Governor Ducey Signs Most Expansive School Choice Legislation in Recent Memory
azgovernor.gov
azgovernor.gov
The AZ schools have a large population of students from immigrants from Mexico and Central America who join with English as a second language barriers and parents without a history of educational prioritization. This leads to districts with extremely poor test scores. The republicans point to these poor test scores, and claim that the public schools are failing the students and school choice is the answer.
Ducey continues to push for school vouchers, citing school such as Basis. Basis charter school is a for profit school, which takes in a class of self selected students in ?7th? Grade, and is extremely rigorous. A sizable fraction of the students drop out after the first year, not to be replaced with new students. After the second year, more students drop out, again not to be replaced. By the time the end of high school rolls around, the remaining students are regularly being admitted to Harvard and Stanford. It’s listed as the best school in the country. Effectively all it’s done is taken the elite students from all the surrounding school districts and concentrated them down into a stream of successful graduates.
The remaining charter schools are regularly for profit schools, where the children of a church congregation end up attending the pastor’s school. The results are lower test scores than the public schools.
None of these options solve the really tough problem of educating the migrant students with English difficulties. And the charter schools are not required to provide services to these students, further concentrating the underperforming students in public schools.
The result is that a fraction of the elite students are given a slightly better education than they would have in their already excellent honors programs. The religious are able to scam money from the system, providing arguably worse outcomes. And the underclass remain underserved and under-motivated.
That’s what Ducey’s school reform have provided.
This creates a valuable learning enforcement and social network for those students.
> None of these options solve the really tough problem of educating the migrant students
But it improves outcomes for some students. At the same time, support for public funding is broadly maintained. The alternative is an increasing fraction of voters switching to private schooling. In the long run, that will undermine political support for public education entirely.
Yeah, that kind of seems like the actual plan, doesn't it?
Correct, but it’s a fraction of 1%, and those students would have already graduated in the top of their classes.
Ducey cites a program that works better for the top fraction of students as a solution for the larger population. In other charter schools with true open enrollment, the outcomes are worse than public schools.
Overall, this will damage education in Arizona, and it’s all done for politics. That makes Ducey the worst of politicians.
If he could demonstrate general improvements over public schools, I’d happily support the change.
Even from just doing genealogy I often find the point where my rural farmer relatives went from being: "Can Read/Write?" : "No" to their progeny answering "Yes" in the decades that follow. (For whatever reason, it seems to have kicked off after the Civil War.)
No doubt it allowed the rural migration to cities where no doubt literacy (and math literacy) became increasingly important.
To return more or less to an era where only the wealthy get good educations is shockingly regressive in my mind.
Say what you want about the degree to which this is already the case with post-Secondary education and the better funding that even public schools get in the wealthier neighborhoods, exacerbating this trend is, in my opinion, not a good idea.
Often when this is pushed (whether through vouchers or similar) it seems to be an attempt to either reward the rich by returning their education tax dollars that they were foregoing anyway since their kids went to private schools or, worse, a mechanism to erode or destroy the fabric of public education in general.
Specifically speaking, a good choice system ought to fund students and not systems, but ought to also provide checks-and-balances on those systems. Charters which work are found in states like Massachusetts, which have basic oversight of those charters. Arizona seems to lack that. We seem to have two types of systems:
Red states: School choice with no oversight
Blue states: Limited school choice with basic oversight
I'd like school choice with oversight. Basic oversight means:
- Non-profit, with proper board governance
- Comply with all relevant transparency laws (public records, FERPA, PPRA, etc.)
- Fair lottery; schools cannot pick-and-choose students who go there
- Some amount of standard data reporting
- Charters can't charge beyond the voucher amount
With that, I'd like to have an uncapped number of private charter schools.
The oversight is:
- Non-profit, with proper board governance
- Comply with all relevant transparency laws (public records, FERPA, PPRA, etc.)
- Fair lottery; schools cannot pick-and-choose students who go there
- Some amount of standard data reporting
- Charters can't charge beyond the voucher amount
There is no proposed oversight of what's taught or how it's taught.
That's basically how charters work in Massachusetts, where they blow away one of the best public education systems in th world.
I would rather have good private schools funded by the government than crappy public schools. This may or may not be the result from this bill, but it is one possible outcome.
What is your solution to fixing the public education system?
incidentally if you want to feel very uneasy, have a look at how many charter schools have just gone out of business in the middle of the school year.
we know how to have good public schools. it involves teachers that are well paid with a strong union behind them, for a start, which is another thing that corporations are historically bad at tolerating.
One of my parents was until recently a public school teacher in arizona. I have no confidence in whatever the governor says; what i think he actually wants is to cut loose and abandon any care over the education of people who aren’t rich and white, and i think that’s both entirely on brand for him, and completely beyond the pale and an utter abrogation of the responsibility of the state.
it’s also a horrible idea; a well educated and civically minded populace is one of the better things you can have, and it’s in your best interests to make sure you have one.
You can have nonprofits running schools as well. They don't have to be trying to maximizing profits. I agree good schools are a public good. Unfortunately, many public schools have been failing at that. Like I said, I don't know if this will succeed, but what we are doing now is not.
The government can also continue running public schools so if you don't think a private school will provide a good education you can avoid sending your kids there.
Unlike the current situation with public schools, private schools will lose students if they are bad.
I don't think they should have no oversight and as far as I know this bill will require some level of oversight. Perhaps more is required. I am not opposed to additional oversight.
>we know how to have good public schools. it involves teachers that are well paid with a strong union behind them, for a start, which is another thing that corporations are historically bad at tolerating.
If that is the case then why are the results so mixed after pay raises and increases to funding?
I don't think doubling the teachers' salaries will fix the issue. I think there has been a change in our culture that doesn't value an education. Look at what jobs kids wanted 20 years ago with today. The government is failing to change that culture back. Why should somebody care about education when they want to be a streamer or whatever?
Private schools may be able to change that. I am not sold that it will work, but there is a chance.
Do you have any solutions other than giving teachers more money?
>One of my parents was until recently a public school teacher in arizona.
One of my grandmothers was also a teacher in Arizona and than later in California. Not sure what it has anything to do with though?
>I have no confidence in whatever the governor says
I have no confidence in the government to fix the education system.
>what i think he actually wants is to cut loose and abandon any care over the education of people who aren’t rich and white
It is possible. I don't like to assume people are being malicious though.
>and i think that’s both entirely on brand for him, and completely beyond the pale and an utter abrogation of the responsibility of the state.
I can make a sweeping accusation as well. The government doesn't want its citizens to have a good education so they won't question them.
Maybe you should elaborate on your reasoning?
>it’s also a horrible idea; a well educated and civically minded populace is one of the better things you can have, and it’s in your best interests to make sure you have one.
And yet you haven't provided any proof education will get worse?
Here’s a premise for public education: Continuous investment and incremental improvement will yield better outcomes than starting from scratch, particularly where starting from scratch means providing a mechanism for public education funds to be funneled into private enterprise.
Setting aside the practical barriers for families to individually navigate providing quality non-public education for their children, which are substantial, this kind of approach introduces a whole range of new risks. If a family with five children is facing poverty, loss of housing, and financial instability, it might start to look appealing to take those five kids and sign them up for homeschooling so that the funds can be used for some education and for survival. Those aren’t the kinds of risks that financially secure families will ever have to face.
It is turning out kids who can hardly read and add. What we are doing is broken. It is possible that a change could occur that would fix the public system, but that hasn't happened yet.
>Here’s a premise for public education: Continuous investment and incremental improvement will yield better outcomes than starting from scratch, particularly where starting from scratch means providing a mechanism for public education funds to be funneled into private enterprise.
Please let us know what incremental improvement you are suggesting? Just saying let's make things better by making them better doesn't add anything to the conversation.
>Setting aside the practical barriers for families to individually navigate providing quality non-public education for their children, which are substantial, this kind of approach introduces a whole range of new risks.
I agree. I think we need to have standards and regulations around this. I am not sure if this specific bill will provide that or not.
>If a family with five children is facing poverty, loss of housing, and financial instability, it might start to look appealing to take those five kids and sign them up for homeschooling so that the funds can be used for some education and for survival.
I don't think that would be good. I imagine you can't spend this money on a mortgage and there would be validation to ensure it doesn't happen. If the bill allows abuse like this then a new bill should be passed banning it.
>Those aren’t the kinds of risks that financially secure families will ever have to face.
I think keeping poor kids in a crappy school where they will come out barely able to read will continue generational poverty and is a risk of the current school system.
I reviewed summaries from NAEP for reading and math [0] and found that across the board, public schools appear to outperform "public charter" schools. I understand that the received wisdom is that public schools are failing student. Certainly there are many public schools that don't increase, or actively harm, outcomes for some or all of their students. But the premise here is that the public system is fundamentally broken, and it should be substantiated.
> Please let us know what incremental improvement you are suggesting
The Hunt-Lee Commission recently released a final report for improving North Carolina Public Education Pre-K through University with 16 proposals[1], broadly categorized as "Build on what we have", "Invite and test new ideas", and "Implement proven solutions". Proposals such as these were what I had in mind when I originally wrote of incremental improvement.
> I think keeping poor kids in a crappy school where they will come out barely able to read will continue generational poverty and is a risk of the current school system.
Yes. The crappy school you mention should definitely be improved. But that's not what this bill does; this bill puts the burden on families to take their kids out of the crappy school and find a better one for them, leaving the crappy school in place along with the students of families who, for whatever reason, aren't able to move their own kids.
[0]: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa... [1]: https://hunt-institute.org/news/hunt-lee-commission-releases...
I wasn't trying to say every public school is bad and failing every student. Some schools are great, others are not. Some students can do great in bad schools and some students do bad in great schools.
I think if there is a bad school parents shouldn't be forced to keep their kids in that school. This isn't ideal, obviously every school should be great.
>The Hunt-Lee Commission recently released a final report for improving North Carolina Public Education Pre-K through University with 16 proposals[1], broadly categorized as "Build on what we have", "Invite and test new ideas", and "Implement proven solutions". Proposals such as these were what I had in mind when I originally wrote of incremental improvement.
I only skimmed the summary not the entire report, but those seem like good improvements. The problem I have is we don't really know the full long term costs and benefits to them.
I don't think these need to be exclusive though. There is no reason you can't allow your changes and allow charter schools. If the changes to the public schools improve things parents will send their kids back to the public schools when / if things improve.
Keeping kids in poor public schools because we may in the future have some fixes to the public school system isn't great and is just going to continue giving poor kids a poor education.
>Yes. The crappy school you mention should definitely be improved. But that's not what this bill does; this bill puts the burden on families to take their kids out of the crappy school and find a better one for them, leaving the crappy school in place along with the students of families who, for whatever reason, aren't able to move their own kids.
The problem is many crappy public schools aren't improving. Allowing parents to put their kids in a different school may be beneficial in the mean time. Parents who can't or won't do research can keep their kids in the crappy school. There would be less kids in the crappy schools which would be an improvement regardless.
I would also note that some Christian schools are top notch. There are also some terrible ones as well, but you probably shouldn't paint them all with such a wide brush.