{"id":8130,"date":"2015-09-28T06:43:22","date_gmt":"2015-09-28T13:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=8130"},"modified":"2015-09-27T17:14:43","modified_gmt":"2015-09-28T00:14:43","slug":"arizona-the-spaghetti-western-state-of-education-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=8130","title":{"rendered":"Raising Arizona&#8217;s children &#8212; a newcomer perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a newcomer to Arizona since June 2014, and with an absorbing job that has been my focus for the last 15 months, I have largely stood back and watched the state&#8217;s education politics. For a small (-population) state such as Arizona, it has been an eventful 15 months:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The (former) incumbent state superintendent was overthrown in the 2014 Republican primary because of racist comments he wrote on the internet.<\/li>\n<li>The woman who beat the incumbent state superintendent in the primary won the general election in the closest statewide race of 2014, by approximately one percentage point, or 18,000 votes &#8212; which I would consider\u00a0a Florida landslide.<\/li>\n<li>The new state superintendent has been in regular political battles with the state board of education, including several trips to state court over who has the authority to hire\/fire a handful of board employees.<\/li>\n<li>The state&#8217;s testing system switched to a new vendor and coverage, like many other states.<\/li>\n<li>The legislature and local public school districts have continued a multi-year battle in court over school funding.<\/li>\n<li>The first-year governor has both appointed a panel to propose a new education funding system for the state and (semi-separately) proposed to tap into a land trust to pump additional funding into K-12 schools on a temporary basis.<\/li>\n<li>The first-year governor has been opposed in this last proposal by the state&#8217;s first-year treasurer, who is from the same party as the governor.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To all the major actors in the state: I am a political junkie who spent almost two decades in\u00a0Florida, but you really didn&#8217;t need to do this just so I would feel at home.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->More prosaically, I have also been trying to grasp\u00a0the political and organizational structure of K-12 schooling here. Arizona has all of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>An elected state superintendent who is one member of a state board of education that is neither entirely elected nor entirely appointed.<\/li>\n<li>Some elementary-only and high-school only school districts, in addition to K-12 unified school districts.<\/li>\n<li>Elected county superintendents (but no county boards of education).<\/li>\n<li>21 federally-recognized Native American tribes, which have the authority to operate their own school systems.<\/li>\n<li>One of the earliest and loosest charter-school laws in the country.<\/li>\n<li>A\u00a0complex educational tax-credit structure that contains both\u00a0an implicit voucher system plus other options.<\/li>\n<li>An\u00a0open-enrollment policy for local public schools.<\/li>\n<li>A statutory school funding measure approved by state voters, overlaid on constitutional requirements and an historical legislatively-approved funding formula.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.azleg.gov\/legtext\/49leg\/2r\/bills\/hb2281s.pdf\">A law<\/a> prohibiting K-12 courses that &#8220;promote ethnic solidarity,&#8221; a mechanism that has been used primarily to attack ethnic-studies courses in high school.<\/li>\n<li>A voter-approved\u00a0policy\u00a0prohibiting bilingual education of almost every sort.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you moved to Arizona wanting a clean\u00a0organization chart for how things worked, you would quickly be driven crazy by this. If you are an historian interested in\u00a0the complex behavior of neighbors, this is absorbing. We have a state where many of the education reforms of the past 25 years have been tried in at least partial fashion here, from charter schools and tax-credit policies to open enrollment, statewide curriculum standards, prohibition of bilingual education, third-grade reading promotion gates, and I could go on. You\u00a0would be forgiven if you said that everything has been thrown against the wall to see what stuck. To this newcomer, the energy is palpable; what is not clear is whether many\u00a0of these policies have served the state&#8217;s children well.<\/p>\n<p>Because there is no dominant urban school system in the state, and the state&#8217;s population is relatively small, Arizona has gotten little national education press apart from\u00a0symbolic battles over ethnic-studies courses in Tucson and the political spats at the state level this year. We have plenty of children, diversity, poverty, and ambition, and I am still wrapping my head around all of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As a newcomer to Arizona since June 2014, and with an absorbing job that has been my focus for the last 15 months, I have largely stood back and watched the state&#8217;s education politics. For a small (-population) state such as Arizona, it has been an eventful 15 months: The (former) incumbent state superintendent was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arizona","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-278","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8130"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8147,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8130\/revisions\/8147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}