TUSD went through a rough-and-tumble board election last year, but compared to what's going on in the Los Angeles school board race, it was a half-hearted shoving match on the school playground. Two seats are up for grabs in Tuesday's L.A. school board election, and so far $12 million has been dropped into the races. Between Wednesday and Thursday, two of the candidates pulled in another $800,000.

Looking at the major battles over education being waged in Arizona as well as L.A., New York, Chicago and other hot spots, not to mention the national-level furor over Trump's Ed Sec Betsy DeVos and her privatization priorities, it's clear to me we're at a pivotal moment. The nation is fighting over the very soul of education. What happens over the next decade could very well decide how we educate our children well into the future.

What's unusual about the education battles is, unlike most national issues, they don't divide along neat political lines. Arizona's statewide educational fight is pretty straightforwardly conservative/progressive, Republican/Democratic. But the TUSD board battles created some mighty strange political bedfellows, and the L.A. education wars are even more complicated.

Unlike TUSD where all the board candidates are lumped together and the top vote getters are elected, L.A. board seats are divided by district. Each of the two hotly contested district seats has a pro-charter candidate and an . . . it's not correct to say an anti-charter school candidate exactly, more like a candidate who wants to slow down charter growth. Some of the pro charter money has come from the usual conservative sources: two members of the Walton (Walmart) family and the conservative co-founder of the GAP. But giving big money to the same side are former N.Y. mayor Michael Bloomberg and Steve Jobs' widow, neither of whom are firmly in the conservative camp. And at the center of the L.A. pro-charter movement is Eli Broad, a very rich Democrat who is a major player in the "education reform"/privatization movement and has a goal of opening up enough L.A. charter schools that they'll enroll half of the local students. The candidates on the other side are getting lots of their money from teachers unions and their allies in the labor movement.

Governor Ducey signed a new program into law, Results-based funding. It will give 17 percent of the state's schools a sizable chunk of change, enough to give their teachers a 5 to 10 percent raise and still have half the funding left over to put to other uses.

Before I begin, let me admit most of the numbers I'm using here are approximations, and I can't guarantee I'm 100 percent correct on the consequences of the new results-based funding, but I think I'm reasonably close. The problem is, I haven't read anything near a thorough analysis of the new funding scheme, so I'm venturing into new territory. Consider my analysis and my numbers a starting point for further discussion. Oh, and a word of warning. This post is going to get wonky in a hurry, so if you're not interested in lots of digging into the numbers and intricacies of results-based funding, run while you still can.

Results-based funding is a new spin on a proposal Governor Brewer tried to put into law a few years back, unsuccessfully. The basic idea is, the most "successful" schools—meaning those where their students are achieving at a high level—should be rewarded for their success by getting more money. That's contrary to what most industrialized countries do, which is to give money, mentoring and resources to underperforming schools to help them improve. But let's put that aside and see how the Arizona plan works.

Next school year, about 17 percent of all district and charter schools will get results-based funding, which will amount to either $225 or $400 per student. The other 83 percent won't get a penny. To put the funding into perspective, Prop. 123 gave all Arizona schools about $325 per student. True, that was less than what schools need (and less than the courts ordered), but it was still a significant amount of money. The results-based funding numbers are in the same general ballpark. The program will cost $37.6 million, which is a bit more than the $34 million the legislature saw fit to allot for statewide teacher raises, yet it will go to fewer than one-fifth of the schools.

Of the 17 percent of schools that make the cut, those with fewer than 60 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch will get $225 per student. Schools with more than 60 percent on free or reduced lunch will get $400 per student. The law states that half or more of the new funding will be used for teachers. Ducey says that's specifically for teacher raises, though the law opens the spending up for other teacher-related uses. But if half of the money—$112.50 or $200 per student, depending on the school—were spent on teacher raises, that would mean a raise of approximately $2,250 or $4,000, somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. Those schools would be instantly more attractive to teachers and would see their teacher shortages disappear. Teacher applications would start flooding in, allowing them to fill their classrooms with top applicants.

The law assures that schools with more low income students, those getting $400 per student, will be included in the program. The clever folks who wrote the bill make it look like they're including an equal number of schools in both the higher and lower income groups, but the way the money is allotted, nearly 25 percent of schools with students from higher income families, those with fewer than 60 percent of FRL students, will be included, compared to 10 percent of schools with more than 60 percent of FRL students. Here's how they created the disparity.

It's no surprise Ducey wants it to be known as his "education budget." He can read the writing, and the polling, on the wall. Education is Arizona voters' number one issue, and for all his posturing in that direction, Ducey hasn't exactly earned himself a vote of confidence.

A recent KTAR News/OH Predictive Insights poll tells the story. Education is "the most pressing issue facing Arizona," according to 43 percent of the respondents. By way of comparison, jobs, the economy and health care totaled a combined 29 percent. When asked what grade Ducey has earned on education, respondents gave him a C—just average. More people gave him an F than all his A's and B's added together. As with all polls, these results should be taken with a few grains of salt, but even if the numbers are off a bit, it's clear, Ducey has earned a resounding "Meh" from the voters regarding what he's done for education. And that's not a good thing when he knows his 2018 Democratic opponent is going to be slamming him on education and pushing for more funding.

So Ducey is selling his education accomplishments, hard. Right now, that means pushing what he calls his "education budget." But if you look at the numbers carefully, you'll see it's a mixture of smoke, mirrors and bullshit.

Take a look the graphic-heavy, information-lite page titled, BOUNDLESS OPPORTUNITY: Education Budget 2017 on the governor's website. The only honest words in that title are "Budget 2017."

Here's what the page says under Teacher Pay Raises: "$68 million for a 2% teacher pay raise." If I were feeling generous, I'd call those figures misleading. Since I'm not feeling generous, I'll call them what they are: bullshit. This year, the budget adds 1 percent to teacher salaries, which will cost $34 million. Ducey assures us the raise will go up to 2% next year, but that's just talk at this point. It'll have to be negotiated again in the next budget.

Sitting at your college graduation trying to decide what to do next? Why not teach in a public school? You don't need any education classes. You don't need to demonstrate subject matter proficiency. Just take off that cap and gown and stow it in the back of your car, drive to the nearest school district and put in an application for a job to teach in your major field. They're desperate for teachers, you know, so you've got a great shot at walking out with an offer. Soon, you'll have yourself a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate and a classroom of your own.

I mean, really, how tough can it be to teach? You were a K-12 student. You spent 13 years watching teachers take roll, say a few words to the class, give an assignment and put the kids to work. You know how it's done, right? Piece of cake. You can do it too!

Dear Reader: Just to be sure you're clear on the concept, that second paragraph is pure satire. I spent 30-plus years in the classroom, and it stayed challenging all the way through my last day. Teaching ain't easy. But the first paragraph is for real. When the recent bill making it easier to get a teaching certificate in Arizona was signed into law by Governor Ducey, it meant that anyone with a baccalaureate degree in a subject taught in a public school can get a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate and start teaching right away. According to the law, there are two more ways you can get one of those certificates, potentially without even being a high school graduate. More on that later.

I've read what's been written about the new teacher certification law in other publications, and I'm almost certain the reporters whose work I've read misunderstood the legislation. The law has three requirements for obtaining a Subject Matter Expert Standard Teaching Certificate, and the articles appear to believe someone needs to fulfill two or more of the requirements to qualify, setting the bar higher than it actually is. I've gone through the Conference Engrossed Version of SB 1042 a number of times and read over the Senate Fact Sheet, and it's clear to me that an applicant only needs to fulfill one of the three to qualify.

Martha McSally stood up in GOP conference meeting and said let's get this "fucking thing" done.

Yes, direct quote — per members and aides.

— Erica Werner (@ericawerner) May 4, 2017

After declining to inform the public of where she stands on the Zombie Trumpcare bill, it appears that Congreswoman Martha McSally (R-AZ02) is fully behind it, according to AP reporter Erica Werner, who reports that McSally told her GOP colleagues it was time to get this "fucking thing" done.

The House is set to vote on the legislation today. The Hill is following the action on Congressional Hill.

Indivisible Southern Arizona is planning a "death march" on McSally midtown offices at 4400 E. Broadway at 5 p.m. today.

Here's New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait's take on this fucking thing:

The heart of the bill is the same one that was polling at under 20 percent and failed two months ago: a near-trillion dollar tax cut for wealthy investors, financed by cuts to insurance subsidies for the poor and middle class. They have added a series of hazily defined changes: waivers for states to allow insurers to charge higher rates to people with preexisting conditions and to avoid covering essential health benefits, and a pitifully small amount of money to finance high-risk pools for sick patients.

The implications of these changes are vast. The Brookings Institution notes that if a single state eliminated the cap on lifetime benefits for a single employee, then employers in every state could actually follow suit, thus bringing back a horrid feature of the pre-Obamacare system, in which people who get hit with expensive treatment suddenly discover that their insurer will no longer pay for their care. This would affect not only those getting insurance through Medicaid or the state exchanges, but also through their job.

The ambiguity of the details is the strategy. Republican leaders have been “assuring centrists that the Senate would make changes to allay their concerns and insisting that few states would actually use the waivers allowing higher premiums for pre-existing conditions,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Sean Spicer says it would be “literally impossible … to do an analysis of any level of factual basis.” Representative Fred Upton told reporters that if the Congressional Budget Office says the bill is underfunded he will push for more money — after it passes his chamber.

They are rushing through a chamber of Congress a bill reorganizing one-fifth of the economy, without even cursory attempts to gauge its impact. Its budgetary impact is as yet unknown. The same is true of its social impact, though the broad strokes are clear enough: Millions of Americans will lose access to medical care, and tens of thousands of them will die, and Congress is eager to hasten these results without knowing them more precisely. Their haste and secrecy are a way of distancing the House Republicans from the immorality of their actions.

No question about it. Republicans with most of the power in Arizona are enemies of public education. They've demonstrated it over and over, for years. But what would they do to public education if they could do anything they wanted? It sounds like a simple question, but it's a tough one to answer. I'm going to take a stab at it.

We have to begin by defining our terms. "Public education" and "publicly funded education" are two different things. Public education is both funded and run by the public, with publicly elected school boards which have the power to make the final education and personnel decisions. Only school districts fit that description. Charter schools are a public/private hybrid, publicly funded but privately operated, answering to the owners and their appointed boards. At one time, private schools were both privately funded and privately run, but with the growth of vouchers, they're becoming kind of a charter/private hybrid, getting a whole lot of their funding from the public but having even less public oversight and control than charter schools.

Arizona's supporters of public education often say Republicans want to "dismantle" public education. I've always been uncomfortable with that term. It sounds too much like the plan is to take public education apart, piece by piece, until it's no longer there. To my ears, "dismantle" sounds a lot like "destroy," and I don't think that's accurate. About 75 percent of Arizona's school children attend public schools. Of the remainder, almost 20 percent are in charters and between 5 to 8 percent are either in private schools or home schooled. There's no plausible way to create enough charters and private schools to get take care of the 75 percent currently in public schools. I suppose districts could be made into collections of charter schools, an experiment currently being tested in a few cities in other parts of the country, but I don't see it happening here, at least not on a statewide scale. Public education is here to stay, and I think most Republicans are OK with that. They don't want to dismantle, as in destroy, school districts. What the want to do is damage, degrade and devalue them.

Regardless of the words we use to describe it, the question is, if Republicans had their way, what would the damaged, degraded, devalued public education look like? I doubt many Arizona Republicans have thought this question through and have a coherent answer, but if they did, I think it would go something like this.

The GOP’s so-called zombie Trumpcare bill—the American Health Care Act that was left for dead last month after President Donald Trump warned House members that if they didn’t vote for it then, he was moving on—is shambling around Washington again this week, seeking a vote that would restore it to life once more.

But if you're wondering how Southern Arizona Congresswoman Martha McSally (R-AZ02) is voting, don't expect to find out. It turns out her position on the latest version of the legislation is a big secret.

Earlier today, The Hill's Cristina Marcos tweeted that McSally said "I'm not publicly sharing my position" when asked how she'd vote on the revised American Health Care Act.

Rep. McSally, who reps Clinton district, says this when asked how she'd vote on the revised ACHA: "I'm not publicly sharing my position."

— Cristina Marcos (@cimarcos) May 2, 2017

Asked by the Weekly is McSally is supporting the legislation, McSally spokesperson Kelly Schibi said today via email:

The status quo is not an option, especially for Arizona where the ACA has left counties with one choice for coverage. Rep. McSally is deeply concerned that the most vulnerable in our communities receive care, which is why she has taken the lead in negotiating on their behalf. She has secured $60 billion in Medicaid for the elderly and disabled, and $90 billion for tax credits for individuals aged 50 to 64. She has also won an additional $15 billion for mothers and their newborns, and for those who struggle with mental health disorders and substance abuse. As her track record shows, she brings a constructive voice to the legislative process on behalf of all of her constituents for improved health care for Arizona.

McSally’s silence on her position on latest version of the GOP's legislation is a big contrast to where she was on the version that never made it to vote last month. On the day before the legislation was pulled just before it was supposed to go up for a vote, McSally went all in on that legislation, taking credit for adding $15 billion to help with the costs of providing maternity care coverage as well as treatment for mental illness and drug addiction. However, those are conditions that insurance companies must now cover under the existing Affordable Care Act, so the additional funding wouldn’t have been needed if McSally weren't supporting legislation that strips those essential health benefits from the law.

The latest version of the American Health Care Act appears to violate one of McSally’s key promises to voters in the highly competitive Congressional District 2: It does not keep intact protections for people with preexisting conditions.

To provide a bit of background: The lightning strike that jolted zombie healthcare back to its feet was an amendment from Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-NJ), who brought back on board many of the conservative Freedom Caucus members who torpedoed the earlier effort. The Freedom Caucus members weren’t satisfied with a bill that, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, led to 24 million Americans being uninsured (including many of those low-income citizens covered by the Medicaid expansion) and huge jumps in insurance costs for seniors. They balked at several provisions in the original repeal-and-replace legislation, such as protecting people with preexisting conditions from discrimination and requiring that the essential health benefits—such as maternity care and mental-health treatment—be covered. That legislation had dropped in the polls to 17 percent approval before House lawmakers gave up on passing it.

Under the new version of the legislation, states would be able to obtain a waiver to get rid of those protections for consumers as long as they jumped through a few hoops, such as setting up a “high-risk pool” to dump people with pre-existing conditions—cancer survivors, diabetics, and the like. (Arizona never actually implemented a high-risk pool before the Affordable Care Act passed, but it’s hard to believe the current Legislature would be willing to fork over the funding that a high-risk pool would require, although it’s easy to see state lawmakers seeking a waiver anyhow.)

Or, as Kevin Griffis, a former Obama administration Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and current vice president for communications of Planned Parenthood Federation of America puts it, GOP lawmakers took "a bad bill and figured out how to make it worse.”

It's in an old Arizona guide book published in 1940, 500 pages long with lots of photos. The first chapter, Contemporary Scene, makes this statement about the state's commitment to public education.

Ah, for those thrilling days of yesteryear, a time Arizonans were "almost extravagant" when it came to spending on their children's educations!

The next paragraph celebrates the state's "liberal spirit" as embodied by its embrace of the initiative, the referendum and the recall.

Back then, folks believed their initiative process was such a treasure that if anyone—the legislature, say, or the governor—even suggested surrendering that right, they "would be smothered under a storm of protest."

Almost 80 years later, it's time we honor our forebearers by renewing our commitment to funding public education and ensuring the viability of our initiative process.

Tonight on the televised edition of Zona Politics with Jim Nintzel: I talk with Tucson City Councilwoman Regina Romero about Prop 101, the city's ask for a half-cent sales tax to fund roads and public safety, as well as her reaction to the Trump administration's push against so-called sanctuary cities, the city's new hands-free smart phone ordinance and other city issues. Then I introduce you to Tom Tronsdal, one of three Democrats seeking to replace retiring Tucson City Councilwoman Karin Uhlich in Ward 3.

Tune in to Zona Politics at 6:30 p.m. on Cox Channel 20 and Comcast Channel 74. The show repeats at 9 a.m. Sundays on both channels.

On the radio edition of Zona Politics: I talk with Tucson City Council candidate Felicia Chew, one of the other Democrats seeking to replace Uhlich in Ward 3. (The third Democrat is Paul Durham, just FYI.) The radio edition airs at 5 p.m. Sunday on community radio station KXCI, 91.3 FM, and at 1 p.m Saturday and 11 a.m. Sunday on Tucson progressive radio station KEVT, 1210 AM.

A few thoughts from recent Arizona education news.

Writing about U.S. News' Best High Schools rankings: When in doubt, read the instructions. The story that BASIS dominated the U.S. News & World Report high school rankings got lots of press in Arizona, but few reporters bothered to look carefully at how the ratings were calculated. The four steps are neatly laid out on the website. The first three are hurdles schools have to jump over—state test scores, achievement by disadvantaged and minority students, graduation rates—to make it to the final round. Over 20,000 schools made the cut. Then the actual judging is all about the percentage of seniors who've taken Advanced Placement courses and how well they did on the tests. The first three steps don't figure into the final results, contrary to the impression left by most articles on the topic. BASIS long ago decided to require a slew of AP courses in high school, and part of the reason was so the schools would score high in national rankings. You don't get that many schools at the top of the heap without figuring out how to game the system. Any reporting on the rankings that doesn't understand and explain the ratings system is doing BASIS a big favor while it misleads readers.

BASIS believes it costs more to educate low income students. BASIS is planning to open a few new Arizona schools in low income areas to see if its educational model will work with a less academically select group of students, but it says it needs more money to do it.

[BASIS.ed CEO Peter] Bezanson said the Basis model can be replicated to teach more diverse students, and his team would like to be the one to do it. But they can only do it with adequate funding. 

Elsewhere, Bezanson said he's planning to look for outside funding to make the new schools work. I find that fascinating. I'd like to see him testify up at the Capitol to ask for extra funding for all schools in low income areas. If BASIS thinks it can't teach those kids with the same amount of money it gets for its wealthier, more academically prepared kids, maybe that would help Republican legislators understand it takes more money, not less, to give low income kids the extra enrichment they need. Other industrialized countries understand that. Apparently BASIS does too.