Study: Ariz. Students Unprepared: State School System’ S Low Rankings Are Met With Skepticism, Distress

By George B. Sanchez, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson

Jan. 4–Not only are Arizona students poorly educated but, according to a study released Wednesday, only New Mexico does a worse job preparing students for life.

Ranked 43rd in academic achievement in the annual “Quality Counts” report from Education Week and 49th — tied with Louisiana — for students’ “Chance for Success,” the Arizona educational system’s dismal performance was met with skepticism, alarm and concern.

“We clearly have a lot of kids dropping out and falling behind in education. There’s no argument,” said Charles Casey, administrative manager for Pima County’s One-Stop-Career Center. “To say they’re less prepared for the work force — I don’t buy that. Statistics show people are more educated as they get older here than is the national average.”

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne pointed out that Arizona ranked 20th for education alignment policy, which deals with state school standards. Arizona also ranked 14th for K-12 policy indicators, including specific standards, subject assessments and school accountability.

However, the report noted Arizona lacks a statewide policy that defines school-readiness for early-childhood education and college-readiness for postsecondary students.

Arizona ranked 43rd out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., when it came to K-12 achievement. The ranking is based on 15 indicators of progress, including proficiency for fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading, closing the poverty gap and its relationship to academic achievement, high school graduation rates and advanced-placement test scores.

Arizona’s only saving grace in the K-12 achievement ranking was improved scores on advanced-placement tests.

The “Chance for Success” attempts to correlate education with personal achievement by measuring education and income from birth to postsecondary-school life.

Based on 13 measures, including parental income and background, academic achievement, education levels and adult income, according to the “Chance for Success” index, Arizona scored above the national average only on kindergarten enrollment, high school graduation and percentage of adults working full-time.

“There needs to be a strong focus on education across the continuum,” Executive Project Editor Lynn Olson said in a teleconference Wednesday.

“This kind of information ought to beg more new questions rather than provide answers from state policy makers,” said Virginia Edwards, editor and publisher of Education Week. Education Week is published by Editorial Projects in Education Inc., a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C.

Horne said the report tries to hold schools accountable for factors beyond their control.

“Policy measures rigor in the classroom. We have control of that,” he said. “I can’t control the number of kids who come from poverty backgrounds or parents who don’t speak English at home. What I can control is that we don’t accept that as an excuse.”

John Wright, president of the Arizona Education Association, said he was glad the study recognized demographics such as family income and background.

“We have a student population that’s very fluid,” he said. “We have immigrants, English-language learners and — people like me, who live in metropolitan areas, forget — a lot of rural poor.”

For these reasons, Arizona’s students, he said, aren’t easily comparable to other states’.

Still, Horne and Casey said it was unfair to say Arizona students won’t do well when it comes to work-force success.

Casey cited statistics from the 2000 U.S. census that showed 21 percent of Arizona’s 18-to-24-year-olds had dropped out of school, but 87 percent of Arizonans 25 or older have a high school diploma, higher than the U.S. average of 84 percent.

Asked about the report’s conclusion on success, David Padgett, assistant vice chancellor for academic services at Pima Community College, said educators know students who arrive at community college often have catching up to do.

“In most cases, it takes one to two years of training in a postsecondary setting to get technology expertise to find work in that field,” he said.

For that reason, he said, PCC works with high schools through its Tech Prep program. He also noted that technical training in the area will increase when the county’s Joint Technological Education District is established. The JTED, approved by voters in November, will create a centralized agency to enhance the ability of all Pima County high schools to offer vocational and technical classes. The district will be funded via a property-tax increase that equals $10 per $200,000 of home value.

Horne also said the study’s measure of proficiency, based on National Assessment of Education Progress scores, represents only a portion of Arizona students — 6,000 of 1 million.

“The fact that we’re 14 out of 50 in academic rigor is important because it’s something we have control over,” he said.

This was the first “Quality Counts” report since its debut 10 years ago that did not grade the states on an A-F scale, nor did it take into account teacher quality, school finance or school climate, which have been rated in the past. The officials who conducted the study said the previous grading system was not used because they are revising their judgment categories.

Last year, Arizona scored an overall grade of C, just below the average of C+.

More education stories are at azstarnet.com/education

Chance for Success Index:

–Top: Virginia, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, Maryland

–Bottom: Tennessee, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, New Mexico

K-12 Achievement:

–Top: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota

–Bottom: Alabama, Hawaii, New Mexico, West Virginia, Mississippi*

–Arizona ranked 43rd out of 51 (including Washington, D.C.)

Quality Counts 2007 is available online at www.edweek.org

–Contact reporter George B. Sanchez at 573-4195 or at gsanchez@azstarnet.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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