From the people who brought you “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards” to replace “Common Core,” comes “Student Success Funding” to take the place of “Performance Funding.” The more the names change, the more the programs stay the same.
Gov. Jan Brewer and Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal got all kinds of flak from the right when they got behind the national “Common Core Standards.” (The left isn’t happy with the standards either, for different reasons, but that doesn’t bother Brewer and Huppenthal much). So Brewer issued an executive order changing the name to “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards,” which changed absolutely everything nothing.
In the Brewer budget last legislative session, she proposed money for Performance Funding, which would give a bonus to schools whose students scored high on the AIMS test. One of the few things educators know for sure: no matter where you are in the world, higher income students perform better on standardized tests than lower income students. So the Brewer plan meant schools with students from high income families would get more money, and schools with students from low income families would get less. Oh, and as an afterthought, schools whose scores improved would get a little extra too. That’s supposed to balance things out. It doesn’t.
Dr. David Garcia, an ed prof at ASU who’s running for Huppenthal’s Ed Supe job, completed a rigorous analysis of the plan. Sure enough, he found that Brewer’s Performance Funding plan was a redistribution of school funding upward, toward students who have all the economic and educational advantages and away from students who need it most. I took a less rigorous look at the plan and got nearly identical results.
How did Brewer approach the problem? In her State of the State Address Monday, she changed the program’s name to “Student Success Funding.” Presto! Now she’s rewarding “success” instead of “performance,” which, I guess, makes all the difference. She’s also asking the legislature for extra funding to pay for the program. Good luck with getting more ed funding from Republican legislators.
The early spin on the program is that it’s going to reward improvement more — that’s the part most likely to increase funding for low performing schools — and lower the amount that goes to the schools with high income students who get high AIMS scores. The change may make a bad program a bit less bad. We’ll know when they release the details. But based on what I’ve heard in meetings from the folks who formulate Brewer’s education agenda, I’m betting it’s no more than a minor tweak that will yield pretty much the same results as the original.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2014.
Who cares what she’ll call it. Cat Foothills will get Jan dollars and the “d” schools will get coal in their stocking.
Do they read any real research on VAM?
The Arizona report cards on schools (and districts) already count how much students improve their academic performance from year to year just as much as they count the actual performance itself. This is very different than the federal No Child Left Behind standards that do not consider academic growth at all. That makes the Arizona accountability regime far more progressive than the federal standard, since it honors the efforts students have made even if they do not meet all standards. For example, if a sixth grade student begins the school year reading at a second grade level and ends up the year at the fifth grade level that student has gained three years of learning in one school year. The state will recognize this as a major improvement and will reward the school for such an effort. On the other hand, under the federal rules the school only gets to count this child as one more failure since he/she still not meet standards. If the same sort of approach is used to hand out “performance funding” it will not result in a shifting of money from poor schools and poor districts to wealthy schools and districts.