I remember a brown duck. It was the next to the last duck in the line of little quackers that marched in identical form across the wall above the chalkboard. They were identical in form and expression but each was a different color with a word identifying their color in bold letters beneath each one. I stared at that duck. I hated that brown duck. And my enmity was directed at the representative of the anatidae family simply because for the life of me I could not spell the word ‘brown’ correctly.

As a student I struggled in first grade. I sat there amazed at how much everyone else knew. Of course I had two strikes against me — I was the youngest in the class, not turning six until December and I was a boy. These are not excuses, they are facts, they are realities.

In our fervor to adopt the new Common Core Standards we have set ambitious goals. I am on-board with this. I don’t shirk hard work as demonstrated by my catching up with my classmates by the second grade and going on to excel in school. It is also proven by my choosing to become a teacher.

But this isn’t about me.

It is about the impact of our desires that our children all excel in school. When my daughter was accepted in a advanced program, for gifted students we were told she would be bused to another school where a special class of high achieving students were all grouped together. Much to the surprise of the administrator of the program, my wife and I, both career educators said, “No thank you.” Our daughter was attending the public school we had chosen for her, she was in a class where we greatly respected the teacher, we felt there was no reason for her to go anywhere. It was nice to know she had qualified for the class but she would stay where she was.

But this isn’t about my daughter.

What this is about is our children. We all want what is best for our children. We want them to achieve the most they can in life and we want to be proud of them. But in the end we have to be proud of ourselves too. Parents have to be able to look back on their stewardship of a new human and know that what they did was in the best interest and to the best of their abilities as parents.

It isn’t about being right or wrong. It is about choosing the things for your child that they aren’t qualified to choose for themselves. As adults we must decide what we want for our children. That is why education is such a hot button issue with many people. You are trusting another adult to deliver what your child needs to learn.

Most of us vaguely remember what we did in school. But the specifics are less clear, they show up in the skills we have and how we employ those skills in our daily lives. I doubt if there are many parents who do not care about what their children are learning but the I also believe the same is true of most teachers.

Teachers take their job seriously. After thirty plus years in this field I know this. You cannot show up ready to wrangle a classroom full of children and not be focused and serious about what you do. Yes, there are people who fail as teachers but they do not last long.

The same is true of students. There are children who fail as students, at least in the standard sense. In every class there are students who struggle for whatever reason in their attempts to learn what everyone else is already doing. We all have our brown ducks, smiling down at us taunting us that we cannot do something no matter how hard we try. Self-doubt is the greatest ally of failure.

That is why we owe it to our children not to set walls up that they will slam up against. It is not in their best interest to say, ‘you failed, do it again’. The proper response is “I see this is hard for you, let me try another way to help you’. We need to adapt education to the multitude of needs evinced by our modern world. We should not be narrowing education, forcing children to all conform, we should be broadening it, expanding it and opening up the potential that each individual child has so that they can best assume their place in this complex world.

Our new Common Core standards seek to encourage students to think. In approaching the completion of these goals we need to offer a greater variety of teaching tools and methods, not a smaller array. We must empower our teachers and support them. We have to provide strong, developmentally correct, early childhood enrichment for all children. Schools build the future, we need to support them to the best of our abilities, not the most cost effective. The investment will be worth it. Here in Arizona and elsewhere in the United States I believe that adoption of the Common Core is only the beginning of the process of reforming American achievement and making our schools all they can be. We have much still to do.

Writing in his blog, ‘Caveat Lector’, Mark Evans of the TucsonCitizen.org has come out against Prop 204, the continuation of the 1 cent tax surcharge meant to assist funding for education in Arizona. 1) Speaking from a purely economic viewpoint he argues persuasively against the measure saying that it is the wrong approach to curing the woes of educational funding in Arizona because it ties the hands of the state legislature and forces them to fund education when our economy is weak. He argues that they need the discretionary freedom to decide where funding will be directed. In his defense, let me add that Mr. Evans is not against funding education, but he would rather the populace simply vote out the current crop of lawmakers and elect ones that will adequately fund education in our state.

I’m sorry Mark but I have to disagree with you on several counts.

First, if you had spent every working day in our schools over the last few years you would see the damage that is being enacted upon our educators and the students of our schools.

Let me give an example. For the last two years our school’s redoubtable attendance clerk has worked part-time in our library so children can check out books. She performed admirably but use of the library was severely limited. This year I lauded the reopening of the school year because our library had an actual librarian in it. True, the library is only open half-time because we have to share that person with another school but at least we are halfway back to where we once were.

What’s even more damaging in this situation is that by adopting the Common Core we have basically put teachers back at square one, or very close to it in creating their curricular materials. The place that is best able to support teachers in this is . . . you guessed it, the library. A recent article by Catherine Gewertz focuses on that exact issue. 2) A library that is only open half-time or worse, shuttered is not going to be as much help to educational growth.

Another reason I disagree with your post is that we have no guarantee that any of these legislators will be voted out. Getting rid of an incumbent has become nearly impossible in our current political system. To sit by and watch them slowly choke the life out of my profession because of their malfeasance without doing anything about it is unacceptable. This is one of the few ways we have to fight back.

When you argue against tying the hands of our legislature I reply that tying their hands is only the beginning of what I would have done to them for their crimes against the children of Arizona. Their attack against public education notwithstanding they have seriously damaged all education services in our state. It is no wonder no major business wants to relocate here.

Finally, because I am a career professional educator I also recognize that my colleagues have taken on more and more responsibilities and duties each year. Now comes the Common Core, an almost entirely new curriculum that will demand more resources to be able to adequately employ it in the classroom. While I am in favor of national standards if they are implemented properly, Rick Hess writing in his blog reports very little correlation between the new standards and typical existing curricular material. 3) Teachers, already stressed in their workplace and by attitudes exacerbated by political posturing are reeling at yet another strike at their professionalism and competency. Our schools have suffered through enough unfunded mandates in the last decade with NCLB and ESEA. The least we can do is try and provide a small increase in resources to assist this transition.

These are just a few reasons why this ReTired Teacher will be voting ‘yes’ on 204.

1) http://tucsoncitizen.com/mark-evans/archives/739

2) http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/09/12/03librarians_ep.h32.html

3) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2011/06/how_big_a_change_are_the_common_core_standards.html

The gist of the first article was that Gov-Ignore Education Brewer was seeking to funnel more funds into private and parochial schools. The announcement coming fast upon the heels of the ruling in favor of Super-Intend-To-Dismantle Public Education Hup-Hup-Huppenthal (he marches to the sound of a distant Horne) did not surprise me. The rapidity of the renewal of their blatant attack on public education did sort of cause me to catch my breath.

These people are without shame or any sense embarrassment. They openly pursue their campaign to privatize education and make it more lucrative for those who indulge in the industry. In Aridzona can you become a teacher of children with no other credentials than that someone, somewhere in the building possesses them. Since we are also a Right-To-Work (and thereby Right-To-Remain-Poor) state, new schools, coming to a mall near you will be able to pay whatever they want to to potential ‘teachers’ and no one will care.

It is not an example of supreme irony that the number one contributor to many of the campaigns of Democratic candidates for elections are the local, state or national teacher associations. Weakening public education strengthens the Republicans in the legislature.

The other article is about a headless corpse found near the Tucson Mountains. My guess is that the body is the epitome of public education because actions by our less-gislature and Govignore have long sought to decapitate that institution.

I am tired. I have fought for public education and educators for over thirty years now. I would like to devote my time to playing with my grandchildren. I would like to leave the fighting to someone younger, someone with more energy but I can no more ignore this kind of despicable assault on the profession I love than I could ignore an attack on my family. Brewer, Huppenthal and Horne are enemies of public education, they have made that intuitively obvious to the most casual of observers and I cannot stand idly by and let them destroy the system that educated me, my children and the one I hope will be around to educate my grandchildren.

I can suggest where Govignore Brewer can find some more headless bodies though. I know it was a key issue supporting her border policies; those headless corpses in the desert. Well, I think I have found three more in Phoenix.

1 Az Daily Star, StarNet Newsletter 01/07/12

If you want a hint of what’s to become of our beautiful state under
the rule of our Republican State House majority caucus, who don’t
appear to care what happens to constitutionally-mandated public
education, consider the situation in a starkly beautiful place called
Bolivia. Since the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, this Andean
nation, with great mineral wealth and awesome natural beauty, has been
subject to a two-class society with famously unstable democratic and
military governments. I make the comparison with Arizona because it
appears that the ideological struggle between the caucus that favors
everything private, and the minority who support public education and
other community-building initiatives, now seems paramount. The caucus
seems to be holding all the cards, and the teachers appear to have
only the joker, at this point. Soon the public schools will be bled
dry and charter/private schools will be all that survive.

Neighborhood schools that are expensive to operate, and convenient to
local residents, will be crumbling monuments to a by-gone era… when the
American ideal of a free education for all was clearly fulfilled.

Consequently, we will be several significant steps down the road to
bolivianization, which is a byword for political and social
decomposition.

Unlike Bolivia itself, or its people, bolivianization is not pretty.
Imagine libraries where books cannot be checked out, assuming they’re
even there. Imagine schools without books (public or private).
Imagine multimillion dollar mansions, surrounded by walls, but having
streets with pavement decayed to mud. Imagine utility poles with live
support cables which electrocute children who touch them. Imagine
eating a salad in the most elegant hotel in the city, then spending
six weeks hospitalized because the uninspected lettuce had botulism.
Imagine having to pay bribes to police so you can drive from one city
to another, because the police need to supplement their income.

Just imagine, you too can live in a state where everyone, rich or poor, has
to endure these conditions, because there is a fundamental
unwillingness to support the community. There is no solid
middle-class which values education for all — so all will be educated
to share the same core values, which are needed for a successful state
to exist.

I have no illusions that the United States of America is a perfect
society. Our nation has many short-comings, and it probably always
will. But a visit to Bolivia set me straight on a few things that I
may have failed to appreciate about our nation. Our problems are
generally minor compared to those endured in Bolivia, mainly because
we have a general level of common respect among our people. This is
due largely to our belief that we all came from somewhere else to
better ourselves, and we understand that an educated population is the
basis of democracy and a strong community. We’ve had some great
thinkers, like Ben Franklin, who saw that our nation could do better
to help itself by investing in community-based organizations, like
volunteer fire departments, libraries, and even insurance plans. He
no doubt appreciated the public education system established by the
Puritan forefathers. They believed all should be able to read the
Bible, and be informed enough to govern themselves.

What the Republican caucus seems to be pushing is an agenda where any
of these American institutions which can’t operate as a self-funding,
private organization is suspect — if not an outright impediment to our
way of life. This is a recipe for bolivianization, the eventual
disappearance of the middle-class, and a two-class society. This
route to societal poverty comes not from overinvestment in the pubic
institutions, but from a fundamental lack of the public goods on which
the universal health and well-being depend. Those whose basic needs
are unmet will not be able to create much prosperity for themselves or
others; they won’t start businesses that create wealth and employment
for their communities. Also, this state of affairs is not attractive
to firms that might consider locating in Arizona.

One choice the Caucus somehow made to better our stake was to
allow the property equalization tax suspension to expire. Our
state property tax burden is well below average; we over-rely on our
sales tax, which is recession-sensitive, regressive and unreliable.
Allowing this suspension to expire directly benefited public
education by about $260 million. It seemed like the very least the
Caucus could do for our state, our children, and our future!

Considering tax burdens among the 50 United States, according to
The Tax Foundation, Arizona ranks 41st for total tax burden (only
nine states have a lower overall tax rate), and 35th for per capita income
(only 14 have lower income). So, Arizona is a low income state that taxes
that modest income at a low rate. These rankings point to how the
bolivianization of our state is being (un)funded. We can see that funding
for education is certainly not the only area for concern. Consider this,
of all other states, only Tennessee has both lower income and a lower
tax burden! These figures are from 2008, which is the most recent
year available. Based on more recent economic events, and budget
decisions by the Caucus, it is probable that Arizona’s rankings are lower
yet in 2011.

We, as a state, and, to a degree, as a nation, stand at a crossroad.
Which way will be go? We have a budget crisis in the midst of an
economic meltdown of global proportions. Will we choose now to eat
our children – metaphorically, of course – by stripping them of the
free, public education they require to prosper themselves and our
nation, or will we invest in them, our communities, our nation, and
our future?

If our choices promote and perpetuate a permanent underclass in
Arizona, then our long-term outlook will suffer. We will look about us
to see the beautiful mountains, and know, in our hearts, that we are Bolivians.

Mark Day
(… who visited Bolivia with his wife and children in 1999)