in following years.

It's something of an obsession with me, writing about AzMERIT scores. A new set of scores, a new use of the scores, a new news story about the scores, and there I am with another post or two or three. So here's yet another post, a rambling discussion on why the tests, the way they're reported on and the way they're used drive me nuts.

Let me start by getting something out of the way. The tests in and of themselves aren't bad. They give a reasonably accurate reflection of students' abilities in reading, writing and math. During my last few years teaching in a district outside of Portland, Oregon, I had to give the Oregon version of the high stakes standardized tests to my sophomore English classes. I did a pretty good job of predicting what my students' scores would be based on what I had learned about their reading and writing abilities during the eight months before the tests, which means the test scores generally reflected the students' skill levels. There were a significant number of exceptions, where students got higher or lower scores than I thought they would, which tells me the tests aren't always accurate on an individual level. But when you're looking at large numbers of students, and assuming everything is on the level—no "helpful encouragement" from teachers during the tests, no erase-and-replace of students' answers by staff after the students hand in their tests — their average scores tell you something about their skill levels relative to other groups of students.

Now, with that out of the way, the problems. The first is, the high stakes nature of the tests distorts the schools' curriculum and, sometimes, the test results. Since teachers, schools and school districts are judged by their students' scores, they're compelled to do everything they can to get the best results possible. That means teaching to the test, which means spending inordinate amounts of time and energy giving students the narrow skills needed to fill in the right bubbles. The give and take of loosely directed discussions is a luxury only to be indulged in when time allows. Creative pursuits, long term projects, even time on the playground are secondary to the central focus of the classroom: preparing students for test day. Teachers become mechanical skill-and-drill sergeants, which is not what they thought they signed up for when they decided to join the teaching profession. Students are encouraged to become robotic, learning how to be successful at performing variations of one repetitive task — answering short questions by picking the right answer from a short list of possibilities. The classroom is a different place — I would say a worse place — thanks to high stakes tests. And, sad to say, all that sweat, toil and tedium generally only adds a few points to students' scores and even less to students' actual skill levels, and since pretty much everyone is doing it, it's a wash. Every class, school and district's ranking in the state stays pretty much the same as it would have been if no one paid any attention to the test until test day.

And sometimes, the pressure to raise test scores leads individual teachers, or whole schools and districts, to cheat. Some schools and districts have been caught at it. Teachers and administrators in Atlanta went to jail for changing answers on student tests year after year. Others do it but haven't been caught. A series of articles in USA Today a few years back talked about a nationwide analysis of erasures on student tests and found that in many schools, including in Arizona, the number of wrong answers erased and replaced by right answers was as likely to be random as it was likely that the school be struck by lightning on test day. Though state departments of education rarely look deeply into suspicious scores, Arizona's ADE found nine schools where the evidence is strong enough, it's highly probable students' test papers were altered. Most likely, those schools are the visible tip of a larger problem. And that's just the most easily detectable form of cheating. There are lots of undetectable ways to boost scores without increasing the students' skill levels.

Cheating can become addictive, and additive. If a teacher cheats one year, how does he/she go back to being honest the next year without having to explain the drop in scores? If third grade teachers cheat, fourth grade teachers look bad if their students score lower than they did back in the third grade—and so on, up the grades. Educators are basically an honest, moral, but not necessarily courageous lot. If you put their salaries and/or their jobs on the line, many of them are liable to do what it takes to push those scores up.

A human Pink Hard Hat Ribbon was created by over 525 people on the Banner Health construction site on Friday, Sept. 29, launching Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The ninth annual event was run by EMCOR Group Inc. to promote their "Protect Yourself. Get Screened Today," campaign.

The 525 people were made up by construction workers and employees from the major companies working on the construction of the Banner Health hospital: EMCOR/University Mechanical & Engineering Contractors, Inc. (UMEC), Banner Health, and Sundt/DPR Construction.

They join thousands of other EMCOR employees around the U.S. who will wear pink hard hats in October to promote getting screened.


Speakers at the program all urged people to let everyone know to get tested, especially because of their personal connection to someone who had cancer.

"For me personally, my wife was diagnosed with cancer in the early part of this summer," DPR Construction Project Executive Brian Brown said. "We went through the process of doctors, biopsies, surgery and radiation treatment all summer long and now she's cancer free. If she had not done her annual breast cancer screening she would not be a breast cancer survivor."

Brad Thornton, President/CEO of UMEC, stressed early screening, especially because he saw both sides of what happened if the disease is caught early and late.

"My sister wasn't as proactive; her road was devastating," Thornton said. "She survived it, but it was very difficult for her. My mother-in-law attacked it, and she had the early detection and it made all the difference."

Besides getting the message to people who could be at risk of cancer, this event also helped the construction workers realize how important their work is.

"We had 500 people out there today that were working on this building," Thornton said. "For them to understand that the quality and care they take in installing their work in this building is going to make a huge difference. It's great that they can take away from this event and go up there and apply it to their work."

Thornton was also excited to be able to take new discoveries in medicine and put them to use to help people in the community.

After the event, construction workers were allowed to keep the pink hard hats to use as they built the new branches of the Banner University Medical Center.

"Many of our employees wear hard hats on a daily basis for personal protection, and we're proud of their commitment to wear an EMCOR/University Mechanical Pink Hard Hat in October to raise awareness for breast cancer, reminding women and men they can help protect themselves by getting screened," Thornton said.

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' statement on last night's mass shooting in Las Vegas:

I know this feeling of heartbreak and horror too well. The massacre in Las Vegas is a grave tragedy for our nation. This must stop - we must stop this.

I am praying for the victims of this shooting, their families and friends. And I am so grateful for the heroism and professionalism of the first responders who acted so courageously to bring this horror to an end. I send the injured all my strength: you have a long road ahead. Be strong. You can do it. My heart is with the city of Las Vegas and all who were touched by this tragedy.

But I am praying for my former colleagues, our elected leaders, too. I am praying they find the courage it will take to make progress on the challenging issue of gun violence. I know they got into politics for the same reason I did—to make a difference, to get things done. Now is the time to take positive action to keep America safer. Do not wait. The nation is counting on you.

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema made it official today: She wants a shot at the U.S. Senate.

Sinema has had a colorful career in politics, starting out as a green in her idealistic youth and growing into the kind of moderate Democrat who votes with the Trump/congressional GOP agenda agenda nearly half the time. (Given that she's running statewide in Arizona, that could be an asset, not a liability.)

Sinema is running for the Senate seat now held by Republican Jeff Flake—but it remains to be seen whether she'll actually face Flake, whose tangles with Trump and other heresies (comprehensive immigration reform, free trade) have created real problems with the GOP base. He's facing Kelli Ward (with other candidates considering a run against him) and this week's Alabama GOP Senate results show once again that the advantage of incumbency is no sure thing in a GOP primary.