We have been struck by another tragedy this week in Texas. The cries go up, “Something must be done!” And indeed, it must. If we do not take active measures to stop this killing, the momentum will continue. Copycat actors will duplicate previous shootings, as we have seen since Columbine.
While some factions of the country will attempt to advance a political agenda, others will go about securing the most vulnerable places in our society. What if there was a model we could use to end the carnage? There is.
In several school districts across the country, a program called “F.A.S.T.E.R” exists. You can read about it at fastersaveslives.org. It stands for Faculty and Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response. It is a program, taught by the most highly qualified police officers and trainers to willing and qualified school administrators, staff, and educators, to equip them with the tools and skill set to save lives in the event of an active killer amongst them.
The program teaches only volunteers who are qualified how to neutralize the threat, and then just as importantly, the lifesaving first aid for gunshot trauma and the tourniquets and chest seal patches to get the victims to the ER with a pulse. Did you know that 90% of shooting victims who make it to the ER with a pulse survive?
According to President Biden, “Terrorism from White supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” as he put it in an address to Congress. Attorney General Merrick Garland agreed, noting that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” are the most dangerous element of domestic violence. Garland declared that we must “bring federal resources to bear” and “adopt a broader societal response” to the threat of White supremacy.
But it’s a slur to claim that Americans live in fear from White supremacists like the brownshirts of yore. In reality, White supremacists are a small fringe group of pathetic losers who are despised by all.
Their gatherings often attract more attackers than members. No one raises money for their bail when they get in trouble, like Kamala Harris did for BLM when their “mostly peaceful” protests produced burning buildings and mass looting.
The Leftist media faithfully performs its task of propping up this imaginary threat. Incidents of White-on-Black violence make headline news for days while pundits emphasize the role of systemic hate. Similar incidents with different racial dimensions are often underreported or ignored.
In early May, five outbreaks of violence occurred within a few days. A California Taiwanese church was shot up by a Black man. Another Black man killed workers in a Dallas salon. A White man killed shoppers in a Buffalo grocery store. Pro-life offices were fire-bombed in Wisconsin and Oregon.
President Biden, as usual, only paid attention to the one that fit his White supremacy narrative. He seized upon the Buffalo incident as “proof of the poison with which White supremacy threatens America.” He vowed to not “let hate win.”
Even though the media’s over reporting makes them seem more numerous, incidents like the Buffalo shooting are, statistically, isolated events. But the Buffalo murders don’t even qualify anecdotally as an example of right wing-inspired terror.
C.E. Cupp on CNN explained the horrific incident by noting how “far right-wing media…stir up racial animus, ethnic animus, religious animus…getting people angry and afraid.” Another CNN expert compared Republicans to 1930s fascists and current Islamic dictatorships. “What these people want is a Christian White nationalist version of what you have in Iran today and Saudi Arabia.”
But the perp’s own 80-page manifesto reveals no hint of any such causation. Yes, he was deranged, a psychopath with an intense hatred of Blacks but no connections to White supremacy groups or ideology. He despised Fox News specifically and said he “wanted no part of conservatism.”
Though he was clearly not inspired by right wing influences, commentators latched on anyway to the killer’s advocacy of “replacement theory.” The New York Times called it a “racist, fringe conspiracy theory,” but it’s nothing of the sort.
It’s simply the fact that the US White population is shrinking while the population total is growing, mostly due to immigration. The concern isn’t skin color but whether this demographic shift will contribute to the decline of America’s culture and values. Recent trends in minority support of Republicans give hope that this may not happen, but at any rate, the observation is immaterial to White supremacy.
The Big Lie of pervasive White supremacy is deeply harmful. First, it serves as the pretext for our overgrown government to react to the “threat” with a series of banana republic-style measures to suppress opposition.
The so-called Ministry of Truth was paused, but the DOJ has created task forces to counter “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” including members of the military and parents advocating before school boards, but not Antifa, BLM, or Muslims.
Second, the Big Lie precludes a serious discussion of realistic remedies for interracial violence and the ongoing carnage of young Black men. We should do away with gun-free zones, which only reassure potential killers. We should work harder to keep guns out of the hands of the clearly deranged without a wholesale sacrificing of civil rights. We need to stop the push to decriminalize crime and denigrate police officers. And much more.
While we chase the chimera of White supremacy, real people continue to die.
Author Note: This column was written before the school shooting in Texas. Its conclusions are not affected.
Push a sympathetic message. Drum up a bunch of misguided support. And then aim for a ridiculous tax increase. That was the strategy from Red4ED after it launched a little over four years ago.
In that spring of 2018, the color red was popping up all over the place—from Facebook profile pictures to protests at the state Capitol. And it was supposedly all about increasing teacher salaries and funding for K-12 education. It was a movement that had great momentum, a sycophant media, and a political class that was terrified to stand up to them. Yet they figured out how to, in four short years, go from a political juggernaut to one of the largest and most expensive failures in Arizona political history.
Of course, defeating this multiyear assault on Arizona by Invest in Ed was a huge win for taxpayers, job creators, and the future prosperity of our state. And it would not have been possible without a combination of political miscalculations and blunders by the Red4ED decision makers and a consistent, sustained opposition from key organizations and elected officials willing to stand up to the bullies behind the movement…
In 2008, I introduced and passed legislation to grade schools in Arizona on the A through F letter grading system. The system was to be based on the test scores and academic gains of students.
If I were king, I would abolish the system which I established. I believe that it has inhibited innovation, damaged great schools, and shifted the focus in education away from the critical areas most fruitful for getting better outcomes in Arizona.
Letter grading, in part, has resulted in Arizona not achieving the full dividend we might have received from our tremendously advanced school choice environment. We are doing very well, but we should have done even better.
These detrimental effects particularly affect D and F rated schools.
I’ve worked inside such schools daily as a volunteer since leaving as Superintendent in 2014, so I have been able to directly observe the effects. Tremendously skilled and dedicated principals and teachers apply to work in such schools because they have a passion for the students. Then, a few years later, they are “all burned out”—as one father described his daughter, a teacher, during a recent fundraiser. These schools burn through principals and teachers at a horrifying rate with teachers, particularly excellent ones, leaving for more satisfying work environments.
Certainly, such schools have always been high pressure environments, but the letter grading just increases the pressure, already unhealthy, to an absolutely toxic level.
As Superintendent of Public Instruction, I had the ultimate test score database: every student’s testing results for six consecutive years. I could tell you the academic gains of Basis students when they were in Basis schools and when they were in other schools. Bottom line? The academic scale score gains of the top schools were 20% higher than the academic gains of the D and F schools. That’s all. That’s it.
Being a volunteer as former Superintendent, I was immune to all that pressure. I ran my math class exactly the way I wanted to run it. When the thought police showed up and demanded to know if I was teaching to the standards, I assured them absolutely. The students who didn’t know how to count were counting. The students who didn’t know how to add were adding. The students who didn’t know how to multiply were multiplying. They were all on their way toward the fractions, decimal, and proportion standards of fourth grade. They weren’t there yet because none of my fourth-grade students had achieved third grade standards, and few had achieved second grade standards. But we were on our way.
My scale score gains were double the statewide average. But not the best. One other teacher bested me by a point, a particularly inspirational sixth grade teacher. One year, one class in a school with 27 classes was not enough to rescue the school’s letter grade.
That teacher still haunts me. He should have received great accolades for his accomplishment. He should have been featured on TV. His students loved him. He was saving students from jail. He was saving students from drug addiction. He was saving students from prison. Instead, he soon left the school.
This year, I am working in kindergarten. Why? Because as I did my work, I came to understand that the initial years in school are, by far, the most critical years. In these years, students establish their personal identity, their habits, and their foundational skills.
How does this relate to letter grading? Letter grades can only take into account academic gains from fourth grade to eighth grade. Our first test is at the end of third grade, establishing the baseline for measuring academic gains in fourth grade.
The academic gains from fourth grade to eighth grade are less than the academic gains from the start of kindergarten to the end of third grade.
So, the entire letter grade system is based on the least important half of the pie. As a result, the attention of the entire system is shifted away from where it should be focused—the early years.
Education culture is the foundation of our entire society. How we think, how we interact. Our degree of interconnectedness. We can do better. We should be the state the goes full free market. Get rid of letter grades. Instead publish customer satisfaction scores. And let’s find out what percentage of parents believe their child is getting an INCREDIBLY GREAT education when given a choice between that and very good, good, or poor.
America’s schools, including Arizona’s, are stuck in mediocrity. Our academic achievement indicators trail 20 of our Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) peers in every subject. It’s not getting better, either.
It matters to more than national pride. The U.S. has fallen to tenth in overall economic competitiveness, our lowest rank ever. Stanford’s Eric Hanushek estimates the U.S. economy would grow 4.5% more in the next 20 years if our students just performed at the international average level.
We have to import workers in fields requiring advanced degrees and outsource tech jobs to other countries. Employers struggle to find trainable applicants.
American educators typically claim academic failure results from inadequate funding. But that simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
In 2018, before the COVID-inspired spending boost, the U.S. already spent $16,628 per student, well over the OECD average of $10,759. Arizona’s all-source spending, documented by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, exceeds $14,500 per student.
Other experts offer poverty and inadequate prenatal care as explanations for our achievement gap. But again, living standards in the U.S. are among the world’s highest. Prenatal care is provided to all pregnant women who are income eligible, which included 42% of all births in 2020.
The causes of our systemic failure are more likely laid bare by the reaction found in an Arizona Republic article reporting that the BASIS schools had captured 10 of the 12 top spots in the ranking of Arizona high schools by U.S. News and World Report. Since BASIS Schools, which have also topped many national rankings in recent years, are public charter schools, have open admissions, and may not require testing or charge tuition, this was an astonishing accomplishment.
You might normally assume that the media and education administrators would be eager to know the “secret sauce,” what BASIS does to consistently excel. But according to the experts quoted in the article, it’s all about race and privilege.
So says Tomas Monarrez of the Urban Institute: “Those rankings are really a measure of prestige and prestige as we know it in this country is very intertwined with history, with race, with income.” Test scores can only reflect quality of instruction “if the schools had the same student body.”
And indeed, seven of the top 20 public high schools are located in the wealthiest ZIP Codes in the state. The usual suspects, Asians and whites, are over-represented in the high achieving schools.
But here’s a simple logic test. If wealth and privilege explain the superior performance of the top-ranking schools, why aren’t all schools in high wealth districts excellent? After all, the seven charter schools in well-off areas outperformed district schools with the same demographics. The other 13 schools in the top 20 weren’t even in wealthy districts at all.
Here’s a more likely explanation than skin color or “privilege.” BASIS, like all schools of excellence, is unflinchingly committed to high-level learning for all of its students. BASIS stresses rigorous requirements and high expectations.
Students take an average of 11 Advanced Placement courses with six required for graduation. Students, parents, and school staff are all expected to robustly participate in educating.
Critics contend that the schools’ high expectations are a de facto barrier for many public school students. But there is nothing inherently racist or discriminatory about high expectations. In fact, they are critical for underprivileged students to be successful, as has been amply demonstrated by KIPP schools, New York’s Success Academies, and others.
The wealth-and-privilege explanation for excellence is also belied by the example of Tolleson’s University High School. Many students come from working-class or immigrant backgrounds, but Principal Vickie Landis offers no excuses. On the contrary, “we pride ourselves on rigorous expectations and opportunities.” The school was ranked in Arizona’s 10 Best and was named the state’s only 2022 National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education.
America’s education system structure is based on an outdated factory model, not suited to flexibility, accountability, and personalization based on consumer choice. Union-style work rules make excellence unlikely, despite many dedicated individual teachers.
But no more excuses. It’s hard to excel, especially with underprivileged students, but we can do better – and we must.
Last year, the legislature passed historic tax cuts. The package was fair, lowering rates for all Arizonans across the board. Despite an effort funded with out of state millions to block the package and place it on the ballot, the cuts are in effect, and over the next two years our income tax will phase down to a single, flat rate of 2.5%.
That is what good tax policy looks like. Unfortunately, some legislators don’t want to be in the business of passing good tax policy. All too often they want to play the game of doling out taxpayer dollars to their special interest friends at the capitol, or to individuals in just straight welfare.
In addition to these schemes, lawmakers are currently considering a measure, SB1018, to create a refundable “earned income” tax credit at the state level…
