Ah, grumpy cat. Still so funny and wonderful and ME.
But anyways. This week I was able to read a couple of interesting articles through the Chamber on Tuesday. One of them continued the discussion on initiative reform and used the recent marijuana bill to support its view. The article talked about how the fight over marijuana legislation proved that Arizona needs initiative reform. It addressed concerns about how some people thought that the "reforms would disenfranchise the undereducated" (Fowler). However, it dispelled that claim, saying that those who wanted to legalize marijuana last year advocated for their position by giving voters pages and pages of legal jargon rather than actual pros and cons of marijuana. Another issue the article pointed out was that when legislators make a mistake in a bill, they can always go back and fix it. However, under the Voter Protection Act, an initiative that voters have put together is practically untouchable, making changes impossible.
A lot of education made its way into this week as well. For instance, the public affairs meeting this week talked initially about education budget priorities. One of the big topics was results-based funding for schools. So far, we've seen that pumping money into bad schools isn't really working. Instead, in Arizona, we've decided to fund schools so we can better them through the growth of good schools rather than that of bad ones. This funding also helps to accelerate the number of students going to good schools.
It's also a good teacher retention strategy. Research shows that teachers are more likely to stay at schools where they believe they can make a difference and improve education for their students. Even if the pay is relatively low, teachers tend to stay at low-poverty high-performing schools more than at well-funded average-or-worse-performing schools.
One way to judge which schools get more funding and which ones don't is through the current definition of a successful school. Though we have the A through F letter grades for a school and we're giving the most funding to "A" schools, people acknowledge that the grading scale (which uses AzMERIT test scores) is pretty outdated. However, currently, this is the most efficient measure of performance that we have and that is what determines how much funding a school gets, if at all.
So, anyways, like I said, interesting stuff! Or at least it was interesting to me...
But I hope you liked learning about it too! Let me know if you have any questions in the comments. You're all amazing and I'll see you next week for another post!
Sources:
Fowler, Sheila Polk and Merilee. "Our Turn: Marijuana fight proves why Arizona needs ballot initiative reform." Azcentral. The Arizona Republic, 04 Apr. 2017. Web. 08 Apr. 2017.
