Author Archives: Linda Lyon

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March 31, 2023

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Curb Gun Violence Against Children by Home Schooling

We are pathetic. Yes, all of us. We obviously don’t care enough about the carnage going on in our schools, our churches, our theaters, our grocery stores, our concerts, our workplaces, and myriad other places. If we cared enough, we would do something to curb gun violence.

I’ll be the first to admit that I started to feel hopeless, powerless, and numb after 20 first graders and six adults were slaughtered at Sandy Hook in 2012. After all, I thought, if this doesn’t change things, what will?

More than a decade and eight mass school shootings later, not much has changed. In all, as reported by the AZ Daily Starjust this morning, 175 students have been massacred in 15 school shootings since 1999. As grisly as that number is, you may have been surprised it wasn’t larger. But then, it doesn’t include all the other mass shootings, defined as where four or more people are killed. So far in 2023, we’ve seen 130 mass shootings in the United States…averaging more than one per day. And, these heinous acts don’t just kill people, they make the rest of us fearful, just as terrorism is designed to do.

Thankfully, we now have some data about the extent and causes of the carnage since President Obama blocked the two-decade effort by the gun lobby and GOP to prevent the CDC from conducting gun research. Facts like this one reported by NPR.org, help us understand the problem,

“Just over 100 people, on average, are killed by firearms in the U.S. every day. That includes crimes, suicides, gun accidents, and shootings involving law enforcement.” 

And according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, (also from CDC data),

“Firearms were the leading cause of death in children between ages 1 and 19″ in 2020.”

No other peer country except for Canada had firearms in their top 5 causes of death for this age group. Canada’s 48 deaths (versus our 4,357) made it their 5th highest cause of death. Our high number of deaths is not so surprising when you learn that in 2017, the U.S. had 4% of the world’s population, but owned 46% of the guns. WTF?

We have met the enemy…and he is us! You, me, all of us. Because you see, a healthy democracy doesn’t allow “checking out”. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” He understood that when we don’t engage in our democracy, we abdicate our rights to self-govern and fully live our lives the way we choose. Author Daniel Suarez put it this way, “Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life.”

The only problem is those “someones” we are counting on to make the difficult decisions, aren’t doing it. In this morning’s New York Times, Congressman Tim Burchett (R), Tennesse, was quoted saying about additional gun safety measures, “We’re not going to fix it…criminals are going to be criminals”. This was just hours after three children and three adults were killed at a school in his home state. He said he saw no “real role” for Congress in this matter and offered “his solution for protecting his family was to home-school his children”. In other words, the hell with all y’all, I’m taking care of mine. And, Tennessee’s governor basically touted a “murderers gonna murder” trope when he said, “we can’t control what they do”.

Burchett is not alone in his refusal to act. The New York Times reports that Senator John Cornyn (R), Texas has dismissed President Biden’s calls for banning assault weapons as a set of “tired talking points”. Senator Cynthia Lummis (R), Wyoming said “I don’t think there’s any appetite” when referring to her party’s unwillingness to take on gun control legislation.

Senate Chaplain Barry Black however, didn’t hold back in an unusually urgent plea for action. He prayed aloud to “deliver our senators from the paralysis of analysis that waits for the miraculous.” “When babies die at a church school” he said, “it is time for us to move beyond thoughts and prayers”. Not sure why it should matter that it was a church school, but have you noticed that GOP lawmakers are no longer offering their thoughts and prayers? That’s because they learned that, “that dog don’t hunt”. Instead with this latest shooting, they’ve decided they are just done with the whole thing, (as Congressman Burchett articulated) and are throwing the bullet (er…) ball, back in our court.

Well, as Abraham Lincoln said, “The ballot is stronger than the bullet” and that’s where “we the people” reclaim our power. That’s where we live the values we proclaim. That’s where we prove our individual and collective moral character by acting per our beliefs.

So, let’s not let the ball lie in our court. Let’s pick it up and commit to acting for change. How do we do that?
1. Vote in every election and help register and encourage others to vote
2. Join, donate, and volunteer for an organization such as Giffords.org or Everytown.org or BradyUnited.org, or myriad others.
3. Know which candidates support reducing gun violence and vote for them, volunteer for them, and donate to their campaigns.
4. If you can’t find someone you believe can affect the change needed, run for office yourself.
5. Hold your current lawmakers, at every level, accountable. Follow what they are doing and speak out when they don’t do the right thing. You can write letters to the editor; email, write, or call them; post about their actions on social media; or sometimes even make in-person or online “calls to the public”.

Except for running for office, the above actions are probably the bare minimum for one person to be able to affect any change. And of course, it will take many of us working together to really make a difference. Think Mothers Against Drunk Driving which “helped get over 1,000 new laws involving alcohol passed on both a local and national level, including laws regarding server liability, the setting up of sobriety checkpoints, and raising the minimum drinking age.”

With more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the U.S. in 2018 (one for every person with 67 million left over), change won’t happen overnight. But…could we at least start moving in the right direction? Even now, GOP lawmakers around the country continue to look for ways to make firearms even more accessible by arming teachers, allowing gun carry on campuses, limiting gun-free zones, removing background checks, and rolling back red-flag laws. The trend won’t reverse until these lawmakers are sent packing.

The Pew Research Center conducted a survey in 2021 that showed “nearly three-quarters of Americans think that gun violence is a big or moderately big problem.” What we don’t all agree on, is how to fix it. That, however, is what we pay our lawmakers to figure out. To…wait for it…compromise to find the best possible solution not just for themselves, not for just their constituents, but for the whole damn country. THAT, my friends, is how we make America great again. Let’s start (today) holding them, and ourselves, accountable to do just that.

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February 17, 2023

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The Indispensability of Community Public Schools

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines indispensable as “absolutely necessary” and “not subject to being set aside or neglected”. I can think of no better word to describe how important our public schools have been, and are, to our communities and country. Unfortunately, the GOP has made it clear they want to privatize and defund public schools. They are working very hard to “set aside and neglect” our community (real) public schools at the risk of great peril to our nation.

Yesterday, U.S. public education advocate #1, Diane Ravitch, published a blog post titled “Inclusion: the key to public school’s value” from Stephen Owens on his blog Common Grace, Common Schools. I hadn’t read anything from Owens before but found his writing both powerful and spot-on. Owens has a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Georgia and is Director of Education at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. His truth-to-power straight talk aimed (at least in this post) at white people and Christians, is all the more powerful because he is himself, an evangelical Christian.

“Not only” writes Owens, “are parts of American public schooling unique, but reflect central tenets of the Christian faith.” Three of the tenets he cites are inclusion, equity, and accountability. I’ve written plenty about accountability before and in fact, believe the lack of accountability is the number one problem (or at least in the top three) facing our society today.

As for inclusion and equity, our community public schools promise to educate all, and helped make our nation the powerhouse it is. “Meanwhile”, writes Anya Kamenetz in the New York Times, “a well-funded, decades-old movement that wants to do away with public school as we know it is in ascendance.” Kamenetz is a longtime education reporter and author of “The Stolen Year: How Covid Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now”. She maintains the extended school closures during the COVID pandemic “effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling. Sad but true, parents with means did what could ensure their kids continued to learn and the rest made do with what they had. Increasingly now, students are being home-schooled, attending private schools, or are otherwise absent from their community schools. Teacher shortages are at a crisis level, with many who are still teaching experiencing intense burnout.

Pro-choice advocates are no doubt, rejoicing at this manna dropped from heaven (or maybe pushed up from hell). Undermining our community public schools and the dedicated educators that toil in them has never been easier. Their gains, however, tear at the fabric of our communities, especially in rural locations where the school maybe not only the major employer but also the hub of the community. This is largely true because community schools, regardless of parents’ ability to pay, ensure students are educated, transported to and from school, fed, given medical attention as needed, and provided specialized help when their circumstances warrant. And, let’s be honest, they are often the source of free child care for families.

As much as we’d like to believe our society is a true meritocracy writes Owens, the “brutal truth of schooling in the U.S. is that parental income is strongly predictive of educational outcomes. The real difference in who makes it or not, he says, “is whether your parents have enough money to provide 1) security (food and housing), 2) accountability, 3) targeted support and 4) social capital.” Of course, the GOP continues to push the notion that all the supposed “disadvantaged” need to do is “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, totally ignoring the fact that this isn’t even physically possible, even if it were true.

As for what is painfully true, many in the GOP want to go back to the “Leave it to Beaver” days. You know, when the neighborhood was all white and comfortably middle class. When Dad went off to work and Mom stayed home and cleaned the house and cooked in her dress, high heels, and pearls. Concern for the common good evidently was much easier in a homogenous society with similar values and understandings. Remember when we used to all watch Walter Cronkite at 5pm to learn about “the way that it was” for each day? That shared understanding of the news, fairly void of opining, provided us common ground upon which to stand.

Likewise, our community schools brought us together to increase our understanding of each other as we became (hopefully) productive members of society. “Without public education delivered as a public good,” writes Kamenetz, “the asylum seeker in detention, the teenager in jail, not to mention millions of children growing up in poverty, will have no realistic way to get the instruction they need to participate in democracy or support themselves”.

Of course, it isn’t just the disadvantaged that suffer, but all of us as evidenced by our extremely high level of polarization. There can be no doubt as to social media’s influence on our polarization, particularly those attacks from our enemies on the global stage (China and Russia for example). But, it is the efforts to rob our community schools of critical funding, dedicated teachers, and the ability to teach the truth, that are most insidious. As Kamenezt points out, “students of privilege will stay confined in their bubbles. Americans will lose the most powerful social innovation that helps us construct a common reality and try, imperfectly, to understand one another.” “In the eyes of conservative activists,” she says, “public education is the enemy of the people, alongside the deep state and the mainstream media, and they are working hard to make the American people believe it too.”

And their tactics are working on a swath of America. According to Phi Delta Kappan (a professional organization for educators) poll from 2020, 53% of Americans support using public tax dollars to pay for private school tuition (48% for religious schools). This should not be entirely surprising as the GOP has worked this very hard for at least 40 years when President Reagan promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and Grover Nordquist advocated drowning the government in the bathtub.

As part of their Machiavellian scheme, the GOP has managed to market private school choice options as the ones that offer parents the most control. The truth is the exact opposite (what a shock). Public schools are the only school choice option that offers parents total accountability and transparency. Other school choice options offer virtually none of either.

I once thought GOP stood for “Grand Old Party”, but now I think maybe it is “Gaslighters or Prevaricators”. Ain’t tryin’ to be hatin’ on those on the Right. I understand they are not a monolithic group. Would just really like to see the party stand for something again instead of just spouting negative ideology. We need a strong two-party system to find good solutions to the many problems our country faces. And, we need to set a good example for our children so they can lead into the future they will inherit. One where the common good is again good and common and…it really matters to all of us.

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January 29, 2023

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T and A: #1 Benefit of Public Schools

I’ve no doubt raised a few eyebrows with the title of this post. Get your mind out of the gutter people, I’m talking about transparency and accountability!

Let me be clear…I believe America’s public schools are what made our country great. They ensured all children had the opportunity to learn and they coalesced our communities and all the different types of people within them. But, in terms of today’s school choice landscape, the number one benefit offered by public district schools over all other choices, is transparency and accountability.

Of course, in this alternate universe the GOP has created, up is down, left is right, black is white, and private school choice options (private, religious, and home schools) are the more transparent and accountable schools for parents and taxpayers. Nothing could be further from the truth. District schools, with publicly elected school board members and the requirement to follow Open Meeting Law (at least in Arizona), are by far the most transparent and accountable. Yes, our charter schools are also public schools, but they don’t have publicly elected boards. Rather, charter school board members may not even live in the same state, let alone in the same town. But as public schools, both district and charter schools have myriad transparency requirements private school choice options don’t. These include the need to follow Open Meeting Law, ensuring the public’s right to witness the discussion, deliberation, and decision-making done in its name. They also must: accept all students; comply with stringent requirements for reporting, procurement, and auditing; and allow parents the right to review all instructional material and intercede in their child’s education where they believe it is necessary. There are many more differences in transparency and accountability, but you get the idea.

And yet, those advocating for school privatization have managed to convince many parents (especially in today’s highly partisan environment), that public schools (especially district schools) are trying to indoctrinate their children with values and ideology that are different than their own.

What it is really about though, as pointed out by fellow education blogger Jan Resseger in her recent post, is money and power. After all, the total bill for K-12 education in the U.S. in 2018-2019 school year was already $800B. In Arizona this year, K-12 education constitutes almost 44% of the state budget. Privatizing public education is a lucrative triple-play for the rich and powerful and those lawmakers they keep in office. Privatization allows the reduction of the need for taxation, it offers the opportunity for corporations to profit directly from the education industry, and it reduces the voice of the people making it easier to ignore their will. As Resseger points out, Gordon Lafer, in “The One-Percent Solution”, said,

(F)or those interested in lowering citizens’ expectations of what we have a right to demand from government, there is no more central fight than around public education. In all these ways, then, school reform presents something like the perfect crystallization of the corporate legislative agenda.”

The brilliancy of packaging school privatization was convincing parents that their “right to choose”, was what was important. Resseger also quoted Benjamin Barber, in his book “Consumed”, who deftly makes the point that this ability to choose, however, is not the real power.

We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu. The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers. We select menu items privately, but we can assure meaningful menu choices only through public decision-making.

In other words, you are either at the table, or on the menu. In fact, I previously wrote a post with this same title back in 2014. With public schools, parents, voters and taxpayers are at the table (if they exercise their rights the way they should). Unfortunately, it takes work to exercise our rights and hold our elected officials accountable. But then, that’s what is meant by “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. “We the people”, must do our part if we want our government and its institutions to reflect our values. At least in public schools, we have that opportunity.

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January 27, 2023

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Tom Horne: An Old Dog with a CRT Bone

AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne is the living embodiment of the saying that an old dog can’t learn new tricks. His campaign gave us a preview that he was not going to change his ways. After all, he didn’t tout plans to improve our public schools (he was vying for the position overseeing “public” instruction after all), but rather, posted countless campaign signs shouting, “STOP CRITICAL RACE THEORY”. Never mind that actual CRT, (which rests on the premise that racial bias – intentional or not – is baked into U.S. laws and institutions), is not taught in elementary or secondary schools, but at the university level, most often in law schools. For Republicans, however, the term became synonymous with being “woke” and their focus on “owning the libs” carried Horne back to his old office.

This isn’t a new fight for Horne. After his recent election, MSNBC called him,

a pioneer in the right-wing crusade against school teachings centered on nonwhite people and social inequality.

As evidence, MSNBC cited his fight against “ethnic studies” which led to a ban on such instruction in Arizona schools in 2010. He also banned bilingual education services that same year which the Justice Department found illegal. The ban on ethnic studies held until 2017, when a federal judge overturned it, finding that it had an,

invidious discriminatory racial purpose, and a politically partisan purpose.

At 77, it is no surprise Horne hasn’t changed his spots. After all, it mostly works for him as evidenced by his previous elections to serve as State Superintendent from 2003 to 2011, as well as his election to a term as AZ Attorney General. Now, he’s swept into office on his STOP CRT broom, promising to,

eradicate teaching on diversity and equity and eliminate the use of social emotional learning in Arizona schools.

He’s off to a running start, canceling previously approved diversity presentations at the education conference hosted by his department and wrapping up today. Michaela Rose Classen, an education consultant originally scheduled to speak, expressed worry to the AZ Daily Star about excising social-emotional learning from schools saying,

When students enter the classroom, I think the assumption by some folks is that they just enter ready to learn. But there are different levels of experiences and often trauma that students are bringing into the classroom with them,’ Claussen said. ‘And they’re not quite developed yet emotionally, like we are as adults, to leave it at the door. So we have to really be cautious about how are we paying attention to student needs.

Horne doesn’t believe this type of learning has any place in the classroom. A 2022 Pew Research Poll, however, showed that about two-thirds of parents believe it is important their children’s school teaches social-emotional skills. These skills, in a nutshell, are:

  • Self-Management – managing emotions and behaviors to achieve one’s goals
  • Self-Awareness – recognizing one’s emotions and values as well as one’s strengths and challenges
  • Responsible Decision Making – making ethical, constructive choices about personal and social behavior
  • Relationship Skills – forming positive relationships, working in teams, dealing effectively with conflict
  • Social Awareness – Showing understanding and empathy

As a school board member in my 11th year of service, I can unequivocally say that many of our students need help with social-emotional skills. Should parents and communities teach these skills? YES, ABSOLUTELY!! But, in many cases, this isn’t happening and the global pandemic exacerbated difficulties with students trying to learn and interact with friends remotely. In fact, I’m guessing most would agree that our society in general needs help with these skills more than ever.

Horne, no doubt, thinks our kids just need to “man up” and stick to learning “readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic” with his stated focus on improving academics and increasing test scores. Unfortunately, the narrowing of curriculum and “teaching to the test” are making our students less prepared for the real world. And speaking of that, I noted he allowed presentations on suicide prevention at the education conference. Does he not understand the relationship social-emotional learning has on student mental health relating to not only suicide prevention but also the mass shootings plaguing our schools?

Another of Horne’s first acts was to eliminate the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department at ADE, stating that in the context of CRT “equity has come to mean equal outcomes by racial groups”. That may be how sees it, but Google’s Dictionary defines equity as “the quality of being fair and impartial”. Doesn’t this mean we recognize not every child is born with the same opportunities to succeed and we should do what we can to make the opportunities available for those who are willing to apply themselves?

There will no doubt be many battles to fight with Horne, (with his “politically partisan purpose”), leading Arizona’s public schools. The inefficiency of jerking our teachers and students around with policy reversals is frustrating. But it is the potential for setting back another generation of our students that really worries me. As the slogan for the United Negro College Fund states, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

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January 13, 2023

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How $200M Could Have Been Better Spent

Although the real total costs will likely never be known, the Arizona Republic reported yesterday that Governor Ducey’s

five-month effort to close gaps along the U.S.-Mexico border with shipping containers will cost Arizona taxpayers more than $200 million.

I’m not writing to debate the wisdom of Ducey’s actions, (okay, just for a second, it was a stupid political stunt). But rather, I’d like to make a case for how that money could have been better spent.

Regardless of what you’ve heard from GOP lawmakers, or have read in right-leaning media, Arizona schools are not flush with cash. Rather, much of what’s been added recently just reinstates part of what was taken away since 2007 and leaves Arizona still at 48th in the nation for per-pupil funding. Additionally, our schools are still hemorrhaging teachers with almost 9,700 vacancies at the start of the 2022-23 school year and about 4,900 filled with alternate teaching requirements or long-term subs.

Another statistic that should also raise alarms, is Arizona’s student-to-counselor ratio. The American School Counselor Association recommends schools maintain a ratio of 250 to 1. The nationwide student-to-school-counselor ratio in the 2021-2022 school year was 408 to 1. Arizona’s ratio that same year was 716 to 1. Although this is down from the 905 to 1 Arizona had in 2019, it is still approaching double the national average and keeps us last in the nation in yet another dismal education statistic.

Superintendent Kathy Hoffman focused on this issue, tweeting in 2022,

Since 2019, I’ve successfully lobbied for the funds to add hundreds of school counselors, lowering our student to school counselor ratio by 20%

The AZPBS’ CronkiteNews verified her claim citing “an increase of 290 counselors in three years” for an improvement of 21%. This was one of Hoffman’s priorities because, as she said,

In an era of balloning classroom sizes, teachers feel unequipped to manage a class of 30 children while also finding the time to provide individualized attention to their students, especially those facing depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts.

And that was in 2019, before the global pandemic which according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared in November 2021,

pandemic-related decline in child and adolescent mental health has become a national emergency.

Hoffman was right to focus on this issue. What’s the chance “Stop CRT” Horne will do the same? (Yes, that is a rhetorical question.)

Before I start down that rabbit hole, let’s get back to the $200M. Based on what I’ve written thus far, I’m betting you can guess it has something to do with school counselors.

According to a SOSAZNETWORK.org report, 135 of Arizona’s 223 school districts are rural and serve 35% of the state’s students. More than 23% of these rural children live in poverty, the second highest poverty rate in the nation. They also have one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the U.S. These kids need the additional help a qualified counselor can provide.

So, what if instead of using OUR $200M for a stupid, partisan, political stunt, Ducey had bought more school counselors with it?  The average salary for school counselors in Arizona is about $55K. To be safe, let’s add 30% for benefits which brings the total cost to $71,500. Let’s see, $200M divided by $71,500 average counselor salary and benefits buys 2,797 counselors for one year. That number of counselors divided by 135 school districts, would give us 20.71 years of one counselor per district. Think of the lives this could impact.

Okay, I know this math is VERY rough, after all, I’m a writer, not a statistician. We know that salaries would increase and it would be difficult to find enough counselors willing to go to some of these rural areas, even if we could fund them (that’s the case in my rural district). Maybe we would need to contract with companies to provide the professional support we need and this likely would cost substantially more. Maybe even then we couldn’t find them and we’d have to start a program to grow our own?

The point isn’t to solve this problem in this article, but rather to show that there were much more important priorities for the $200M than Doug Ducey’s personal erector set project. This is just one example, don’t even get me started on the needs in our rural animal shelters. I’ll save that for another post.

Let’s hope Governor Hobbs can find a way to work with the Arizona Legislature to make headway on fixing Arizona’s major problems. So far, she seems focused on education and water. That sounds about right to me. Nose to the grindstone Governor!

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January 10, 2023

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AZ Legislature, Budget, Democracy, Education, Opportunity, Privatization, Public Education

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Drowning Public Education in the Bathtub

Those of you who’ve been around a while will remember lobbyist Grover Norquist, who founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985. This was during the Reagan years when government was seen as a drag on the free market. Norquist is probably best known for this quote in 2001: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”

It has been obvious for many years that Arizona Republican lawmakers want to drown our district schools since the budget for K-12 education makes up almost 44% of the state budget. But then, the predominant responsibilities of the AZ state government are to provide for public safety and public education, so…it stands to figure that education would comprise a large portion of the budget.

If you’ve listened to the AZ Republican lawmakers’ talking points over the last few years, you’d tend to believe that public education has been showered with funding. The truth however is quite another story. In fact, adjusting for inflation, K-12 funding per public school student hasn’t increased in 21 years and leaves us still 48th in the nation. In 2001, districts were provided $8,824 per student, and now, only $8,770. The high-water mark in 2007 of $10,182 per student was under Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano. This was actually $1,412 more than in 2022.

You see, pretty much all the GOP has been doing over the last few years is to reinstate funding they took away to begin with. And to add insult to injury, they’ve been chipping away at the amount available to district schools by the continuous expansion of privatization options.

Guess you’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the battle over vouchers (Empowerment Scholarship Accounts) during the past decade. ESAs were enacted in 2011 and GOP lawmakers have been steadily expanding these vouchers over the years. In 2022, (I’m really cutting to the chase here), they were finally successful in enacting a universal expansion. Not only are students no longer required to have previously attended a district school to qualify for a voucher, but there are no guardrails or caps and no transparency or accountability for private schools. And, only two months into the new law, AZ DOE had received nearly 30,000 filings for the vouchers, totaling an immediate hit to the state fund of $210M. The Joint Legislative Budget Committee only budgeted $33M for the program for the 2022-23 school year, but some now estimate the bill could approach as much as $500M.

Student Tuition Organizations (STOs) are another vehicle to poke holes in the district funding life raft. They allow taxpayers to take a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their state taxes when they give to an approved STO which provides scholarship funding to children attending grades K-12 at qualified private schools in Arizona. These STOs basically serve as a pass-through for tax credit donations to private schools while keeping 10 percent for themselves. STOs have also seen tremendous expansion over the years with the individual tax credit amount now at $1,306 which is over six times that which taxpayers can give to district schools. There are also two types of tax credits corporations can take and the combined cap for those is now up to $141M.

Just introduced last week by Representative Livingston, is HB 2014 which seeks to expand the aggregate dollar amount of STO tax credits from $6M in 2021-22 to $10M in 2022-23, to $15M in 2023-24, and to $20M in 2024-25. It also would eliminate the need for recipients of a corporate, low-income scholarship to have attended a district school prior to receiving the scholarship. Keep in mind that removing the requirement to have first attended a district school prior to receiving STO or ESA monies, accommodates students already in private school or being homeschooled, at their parent’s expense. In fact, that was the case for 80% of the filings for the universal expansion last year. And, when a student taking an ESA or STO scholarship was never in a district school, there is zero reduction in cost to that district school and ultimately, taxpayers.

These schemes are chipping away at the foundation of our district (community) schools so that eventually, they can be “drowned in the bathtub”. This is not by accident, but rather, by design. There are those in the Legislature, who do not believe in equal opportunity to learn and thrive, but rather, in survival of the fittest. And, they are hell-bent on deciding who the “fittest” are. Privatizing public education primarily serves those who “have” at the expense of those who “have not”. This continued war on public education will continue to weaken our communities and our democracy as it solidifies power and influence with those at the very top.

Want to fight back? Go to SOSArizona.org.

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August 13, 2022

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AZ Legislature, commercial schools, Democracy, Education, Privatization, Public Education, school choice, vouchers

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Fighting for the Soul of Our Nation

Diane Ravitch published a great update on her blog yesterday, about Save Our School Arizona’s latest fight against universal vouchers and their urgent need for additional resources. Please read the post and then help support the effort by donating at, http://sosarizona.org/donate. If you live in Arizona and haven’t yet signed a petition, please go here to find out where you can do so tomorrow: https://teamsosarizona.com/signature-slam/

If you need any additional motivation, allow me to pass on the latest efforts of the voucher proponents I just heard about from my friend Tamar Rala Kreiswirth. Led by the Goldwater Institute and Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, pro-voucher protestors are heckling volunteers at petition signing events at libraries and business locations. They are also,

  • Calling local businesses that have historically welcomed SOS AZ petition circulators;
  • Emailing iloveschoolchoice@gmail.com to report signature gatherer locations;
  • Taking a photo if a petition is left unattended as you must be present to witness each signature;
  • Taking photos of the petitions to verify whether they have the dates correct, have been checked “volunteer” and have the county names written on the page.

They are relentless in their efforts to find any reason to challenge the petitions. If you want to learn more about the Goldwater Institute and American Federation for Children’s support of the effort, check out the respective websites they fund at DeclinetoSign.com and Power2Parents.org.

As Beth Lewis, the director of SOS AZ so astutely wrote to Diane Ravitch,

Universal voucher expansion is the KEY issue driving right-wing politics in the US, and hardly anyone is talking about the well-moneyed, dangerous forces driving it. The AZ legislature’s myopic focus on pushing private school voucher expansion over any other piece of legislation for the past 6 years is enough to tell us that — not to mention the massive focus FOX News has placed on vouchers since the bill’s passage here in Arizona. Recently, Christopher Rufo admitted he created the CRT furor in order to advance universal vouchers.

If you live in Arizona, support public district schools, and haven’t yet signed the voucher, DO IT NOW! We still have a voice and a vote in the USA, but we must act now before it is too late. Think we can’t lose our right to vote, our right to free speech, our right to self-govern? Just look at the “pledge of allegiance” Diane Ravitch also posted about yesterday. A North Carolina charter school operator requires his students, faculty, and staff to recite at each of his schools every morning:

I pledge to be truthful in all my works, guarding against the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts, the temptation of vanity, the comfort of popular opinion and custom, the ease of equivocation and compromise, and from over-reliance on rational argument. I pledge to be obedient and loyal to those in authority, in my family, in my school, and in my community and country, so long as I shall live.

Read that pledge again and let it sink in. Don’t listen to experts, don’t rely on rational argument. Just OBEY! Make no mistake, we are in the fight for the very soul of our nation and so far, at least at the state level, we are not winning. The fight is here, the time is now. We must be as relentless as our adversaries. Will you step up?

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August 8, 2022

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voting rights

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“Deeply Embarrassed and Frustrated”

My last blog post was an evisceration of the Pinal County Board of Directors for their September 2021 refusal to accept almost $3.4M in Federal funding to hire a vaccine equity employee and distribute COVID-19 vaccines to underserved communities. Two months later, they reversed their decision with an amendment that, “the public health department or designees shall not assist the U.S. government in the implementation or enforcement of federal orders related to quarantine and isolation”. I don’t why they reversed their decision, but I suspect public outcry was a factor.

Nine months later, Pinal County is big news again. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock on Mt. Lemmon, you probably heard about the election fiascos in Pinal County (home to over 425,000 residents). According to the AZ Daily Star, hundreds of voters said they were “unable to immediately vote at the polls because the county had run out of some ballots”. One polling location also opened hours late because the keys to its doors were not available.

Polling locations tried to print new ballots to meet the surge in demand, but old printers were limited and delivery of ballots to the sites was slow. These problems were on top of about 63,000 incorrect mail ballots sent out in July, (missing city races), forcing the county to send out supplemental ballots.

Officials believe the contributing factors to the shortage of ballots were the unanticipated Independent voters who came in-person to polling stations and requested Republican ballots. Another, was the 10% increase in the county’s population since the last election. Other factors surely came into play however, such as Elections Director David Frisk being the third director in the position in only two years and initially having a staff of only one in a department that should have had five full-time employees. Officials said the mistake was caused by a staff member’s programming error that pre-election checks by inexperienced staff didn’t catch. Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt as AZCentral.com stated, that, “Pinal became the poster child for Election Day problems in Arizona, as only a smattering of problems were reported throughout the state”.

In the end, it is impossible to know how many people were unable to vote, although “about 25% of the county’s 95 precincts reported running out of ballots or running low and needing help”. These snafus, of course, did nothing to restore people’s confidence in our voting system. And that, and it’s impact on our democracy is the real danger.

The one silver lining is that the Pinal County Board of Supervisors, recognized the seriousness of the problem and did not try to downplay it or shift blame. At a news conference the day after the election, Chairman Jeff McClure blamed the problems on “human error”, and called it “a major screw-up”. In a statement provided later, he said the Board of Supervisors was “deeply embarrassed and frustrated” by the mistakes made and was taking immediate action to fix the problems prior to the general election. The Board of Supervisors then replaced the county Elections Director, David Frisk, appointing Recorder Virginia Ross to that position. Chairman McClure also said that, “elections experts are being sought to review election procedures and operations” and went on to say that, “I have not seen any evidence of a nefarious act. I have seen mistakes made on a grand scale.” In other words I suppose, there was no fraud.

I am a firm believer that many of the problems our country and yes, even the world, is experiencing today, have to do with the lack of accountability. The Board of Supervisors did not obfuscate and I remain hopeful (for now) they will fix the problems. I believe Virginia Ross is right person to build back the department, but she will need Board support to ensure the department is sufficiently funded, staffed, and trained. Will that all come to pass? We’ll certainly find out in November. For our democracy’s (or republic if you must) sake, let’s hope so.

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September 6, 2021

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civil rights, Democracy, Education, Elections, Equity, teachers

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#1 Way to Build Back Better

I am a currently serving school governing board member of nine years and the past president of the Arizona School Boards Association (ASBA). As such, I have been closely following the stories of school board meetings, especially in Arizona, that have become especially contentious.

The ugliness probably shouldn’t be surprising in the uber-polarized environment we now find ourselves. As Michelle Cottle (editorial board member) points out in the New York Times,

while the drama may feel bound up in the angry, ugly, polarized politics of the moment, it is nothing new. Public schools have long been an irresistible battleground for America’s culture warriors. On issues ranging from sex education to desegregation, public prayer to evolution to the Pledge of Allegiance, cultural cage matches are frequently fought on the backs of local schools, with board members, educators and students too often caught in the fray.

And that my friends, is the saddest part of what we see being played out – students caught in the fray. Even those who have never been parents understand that children learn from our actions, as well as our words. What does it say to our students when parents show up to their school to threaten, harass, and vilify teachers, administrators and school board members? Director of ASBA’s governmental relations, Chris Kotterman, described it well when he said,

Threatening public officials for advancing policy you don’t agree with is fundamentally opposed to the behavior we expect from our students. It sends the message when we aren’t getting what we want or we disagree, the thing to do is to try and intimidate the opposition into compliance. That’s a terrible example to set.

Cottle gives plenty of examples of school board meeting protestors around the country being incredibly ugly and scary, screaming profanity and threats like ““You will never be allowed in public again!” one raged. “We know who you are,” another warned. “You can leave freely, but we will find you!” and after another school board passed a mask mandate, another saying, “you made Dr. Mengele proud” (while giving the Nazi salute). Even locally though, we’ve had protestors in Vail try to elect a new school board outside the board meeting and blocking staff members from leaving the building shouting obscenities at them and saying, “You’re surrounded. You can’t leave.”

It is not okay to treat each other this way and the lack of respect shown each other at the most fundamental level – as human beings – is sorely lacking these days. I personally know of an administrator who was called a “cunt” by a grandmother of a student. And again, this shouldn’t surprise me when we just suffered through four years with a U.S. President who normalized all sorts of actions and words that wouldn’t have been acceptable before his time.

Let me just point out though, that at least in Arizona, school board members don’t get paid for their service. In fact, this is true for most school board members around the country. And yet, during my travels all around Arizona and to national conferences with ASBA, I met countless dedicated school board members who really care about their students and work hard to improve their educational experience. Yes, just like in every other endeavor on the planet, there are those few who either have agendas that aren’t focused on the kids or don’t take their roles seriously enough, but they are the rare exception, not the rule.

And although I can understand how the current climate would discourage good people from wanting to serve on school boards, it is exactly the time that they must. Otherwise, the bad guys win. What we’ll end up with is school board members who thrive on hateful discourse and self-destructive environments. We’ll end up with an exodus of good school board members, good administrators, and good teachers. Eventually, we’ll end up with a system of public education that is circling the drain.

I don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theorist, but neither do I think we should be so naive, to think that all this is happening organically. Of the April Vail protests for example, Superintendent Carruth said,

“There was a handful of people – I don’t know exactly how many – who either don’t have kids in the school district, don’t live in the school district, don’t live in the county, who came with the express purpose of whipping up that group.”

Yes, around the country, administrators and school board members have suspected outsiders of coming in to school board meetings to wreak havoc for political purposes. This is not a new strategy, as conservative strategist Ralph Reed, (former executive director of the Christian Coalition), once said he would “exchange the presidency for 2,000 school seats”. But the current political climate and ease message spreading via social media has whipped it into a frenzy.

For those who are shocked at how low we’ve sunk at a country, and are committed to do their part to “Build Back Better”, there is almost no better place to start than to serve on your local school board. Ensuring our students are prepared to build a better future is why I first ran for the school board in 2012, and why I continue to serve. I can assure you that the other side is feverishly working to ensure they win this battle for hearts and minds and they’ve been very successful thus far in using school board seats as stepping stones to higher political offices.

Elections happen every two years and the paperwork to run is usually due in the summer of election year. Our kids need you, will you step up in 2022? For more information about running for school governing boards, please contact the office of your County Schools Superintendent (Pima and Pinal), or the Arizona School Boards Association.