What’s the value of a high school diploma in Arizona? These journalists looked into it

What’s the value of a high school diploma in Arizona?

Our next guests this morning are out with a new investigation that gets at the heart of that question. Evan Wyloge and Katie Wilcox are with The Beam at Arizona State University’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

They took a closer look at attainment levels and graduation rates in our state’s public schools — and found a growing gap.

They came into KJZZ's studios recently to tell The Show more about it.

Ayana Hamilton

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KJZZ

Full conversation

EVAN WYLOGE: In Arizona, we’ve seen over the last few years at least that the graduation rate has climbed, and we’re now at 80% of high school students who graduate.

But at the same time, when we look at the 11th grade standardized test for math and for English language arts, we see that there’s only about a third of students who are actually passing those tests and meeting the state’s level that they call proficient. So it’s 40% for English language arts and 30% for math.

LAUREN GILGER: And that’s a pretty significant gap there between how many kids are passing those tests and how many are then graduating, sometimes not very long after.

EVAN WYLOGE: Yeah, and those numbers, they’ve kind of bounced up and down a little bit over the last few years, but they just remain really low, and there’s that really big gap between those numbers.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so a very interesting thing. This is especially true for low-income students.

KATIE WILCOX: Yeah, when we started to look at and see what are some of the reasons why this might be happening, and a lot of people had different opinions.

Obviously, some educators will blame the test itself, but what we started to look at is, OK, but there is this very, very big gap when you just isolate students who are from low-income households. So these are the students who are getting free or reduced lunch, basically, is the way that the state categorizes them.

And that’s been true historically, and that is sticking around, and it has been for years and years and years, this very strong correlation between poverty and proficiency.

LAUREN GILGER: So we have ways of telling in this state, right, which schools are doing well, which schools are not, right? We have this letter grade, this A through F system, which theoretically should give folks a window into this, right? If many of their students are not passing these tests, that should be reflected there. Is it?

KATIE WILCOX: Not really. Frankly, poverty is a part of that system as well, and so this is one of the things. When you just look at proficiency, what the state Board of Education experts will say is if you only isolated proficiency and graded schools on that, we’d have much lower-graded schools.

Part of the reason why the state doesn’t do that anymore is that 10 years ago they identified that if you’re just basing it on proficiency, poverty plays such a strong role that you’re going to have much lower-graded schools in the higher-poverty districts.

And so they said, “OK, well, how can we be more holistic?” And they pulled in all these other categories and factors, and now proficiency almost seems to minimize how much that is impacting your letter grade.

LAUREN GILGER: So you can, as you’re reporting, have a school with an A grade that has pretty low test results.

KATIE WILCOX: Very low test results, and we saw that even sometimes — Evan, you can talk about how we saw these schools actually decrease in some cases their proficiency scores and still get a higher letter grade.

EVAN WYLOGE: Yeah. We’ve heard from some of these districts that they have figured out kind of how to boost those scores by taking advantage of some of those other factors that are being included in those letter scores.

And for parents out there, they can go and look up the letter grade for their school and for their district, but they might not dig in to all those different factors because it does take some time, and that’s where we did a lot of our reporting was looking into these factors, but also comparing those to the standardized test scores.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, and I can say as a parent, that is a confusing process. I remember looking at the letter scores and saying, “What does this mean? How do I tell what school’s good and if I live in a district with good schools?”

KATIE WILCOX: It does, and it can be really confusing. And what the educators will tell us and what teachers that we talked to said is that, “Look, the tests themselves, maybe students aren’t going to do great on any given test any given day, but we’re trying to grow them. And if you’re coming into my school behind, if you’re coming into ninth grade reading at a sixth grade reading level, I get you up to eighth grade by the time you’re done with the ninth grade thing, I’ve grown you two letter grades, you’re still below the standard.”

What they’re trying to communicate is like, “Look, we’re teaching kids in these schools, they’re growing and developing.” But at the end of the day, these standardized test scores are showing us that we’re still having this huge gap between the numbers that are meeting what the state has chosen to be its standardized test, and the gaps are even worse for the kids who are already the most vulnerable. So what does that set us up for?

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Well, so what does it set us up for, right? You spoke with education advocates, experts. What do folks have to say about this gap and how it seems to be persisting?

KATIE WILCOX: Well, one of the biggest problems is that if you have really low educational outcomes, then it’s going to be harder for you to have upward economic mobility. So if you’re born poor and then you’re in a community that maybe isn’t giving you the same advantages and opportunities, once you graduate, the options to you might be more limited.

And one big problem is that people have looked at college as this way to build up, but what we are still seeing is a really high college dropout rate. And what that means is that you’re saddled with more debt without the degree. So that’s a big concern for some of the education advocates we talked to.

And they’re saying, “OK, let’s point to other interventions that we can do earlier that we know are going to help students get to those levels where they can read and do math in the ways that we really need them to, so that they can have more success not only in college, but also in a career or whatever path they choose to take.”

LAUREN GILGER: But is that about funding essentially, and a funding level we still see is very low in Arizona as compared to the rest of the country?

KATIE WILCOX: I mean, yes. And that’s where it gets to be a little bit more political, but I will say, even speaking with Republicans, everyone knows there’s an issue with teacher retention. If you’re not keeping a teacher around, then you’re going to have these unstable classes, and your students are going to have underqualified substitutes, or they’re going to have a different teacher every maybe even semester in some cases.

And that’s a funding problem. Paying teachers to keep them around is a funding issue. Early childhood development, that’s a funding issue. Tutors can be a funding issue, right? There’s all of these different programs, and what we saw this year is that because funding is tied to enrollment in the state of Arizona, our enrollment-based funding for the state decreased by $90 million for public schools.

Now, there’s some change for inflation, so net cost, there will be debate over whether that was enough, but at the end of the day, we still remained the lowest per pupil as of the latest review by the National Education Association.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me end with both of you with some bigger-picture questions about what this says about the state of our education system in Arizona, maybe what it says about the future of the state, right.

Does all of this kind of raise the question of what is the point of these proficiency standards, of these tests, if most students aren’t passing them and we’re graduating them anyway?

EVAN WYLOGE: Yeah. Well, the state is right now debating some options about how they might adjust the letter grade part of this, and they haven’t settled on it, and they’re continuing to meet and discuss. And we’re tracking that. The proficiency tests, I don’t hear, when I talk to policymakers, any real plan to increase those proficiencies across the board.

A lot of times what we will hear is that this is the fault of bad teaching, bad educational environments, and that by opening up enrollment, which allows parents to move their students from one district to another, one school to another, that we’re going to introduce competition that’s going to increase the outcomes. And it’s hard to tell whether that is effective or has — is having that intended outcome.

And the other thing that comes to mind as we talk about the impact for the whole state, just across the board as a workforce, Arizona has an interest in making sure that we have well-educated students coming out of the system who can fill good jobs and attract technical companies that want to come here or any thriving industry.

LAUREN GILGER: The quality of the education system has so much to say about the economy, right, Katie? How does the question of the value of a high school diploma in Arizona play into this?

KATIE WILCOX: Yeah, people are questioning that. And there’s kind of a double-edged sword here because Arizona’s also pretty low in terms of actually graduating students as well. So we’re too low on that, but then also, even educators who know that their students are getting really low test scores want those to get better because it does show that they’re learning.

So you can be critical of the test, but at the end of the day, everyone’s goal should be to give the most education to the most students, regardless of the home that they were born into.

LAUREN GILGER: All right. That is Katie Wilcox and Evan Wyloge, professors of practice at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Evan’s the data editor, Katie’s a reporter for The Beam, which is out of ASU’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. Katie, Evan, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for your reporting here. Appreciate it.

EVAN WYLOGE: Thanks so much.