Illustration by Cody Angell

The best thing about Arizona colleges is that while the state enjoys screwing them like a sailor on shore leave, they manage to avoid much curricular interference from our state legislators, who collectively have brains whose complexity rivals that of an Etch A Sketch.

Case in point: The new brain crack-child of our noble leaders comes as an attempt to shore up our educational system, which has hovered between 48th and 49th in the nation since I can remember. (Thank God for Texas and Mississippi.) According to the misfiring neurons of our dear leaders, who have been so eager to jump on the accountability bandwagon that they timed it wrong and were run down by it, "We need to hold schools accountable for their failing kids," who have actually been largely a result of the leaders' incompetence. But since every time they nod their head their brains reset themselves, they are still convinced it's the teachers' fault.

The solution: A bill that's been drafted in the state Legislature has provisions to hold the schools "accountable" by basically trying to proscribe a quick fix that'll screw the schools heartily in the long run and merely all the teachers and students in the short run. Here's a run down: After three years of not succeeding in the wake of dramatic curriculum changes, sub-par materials and politicized administration, a school will be labeled "failing." This means that first an "expert," likely someone with connections to the Edguwkashun department gurus in the state, will come in and look around blankly for a few hours and get paid $20,000 ÷ during a budget crisis nonetheless. (This actually has happened in Phoenix's Osborne Middle School, where an advisor has been paid twenty grand for a semester of visits and, as of mid-September, had made two.)

Once condemned to "failing" status, all responsible teachers will be severed and the school will rebuild with fresh faces straight from ASU's teaching program. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, these teachers will bound happily into the classroom, to be mowed down by the conditions that 20-year veteran teachers couldn't cause to not "fail" and they'll quit in droves.

But the sad part is that teachers are NOT the problem. The curriculum ÷ usually insipid crap, if my experience serves ÷ is given to them by administrators, determined by the district, and tends to recycle itself with every trend. So kids will go into 6th grade learning the "best way," only to enter 7th grade with a "new best way" and thus negating a large part of what they'd learned.

And apparently, demographics no longer matter. If a hefty percentage of the children in the school can't speak English, then English test scores (naturally tests are the way to determine a teacher's worth) will be wretchedly low for the simple reason that the kids don't speak the language they are required to write! Thus, the poor schools and inner-city schools are doomed to fail and the upper-class white schools, who are better funded by disproportionate property tax revenue anyway, will continue to do well. And when the good teachers are purged and need a job, they'll be grabbed by the other districts, creating a bigger vacuum in the lousy paying inner-city schools, which now have no funding or experience.

According to a close source ÷ who has been in the education business for about 17 years and just so happens to have bore me into this world pink, naked and screaming (sadly not much has changed) ÷ the goal of our leadership is to place every student in the state above the average mark on the SAT9 test. Now aside from the obvious lack of basis in the real world and the fact that the number of ESL (English as a Second Language) students is dreadfully high, this is a test based on a bell curve; thus half of those taking the test have to be average. Our elected idiots want to fit the entire population of the 49th-ranked system in the nation into the top 25 percent of the nation's students, which is not only unfeasible, but damn near mathematically impossible.

The changes that need to be made are eliminating the AIMS test totally, which would save us several million dollars a year, increasing teacher salaries, and sending the Legislature to go chew their cuds and stop politicizing our kids' future.