3 big changes lawmakers made for schools

Could lawmakers have done more for Arizona schools this session? Undoubtedly.

While the focus of that discussion has been on funding (and for good reason), let’s not overlook the significant policy changes lawmakers made this year. Here are the three most consequential:

Everyone hates AzMERIT, Arizona’s mess of a standardized test. It takes way too much class time to administer and is conducted at the end of the year, offering little valuable information to help students improve.

Senate Bill 1346 may not change that, at least in the interim, but it leaves the door open for the state Board of Education to come up with something better down the road.

Earlier this spring, the feds essentially threw out the state’s plan to allow schools to choose from a menu of assessments, saying it violates a federal requirement that students must all take the same test. SB 1436 directed the state board to come up with a new statewide assessment and menu of assessments.

Based on their plans, it looks like we’ll be stuck with AzMERIT for the next couple of years (darn). But Arizona is now poised to ditch it in 2021 for something else.

What will that new test (or tests) look like? There’s still a lot to work out.

I don’t know why Senate Bill 1071, which abandons the statewide teacher evaluation process, has largely been ignored. It passed earlier this session with wide bipartisan support.

Arizona’s evaluation system uses a mix of standardized test scores, in-class evaluations and surveys to place teachers in four levels of proficiency. But critics said it was a time-suck that offered little insight on teachers’ strengths and areas where they could improve. Nearly all teachers were classified as effective or highly effective, the two highest classifications.

SB 1071 still requires schools to assess teachers at least once a year and adopt a system for doing so. But they must put less weight on standardized test scores than the statewide system did. Because the assessments will now vary by district, there also will be no statewide reporting requirements on teachers’ ratings.

While it may be smart to ditch a system that many clearly thought wasn’t working, you’d think such a wide-ranging bill would have started a wider conversation about teacher quality. It didn’t, and that’s a shame.

We know that having an effective teacher in a classroom is the most important thing we can do to improve education. Yet if we don’t know what makes teachers effective (and, largely, we don’t), no district will ever be able to fairly evaluate those traits.

Arizona has a horrible track record of teaching English language learners. Senate Bill 1014 could change that by cutting in half (or more) the time ELL students must spend in these programs.

Proponents (and there are many) say this change should help students learn English faster because they would be immersed with native speakers. And because students wouldn’t be pulled out of their regular classrooms for half the day, they’d have time to take more of the science, math and art classes they regularly missed.

SB 1014 gives school districts far more discretion on how they teach ELL, allowing schools to adopt the lessons and setup that works best for their students.

This is how it should be. Arizona’s ELL requirements have long been too rigid and divorced from reality – and that has hurt the very students it was supposed to help.