Thomas B. Fordham Institute - Advancing Educational Excellence

The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children?

November 1, 2006

The Fordham Report 2006: How Well Are States Educating Our Neediest Children? appraises each state according to thirty indicators across three major categories: student achievement for low-income, African-American, and Hispanic students; achievement trends for these same groups over the last 10-15 years; and the state's track record in implementing bold education reforms. It finds that just eight states can claim even moderate success over the past 15 years at boosting the percentage of their poor or minority students who are at or above proficient in reading, math or science. In addition, most states making significant achievement gains--including California, Delaware, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, and Texas--are national leaders in education reform, indicating that solid standards, tough accountability, and greater school choice can yield better classroom results.

View the press release for this report

Contents

Arizona

 

 


 

Grand Challenges, Promising Results

If demographics were destiny, Arizona's schools should be scraping bottom. About one-fifth of its students live below the federal poverty line, and another fifth live in families whose incomes are low enough to qualify the children for free or reduced-price school meals.

Nevertheless, the Grand Canyon State is making progress-though limited-with its most vulnerable populations. The state's on-time graduation rates of 60 percent for Latinos-Arizona's largest minority group-and 66 percent for African-American students rate among the highest in the nation, though the quality of that education is suspect. Their achievement grades rate Ds and Fs.

Native Americans, who make up 5 percent of the state population and are the state's second largest minority group, look to be improving as well. The Arizona Department of Education reported this year that the traditionally dismal four-year graduation rate for this group rose by 13 percent from 2000 to 2004, reaching levels close to those of the state's other minority groups. (The scale differs slightly from the one employed for this report, which does not produce scores for Native Americans.)

In addition, black and Latino students have demonstrated statistically significant progress since the 1990s on NAEP's math assessments. Native Americans have also gained some ground. In 2003, just 6 percent of Native American fourth-graders were reading at or above a proficient level, a number that went up three percentage points in 2005.

These modest gains are hardly happenstance. The nation's second-fastest-growing state has a well-established system of standards-based reform, complete with solid academic standards and school-level rewards and interventions. Plus, Arizona encourages districts to offer performance-based pay for teachers and continues to expand its pioneering school choice programs with public charter schools and with tax credits to subsidize private school scholarships.

Charter schools have played a role in raising student achievement. Arizona first authorized charter schools in 1994 and was among the first states in the nation to do so. Today, the state has some 500 schools that serve more than 86,000 students, according to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools.

Studies by Harvard economist Caroline M. Hoxby indicate that Arizona's charter elementary schools make greater gains in math and reading than their peers in district public schools. More striking is her finding that students in traditional public schools near charter schools make greater gains on state tests than students in schools not facing competition from charters.

The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools reported this summer that enrollment is expected to keep growing in 2006-07, though the number of charter schools is declining as underperforming schools are weeded out by charter authorizers. This level of commitment to standards and school choice earns the state a number one ranking in the nation on our reform gauge.

Still, there's no lack of work to be done. The influx of newcomers from other states and Mexico into bustling Maricopa County (Phoenix) and Pima County (Tucson), which together account for 77 percent of the state's population, is placing enormous strains on Arizona schools. The most pressing is the challenge of hiring and retaining strong teachers and principals.    

Currently, the state is placing teachers with either temporary or emergency credentials in the classroom (almost all states do some of this). How many is anyone's guess, because the state's data system for tracking these individuals is broken. Relying on information provided by districts, the education department estimates about 20 percent. According to Tom Horne, state superintendent of education, teacher shortages are most severe in special education, foreign languages, math, and English immersion throughout the state. And in Arizona's 15 rural counties, the problem is even more acute.

Creating alternative routes to teacher certification hasn't been high on the state's list of solutions. But that may be changing. Teach for America has been active in the state since 2003, placing roughly 150 teachers per year in Phoenix's inner city schools. The Arizona Department of Education is currently funding a pilot program in which mid-career professionals in 20 of the state's 500+ school districts can take an intensive summer course, become high school teachers with full salaries and benefits that fall, and complete their pedagogical studies over the next two years.

The supply of qualified principals has also not kept pace with the growing student population. "Arizona's pool of effective education leaders," writes the education department in a July 2006 report, "is not adequate for the job at hand."

Another headache looming for Arizona education leaders: one-third of the state's regular public schools and charter schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2005-06. It's the fourth straight year in which the state as a whole failed to meet the interim targets in its plan for reaching the federal act's goal of having 100 percent of all students proficient in state standards for reading and math by 2013-14.

Horne blames this year's especially poor showing on stringent enforcement of federal rules under NCLB. He noted that the state's own calculations show substantial progress by students in recent years. That's easy to understand when one considers that the state's methodology excludes the scores on state exams of English language learners (ELLs) for their first three years in the country (federal rules allow exclusion of these students for only one year) and of all students in grades 4, 6, and 7. Horne sued the U.S. Department of Education, claiming it has violated an oral agreement he had with unidentified federal education officials. A department spokesman dismissed that argument as "a complete sham."

The ELL issue has been a hot button at the state level, too.  By law, these students must be educated in approved "structured English immersion" programs. The cost of doing so has been debated and litigated since 1992 when the Flores family sued the state for not adequately educating their daughter, an ELL student. A law passed this year increased slightly the amount to be spent on the state's 150,000-plus ELL students; a U.S. Court of Appeals panel will decide whether that law provides sufficient funding.

Fortunately, say reformers, much of the news from Phoenix is good. The state's system of tax credits for individuals and corporations that support scholarships for poor children to attend private schools was expanded this year. And Governor Napolitano signed a law that will fund free, voluntary, full-day kindergarten for all students. Some, however, are skeptical about the impact on achievement the latter measure will have.

Such problems don't dampen reformers' determination to press on. Two new state-subsidized task forces of citizens and experts were formed this year. One will look at linking public school education to the requirements of employers and higher education, and the other will examine ways to improve the education of ELLs.

Arizona is still far from Nirvana, but its leaders have taken the first critical steps on that long journey toward making high quality education a reality for all the state's students.

back to top

< Previous  Next >

© Copyright 2003-2010 The Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All Rights Reserved.