Hey D.C., we have school choice

For some time conservative scholars, most prominently Matt Ladner now with the Arizona Chamber Foundation, have pointed out that Arizona students have been outperforming those of other states in gains on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress test. By a lot.

In the local education debate, this has been greeted with suspicion or a yawn. If the data wasn’t about money, and pointing to the need for schools to have more of it, there just wasn’t much interest in the information.

Now, I support more funding more quickly for Arizona schools, including an increase in consumption taxes to pay for it. But I have found this lack of interest in the good news about how well Arizona students are performing curious and obtuse.

Perhaps that will change now that the trend has been noticed and documented by a national board overseeing the test.

The NAEP test is administered by the federal Department of Education to a large sample of students in every state. It is the only reliable comparison of performance among the states.

The test is overseen by a National Assessment Governing Board. The board is dominated by educators from the various states, seasoned with a few state politicians and representatives of outside interests.

The governing board recently released a short study hailing the fact that the gains of Arizona students on the NAEP test were roughly double the national average from 2005 to 2017. That was true for math in the fourth and eighth grades, and for reading in the same grades.

Now that the trend has been validated, and praised, by a national, mainstream educational organization, maybe it will finally become of some interest here in Arizona.

The question, of course, is why are Arizona students showing so much more improvement than students in other states?

The governing board’s paper attempts to answer that, but its postulate is implausible.

According to the governing board, the gains are likely attributable to Arizona adopting a tougher state test more aligned with the NAEP test. Along with a sharper focus on early literacy.

But Arizona’s tougher test, AzMERIT, was first used in 2015. Ladner has documented that the greater gains by Arizona students on the NAEP exam were already well established by then.

Moreover, since AzMERIT was introduced, Arizona students have shown little improvement on it. If the state test were driving gains on the national test, you’d expect to also see gains on the state test.

The governing board’s paper totally ignores the largest change, by far, in Arizona’s educational landscape during the period under study. From 2005 to 2017, the percentage of Arizona students attending charter schools increased from roughly 8 percent to 16 percent.

Arizona charter students outperform district students on the AzMERIT test in every grade and in every socio-economic category.

Ladner’s work, which should get much greater attention given the validation by the governing board on at least the trend, points toward a more plausible explanation.

According to Ladner, Arizona’s charter schools, taken alone, would rank as among the highest performing school systems in the country. But the gains are not only occurring in charter schools. Considered alone, Arizona district school students are also showing NAEP gains significantly above the national average.

The theory behind school choice is that competition for students will drive improved performance in all schools. The evidence in support of that has been thin because the existence of competition has been limited.

The following is at least plausible if not probable. Arizona is the first state in the union in which competition for students became broad enough to test the theory. And it is not just increased enrollment in charter schools. Arizona has open enrollment between district schools, which is widely availed.

And, so far, the Arizona experience suggests that the school choice theory is working, even in an environment of inadequate resources for all schools.

There are those taking aim at the multiple-site charter school systems that have been so successful in attracting students in Arizona, with a goal of largely reducing charter schools to standalone mom-and-pop operations.

It would be ironic, and tragic, if Arizona, having finally achieved scale in educational competition, and having experienced notable improvements in student learning, were to decide to shut it down.