David Safier

by David Safier

My Tucson Weekly column takes apart the misleading conservative slogan, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation." The phrase sounds all progressive in a Brown v. Board of Education kind of way, but its purpose is to distract us from other pressing civil rights and economic rights issues. If education is the — THE — civil rights issue of our generation, that means all the other issues been solved, and that means we can cut social programs and services, and we can forget about income inequality. Just fix our failing schools, and everything else will take care of itself.

Here's what's interesting and telling about people who want us to believe education is the civil rights issue of our generation. They don't much care about civil rights. According to them, we've already realized Martin Luther King's dream, and it's time to replace "We shall overcome" with "We have overcome, so let's move on, shall we?"

Except for education, which is the one place they say the civil rights struggle continues. Why this one exception? Because blaming education for all of society's ills has so many benefits for conservatives.

The political right would love to take all our social and economic problems, wrap them up in a neat little bundle and dump them inside the schoolhouse door. No need to address problems like bias toward minorities. No need for remedies to the widening income gap and worsening economic stratification, which hit minorities so hard. Blame it all on the schools for not teaching those kids how to fit into society or giving them the skills they need to qualify for high-paying jobs. Fix the schools, and the problems will go away.

I'm feeling a bit hopeful that people are beginning to realize that education isn't the best way to get people out of poverty. Instead, poverty is the major reason too many children in this country are ill equipped to focus on their educations.

by David Safier

On this month's episode of the cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, I have a segment showing how closely, almost exactly, state school grades correlate with the household incomes in areas around Tucson. I posted about this earlier, but the video allowed me to enhance the graphics to make the point clearer. And I added a second map which was created by Barbara Tellman that uses census data to show how Tucson breaks down by average household income. You can see both maps below the fold.

The video busts the conservative myth that great teachers and great schools create high test scores, and family income is only a secondary consideration. As Bill Clinton's campaign pointed out, "It's the economy [and income inequality], stupid."

by David Safier

Yeah, I know, Indiana is a long way from Tucson, but the conservative "education reform" juggernaut, like "Money" in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, "never sleeps," so any news that contradicts its constant myth making is worth reporting on.

Indiana's database on state school grades and test-score gains is out, and it looks like school district schools out-gained both charter and private schools that take kids with vouchers.

To be sure, there are charter schools and private schools with strong growth scores. In fact the scores are all over the map for charter schools, private schools and public schools. And among public schools, there’s no clear pattern to which schools do well and which don’t. . . . But the overall trend is clear: Schools that are part of public school districts do better.

If you've read my posts over the years, you know I don't like the national Imagine Schools chain, which has a dozen-plus schools in Arizona. The founder is a multi-millionaire who made his money on an Enron-like energy scheme, and he thinks growth is more important than quality. The four Indiana Imagine schools earned two Ds and two Fs from the state. One of the D scores is actually an improvement, since the school had an F in 2012.