In early September, it was an article in the Star praising Catalina Foothills District for having the highest AzMERIT scores in Pima County. Last week it was the same thing in the print edition of the Tucson Weekly. Both articles gave Cat Foothills' Assistant Superintendent multiple paragraphs to pat herself and her district on the back.

From the articles, I learned the district achieved its high ratings through its "commitment to rigorous curriculum in schools, ongoing evaluations for its students and professional development for teachers." Also by "developing a curriculum that considers the end goal and works backwards from there to achieve that goal." And by using "authentic real-world scenarios." Wow. Good stuff. Other districts should consider using similar strategies if they hope to match Cat Foothills' success. Especially Tucson Unified, which apologized for its poor scores in both articles and swore it would try to do better.

But I'm not sure Cat Foothills is the district we should be looking to for pedagogical advice. Among its seven schools, the highest passing rate is 77 percent for Language Arts and 74 percent for Math. In a district outside of Pima County, three schools topped that, with Language Arts passing rates from 79 to 84 percent and Math passing rates from 77 to 85 percent. We should really be asking the superintendent in Scottsdale how the district manages to pull such spectacular achievement from its students. I know Scottsdale isn't in Southern Arizona, but listen, if it's getting results, the whole state could benefit by learning more about the secrets of its success.

And while we're at it, we should also be asking a low-scoring Phoenix-area district how it plans to improve. One of its schools has a 16 percent passing rate in Language Arts and a 17 percent passing rate in Math, and other schools are in the teens and twenties. We need to hear the educational improvement plans for . . . Scottsdale? Really? The same Scottsdale district with those 80 percent-plus passing rates?

Longtime University of Arizona basketball assistant coach Emmanuel “Book” Richardson was one of four coaches arrested Tuesday by the FBI.

Richardson’s arrest was for allegedly receiving more than $20,000 in bribes from former sports agent Christian Dawkins and financial advisor Munish Sood, in exchange for recruiting prospective and current Arizona players, according to the FBI’s documents.

The University of Arizona’s athletic department suspended the ninth-year coach Tuesday, releasing a statement that said in part:

We became aware of the situation involving one of our men’s basketball coaches Emmanuel Richardson this morning. We have been working in conjunction with the University, and have confirmed that Richardson has been suspended effective immediately. We will cooperate fully with authorities as they move through their investigation.

Richardson, along with University of Southern California‘s Tony Bland, Auburn’s Chuck Person and Oklahoma State’s Lamont Evans, were among the 10 people charged Tuesday with federal crimes.

According to the FBI reports, Richardson agreed to take the money to guide his player’s to use Dawkins as a manager and Sood as a financial adviser once their careers in Tucson ended.

Acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Joon Kim announced the charges Tuesday, laying out the charges facing the coaches, as well as financial advisors and representatives from an unnamed sportswear company.

According to the complaint, Richardson on June 20 agreed to take a $5,000 bribe in a meeting with an undercover FBI agent and Sood.

Richardson, according to the same complaint, also requested $15,000 more from the officer to lock down a player, identified by Richardson as a “top point guard in the country.”

Richardson faces upwards of 60 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine if convicted of all charges, according to the Arizona Daily Star.

OSIRIS REx, Tucson’s favorite space bot, swung by the earth last Friday to say hello, take some pics, and to borrow some of the planet’s gravity in order to launch off toward the asteroid Bennu, the spacecraft’s destination site.

“We made the decision to to use nature to help us to get us to our destination,” said Heather Enos, deputy principal investigator of the OSIRIX REx mission. “What that means is we actually used the earth’s gravity in order to propel us onto our destination into the orbital plane necessary to match our target, Bennu."

While it was nearby, the OSIRIS REx team used the opportunity to recalibrate the spacecraft’s instruments, including the MapCam camera. MapCam captured this image on Sept. 22, from a vantage point 170,000 kilometers (or 106,000 miles) away from the earth. It's largely of the Pacific Ocean, but you can see Australia in the lower left and Baja California in the upper right.

Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the UA-led NASA mission, said the photo represents one of his favorite new angles of the earth.

"What if we were an alien species and we sent a flyby spacecraft to the earth and they took this picture?" he asked "It really looks like it is an ocean world... It is a nice reminder of how beautiful and important the oceans are, and our planet is."

The black marks at the top of the photo—the OSIRIS REx team calls them "icicles"—are the result of a camera designed to take pictures of a very dark (darker than coal) asteroid trying to take pictures of a very bright earth.

"[This] meant we had to take the images as fast as possible, and as a result of that very fast data acquisition rate, there [were a few] readout issues," Lauretta said.

Lauretta described Friday and Saturday as the second most exciting days of the mission so far—besides, of course, the day of the launch. The team spent Friday evening huddled around their monitors and waiting for the images to arrive. When one of the team members finally pulled it up, a mad scramble ensued to get the image up on the big screen, and the whole team was left in awe.

"It felt like I was actually in space and I was looking at that image," Lauretta said. "Because OSIRIS REx is us. We built it, and we own it and we really feel like it's a projection of ourselves that's out there exploring the solar system."

Follow OSIRIS REx on Twitter or Instagram, and see the OSIRIS REx website to learn more about the mission.

When the Friday night lights are turned on in high school football stadiums around the country, you can bet students, parents and staff will be asking themselves, "What should we do if some players decide to take a knee during the National Anthem?"

Most probably, the right answer is, they should do nothing. Student athletes have the right to this kind of protest, according to an article in Education Week. Students cannot be forced to participate in what the school considers acts of patriotism. (I would argue that taking a knee to protest injustice and to urge the country to be a better place is a patriotic act, but that's a different issue.)

In the 1943 case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a school would violate the free speech rights of its student, a Jehovah's Witness, if it forced him to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

"To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds," Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his majority opinion.

Schools can't require students to observe patriotic rituals in the classroom, and their authority to discipline them for such acts diminishes even more at an athletic event, where behavior like shirtless cheering is "a regular occurrence," Frank LoMonte, the former executive director of the Student Press Law Center, told me last year.

And school's authority to discipline students for silent anthem protests isn't heightened if those students are taking part in a privilege, like being members of a football team, he said. Courts have held that public institutions can't withhold privileges, like employment at a public agency, if employees exercise free-speech rights, like refusing to recite an anti-communist pledge, he said, arguing that the precedent applies to student athletes.

"You can't condition a privilege on forsaking your constitutional right any more than you can condition a right or a benefit," LoMonte said.

This isn't to say that schools can't discipline, suspend or expel students for taking a knee. Schools take disciplinary actions against students for questionable reasons all the time. It's just that they're very likely to get their asses sued by a local lawyer working pro bono, or if they really get lucky, the ACLU may step in to make a Federal Case out of it—literally. Chances are good, the schools will lose.

Teacher shortages are a national problem. According to a recent survey, the number one reason teachers give for leaving the profession—55 percent of them—is dissatisfaction. By comparison, financial considerations are cited by 18 percent. Between the top and bottom are Financial/personal reasons, Retirement, and Pursuing another job, in that order.

This isn't new news. It's from the 2012 School and Staffing Survey put together by the National Center for Educational Statistics along with a follow-up survey in 2013. It came up again in a recent panel discussion in Washington DC, and sadly, it's more relevant today than it was five years ago. As with any survey, the numbers are approximate. General dissatisfaction covers low salaries as well as a host of other issues, and in a place like Arizona with its bottom-of-the-barrel salaries, money concerns certainly rank higher than elsewhere.

But as a teacher who retired just when our national obsession with high stakes testing was revving up and class sizes were climbing, I'm certain a growing sense of dissatisfaction pervades the teaching profession, driving many a gifted teacher out of the classroom and making potential new teachers think twice about going into the field of education.

When I went into teaching and began my 30-plus year career, it was because I wanted to teach. I wanted to be part of helping young people learn. I wanted to be part of helping young people grow. I wanted the freedom to shape my curriculum in a way that suited my interests and teaching style so I could maximize my enthusiasm and effectiveness.

I cannot in good conscience vote for Graham-Cassidy. A bill impacting so many lives deserves a bipartisan approach. https://t.co/2sDjhw6Era pic.twitter.com/30OWezQpLg

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) September 22, 2017

Sen. John McCain, who torpedoed the last GOP healthcare bill in a surprise vote in July, says he’ll vote against the Graham-Cassidy healthcare legislation that GOP lawmakers are rushing to a vote by the end of the month.

McCain announced his opposition in a statement on his Twitter feed:

As I have repeatedly stressed, health care reform legislation ought to be the product of regular order in the Senate. Committees of jurisdictions should mark up legislation with input from all committee members, and send their bill to the floor for debate and amendment. That is the only way we might achieve bipartisan concensus on lasting reform, without which a policy that affects one-fifth of our economy and every single American family will be subject to reversal with every change of administration and congressional majority … I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal. I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried … I take no pleasure in announcing my opposition. Far from it. The bill’s authors are my dear friends, and I think the world of them. I know they are acting consistently with their beliefs and sense of what is best for the country. So am I.

McCain's decision makes the passage of Graham-Cassidy much more difficult for GOP leaders, who are struggling to find 50 votes in their caucus in the face of unified Democratic opposition. They can only afford to lose three votes in order to get the bill across the finish line.

Sen. John McCain provided the critical vote to block the so-called "skinny repeal" legislation that ended the summer chapter of Obamacare repeal, so supporters of the Affordable Care Act hope that he'll do the same with the Graham-Cassidy legislation that senators hope to pass by Sept. 30, when the reconciliation clock runs out for the fiscal year, along with the power to pass the healthcare legislation with just 51 votes.

McCain hasn't yet said that he'll support the legislation, but opponents of it worry that his close friendship with Graham may sway his vote in favor of the bill, which would essentially take the money that the federal government now spend on Obamacare and send it all to the states, allowing the 50 state legislatures to figure out how to best spend it. It would also allows waivers of essential health benefits, protections for people with pre-existing conditions and other federal regulations designed to protect ordinary Americans with help problems.

Meanwhile, Save Our Care is highlighting a new study that shows the proposed legislation would cost Arizona a staggering $133 billion by 2036:

A new study from Avalere Health released today estimates that the Graham-Cassidy health care repeal bill will lead to a reduction in federal funding to states of more than $4 trillion nationwide by 2036.

Arizona alone would lose $133 billion. This is the latest analysis to confirm that the Graham-Cassidy plan is the worst repeal bill yet, stripping health coverage from 32 million Americans and raising premiums by 20 percent next year. According to another study, by the Center for American progress, 511,000 Arizonans would lose health coverage.

The bill would be devastating for Arizonans. According to Avalere Health, Arizona would lose $19 billion over the next decade, and then would continue to lose even more federal funding over the following two decades. By 2036, the repeal bill would cost Arizona $133 billion in federal funding that is needed to support those on Medicaid and to provide tax credits to help Arizonans pay for their health care.

Despite these alarming estimations and overwhelming calls for bipartisan solutions, Senate Republicans are still pushing forward this disastrous health care repeal bill and are expected to vote as soon as next week.

For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about the conservative crusade against the  Political Correctness. Then I thought about how conservatives go nuts over ideas and actions they don't think are "American" and jingoistic enough. Same idea, different targets. So I asked myself, "What can I call the conservative version of political correctness? Can I come up with a two word phrase with the initials 'P.C.'? . . . I got it! Patriotic Correctness."

If a football player takes a knee during the National Anthem, conservatives go crazy, because he's not showing the proper respect for the country. "How unpatriotic!" Could it be he thinks it's patriotic to point out problems which should be fixed to make this a better country by making a quiet, peaceful statement? "No way! You show patriotism by standing and waiting for the National Anthem to be over so the damn game can start already." People protesting the Iraq War were labeled traitors. "Why do you hate America?" conservatives screamed. And when the Dixie Chicks made a disparaging comment about President George Bush during a concert in London, their records were burned, their music was banished from country music station playlists and they got death threats. All in the name of Patriotic Correctness.

Before I congratulated myself for my creative genius, I decided to google "patriotic correctness." I found a column in the Washington Post dated Dec. 7, 2016. The writer stole my idea nine months before I thought of it.

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Conservatives use “patriotic correctness” to regulate speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva was arrested during an immigrants' rights protest in front of Trump Tower Tuesday morning, along with U.S. Reps. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) and Luis Gutierrez (D-IL)

"I stood in front of Trump Tower today with a whole lot of DREAMers, immigrants and Americans to say enough to Trump and his criminalization of our immigrant communities," he posted on Facebook shortly before being arrested.

Grijalva was sitting in the street below Trump Tower with other demonstrators, holding a banner advocating for DACA recipients when he was taking into custody by the New York Police Department with his hands zip tied behind his back.

A representative from Grijalva's office said the congressman was released several hours after the arrest and now faces charges of disorderly conduct with other charges pending, according to Tucson News Now. They also reported the lawmakers had intended to get arrested at the protest.

Last week, I took the Star to task for its article about Pima County districts' AzMERIT scores in the post, To Understand Pima County Test Scores, Follow the [Parents'] Money. (The post had more likes, shares and comments than most of my recent pieces, and a number of letters in the Star voiced similar criticisms, meaning the Star article bothered a lot of people.) Comparing Tucson Unified's test scores with districts whose students come from more affluent homes where parents have more formal education makes little sense, I wrote. In Arizona, around the country and around the world, children from higher income families score higher on standardized tests than children from lower income families regardless of the quality of schools they attend.

I've written often that if you want to create a reasonable analysis of Tucson Unified's AzMERIT scores, you have to compare them to scores in districts with similar demographics. Well, I've decided to put my keyboard where my mouth is. I'm beginning a rough study to see how test scores in Tucson Unified schools compare with scores of similar schools in similar districts. Why am I telling you what I'm planning to do even though I've only just finished the thinking process and haven't begun the research? To keep myself honest, for one. If I put my approach in writing, I'll be forced to stick to it and report the results as honestly as possible (which I'd try to do anyway, but it's always tempting to fudge a bit). And to let readers know what my approach is before I write about my findings so you're less likely to think I began with my conclusions and worked back to the data that "proved" what I already decided.

On my computer, I have two databases from the AZ Department of Education. One lists the total number of students in every district school in the state along with the percentage of students on free or reduced lunch. The other breaks down the 2017 AzMERIT scores of every school in detail, by gender, ethnicity, English Language proficiency and grade level. Looking at the two data sets, I can compare how schools with similar student bodies scored on the state tests, and I can compare the scores of subgroups in the schools.

Here's my methodology. Scratch that. "Methodology" is to high fallutin' a term for my crude analysis—I won't be using any sophisticated statistical tools—of a blunt instrument—a high stakes test whose validity as a measure of student achievement is questionable. So, here's what I'm gonna do.