David Safier

by David Safier

I'll see your "Washington Redskins" controversy and raise you one. Florida's N.B. Forrest High, a school with a majority African American student body, is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a general in the Conferate army responsible for the massacre of huge numbers of African American troops during one of the most despicable incidents in the Civil War, then after the war became one of the early members of the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and its Grand Wizard. And yet there's debate over whether the school should change its name. As of now, it hasn't come up for a vote.

The Jacksonville paper carrying the story said some people question whether Forrest was really the bad guy he's made out to be. Let's say for the sake of argument he wasn't such a bad guy. Let's say, even though he was a rich slave owner and slave trader, he wasn't responsible for a massacre during the Civil War, and the KKK was just a "gentlemen's club" when he joined. That still leaves plenty of reasons to rename the school. But it looks like Forrest deserves every bit of his bad reputation.

I'm no historian. But biographies on Wikipedia and civilwar.org tend to agree on the main facts, as do other websites. First, Forrest was a self made millionaire, making his fortune on the backs of slaves, as a plantation owner and a slave trader. Next, he volunteered to join the Confederate Army and soon moved up to general because of his military skill. At the Battle of Fort Pillow, Forrest's troops outnumbered the Union soldiers and killed a huge number of the soldiers, many of whom were escaped slaves. Forrest claimed the Union troops never officially surrendered, but Union and Confederate soldiers disagreed. This is from a letter a Confederate soldier sent to his sister after the battle.

"The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded, negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased."

by David Safier This story about a bunch of middle school football players from Olivet, Michigan, has been knocking around on Facebook for a week or two. If you haven't seen it yet and you're looking for a little mood elevation, take 3 minutes to watch. You'll feel proud of our species, for a little … Read more

by David Safier

Ed Supe John Huppenthal put out the word that the Common Core test will mean higher failure rates in Arizona than the current AIMS test. And he's right. It only makes sense, if you give a tougher test and don't adjust the pass-fail point downward, more kids will fail. But he hasn't pointed out that, while the failure rate will go up a bit at schools with "high achieving students" — that usually translates to "high income students" — the failure rate could rocket to 90% or higher at schools with low achieving — read "low income" — students.

That's what happened when New York gave the Common Core test in place of the usual state test at the end of last school year. In New York City, the passage rate was basically cut in half, from 47% to 26% in English and from 60% to 30% in math. But among low income students, the scores plummeted, reaching a 75% drop in some cases. In one East Harlem school, for instance, the passage rate on the English portion fell from 31% to 6.8%, and in math from 44% to 9.5%.

The huge drop in scores for low income students compared to high income students — the growth in "achievement inequality" between the academic haves and have-nots — isn't because the low achieving students are worse educated than they were before, or because their test prep wasn't as good. It's a predictable outcome of the test getting harder. And the same thing is going to happen in Arizona when the Common Core is implemented. Achievement inequality will increase dramatically, as will the number of schools labeled as failures when the Common Core tests replace AIMS. Expect the conservative "education reform" crowd to be overjoyed as they ratchet up their faux outrage at the growing failure of "government schools."

by David Safier

I don't know which fact is more interesting: that there was a symposium on Common Core organized by Sen. Andy Biggs at the Capitol that had an overflow crowd, or that both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Post Intelligencer picked up the AP article about it, at least on their websites. When it comes to immigration and education, Arizona is national news.

Biggs said absolutely, his symposium wasn't a setup by the anti-Common Core crowd to give Huppenthal a hard time. The Bigg-man doth protest too much, methinks. The panel had Huppenthal on the pro Common Core Arizona College and Career Ready Standards side (It's got a new name, so that means it's not Common Core anymore, right?) and three people against it. It sounds like the crowd might have been packed with people against the Common Core as well.

It may be that none of the journalists know how stacked the panel really was. Half the panel, two out of the four, was made up of a Goldwater Institute employee and someone else connected to G.I. by less than one degree of separation — and G.I. does not like Common Core. First there was Jonathan Butcher, ed director of the Goldwater Institute. Then there was Sandra Stotsky, a University of Arkansas prof. Why fly in a prof from Arkansas when we have profs galore here in Arizona, you may ask. The reason is, she's in the university's Department of Education Reform, which sits at the more conservative end of the conservative education spectrum. Also in that same department is Jay Greene, who is a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute. Jay P. Greene's Blog gives Stotsky a regular forum. Another regular on Greene's blog: Matthew Ladner, former ed director of the Goldwater Institute. A very incestuous group, Butcher, Stotsky, Greene and Ladner. (The fourth panel member, by the way, was from a Mesa charter school and also doesn't like the Common Core a whole lot).

by David Safier

The headline for my column in the Weekly is, Craig Barrett might be the most powerful man in Arizona education, but should he be? That captures the column pretty well. I'm often surprised how few people know who Barrett is, but I shouldn't be. I'm so immersed in all things educational, I see his name and deeds cropping up on a regular basis, but he prefers to fly under the radar. He occasionally allows himself to be quoted in a news article or writes an op ed. He was reasonably visible when he helped campaign against Prop 204, the one cent sales tax for education. But his real power isn't in swaying public opinion. It comes from whispering in Governor Brewer's ear and steering the legislature toward adopting his educational ideas.

The purpose of the column is to let people know who Craig Barrett is — a politically conservative ex-CEO of Intel worth hundreds of millions of dollars — and what an outsized, potentially destructive role he plays in determining the future of education in Arizona.

I squeezed as much as I could into my allotted 750 words; there's much more I didn't have room for. The most important thing to know is, Barrett heads Brewer's Arizona Ready Education Council (AREC), and he has some dangerous ideas that will probably be turned into bills in the next legislative session. Here's a condensed version of the ideas coming out of Barrett, AREC and Sen. Chester Crandell, who is the point man for conservative "education reform" legislation.

Don't add a penny to K-12 school funding. Freeze it right where it is, even though we're spending about 20 percent less than five years ago and we're near the bottom of the nation in per-student funding.