This site aggregates Arizona's political blogs. If you would like to have your blog added to the list, contact site administrator Mark B. Evans at mevans@tucsoncitizen.com.
Your blog must allow RSS feeds.
For a list of all the blogs aggregated, see below.
Ann-Eve Pedersen and I have created a new half hour cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story (apologies to Paul Harvey). Our goal is to look deeper into education issues than what you usually see and hear in the mainstream media, correcting misimpressions and adding information to the discussion. The first episode hasn't aired yet, but we've put it on youtube, divided into three 10 minute segments. I'll be putting them up one by one.
There's the story out of the Oklahoma town devastated by today's tornado of a teacher who took the six children in her charge into a bathroom and laid on top of them so any falling or collapsing debris would injure her first. She put her body on the line to protect her children from harm.
We keep hearing stories like this about teachers in emergencies and disasters -- not the occasional heroic teacher, but the majority of them who do whatever they can to protect their students wh...
The NY Times has a good op ed by UCLA law prof Joanna C. Schwartz on the value of malpractice litigation in reducing medical errors. Contrary to the notion that malpractice suits result in people hiding problems, she says it encourages improved practices.
New evidence, however, contradicts the conventional wisdom that malpractice litigation compromises the patient safety movement’s call for transparency. In fact, the opposite appears to be occurring: the openness and transparen...
Recent international tests of students have put Finland's schools at or near the top of the rankings. Finnish education has a few traits that should make conservative "education reformers" sit up and take notice. It doesn't give standardized tests to students until high school, and very few even then. Instead of punishing or closing "low performing schools," it puts money and resources into improving student achievement (The usual result is, student achievement improves). And its...
A new ad about Jeff Flake's vote against background checks will be playing in Arizona through May 30. It's Caren Teves talking about her son and his fiance who were killed in the Aurora, Colorado, shooting, then showing the letter from Flake saying he supported background checks, which he went on to vote against.
Jeff "Both Ways" Flake continues to try and wriggle his way out of the bad publicity, saying he did vote to strengthen background checks, it's just that . . . (Fill in t...
The national PAC Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) recently set up shop in Arizona. DFER is a pro "education reform" group funded primarily by hedge fund money that favors school choice, charter schools and vouchers with a bit of teacher union bashing on the side. It has clear connections to conservative groups pushing a nearly identical privatization agenda. By giving campaign cash and support to Democratic candidates and sitting legislators in exchange for them playing nice...
I write a monthly column for The Explorer. My latest column is about BASIS, an appropriate topic for a paper whose distribution area spans BASIS Oro Valley and the new/old BASIS Tucson North (a new building that houses students from the original BASIS).
I start with a hypothetical:
Let’s say you decide to start a school for sixth through 12th graders that gives students a rigorous, world class education: demanding courses, lots of homework, sky-high expectations.
It's nice to hear a positive story like this saying Hispanic students are succeeding at UA. The NBC News story says UA has a 44% Hispanic graduation rate compared to a 36% rate nationwide. It also says the freshman retention rate for Hispanic freshmen is 78%, just a bit under the average 82% rate.
I'm sure this isn't the whole story -- my knowledge of the world or higher ed is limited, so I can't fill in any details -- but any story about people making it at college, especially t...
Tom Prezelski and I chimed in about rumors of some Senate Democrats playing Let's Make a Budget Deal with Republican Senate President Andy Biggs. AZ Blue Meanie has the Capitol Times take below. The other country heard from is Steve Moratore at the Arizona Eagletarian. He's got a similar take, but he's naming possible names.
Scuttlebutt has it that Biggs has been meeting with Senate Minority Leader Leah Landrum Taylor (D-South Phoenix) and Assistant Minority Leader Linda Lopez (D...
Aspects of the conservative "education reform" movement are coming under increasing scrutiny lately, especially the for profit wing of the movement. For profit, publicly traded K12 Inc., for instance, has taken lots of well deserved heat.
Rumors are circulating that a group of Southern Arizona Democratic senators are cutting a deal with Republican Senate President Andy Biggs over the budget. The deal is, if Biggs gives the Democrats the Medicaid expansion they want, they'll vote for his Tea Party budget, no matter how repugnant it may be to progressive values.
If a few Senate Dems give Biggs their votes, it will allow him to cut out some of the more moderate Republicans who object to parts of his far right budget ...
I was looking through the high school course sequences on the BASIS website when I saw this asterisk at the bottom of the Social Science/Foreign Language page.
Eighth graders are required to take World History 2 and Economics. They don't have to take the World History AP exam, unless, of course, they want to continue on to 9th grade. They don't have to pass the exam, just take it.
This sounds to me like trial by fire, making 13 or 14 year olds feel the heat of BASIS High School ...
Fox: New Evidence Hillary Killed Lincoln By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker 13 May 13
In what may be the most serious allegation ever made against the former Secretary of State, Fox News Channel reported today that Hillary Clinton was involved in the conspiracy to murder President Abraham Lincoln.
The latest charge against Mrs. Clinton was reported by Fox host Sean Hannity, who sai...
The IRS absolutely should not have targeted groups with "Tea Party" in their names for special scrutiny. As Ezra Klein points out, the IRS should have used a far broader brush, going after the progressive Organizing for America as well as conservative groups like Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and Heritage Action Fund. The problem wasn't the Tea Party. It wasn't right or left. The problem was misuse of a nonprofit category by both sides. And it may be, though we don't have the de...
If the initial stories about the IRS targeting tea party-related groups with audits and onerous application forms are true, the scoundrels who participated should be thrown out, and if they did something illegal, they should be punished for their actions. If the tax laws for nonprofits are being abused for political ends, politically related groups of all stripes should be investigated similarly. No one should be targeted for investigation or be made to jump through more hoops th...
Today, the Star's Tim Steller has a follow-up to his Sunday column about BASIS. It's mainly a collection of opinions and observations he's received about the charter schools, both positive and negative (More people agreed with his observation that BASIS is over-praised than defended the school). Interestingly, none of the BASIS defenders talked about it as the shining educational city on the hill pointing the way for all other schools to follow. In other words, they didn't repeat...
The term "education reform" is conservative shorthand for the vast, well funded education privatization movement. So why would a Democratic PAC adopt conservative educators' favorite term and call itself Democrats for Education Reform (DFER)? The answer is, DFER, which gets most of its funding from hedge fund billionaires, is interconnected with a number of conservative "education reform" groups, and its purpose is to woo Democratic legislators over to the education privatization...
I don't know if this is good, bad or indifferent, but it strikes me as curious. TUSD has stated it has a $17 million shortfall, which is why is has to close a bunch of schools and make serious cutbacks elsewhere. Yet it says it's spending $19 million more than it has on its court-mandated deseg efforts.
The majority of the plan will be covered by $64.3 million in desegregation money. The remaining $19 million will come from existing federal and maintenance and operations funds.
Supporters of BASIS charter schools really shouldn't be so touchy. When Tim Steller wrote a column that put BASIS' second place finish in the U.S. News & World Report national high school rankings in perspective, he was deluged with "How dare you?" comments at the end of the article. Steller made the same observations about University High, but he got few comments from those parents. I guess UHS folks are a more secure bunch than the BASIS Boosters. At worst, you can accuse S...
