You know that new results-based funding system, the one that gives Arizona’s most “successful” schools a big infusion of cash? If anyone tells you how equitable the funding system is based on the distribution of money the first year, ignore them. The funding for 2017-18 is more balanced than it will ever be again. Starting with the 2018-19 school year, all the money, or close to it, will go to schools serving children from families with above-average incomes. Those lucky schools will give their teachers a $2,250 raise, or more, leaving plenty more for school purchases. Their financially blessed students will be doubly blessed with the state’s highest paid teachers along with new computers, books and other educational supplies the rest of Arizona’s schools can’t afford.
Results-based funding is designed to distribute $37.6 million to 15 to 17 percent of Arizona’s district and charter schools. Schools with fewer than 60 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch will get $225 per student, and schools with more than 60 percent of their students on FRL will get $400 per student. That sounds fair, giving more money to schools with more low income students. And it is reasonably fair, for year one, anyway. A little more than half of the money will go to schools with lower income students in the upcoming 2017-18 year, because that’s the way the law is written—for the first year. That distribution system stops the second year of the program. From then on, the money will be only go to schools with a state grade of A.
For the past few years as we’ve transitioned from the AIMS to the AzMERIT state test, Arizona hasn’t given out school grades. That’s why A-F grades can’t be used to determine who gets results-based funding the first year. When the grading system starts up again in the second year of the program, two things will be different from the way things were before. First, new items will be added to the grading rubric which will make state test scores a little less important. That will mean schools with lower income students who generally get lower state test scores will have a better chance of getting a higher state grade. Second, the number of A grades the state gives out will be cut almost in half. In 2014, more than 30 percent of Arizona’s schools got an A. In 2018-19 and following, the grading curve will change so only 15 to 17 percent of schools get an A. That has to happen. If every A school gets a slice of the $37.6 million results-based funding pie and there’s only enough pie for 15 to 17 percent of schools, that means you have to adjust the number of A schools to match the money.
Let’s look at those two changes together, the new features in the state’s A-F grading system which will boost the grades of some lower income schools and the fact that only half as many schools will get an A. It’s certain the modest changes in the grading system will help some D and F schools move into the C range and some C schools move into the B range. The new grading system might even help some low income schools that scored a B in 2014 get an A in 2019—if 30 percent of schools still made the cut. But they won’t make the 2019 cut unless they move into the top half of 2014’s A list schools since the bottom half will be dropping into the B range. For a school with low income students to go from a B in 2014 to the top half of 2014’s A list in 2019 will be as rare as a June snowstorm in Tucson. Here’s what’s more likely to happen. Those few low income schools that managed to make it into the A range in 2014—and there are a few—will find themselves dropping down to B’s in 2019 along with half the other schools that didn’t make it to the top of the heap. That means the number of schools with more than 60 percent on FRL that get the results-based funding will range somewhere between not many and none.
This year’s legislature has brought us two laws amounting to welfare for rich kids. The first gives everyone a voucher who attends private school, no matter how much money they have. The second gives schools attended by students from the most affluent families an extra $225 per student.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2017.
We should send the worst schools all the education money and just buy Chinese junk. Then we could stop this constant argument over who gets to hold all the education money. It is obvious it should be you.
Just keep saying it over and over and over again, David.
WELFARE FOR THE RICH!!!
WELFARE FOR THE RICH!!!
WELFARE FOR THE RICH!!!
Perhaps, no matter how deliberately misleading, how discriminatory, and how biased your “take” on education policy is, some gullible members of your audience who don’t bother to analyze your arguments will believe you just because they’ll figure if you’re confident enough to repeat it in blog after sad blog, it must be true.
Vouchers make per-pupil funding that could previously be applied only in public district and public charter schools “portable.” In most cases, they are used to extend the state’s support of K-12 education to high functioning institutions that are entirely worthy of public investment. That this support was previously offered in a discriminatory fashion to families willing to utilize certain institutions, but not to families who prefer to use other institutions (institutions which, in many cases, deliver higher quality academic instruction than the institutions that were publicly funded) is an injustice that needed to be corrected.
As for the “more funding to higher performing schools,” the way it has been structured is problematic. But, if we’re going to be completely honest, we’d have to acknowledge that this is also highly problematic: the notion that families that have chosen to structure their lives to provide the maximal amount of support to their children at home should be taxed to install expensive services in schools that compensate for other families’ unwillingness or inability to do so. If, for example, a family chooses to keep one parent at home to support children’s growth and development, they are making a choice — extremely costly to themselves in terms of total family income — that, if the at-home parent’s time is appropriately allocated to support the children, makes the job of educating those children easier and less expensive for the school that child attends. Should the taxes this family pays into the system be used to provide supplementary services for children of families with two parents working full time, who need after-care and perhaps tutoring support that a family with one parent at home does not need?
Education policy questions are complicated, much more so than simplistic analyses, tag phrases like “WELFARE FOR THE RICH!!!,” and vulgar appeals to emotion and / or prejudice make them out to be.
You are one long-winded fuck. Why is it every time that I decide against my better judgement to read your BS commentary that I read it anyway and Every time I Always regret that decision afterwards? I have figured out the answer. It is because you’re a long-winded fuck!
WELFARE FOR THE RICH!!!
Yes, that’s what the voucher system is All about. Maybe you don’t get it because your head is buried in the sand. God Forbid that you want to actually help those in need, not those who already have access to private/Christian/Catholic schools because of their income.
It’s definitely welfare for the rich, the rest of us will get the bone and no lube.
Whenever the word “choice” comes out, buyer beware. That is not a choice for the many (the 80% that “choose” public education) but for the few (that have a good 1/2 or 3/4 of the tuition for their favorite private institution to begin with). Welfare for the rich, cloaked in the language of choice is what this administration has to offer. When previous Superintendent Sanchez championed the award the district received for offering the most “choice” some of us thought he was doing the same thing. Unfortunately the biggest “choice” that people utilized under his administration was to leave, en masse, for charters, especially at the middle school level. Despite the machinations he used to try to hide it, and despite the enrollment lies told by his biggest Board cheerleader during her campaign, this continued a tradition that has plagued TUSD for a long time. Now it will need to be resolved in a considerably more difficult educational landscape.
The left is getting very selfish. They neglect to tell you that even after the wealthy spend large amounts of tuition money to get their children in better schools, they still have to fund the masses that are stuck in the public school swirl. You can’t discriminate based on income, if you want fairness. And hating the rich has never made them go away.
I guess all that you have left is name calling. Carry on.
Students have been exiting TUSD by the thousands for well over a decade, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo, not just during the Sanchez administration. The reason is because it has been, is being, and will be mismanaged. It has deeply imbedded problems with its middle management, its Board, and its institutional culture that seem to be reform-proof at this point. Talk to a few of the hapless former Superintendents (other than Sanchez) who tried to take the helm during the last decade some time and draw your own conclusions. When I have heard them, they’ve sounded a lot like another CEO of a Tucson public institution who has spoken honestly in public forums about the difficulties of trying to administer a massive underfunded public institution where the workers in the trenches are in shell shock over ongoing budget cuts and forced reorganizations and the long-term players within the bureaucracy have become accustomed to going their own way and ignoring the latest figure head installed atop the dysfunctional hierarchy.
Were you surprised when the new and improved Board majority filed, inappropriately, prematurely, for partial Unitary Status? I wasn’t. All any of the elected leaders in this district seem to want is to get out from under court oversight so they can go their own way with initiatives that have nothing to do with the kind of social justice concerns at the heart of the desegregation case. They want to grant UHS a separate site with a co-located middle school, establish a Fruchthendler to Sabino direct-feed pipeline, etc. Why would those concerned with social justice want increased enrollment in this district, i.e. to add more students to experience inequitable conditions? What reason, based on the management of the desegregation case for the past 40 years and more, do you have to believe the district’s way of responding to these concerns will ever change?
There are many families, who, with good reason, do not think it wise to entrust their children’s “educations” to an institution with these kinds of entrenched problems. Should they be penalized financially by losing state support for their children’s K-12 education when they decide to utilize well managed institutions that will deliver better education? Should the state be off the hook for providing support when families exit public districts or charters? That’s what happens without vouchers or tax credits. Students leave the public district / charter system, and the state gets somewhere in the neighborhood of $5K savings per year on the cost of educating that child. Whom does that benefit? Children in public schools? No, not unless the financial disincentive of having to lose all state support for your child’s K-12 education acts effectively to prevent families who want to exit the public system from exiting. If putting up financial obstacles to students leaving the public district and public charter systems is what is intended by anti-voucher advocacy, then there’s no valid argument against the notion that anti-voucher campaigners “want to use the children of other families as economic hostages to the dubious goal of supposedly ‘saving’ troubled public school districts.”
I’m sorry you find that offensive, but you have yet to provide a clear explanation of how exactly denying students attending certain (largely Roman Catholic) institutions any state support for their educations serves either the cause of social justice or the cause of delivering as excellent an education as possible to the young people in our communities, especially in a context where our largest local public school district is what it demonstrably and persistently is.
Marilyn Tucson:
What are you on?
The fact that you’re calling liberals selfish is name calling.
Quit being a hypocrite.
If we are concerned about the generally dismal state of our System of Public Education, we would not hesitate to supports efforts at improvement. We cannot continue with our heads in the sand, and, under the shibboleth, local control of Education watch passively as our System of Public Education becomes, internationally, at best, Second Rate!! The viability of our Democracy and National Security are in jeopardy.
Given the wide classroom instructional heterogeneity within Public Schools/Districts, it is necessary to have some State objective measure so as to determine if Students are being taught properly and/or effectively learning the required body of information per Subject Area. This is the sole purpose of Standardized Assessment Examinations. AzMerit is such an Assessment Examination and will indicate the effectiveness of the Schools/Districts Academic Program, so that, if necessary, remedial action can be taken; so as to ensure Teacher/Administrator Academic Accountability.
Two different visions:
1. Ensuring that the worst teacher in the worst school in the worst school district has a full classroom.
2. Providing so many choices for so long that every full classroom is evidence of a world class teacher.