It’s Complicated

Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com.

To my post on Blog for Arizona yesterday, former AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal posted the following comment:

“The 170,000 charter school students save taxpayers over 290 million dollars per year. The Peoria school district is projected to grow substantially over the next decade. With charter schools, they will not grow as much. They have enormous advantages, both financially and organizationally, over charter schools and if they can keep improving, they will actually be able [to] suck these students back into their school system from charter schools. I actually see this effect in the Chandler Unified school system. As Chandler has improved from 38% excellent rating to 75% excellent rating you can see certain charter school[s] dying on the vine. Meanwhile, public schools nationally have dropped from 36% excellent rating to 24%. Wrong direction. Competition and great leadership were both necessary for Chandler to get to where it is. We will see if Peoria is also the racehorse that responds to the challenge.”

As far as Huppenthal’s blog comments go, this is one of the more coherent ones and the statistics he cites made me want to dig in. Let’s look at a few: 

Read more

Phoenix New Times names Blog for Arizona the “Best Democratic Blog” for 2015

From Phoenix New Times: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/best-of/2015/megalopolitan-life/best-democratic-blog-7677833 BEST DEMOCRATIC BLOG (2015) Blog for Arizona “Unapologetically lefty, Blog for Arizona proudly wears its Democratic donkey on its banner, sings the praises of Obamacare, and incessantly is critical of Arizona’s Republican overlords. In other words, for this redder-than-red GOP state, Blog for Arizona is an outlier. That doesn’t make its … Read more

Tea Party

2010 Arizona Tea Party Dream Team: 4 Down, 1 to Go

Oh, boo, hoo. The Blog for Arizona commenters think I am being too tough on poor millionaire GOP gubernatorial candidate Doug Ducey. Let’s not forget that Ducey– along with fellow Teapublicans Governor Jan “Papers Please” Brewer, Department of Education Superintendent John “Thucydides” Huppenthal, Ken “Birther” Bennett, and Tom “Banned for Life by the SEC” Horne— were … Read more

Thucky: One More Lie for Old Time’s Sake

I promised myself (and my wife) that I’d written my last Thucky post. Oh well, you know what they say promises were made to be. This one was too much to pass up. I’ve written before about Thucky’s lies, but now he’s broken all his own records. In a “post-mortem” interview with Greg Patterson, the … Read more

Thucky Goes Down ….. Fighting(?)

Well, it looks to be all over for my buddy Thuck. I wanted to say he went down fighting, but I don’t know. I was hoping for a closer race. Heck, I don’t even know who I was rooting for. He tried the flip-flop on Common Core. He executed an exquisite flip-flop-flip when he threw … Read more