Education Week RSS Feed
John Huppenthal is the Arizona Department of Education schools superintendent.
On August 2, the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) released Arizona’s A-F letter grades for all district and charter schools. In accordance with ARS 15-241 the ADE is charged with attributing letter grades to every district and charter school in the state. These letter grades are principally based on the weighting of student performance...
Read More »
It’s back to school, and our Research and Evaluation team has been hard at work. During the 2011-2012 academic year, the legislature changed the labels for school categories based on student performance from the terms Excelling, Highly Performing, Performing Plus, Performing, and Underperforming, to easy-to-understand letter grades (A, B, C, D, and F)....
Read More »
As the school year comes to a close, I think it’s important to reflect on the past year. But it’s also a time to move forward. As we prepare for the coming year, I would like to share my vision on how we better prepareArizonastudents for career and college success. Each year, the economy...
Read More »
As the school year begins to wind down, it’s not too early for parents and summer school teachers to start thinking about how to engage students in reading activities throughout the summer. Research shows that the more a student reads, the more he or she becomes proficient at reading. A typical fifth-grade student who...
Read More »
Now that we have hit April, things are beginning to wind down legislatively at the state capital. As we gain clarity on which bills will ultimately reach Governor Brewer’s desk, we begin to shift focus to budget negotiations and how these will shake out for Arizona’s schools. As many of you know from past...
Read More »
Arizona has always been an independent state, imbued by a frontier spirit that embraces individual freedom while welcoming necessary reform and innovation. With 23 distinctly different Native American nations; the many social and economic challenges associated with a border state, and a vast geographic territory encompassing myriad income, ethnic, and education-level demographic strata, Arizona...
Read More »
The week of January 22 -28 marked the second annual National School Choice Week. All across the nation, school choice advocates and organizations, grassroots networks, parents, and students held hundreds of events to increase awareness of the importance of providing effective educational options for every child. Arizona, considered by many to be one of...
Read More »
In November the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading and Mathematics assessments were released. I was very happy with Arizona’s progress. The 2011 results show that Arizona Grade 4 and Grade 8 students continue to show an upward trend in NAEP scores for Mathematics and Reading – with fourth-grade students showing the...
Read More »
One thing I have learned after spending over 15 years traveling across Arizona speaking to parents is that, without exception, they all want a better future for their children. Arizona’s system of public school choice, robust charter school system, and tuition tax credit programs means that no matter where they live in our state,...
Read More »
