Huppenthal, demand the taxpayers get their money back!

by David Safier

Huppenthal is right. Heads should roll. Arizona should get the $100,000-plus it spent on that shoddy MAS audit back. The auditors didn't do their job. Whoever commissioned the audit — it's time to name names — needs to be held accountable.

Do you know what $100,000 will buy in these cash-strapped time? Two teachers' salaries. More than a thousand textbooks. The AIMS test for who-knows-how-many students. Instead, someone had the harebrained idea of squandering it on a worthless study.

In today's Star, Huppenthal explained why the audit was worthless. The auditors refused to looked at the materials Huppenthal gathered together to show how vile the MAS program is. They didn't review "substantial physical evidence" that would have helped them render the right decision. They didn't spend hours and hours in every single MAS classroom, making multiple observations (Visiting a third of the classes for an average of a half hour each may be what researchers call "sampling," but Huppenthal knows better than to pay attention to what researchers say). And they wasted time actually talking to people in "on-site interviews" when the evidence Huppenthal gathered was sitting right there in front of them, making a slam dunk case.

I could go on, but why bother?

What I want to know is — and Huppenthal, for some reason, was reticent to write about this in his op ed — who wasted Arizona taxpayer money on this travesty?

I have some ideas. It may have been MAS Director Sean Arce, who cleverly disguised his involvement by refusing to be interviewed. It could have been Pimadem Chair Jeff Rogers who, as a lawyer, is an agent of the Queen of England (I was SHOCKED when I learned that from Marshall Home a few days before he pulled his name from the mayoral race). Certainly, involved in the decision was a cabal of nanny state, anarchist, atheist, Muslim loving, socialist Democrats. (Oh yeah, you can be a nanny-state anarchist, and a Muslim-loving atheist. Just ask Russell Pearce.) Who else could devise such a colossal waste of taxpayer money to contract with a leftist educational consortium which conspired to arrive at the ridiculous conclusion that the Mexican American Studies program doesn't violate the law designed to bring it down — and, even worse, concluded the program helps students and should be expanded and duplicated?

Hold it. Wait a sec. What's that? Are you telling me the audit was commissioned and the company chosen by Huppen . . .

Never mind.

[NOTE: Satire. This is satire. That's clear, right?]