July 9, 2019
By Matt Beienburg
What do the
U.S. Department of Education (ED), the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR), and The Arizona Republic have in common?
Well, thanks to Republic columnist Robert Robb and several publications from ED and ABOR, the answer is: promoting “scandalous” ideas. “Scandalous,” I mean, for suggesting that student outcomes—rather than institutional inputs—might be the best measure of our K-12 education system.
The U.S.
Department of Education administers the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP) test to students across the country, and the scores compare student
performance in each state. As Robb noted
this past weekend in his column, the National Assessment Governing Board (which
oversees the NAEP test) “recently released a short study hailing the fact that
the gains
of Arizona students on the NAEP test were roughly double the national
average from 2005 to 2017.”
It may sound
a bit odd that Arizona students have achieved gains at twice the rate of their
peers in other states, especially amid the annual
refrain
that Arizona has decimated its public school system through funding cuts and the
proliferation of uncontrolled school-choice programs over the same period.
Indeed, how
do we square this positive academic news with the state getting routinely
panned by the Education Week “Quality
Counts” series under headlines
like “Arizona Earns D-Plus on State Report Card, Ranks 46th in the
Nation” in 2018?
Well, it basically boils down to which we think is more important: how much we spend on our K-12 system, or what our students actually get for all that money.
For example, in the EdWeek “Quality Counts” ratings, Arizona’s 2018 “K-12 Achievement” score is just a single point below the national average (72.7 vs 71.6). But thanks mostly to the EdWeek formula docking Arizona 12 points below average for K-12 spending in the “School Finance” category, the state’s overall score drops down to a D. (See the graph below.)
In other
words, there’s no actual contradiction between Arizona’s impressive NAEP gains
and the seemingly harsh scores from sources like EdWeek, as long as we’re talking about actual student achievement.
So if
they’re real, what explains these gains? The National Assessment Governing Board
credits
Arizona’s adoption of more rigorous state standards circa 2015, though as Robb points
out, Arizona Chamber Foundation researcher Matthew Ladner had already documented
most of the academic gains before the new standards were actually even implemented.
Rather, as
Robb suggests, the “largest change, by far, in Arizona’s educational landscape
during the period” was actually the proliferation of school-choice options via charter
schools, district open enrollment policies, etc. Arizona, he notes, has become
“the first state in the union in which competition for students became broad
enough to test the theory” that competition could help drive student
performance, and the results are now bearing fruit. Robb, it seems, is spot on.
Of course, encouraging
test scores are only one imperfect measure among many, and true competition requires
giving parents the ability to evaluate their educational options fully.
It’s for
this reason that the Arizona Board of Regents deserves attention and credit as
well for having made enormous strides in compiling data on the postsecondary
success of Arizona students, establishing
an entire “Student Outcomes” portal with data available on virtually every
public high school in Arizona. Such tools allow parents to see which schools
are truly equipping their students for success after senior year by reporting,
for example, the percentage of graduates from each school who go on to in
enroll in, and subsequently graduate from, a 2- or 4-year college program.
Admittedly,
not all school qualities can be measured, however, and it’s for this reason
that parents likewise deserve transparency in other aspects of their children’s
education—being informed, for example, of the core textbooks and reading lists their
children will be introduced to in their course of study. (State Senator Sylvia
Allen deserves commendations for promoting a version of
this idea during the recent legislative session.)
Indeed,
while politicians and pundits will ever debate issues of funding, regulation,
and policy, our highest priority should be on empowering families to pursue the
most promising educational avenue available. Based on a decade of improvement,
that focus seems to be working.
Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute.
