We don’t get much of this type of investigative reporting into school finances, so we cheer Dan Weikel of the Los Angeles Times for this piece on California school districts and their investment in capital appreciation bonds (CABs).

CABs are the kind of deal you get from the local leg-breaker when you have tapped out all your other sources of credit. They allow you to put off your first payment for years, in exchange for the exorbitant compounded interest they accumulate. Weikel found 200 school districts that borrowed $2.8 billion in CABs, which will end up costing $16.3 billion when they are due. The Times helpfully provided a database of the districts and what they owe individually.

This being California, not everyone thinks this debt is a bad thing. “It was well worth it,” said Jennifer Zaheer, president of the Palomar Council Parent Teachers Association. ”In my son’s experience, there’s a big difference between using a trailer and having a new classroom.”

Zaheer’s son might be living in a trailer because he won’t be able to afford the property taxes, special assessments and local levies needed to pay off the CABs when he’s an adult.

Sure, it isn’t easy coming up with provocative and insightful columns time after time, but a post-Thanksgiving funk settled in at the New York Times.

Thomas Friedman suggested President Obama name Arne Duncan as Secretary of State.

This could actually pick up a lot of support from the teachers’ unions, who have been trying to get Arne to leave the country for four years. Since no one else will take this idea seriously, we search in vain for Friedman’s point. He doesn’t make it easy:

A big part of the job is negotiating. Well, anyone who has negotiated with the Chicago Teachers Union, as Duncan did when he was superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools before going to Washington, would find negotiating with the Russians and Chinese a day at the beach. A big part of being secretary of education (and secretary of state) is getting allies and adversaries to agree on things they normally wouldn’t — and making them think that it was all their idea. Trust me, if you can cut such deals with Randi Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of Teachers, you can do them with Vladimir Putin and Bibi Netanyahu.

This looks like a swipe at Randi, but maybe it’s some sort of backhanded compliment. No matter, because if Duncan became Secretary of State it would open up the Secretary of Education job, and Times columnist Joe Nocera has his own brilliant idea – name Randi Weingarten to the post (he also wants David Petraeus as Secretary of Defense):

With rumors that Arne Duncan may step down as secretary of Education, we nominate Randi Weingarten to replace him. Risky? You bet. But as the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Weingarten has long claimed to support education reform, so long as it is done with the nation’s teachers instead of at their expense. Making Weingarten the next education secretary would give her the chance to put her money where her mouth is.

This also looks like a swipe at Randi. Might be time for AFT to set up an editorial board meeting. In any event, I don’t know what rumors Nocera is talking about, since Duncan seems pretty committed to sticking around.

The President of the United States can’t indulge in wacky cabinet appointments. For that kind of comedy, you have to travel west – say, to San Jose, California. The school district needed a new chief business officer, and the obvious choice was… Stephen McMahon, the current president of the San Jose Teachers Association.

The U.S. Department of Education released a table showing graduation rates in 2010-11 using a more accurate measure than in the past. The department hasn’t released the sample sizes yet, so it’s chancy to draw great conclusions from some of these figures. Gaps along racial lines persist, with whites and Asians exceeding the average while African Americans and Latinos trail. However, with a few notable exceptions, if a state ranked well graduating one sub-group, it ranked well graduating other sub-groups. In other words, if your state ranked 1st in total graduation rates, it probably had a high African American graduation rate compared with other states, even if there was a large gap between the white and black rates. (Or, if you’re looking at the table, one compares columns, the other compares rows.)

Texas had an 86% total graduation rate, and also ranked high among its peers in rates among African Americans, Hispanics, whites, children with disabilities and economically disadvantaged students. South Dakota had the best rates for children with disabilities, Limited English proficient (LEP) students and economically disadvantaged students. Tennessee had the best graduation rate for Native Americans, and also did well with African Americans and economically disadvantaged students.

At the other end of the scale, Nevada did badly with virtually all of its populations, ranking at or near the bottom with racial and ethnic minorities, special education and poor students.

While rankings didn’t change much when comparing sub-groups, the gaps in graduation rates between white students and minorities are large and stubborn across most states. Only Hawaii has graduation rates that are virtually the same for whites, African Americans, Asians and Hispanics. Gaps are small in Maine, Montana, South Carolina and West Virginia.

The largest gaps in graduation rates between whites and minorities took place in Minnesota, the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

As much as we all love empirical rankings, graduation rates are an imperfect measure of school quality. For one thing, a quick way to improve them is to lower graduation standards. Still, people of all ideological persuasions can agree that fewer dropouts are better than more dropouts. It helps that the Department of Education provided more precise data.

A timely piece in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel details the soul-searching going on at the Wisconsin Education Association Council, where a special representative assembly will be held next Saturday to discuss the union’s options, including possible merger with AFT Wisconsin.

WEAC leaders apparently “are more seriously considering how to shift their emphasis to organizing from the community level up rather than the Capitol level down.” There are quite a few aspects of this plan that seem familiar, considering the National Education Association has similar plans, including moving away from a “service model, where people paid their dues and got a certain number of services from the union in return.” Under the new model, people would pay their dues to become part of an ideological mass movement – more like the NRA than the NEA.

The common denominator in this thinking is Bob Peterson, currently president of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, but long-time advocate for this very approach at Rethinking Schools. Whether all this new thinking will take hold in an organization wedded to old thinking for the past 35 years or so is, of course, academic.

So scary, only Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi could stand the terror.

Ever since the 2000 elections we have settled in to the designation of Democratic states as blue and Republican as red. More recently we have seen reference to purple states. But if the 2012 results are any indication, we will soon have to come up with a new identification for states that are deep red and deep blue.

Two stories appeared this week that suggest the political landscape is shifting so that states are further from the mythical middle than ever. An Associated Press piece notes that half of state legislatures now have veto-proof majorities and only three – Iowa, Kentucky and New Hampshire – have split control of their two legislative houses between the two parties.

Couple this with a Smart Politics analysis showing the U.S. House Democratic Caucus will consist of almost 30 percent New Yorkers and Californians – up from 17.6 percent in 1990.

What this will mean for good governance is open for debate, but it will make for a fascinating civics experiment. What will happen as the dominant party in each of these states enacts its wish list? As the difference in policies becomes starker, how will population shifts be affected, and who will move where? Will all future Presidential elections become even more of just a battle for a handful of evenly split states?

Split government at the federal level will make it easier for each state government to go its own way, but how would one-party control of the federal government affect the opposing party’s agenda in states it controls?

Good and bad, we are going to see things in the political arena we haven’t seen in our lifetimes.