As Arizona students head back to school, they face the enormous challenge of overcoming learning loss from the COVID-19 pandemic period. Arizonans, however, have reasons to feel optimistic. The state’s dynamic school system produced the highest rate of academic growth on average in the nation pre-pandemic, and to help mitigate learning loss over the last two years, over 100,000 students attended state-funded summer camps.

If you are going to bet on a school system to bounce back from the pandemic, double down on the Grand Canyon State.

Pluralism has driven Arizona education for decades with a variety of approaches created by both traditional district and public charter school educators. Sometimes, these come in the form of entire specialized schools; other times, as programs. Further, almost one-third of Phoenix-area district school students use open enrollment to attend a school outside their attendance zone. Statewide, almost 1 in 4 students attend a public charter school with no attendance boundary.

A brisk migration of students exists between traditional district and public charter schools as families make choices based on interests and aspirations that may change. Options in Arizona’s charter sector include innovative and specialized opportunities, such as STEM schools, classical education, arts schools and career education schools, to name a few. Some students choose one of these for elementary school and a district school for middle or high school, or vice versa.

Innovation in Arizona’s public schools flourished during the pandemic, which is especially promising for rural communities. Both districts and charters have sponsored small schools that combine in-person instruction, distance learning, and project-based learning. While areas with low population density may lack the student enrollment to support a public charter school, rural families often have opportunities to select micro-schools.

Enabling educators to create schools, and families to choose among them, brings academic benefits for students. Stanford University scholars collected testing data from around the country between 2008 and 2018 and found that Arizona students learned more per year of schooling than their peers in any other state. This was true both overall and for low-income students.

Academic growth is widely recognized as the best measure of school quality, and Arizona charter schools are contributing with the average rate of academic progress for charter students almost 20% higher than the state average.

However, some believe that the disruption caused by expanded choice is not worth the benefits. For instance, critics decry the closure of low-demand schools. The reality is that, during the 2021-22 school year, far less than 1% of students statewide were impacted by a public-school closure, and a large majority of those students attended district schools. District facilities, of course, age out of their usefulness, sometimes consolidate, and sometimes close. Along with this, new and expanding schools offer learning experiences that best meet the needs of Arizona students. Families and educators gradually but steadily shape the clay of our education system like a pair of hands on the potter’s wheel.

While Arizona educators and policymakers have accomplished a great deal, they must address a number of outstanding policy issues. The school funding system has seen no significant revisions since 1980, and delivers widely varying levels of funding to schools. To illustrate, the second-highest-funded district receives almost six times as much funding per pupil as the lowest-funded district. To ensure equity for all students, it is time to equalize funding across systems.

Additionally, Arizona’s school bus system mostly still rumbles within the attendance boundaries that families increasingly cross. Every year the number of Arizona public school students grows, the number of students riding yellow buses shrinks and the system costs increase. Governor Doug Ducey and the Legislature have begun a process of student transport modernization, but these innovative measures must continue.

Arizona families have been voting with their feet through district open enrollment and charter schools for 28 years. Lawmakers should accelerate the rate of progress by reducing regulatory red-tape – secure in the knowledge that Arizona families hold schools directly accountable for serving the needs of their children.

The pandemic exacted a terrible cost on both students and educators in communities across the state. But we have a record of success on which to build, with growing options and opportunities for families. The foundational values of diversity, variety and pluralism that led Arizona students to lead the nation in academic growth pre-COVID will lead us back post-pandemic.

The post Back to school, and Arizona’s ready to rally appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

Imagine you’ve just moved into the Arizona State Capitol – great bones, but it’s a bit of a fixer-upper.

You need to find a school for your 7^th grader. Within a mile-and-a-half, there are 5 middle schools. But inside 3 miles, your options expand to 19 public schools – many with high ratings and strong reviews.

Just one problem: like thousands of Phoenix families, you don’t have a car – meaning your child is effectively limited to the single middle school served by the school bus route. So much for school choice.

Gov. Ducey and legislators began that process this year with approval of a $20 million competitive grant program. The pilot will enable district and charter schools, local governments and non-profit groups to submit innovative proposals for student transport.

The fact is, more than half of K-8 students in metro Phoenix attend a school other than the one assigned to them according to their address. A growing number of families are taking advantage of a broad menu of school options, including district, charter, online, micro-schools and more. Yet, until now, Arizona’s K-12 transport system – and the funding that supports it – has remained yoked to the increasingly outdated model of diesel-belching yellow school buses we all remember from our childhood.

Today, nearly 2 out of 3 students nationally travel to school each day in a household vehicle, walk or ride a bike;. The trend long preceded the pandemic, but has accelerated in the past two years amid a widespread bus driver shortage that has sent schools scrambling and led to canceled routes and frustrated families.

Just like there is no single style of school that meets the needs of all students, Arizona requires a multifaceted approach to student transport. The first round of, with awardees proposing everything from on-demand micro-transit solutions like vans, to app-based carpooling, rideshare and more. Midtown Primary School in central Phoenix will even use grant funds to create what it calls a “walking school bus,” which will involve use of staff members, adults and walking ropes to help young students safely walk to and from school and navigate busy intersections.

Another common sense solution involves realigning municipal bus routes and bus stops so that they can be more useful to students. A Minneapolis program to give monthly bus passes to high-school students resulted in reduced truancy and improved GPAs. Surveyed students said the added flexibility of the municipal system helped them both get to school and participate in afterschool activities. Arizona schools have the opportunity to partner with local governments and non-profits to create similar cooperative efforts.

During the past legislative session, South Phoenix parent Alysia Garcia told lawmakers that – as an open enrollment transfer family for the last decade – her family has solely borne the expense of taking her kids to and from school every day. That’s 5,600 trips totaling over 62,000 miles.

“What is the point of having a great open enrollment policy if families aren’t able to utilize it?” Garcia asked. “I’m fortunate to have a vehicle to transport my kids. What about the kids who don’t have vehicles?”

She’s right. Arizona families already pay taxes to support a wide array of public school options. They deserve a modern student transport system designed with this flexibility in mind to help their kids get to and from these schools safely.

Matthew Ladner is the Director of the Arizona Center for Student Opportunity

The post Arizona expanding school choice by reimagining school transportation system appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of passage of the nation’s first charter school law, a movement that has benefited Arizona perhaps more than any other state. 

Stanford University scholars, for instance, linked testing data across the country and found only 28 general enrollment public schools nationwide where the students learned at a rate 50% or more above the national average. Arizona has 11 of those 28 schools, and charter schools make up nine of the 11.  

Scholars widely regard academic growth as the best measure of school quality, and Arizona has the fastest rate of academic growth nationwide and across multiple student subgroups. Arizona’s reward for embracing education choice, however, goes far beyond academic achievement alone. Among students of all income levels, Arizona has the nation’s highest rate of academic growth during the period studied by the Stanford scholars (2008-2018). Arizona was also the only state identified by Stanford scholars to have a rate of academic growth faster for low-income students than their high-income peers. 

Arizona’s public education system has flourished by freeing educators to create their own schools. In 1994, a bipartisan majority of Arizona lawmakers passed the nation’s broadest charter school law and adopted an “open enrollment” policy that allowed families to enroll their child at a public school outside their zoned district, tuition-free. Arizona now has the country’s highest percentage of students attending charter schools (almost 22%), as well as a robust system of open enrollment between district schools. 

A majority of Phoenix-area students attend schools other than the one assigned based on their zip code. Rather than withering in the face of competition, these Arizona districts have actually improved over time – demonstrating once again that healthy competition helps make all schools better. Arizona’s nation-leading academic gains would not be possible without the success of its district schools, and it is to their credit that they’ve adapted and thrived in this environment of education choice. 

If you’ve been around a gathering of teachers, the topic of conversation will often turn to administrative folly. Many teachers regard this as just another sacrifice they have to make in order to serve students. Arizona policy gave educators the opportunity to show us, not just to tell us, how much better things would be if they ran schools. Arizona educators can and have pursued their own vision of educational excellence. 

Arizona is a wildly diverse state. Our families have varying priorities and preferences, and our students possess different aspirations. Some Arizona charters focus on the arts; others specialize in STEM, equestrianism, classical education, back-to-basics and much more. Many Arizona charters give students with troubled academic careers a second chance, while others offer accelerated curricula that match or exceed the most advanced college-prep schools in the country. Recent years have seen the advent of charter schools focused on helping students with disabilities, such as autism. 

Systemic improvement begins with individual solutions. We have vital equity issues around funding, transportation and enrollment to address. Matters were improving quickly before the pandemic struck in early 2020, but learning loss during the past 18 months poses a new and serious challenge. 

But our nation’s past three decades of experience with charter schools suggest empowering educators and freeing families to select the right school for their children is the fastest way to help get Arizona K-12 back on track. 

Dr. Matthew Ladner is the executive director of the Center for Student Opportunity

The post Marking 30 years of educational choice and innovation appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

Maricopa County students lead the nation among large urban counties in academic gains in new data released by Stanford University. Perhaps even more impressive, Maricopa’s strong performance ranked only third among Arizona’s 15 counties.

So, a bit of background before we get to the good news.

The Stanford University Opportunity Project has done the hard work of linking state K-12 academic exams from across the country, allowing us to compare academic outcomes across jurisdictions. The Stanford data allows comparisons between schools, school district and charter school combinations and counties. You can examine the data. Counties with above average growth are colored green, those with below average growth are blue.

The chart below has Maricopa County marked as 1. The other four counties with the largest populations are also marked (Harris County, Texas=2, Los Angeles County, California=3, Cook County, Illinois=4, San Diego County, California =5).

The chart shows the average rate of academic growth for low-income students. Low-income students in Maricopa County had a rate 19% higher than the national average, which is easily the best nationwide among large urban counties.

The Stanford website allows you to examine these charts by a variety of subgroups. I’ve shown you the chart for low-income students because it is obviously very important. Rather than bomb this column with charts, I’ll simply note that Maricopa County also beat the other large urban counties among non-poor students, Black students, Asian students, White students and got edged out for first place for Hispanic students by Cook County. (Maricopa County Hispanic students had a rate of academic growth 14.4% above the national average.)

As impressive as Maricopa County’s performance shows out in the data, it is not the highest performing county in Arizona. Including all Arizona counties in the academic growth chart for low-income students produces the following chart:

Two of Arizona’s smaller counties (Santa Cruz and Navajo counties) have even higher growth rates for poor kids than Maricopa. All Arizona counties except one have academic gains for low-income students above the national average. You see the same pattern when examining the gains of student subgroups. If you are a student in Arizona, you are likely to be making above average academic gains.

The Brookings Institution measured student access to charter schools in 2015. Their study focused on the percentage of students in each state that had access to one or more charter schools in their zip code. Arizona students had the most access at 84% of students. The lone exception to the overwhelmingly positive story on academic growth in Arizona comes from a county clocking in at 16%. Marked 5 in the chart above, Greenlee County has no charter schools in operation.

Arizona had a remarkable system of public education before the pandemic struck. Let’s hope the remarkable achievement seen by our district and charter educators seen in these data will prove a prelude to a successful recovery from the learning losses accrued during the pandemic.

Dr. Matthew Ladner is the executive director of the Center for Student Opportunity

The post Stanford academic growth data has good news for Arizona appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released 2019 12^th grade Math and Reading national results a few days before the 2020 election. NAEP provides state level data for 4^th and 8^th graders at the state level, but this recent data was only at the national level. The news is bad; performance of American 12^th-graders was in decline before the pandemic struck. These tests were given in the spring of 2019, meaning before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The earliest 12^th grade reading score we have in this series comes from 1992. The Class of 1992 had a nationwide. The Class of 2017 (latest available, the Class of 2019 would have a somewhat higher figure) had a nationwide average of $158,431 in constant dollars spent on their education–approximately 50% more. Which class had the better ability to read? Let’s break down the 12^th grade Reading results by parental education:

Regardless of the level of education of your parents, reading scores were lower for the Class of 2019 than 1992 despite the higher level of spending. All of the above declines in scores are statistically significant. An increase in childhood poverty might explain such a decline, but Mike Petrilli from the Fordham Institute showing that national childhood poverty rates have declined from where they stood in the early 1990s.��

We do not have 12^th grade NAEP data for Arizona, but we do have reasons to hope that Arizona’s results have been better than that of the nation as a whole:

The above chart shows NAEP 8^th grade math scores from 2003 (the first year all 50 states participated) and 2019 (the most recent available) for Anglo, Hispanic and Black students. All three student groups advanced approximately a grade level worth of learning, with both Arizona’s Anglo and Black students landing in the top 10 when compared to their peers in other states in 2019.

Arizona educators nevertheless have their work cut out for them in attempting to help students recover from. Evidence regarding “COVID slide” has begun to trickle in from formative assessments given during the Fall of 2020, and the data is concerning. For example, 54% of Dallas Independent School District 5th graders reached the “meets grade level” threshold in math in 2019, but only 24% of this year’s 5th-graders do so on the same test given in 2020.

The national 12^th grade NAEP results are especially worrisome as students took the exams approximately a year before the outbreak of COVID-19. The next round of state level NAEP is scheduled for the Spring of 2021 and seems likely to show academic damage caused by the closure of schools and the reduction of instruction time.

Chad Alderman, senior associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, to see how much instruction time they were delivering to students by whatever means – in-person, remote, etc. Alderman wrote:

The term ‘’ is defined as missing 10% or more of school days in a year. By that standard, the majority of K-12 students might be considered chronically absent this school year.

Alderman examined the instruction time being delivered by 10 major American districts, including Arizona neighbors Los Angeles Unified and Clark County Nevada (Las Vegas metro area). He found that these and other districts were delivering less than half of the normal amount of instruction.

The long and the short of this: the 2019 NAEP demonstrated that American education had substantial problems before the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the heroic efforts of many educators to hold things together during an incredibly challenging period, the scale of the challenge has grown still more dire. Arizona schools however rose to the challenge of the Great Recession by. I’m “all in” on them rising to this new challenge as well.��

Dr. Matthew Ladner is the executive director of the Center for Student Opportunity

The post New 12th grade NAEP results show bad news for American schools appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

Recently I visited the U-Haul company website to check on the cost to rent a 20-foot-truck to go from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Answer: $157. Then I checked the same trip but in the opposite direction–from Los Angeles to Phoenix–and the cost was almost nine and a half times higher-$1,483.

Why the difference?

You get a steep discount moving to Los Angeles because so many trucks from L.A. have piled up in Phoenix that you are doing the company a favor to drive a truck back where they are badly needed. Meanwhile, the demand for moving trucks is much higher in L.A., so they charge a great deal more.

When you compare the education statistics between Los Angeles County and Maricopa County, they make you wonder when the rest of L.A. might arrive in Arizona.

Stanford University has linked state academic results across the country and created a handy data tool to allow visual comparisons. Academic growth–student progress over time–is a key measure of school quality. Maricopa schools educate almost 67% of Arizona students, and Los Angeles County is likewise the giant of California.   

Below I compare Maricopa County (circle 1) with Los Angeles County (circle 2) in the context of academic growth rates for every county in the country. While I could display a repeated beatdown across multiple subgroups (White, Hispanic, Black students), we’ll keep things simple and simply divide students into low-income and non-low-income.

Low-income students in Maricopa County learned at a rate 12% higher than the national average. Similar students in Los Angeles County learned at a rate 5% below the national average. A similar gap appears among non-poor students in the figure below.

Middle-to-high-income Los Angeles students fell one percent below the national average in academic progress. Similar students in Maricopa County made academic gains 16% above the national average during this period. Interestingly, both groups of students (low-income and middle-to-high-income, respectively) saw a gap of the same size, a 17% advantage for Maricopa County students.

We cannot definitively say why students learn faster in the Phoenix area than in L.A. A distinguishing feature of Arizona’s K-12 system is the prevalence of charter schools and the widespread participation of districts in open enrollment. The Brookings Institution measured the percentage of students with access to a charter school during the 2014-15 school year. California came in with a nationally respectable 45.8%. Arizona led the nation with 84%.

districts demonstrates a very dynamic system of schooling. Open-enrollment students, defined as district students attending a district school other than the school assigned by their zip code, outnumbered charter school students nearly two to one.

Arizona school districts, much to their credit, are leading the way in providing out-of-zone education options to Arizona families. In other words, despite the tenor of the debate by various advocacy organizations, the reality is that choice is being done by districts rather than to districts.

Much work remains to be done, and many Arizona K-12 policies and practices look increasingly antiquated given the very high mobility of students. Despite a majority of students attending non-zoned schools, for example, we continue to give exclusive transportation taxing authority to districts. Districts continue to primarily bus kids around within their attendance boundaries, and thus most students do not benefit from funding to which everyone contributes. Such an antiquated system looks like an 8-track cartridge in a Spotify world. Just imagine what we might accomplish with a modernized and rational system of student transport.

In the meantime, it looks like a continuing flow of Angelenos will continue to transport themselves to Arizona despite the steep price for moving trucks. 

 Dr. Matthew Ladner is the executive director of the Center for Student Opportunity

The post Maricopa school appeal > beaches and movie stars? appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) saw mixed results for Arizona student achievement.

NAEP, a project of the National Center for Education Statistics, has given academic exams to representative samples of students in all 50 states since 2003. The exams cover fourth-��and eighth-grade math and reading, and occasionally other academic subjects. NAEP released new results for 2019 on Oct. 30,��and news proved bad nationally and mixed in Arizona.

Between 2017 and 2019, Arizona students had a statistically significant improvement in fourth-grade mathematics and a decline in eighth-grade reading, while fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math results remained statistically unchanged. These short-run results, on net, are nothing to celebrate nor to lament, especially when examining the trends in other states.

Taking a broader look over the last decade, Arizona stands as one of the few states showing progress over time.

The chart above tracks eighth-grade math and reading gains and losses from 2009 to 2019 for Free and Reduced Lunch-eligible students. As you can see, a majority of states saw declines in both math and reading for these students (lower left quadrant). Arizona stands among a minority of states with improvement in both eighth-grade math and reading.

Taking the lens back to the beginning of when NAEP began testing in all 50 states allows us to track Arizona’s rise across student subgroups. The figure below sequentially shows eighth-grade math scores for 2003 and then 2019 for Anglo students, then Hispanic students in 2003 and 2019, and then Black students in 2003 and 2019. Some states did not have a sufficiently large Hispanic or Black population to report scores and thus are not included.

In 2019, Arizona’s Anglo, Hispanic and Black students were all demonstrating a mastery of mathematics approximately equal to what their 2003 peers would have landed as ninth-graders. Because of these gains, Arizona’s Anglo students ranked 10^th, our Hispanic students ranked 20^th and our Black students ranked fourth on eighth-grade math,��compared to their peers in other states.

Arizona was also one of only a handful of states to show academic progress for students with disabilities over the last decade. The figure below shows that, while Arizona students with disabilities made progress on eighth-grade math, the trend in a large majority of states showed declines in scores. The trend is the same for Arizona and nationally with regards to eighth-grade reading.

Arizona has a lot of work yet to do in order to build a world-class system of education.

We’ve faced huge challenges over the past decade. We will face new challenges in the decade that looms ahead. We do, however, have a decade of improvement at our backs.

The post Student achievement scores are mixed, but Arizona is still moving up appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

In earlier columns . Rudy of course didn’t have the grades to get into Notre Dame (until he hit the books) and was too small to play football (until they couldn’t keep him off the field). New data from Stanford University demonstrates once again that Arizona schools are exceeding expectations.

Stanford scholar Sean F. Reardon released , allowing for a number of interesting visualizations. Dr. Reardon’s data allows for the tracking of academic gains over time, and now includes 2016 data. Arizona once again shows we are a high-growth state.��

The below chart shows the combined math and reading gains for every public school in Arizona. The dark green represents high growth schools, and the dark blue represents low growth schools. Each school is sized according to enrollment (big schools = big circles).

The horizon of this chart tracks the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunch (0% on the far right, 100% on the far left) while the vertical axis tracks academic progress between grades 3-8 (dark green is high growth, dark blue low growth). Note that there is more green than blue, more dark green than blue, and only three dark blue (very low growth) schools compared to scores of dark green.

I’ve sampled states and here is what stands out about Arizona: first it is very green, and secondly our high growth schools are broadly distributed across the socio-economic profile of schools. Arizona has low-poverty, high growth schools, but we also have high-poverty, high growth schools. If you look at the same growth chart for the nation’s highest scoring state (Massachusetts) you’ll see a large cluster of the green schools concentrated in the low poverty area. Arizona on the other hand sees a lot of green everywhere. The two highest growth schools in Arizona— Reyes Maria Ruiz Leadership Academy and Mexicayotl Charter School—are both high poverty public charter schools.

Reardon’s data tool also allows the user to download data, including data converting district and charter state scores into (NAEP) scores during the 2009 to 2013 period. Each district includes the charter schools operating within the district boundaries, and districts vary considerably during this period regarding the percentage of students attending charters. Reardon’s district/charter combination estimates also lack the precision that a statewide estimate would have, so some random anomalies doubtlessly lurk in the data here and there. Note as well that some of this data is literally a decade old at this point, and the period covered in the chart below was very difficult for Arizona’s economy.

With those caveats in mind, I decided to plot Reardon’s estimated NAEP eighth grade math scores and gains (2013 eighth grade scores minus 2009 fourth grade scores) for Arizona districts and the charter schools within their boundaries, the United States, Arizona (the state with the highest gains during that time period), Alabama (the lowest performing state in the 2013 NAEP) and Massachusetts (highest performing state in the 2013 NAEP).

Lots of interesting things to unpack: the differences within states is much greater than those between states. At just over 30 points, the average Massachusetts students stood at a little under two and a half to three grade levels worth of average academic progress ahead of the average student in Alabama. That is a very large and meaningful difference. The largest difference between the highest and lowest performing Arizona jurisdictions are twice as large.

Next let’s take a moment to acknowledge Arizona school districts and charter schools within their boundaries that scored in the same neighborhood as Massachusetts. I’ve marked a few of the notable high performing/high growth district and charter combinations, and the state’s two largest districts of Mesa and Tucson.

Some of these districts are demographically advantaged compared to Arizona as a state, but far fewer of them are advantaged compared to Massachusetts or Vermont. Massachusetts and Vermont are among the small handful of states with an average family income for a family of four in six figures, and they spend a great deal more per pupil than we do in Arizona. Take Vail School District for example—they apparently didn’t get the memo that they weren’t supposed to beat the rich kids. And Vail only has district sponsored charter schools during this period, so the district gets all the credit)��

Taken together there is a lot of good news in these two charts, but also unfinished work to be done. Schools on tribal nations make up most of the cluster of low performing district/charter combinations in the second chart on the bottom left.����

The toolbox which has been helping to drive improvement in Arizona’s urban areas faces hurdles in rural Arizona. A majority of Maricopa County students attend schools other than their assigned district school—as open enrollment, magnet and charter opportunities are relatively plentiful. Bringing these opportunities to rural areas faces several challenges. We have however started to see some .��

We have faced many challenges and we will face many more. I’m willing to bet big on a state whose educators can start their own schools and where families have the power to take the lead in deciding which is the best fit for their children.

The post Column: Rudy strikes again – good news for Arizona schools in new Stanford data appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

Students are heading back to school, fall football practice is underway with games kicking off soon. Years ago, I recall watching an opening week college football game—the underdog pulled a big upset and their fans stormed the field in jubilant celebration. The team’s head coach body surfed around the field before being deposited in front of a television reporter who was waiting with a microphone and her camera crew. The reporter yelled a question to the coach who smiled with a maniacal grin amid a mosh pit of crazed supporters. “They said we couldn’t do it,” the coach replied to the question he may not have heard over the din of the crowd. “They said we couldn’t do it! WHAT WILL THEY SAY NOW?”

That once obscure coach, Dabo Swinney, has now won multiple college football national championships. I often think of this jubilant scene when looking at how Arizona won their own national championship of . Arizona is on what is thought to be the wrong international border to be doing well on academics, but we didn’t get the memo and . Alas some tend to evaluate Arizona’s academic gains in a similar fashion to Jerry Seinfeld’s evaluation of dates—, or you know something.

If you stretch the national academic data back as far as they go (1990) Alabama consistently had the lowest scores and Arizona was second to last. Since 1990 Arizona’s population has doubled, our K-12 student body went from majority-White to majority-minority and our average level of academic achievement improved substantially across every subgroup and overall. Like for instance the trend for free and reduced lunch eligible students:

!

The National Assessment of Educational Progress recently , which was very nice to see. I’m afraid however that they missed the elephant in the room in terms of likely drivers of the improvement. We never know what policy or non-policy factors drive trends in academic scores (many things going on at once) but the National Assessment piece focused on assessment and testing changes.��

The change in standards and testing may have indeed played a role, but Arizona students had become the only state to show statistically significant gains on all six NAEP exams given between 2009 and 2015. The average among the other 49 states during this period was approximately one net improvement. The AzMERIT debuted in 2015, shortly after students would have taken the 2015 NAEP. Moreover, most states changed their standards and tests during this period, but as seen in the figure above they didn’t see Arizona levels of improvement. Testing changes in the short seem to be an implausible primary driver of improvement.

Bob Robb, the dean of Arizona political analysts laid out the case for choice :

The theory behind school choice is that competition for students will drive improved performance in all schools. The evidence in support of that has been thin because the existence of competition has been limited.

The following is at least plausible if not probable. Arizona is the first state in the union in which competition for students became broad enough to test the theory. And it is not just increased enrollment in charter schools. Arizona has open enrollment between district schools, which is widely availed.

And, so far, the Arizona experience suggests that the school choice theory is working,��

There are those taking aim at the multiple-site charter school systems that have been so successful in attracting students in Arizona, with a goal of largely reducing charter schools to standalone mom-and-pop operations.

It would be ironic, and tragic, if Arizona, having finally achieved scale in educational competition, and having experienced notable improvements in student learning, were to decide to shut it down.

If you can imagine Clemson fans wanting to fire Coach Dabo because he eats his peas one at a time, you might get a sense of some of the misplaced priorities in Arizona’s K-12 conversation. We are making an $11.5 billion investment in public education in order to give each student the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills and character necessary for success in life and to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship. There is far more of this happening now than in the past, and the future can be brighter still. Arizona’s gains are real, and they’re spectacular.

The post Column: Dabo vs. Jerry in a Man-Handed Spectacular appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.

Recently the Governing Board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released a study . Subsequent to that, a personal finance website specializing in social media rankings said . One of these things is not like the other.

conducted by the publisher of Education Week ranked the NAEP the most influential K-12 information source and separately the most influential K-12 study. Meanwhile, Arizona Republic editorial columnist Bob Robb compared the WalletHub ranking to a household appliance, :

WalletHub is a personal finance website that makes its money from advertising and premium listings on the site. It has come up with a brilliant marketing strategy. It collects data from other sources, tosses it into a blender, and spits out a list of the best and worst states and cities about various things…WalletHub, however, isn’t a serious social science research outfit, as this report amply demonstrates.

Let’s look inside the blender of this year’s WalletHub ranking methodology, with some comments in bold. Some (but far from all) of the questionable ranking measures include:

Projected High School Graduation Rate Increase Between 2018-2019 and 2031-2032 School Years (The Class of 2032 attended kindergarten last year. What does someone’s projection about 2032 have to do with the quality of schools in 2019?).

Share of High School Graduates Who Completed ACT and/or SAT) (Arizona public universities do not require ACT/SAT scores for admission purposes for all students, so the rate of students taking the exams is low, but this doesn’t mean that Arizona K-12 schools are bad.)

Share of Licensed/Certified Public K–12 Teachers (Researchers have established that teacher certification is .)

Pupil-Teacher Ratio (Average class size is an input rather than an outcome.)

The far more credible and highly respected NAEP publication had the following to say:

Over the last 12 years, Arizona has made steady progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Between 2009 and 2017, in fact, Arizona was among the top 10 jurisdictions with the largest score gains for fourth- and eighth-grade students in mathematics and reading. ��

NAEP also gave 4^th and 8^th grade science exams in 2009 and 2015, so in total NAEP gave six state-level subject matter exams between 2009 and 2015 – 4^th and 8^th grade math, reading and science respectively. Arizona was the only state whose students made statistically significant gains on all six of these exams. The average state made a net improvement of one compared to Arizona’s perfect six out of six. Arizona students have not only seen above-average academic gains, the improvement is broadly distributed.

I could go on but let’s just say that blenders everywhere should feel miffed that Robb compared them to the Wallethub’s K-12 ranking. Say what you will about blenders, but they have their uses.

The post Column: Ranking blender liquifies the truth of Arizona’s K-12 progress appeared first on ˿����Ƶ Business News.