Posted inUncategorized

Fire and rain and blame

I keep getting emails from friends asking if I'm okay. The national news has been saturated with reports of the flooding in western Washington. I'm fine, largely because I live within the long-established urban footprint of Seattle (downtown, happily). Most of the damage has come in the exurbs, and much of it is human-caused. This is our second straight year of unusual flooding. It won't be the last.

This reminds me of my return to Arizona in 2000. Every year forest fires would erupt threatening cabins on the Mogollon Rim (pronounced Mug-e-on) in the High Country. One particularly devastating fire began in 2002 when a woman had a fight with her boss (boyfriend?) while they were on a trip to service his vending machines (I am not speaking in euphemism here). She stalked off into the forest, wearing only shorts, tank top and flip-flops, carrying a towel, cigarettes and lighter — a survival kit I never learned about as a Boy Scout. When she became lost, she lit a "signal fire" that turned into one of the worst conflagrations in state history. (And you wonder why Arizona is rated America's dumbest state). Comedy aside, I was puzzled because these areas of the High Country had been mostly uninhabited National Forest land when I was a boy. Then I drove up and saw the "cabins" were mostly subdivisions plopped down amid stands of combustible pine trees.

These disasters, repeated around the West and indeed the nation, bring large public burdens, from relief efforts and firefighting, to higher insurance costs. Yet nothing is being done to address the cycle of disaster. And with climate change and other environmental degradation, we ain't seen nothing yet.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Lisa Graham Keegan: Who says there are no second acts in American lives?

No doubt, the fetching Lisa Graham Keegan will play well on television as an education adviser to President-elect McCain. It will be instructive to see if the national media look beyond the blond good looks and quick mind to see that Keegan represents everything that voters want to get away from in Republican education policy.

As a legislator and then as superintendent of public instruction in Arizona — the equivalent of education secretary — she aggressively embraced the "charter school movement" and made Arizona into a national leader as an education "marketplace," where charters became as ubiquitous as Circle K stores. Properly constituted and regulated, individual charter schools have turned in impressive results nationally. These individual charters can be studied for best practices, but, there’s little evidence they can handle the job of public schools on a massive scale. Evidence mounts that many fail to ourperform public schools, yet are more costly and prone to financial abuse.

The results of Keegan’s crusade in Arizona were nothing short of tragic. Acting as if Arizona public schools were overfed, union-wrecked systems seen in a few big cities back east, she pushed for "school choice" in the form of charters. Few appear to perform well. Some are prime business ventures for well-connected right-wingers. Many are fly-by-night storefronts with no playgrounds, libraries or cafeterias. I recall seeing one where a roach coach would stop by at noon and toot the horn, as if it were a construction site. I guess the school owners were preparing the pupils for their future careers. Meanwhile, the costs of a school library — a given when I was in Arizona public schools — are foisted on the city library.

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