The Arizona State Board of Education started the process of updating the state’s school letter grading calculation at the May 23 board meeting, and it appears the Bush Foundation might be driving the process. Because Governor Doug Ducey has not kept his commitment to bring change to the State Board of Education, the Bush’s latent fingerprints can be found from the start.
In a press release issued by the Arizona State Board of Education, the Board included an endorsement for the process from Bush sycophant and Executive Director of A for Arizona, Lisa Graham Keegan.
Graham Keegan pushed the false data driven decision-making narrative by stating that “parents need an honest indicator of how their child’s school is performing.” She then made the grand claim that while Arizona’s grading systems works, “we also know how to make it better.”
To that end, the Board heard from Dr. Christy Hovanetz, Senior Policy Fellow at the Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. She was selling the cookie cutter approach sold to other states.
Hovanetz walked Board members through a proposed process to make the accountability system even less meaningful than it already is, including calculating student growth compared to standards and “setting an aspirational school grading scale with an automatic increase to raise the bar.”
One parent told the ADI, “Parents are tired and distrustful of the one size fits all decisions made in AZ education. There is little reason to believe AZ’s A-F accountability won’t be a carbon copy of the dozen other states that already bought into the Bush cookie cutter plans. A one size fits all rating system will further cement keeping the failing Common Core Standards. Will parents be included in updating the letter grading since it’s supposed to be FOR parents to use in school choice decision-making? If not, why would a tool FOR parents not include parents? If it’s up to SBE it will be same old same old nothing new under the sun. Status quo and establishment decision making.”
“I personally think this whole A-F stuff is more accountabaloney,” continued the parent. “Sen. Lamar Alexander has repeatedly said the intent of ESSA was to send power back down to the states. He clashes with Sec King who is acting on his own accord making law rather than interpreting it. The question is, will AZ take the power to lead in policy decision-making or simply be complicit in complying with the Feds out of fear as it always has?”