As I was leaving the studio of the Bill Buckmaster Show Thursday, Bill told me that TUSD's new superintendent, Dr. Gabriel Trujillo, was on the show last week, and Trujillo mentioned that the district is rebranding itself as Tucson Unified in place of the longstanding tradition of referring to it as TUSD. It's not a huge deal, obviously. It doesn't change the way the district operates or educates its students. But I like it. Words matter, and the feeling the public has about the district matters.

The words "Tucson Unified" have a nice, positive ring to them. They link our city name with a sense of togetherness, indicating that Tucson is unified in our pursuit of education for our children.

The rebranding process has been going on for awhile. It began before Trujillo was chosen as interim superintendent, then superintendent, but I hadn't noticed it until Bill pointed it out to me. From this point forward, I'll use "Tucson Unified" instead of TUSD in my posts.

If you haven't had a chance to hear Dr. Trujillo, the interview on the Buckmaster Show is a good place to start. You can listen to it on the show's website. He comes across as smart, positive and personable. Early indications are, the board made a good pick.

I've been out of town for three weeks. Did I miss anything?

Let's see. TUSD has a new superintendent, Dr. Gabriel Trujillo. Looks like a pretty smart choice. He's getting stamps of approval from people on various sides of district issues, which is promising. And board member Mark Stegeman has voted against him twice so far, which makes Trujillo sound even better to me. Best of luck, Dr. Trujillo. You'll need it.

Then there was the Mexican American Studies decision from Judge Tashima, a clear-the-bases, grand slam home run for MAS supporters. Ex Ed Supe John Huppenthal didn't like the program because it taught students they were victims of a racist system; the judge said Hupp's dismantling of the MAS program was the result of racial animus. Hupp didn't want Mexican American youth to think of themselves as oppressed; Hupp suppressed a program which used historical facts to show ways Mexican American students and their ancestors have been oppressed. Earlier Ex Ed Supe Tom Horne was upset that MAS taught ethnic chauvinism; he went around the state telling white people their privileged status was threatened by the program. One term to describe the Hupp and Horne statements in light of the judge's decision is "irony." MAS supporters are probably more fond of the term "vindication."

And then there's the statement by Jim Swanson, the leader of Ducey's Classrooms First Initiative Council, that our schools need an additional billion dollars in added tax revenue. It's not exactly new news. Other business leaders raised the idea in June. But for Swanson, Ducey's hand-picked head of his council to explore ways to improve education, to say Ducey isn't doing enough to fund schools, and to go into such detail about the reasons why the extra money is needed, that's really something. The public already supports increased education funding. A statement from Swanson and other business leaders helps build a statewide consensus which will make it harder for Republicans to pretend to be pro-education while saying they don't want to "throw money at schools."

Concern and complaints abound over U.S. students' low scores on international tests compared to other industrialized countries. The favorite culprits accused of causing the disparity are, in no special order: (1) Failing schools; (2) Failing teachers; (3) Failing parents (4) Low expectations; (5) Lack of common curriculum; (6) Too much common curriculum; (7) Inadequate funding; (8) Socioeconomic inequality. I'm sure I missed a few.

But one possible culprit that doesn't come up as often as it should is lack of opportunities for quality early childhood education. The U.S. sits near the bottom of the list when it comes to the percentage of 3 and 4 year olds enrolled in educational programs. Is that one reason for our low scores on the international tests? Maybe so, maybe no, but it should be a larger part of our national discussion, even among the privatization/"education reform" crowd, who are all about charter schools and vouchers for private schools. If they care more about education than privatization, maybe those folks should be more into promoting early childhood education.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) administers the PISA international student testing, and it analyzes the results as well as other relevant educational information. It recently published Starting Strong 2017, a 200 page document focusing on early childhood education and care. Starting on page 128, it compares the enrollment rates of 3 and 4 year olds in pre-primary education in 2014 in about 35 countries. In the U.S., 40 percent of three year olds were in educational programs compared to an OECD average of 70 percent. Only five countries had lower numbers. Among four year olds, the U.S. enrollment was 70 percent compared to an OECD average of 85 percent. Only three countries had lower numbers.

The Star's front page story about Pima county school districts' scores on the AzMERIT test has its facts right, but it doesn't include all the relevant information. As a result, readers are likely to draw the wrong conclusions—that TUSD and Sunnyside are doing a terrible job educating their students, while Pima county's suburban districts are shining stars in Arizona's educational firmament.

Hank Stephenson, the new education reporter at the Star, is a good journalist who does the necessary leg work and phone work to get the story—far, far more of it than I do as a humble blogger—but with this article, he's earned a spot at the top of the front page by telling only part of the story, which does a serious disservice to our two districts with the lowest income students. Unintentionally, I believe, Stephenson has followed one of the Star's unwritten maxims: If TUSD bleeds, the story leads. So let it bleed.

TUSD must be doing a terrible job educating its students, or so the story makes it sound.

Southern Arizona’s largest school district is dragging down the county’s results. Students in the Tucson Unified School District performed well below the state average on the standardized test and were also outperformed by students in eight of Pima County’s nine major school districts.

Sunnyside must be doing even worse, according to the story.

The test results were even worse for Sunnyside Unified School District, which scored the lowest of any of Pima County’s nine major districts.

A bulletin to the press let us know this morning that Gabby Giffords, the former Southern Arizona member of Congress, is set to endorse Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick in the race to unseat Republican Congresswoman Martha McSally.

Giffords once held McSally's seat but her career was cut short when a crazed gunman opened fire at her Congress on Your Corner event in 2011, killing six and wounding 13, including Giffords, who miraculously survived being shot through the head.

Kirkpatrick represented Arizona's Congressional District 1 until she stepped down in 2016 to launch an unsuccessful challenge to Sen. John McCain. She has since moved to Tucson and is now one of several Democrats who hope to unseat McSally in Congressional District 2, a highly competitive district that McSally first won in 2014 by just 167 votes.

Other Democrats in the race include former state lawmakers Matt Heinz and Bruce Wheeler; businessman Billy Kovacs; and Mary Matiella, a former assistant secretary of the Army in the civilian role of financial management.

Giffords will be joining her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, and Kirkpatrick at an event this afternoon for a "major announcement," according the press release from Team Kirkpatrick.

Voucher supporters don't believe in a fair fight. Pro-voucher legislators don't trust the voters they work for. They're trying to quash a referendum on the vouchers-on-steroids-for-everyone law passed last session, using any means necessary. If that effort fails, expect them to repeal and replace their own voucher law next session, rendering the referendum null and void.

If the referendum actually does end up on the ballot in 2018, it will make for an interesting battle. There's no way to predict which way the vote will go.

When Republicans first passed the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts law—aka Educational Savings Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids—a limited number of Arizona families were able to use the ESAs. But from the beginning its advocates said their plan was to make vouchers universal so everyone from welfare recipients to billionaires could get government money to pay for private schools, or pretty much any other form of non-public education. "Eventually" came in the last legislative session. They got what they wanted. If the law stays in effect, it will take twelve years for every child who isn't attending a district or charter school to receive between $5,000 and $30,000 a year to pay for their educations.

Along came a group, Save Our Schools, which began a quixotic quest to overturn the law. The effort should have been doomed from the start. Logic says you can't collect enough signatures to put a referendum on the state ballot without lots of funding. But the group's shoe-leather-driven volunteer effort worked. The referendum got the signatures it needed. Clearly, lots of Arizonans want the vouchers-for-all law off the books.

Coincidence once again placed me in D.C. at a historic moment. A little more than two years ago, I stood in front of the Supreme Court and witnessed the joyous moment when the Court moved the country forward, deciding gay marriage is legal everywhere in the U.S. Today I stood in front of Trump's White House protesting his alarming decision to move the country backward, tossing out DACA and putting its fate in the hands of a deeply divided, ineffective Congress, leaving 800,000 Dreamers and their families walking a razor's edge for the next six months as they wait to see if they will be allowed to remain in the country legally.

Except for the White House in the background, the march and demonstration could have been in Tucson or pretty much any city in the country.

We gathered at Lafayette Park across from the White House, walked along H Street, then down 15th Street.

In the wake of Trump’s latest sledgehammer, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival recipients and their many allies gathered on Tucson’s City Hall to demand action from Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, Tucson City Council, local school boards and universities.

They told the hundred or so gathered that they have nothing left to lose, and they’re not going to rest until they have the same rights afforded to all Americans.

“We are undocumented and unafraid, and we’re not going back into the shadows,” said Jessica Rodriguez, a member of Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA. “We are going to send a message. No racism will be allowed in this town.”

The Trump administration announced yesterday an end to an Obama-era policy that protected 800,000 young people from deportation, saying Congress has six months to come up with legislation to replace it.

As of March 6, thousands of people a week nationwide will lose their right to drive, work, study and leave their house without fear of deportation if Congress can't find a solution.

Activists are marching from De Anza Park to Tucson City Hall at 4 p.m. today in support of DACA.

Rodriguez addressed the crowd in Spanish and then switched to English. Thanks to DACA, she was able to buy her first car and drive without the fear of being deported. Thanks to DACA, she’s pursuing her educational goals and career goals.

“I have DACA,” she told the crowd. “And they’re not going to take that away from me.”

Edward Cott, from Lucha Unida de Padres y Estudiantes, or LUPE, said that Trump is a white nationalist, chauvinist and a racist who pardoned Joe Arpaio after the former sheriff was found in contempt of court for continuing racist policies during his long tenure in Maricopa County.

Supervisor Ally Miller didn’t violate county policy with her controversial Facebook comments announcing her white pride while neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville on Saturday, Aug. 12. The Pima County Board has no recourse to discipline or censure her, advised the Chief Civil Deputy County Attorney Andrew Flagg.

County policy states that “County employees are expected to be professional, respectful, fair, unbiased, honest, civic-minded, service-oriented and fiscally responsible,” but only when engaged in county duties. Miller made the comment on a Saturday evening, and therefore is entitled to be as offensive and insensitive as she sees fit.

“I think our First Amendment rights are alive and well, and I’m very pleased with the county attorney’s opinion,” Miller said following the meeting.

Many showed up to Tuesday’s board meeting to both condemn and support Miller.

Najima Rainey with Black Lives Matter Tucson spoke directly to Ally Miller, saying Miller can have German pride or Irish pride because those are cultures, but if Miller doesn’t realize that saying “white and proud” would be synonymous with the white supremacist movement, she’s not fit for her job.

“When you say, ‘I am white and proud,’ you are saying you embrace a designation of superiority,” Rainey said.

Local activist and former Pima County public defender Isabel Garcia also spoke, telling Miller she should acknowledge the racist history of this region and country—the genocide of indigenous people and enslavement of black people.

“Did we wake up and say these things were wrong?” she said. “We didn’t. We didn’t do what Germany did and say, ‘Never again.’”

Community member Bryna Koch echoed the sentiment of many who opposed Miller’s statements, saying that making that statement while neo-Nazis marched in broad daylight, “shows a lack of empathy and lack of a moral compass.”

“As a white person, I’m here to tell you that what you said is unacceptable,” she said. “The fact the Supervisor Miller thinks equality for everyone is a threat to her whiteness tells me everything I need to know.”

The Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program changed Fernando Najera’s world. For starters, he’s no longer afraid of being deported to a country he left when he was 3 years old.

“That in itself is a real big blessing for a community of people who have had to live in the shadows because of that fear,” he said. “It’s renewed my faith in God.”

Although Najera was in the top 10 percent of his high school class, he didn’t know if college was a possibility until DACA came through. Because of DACA, he could get a job and a scholarship, and he’s now a junior at the University of Arizona, double-majoring in law and political science.

“To me, it’s not so much the freedom that every other American has, but it’s also served as a message that everything is going to fall into place,” he said. “You’ve got to fight a little bit, be patient, but God has everything in control.”

But now Najera faces the unknown after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that Trump administration would be rescinding the DACA program, leaving him and roughly 800,000 other participants in the program wondering what’s next.

“We are people of compassion and we are people of law, but there is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration law,” Sessions said Tuesday morning at the press conference announcing the decision, which Trump had teased for two weeks.

Sessions said that the program would remain in place for another six months, allowing Congress time to come up with an alternative to the DACA program.