Francisco Peña contemplates a math problem at an AIMS workshop at Pueblo High Magnet School.

After many years as a political observer and erstwhile practitioner, I usually understand why what I think is sensible policy doesn’t get enacted.

Often, there is some interest group opposed. In our political system, intensity matters. An organized group that cares a lot can usually carry the day against policies whose benefits are diffuse.

Our political system also is set up to make big reforms difficult. Incremental change at the margins is more the norm. And usually, that’s a good thing.

And not at all infrequently, my views are in the minority, and not infrequently a very small minority at that.

Nevertheless, the failure of policy to move in the direction I think sensible about a high school graduation test in Arizona perplexes me. It doesn’t disadvantage any organized interest group. It’s not that big of a reform. And I think most people would agree with me, although I might be wrong about that.

Nevertheless, Arizona’s high school graduation test remains stuck in a place that makes no sense, and reform efforts, to the extent they are gaining traction, move in the wrong direction.

Arizona has a high school graduation test, AIMS, that all students must pass to receive their diploma (ignoring the temporizing fudging mechanisms the Legislature has adopted and extended).

However, the test doesn’t really determine whether a student knows what a high school graduate is expected to know. Instead, it is set at a 10th grade level.

So, Arizona can be relatively confident that its high school graduates know what a sophomore in high school should know. Wouldn’t it make more sense to determine if they know what a high school graduate should know?

I think Arizona should have a high school exit exam that actually tests what high school graduates should know. If passage were made a graduation requirement, however, the failure rate would be, at least at first, politically unacceptably high.

So, I’ve proposed a two-tier diploma: a certificate of achievement, representing passage of the test; and a certificate of completion, representing passage of all other graduation requirements but failure to pass the exit exam.

No one would be denied graduation because of the test. But employers and universities could place appropriately differential value on the two diplomas.

An AIMS Task Force formed by the Legislature recently released its recommendations. It said, much to my surprise, that AIMS should remain a 10th grade test and should remain a graduation requirement. However, it should be supplemented by two “college and career readiness” tests in the freshman and junior years.

Now, that would mean that there would still be no way of knowing whether an Arizona high school graduate actually knows what a high school graduate should know.

The desire for new “college and career readiness” tests issues from two growing fallacies.

First, that all students should graduate high school ready for college. Second, that what is necessary to prepare for college is the same thing as is necessary for jobs that don’t require a college degree.

If college is to be what it should be, and not just the new high school, then it should require cognitive abilities and a keen interest in hard academic work that just isn’t universal. And the math skills that an aspiring plumber or carpenter needs just aren’t the same as for an aspiring physicist or economist.

This is an overreaction to the commendable desire not to prematurely track kids, and particularly to avoid lower expectations for low-income and minority students.

But there are plenty of college readiness tests that already exist, and the entry requirements for Arizona universities are not opaque. Avoiding low-expectations is a matter of exhortation, not new tests.

Arizona does, however, need a high school graduation test that actually tests high school graduate knowledge.

Getting one shouldn’t be this difficult.

Robert Robb, an Arizona Republic columnist, writes about public policy and politics in Arizona. E-mail: robert.robb@arizonarepublic.com

Sari Horwitz, Tucson Citizen High School Student Achievement Award recipient in 1975, holds the plaque inscribed with decades' worth of winners' names, including hers. BELOW LEFT: The guitar-playing 17-year-old Horwitz in a photograph accompanying a story announcing her winning the award. She said she was thinking about pursuing a career in political journalism. Boy, did she ever. BELOW RIGHT: She accepts the award from Citizen executives.

In 1957, when the Tucson Citizen set out to pick the top high school student in the city that year, the editors may have thought it was possible to choose just one teenager who was the very best.

What this project has proved through more than half a century is that local schools are filled with caring, intelligent, thoughtful young people who have been, and will continue to be, fabulous leaders and contributors to our world.

Many past winners have gone into law or medical professions. Some have taken jobs that help the underprivileged.

Sari Horwitz, the 1975 Student Achievement Award winner and an investigative reporter at The Washington Post, has won three Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent just last year. She was nominated for one this year, as well.

The nomination was for a 13-part series with another reporter on the murder of Federal Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy. The series prompted Washington, D.C., police last fall to reopen the7-year-old case. In early March, they arrested a man the stories had focused on.

The top journalism prize last year went to the 11-member Washington Post team Horwitz was on that covered the Virginia Tech shootings, the deadliest campus massacre in U.S. history.

In 2002, she won a Pulitzer for a series uncovering the District of Columbia government’s role in the deaths of children placed in protective care. In 1999, her first Pulitzer, the Pulitzer board’s Gold Medal for public service, went to Horwitz and four colleagues at the Post for a five-part series on the high rate of police shootings in the District of Columbia.

Winning such big awards hasn’t kept her from remembering the one she received from the Citizen almost 34 years ago.

As a senior at Tucson High, it was the biggest award she had ever won.

In 1975 she was a teenager who had never been back East and was more than a little nervous to know that in a few months she would be on her way to Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia.

“The big award from my hometown newspaper and the front-page story about me sent me off with confidence,” she said.

Horwitz, who graduated from Bryn Mawr and then from Oxford, said she is sad to see the end of the Tucson Citizen, and the end of the Student Achievement Award.

“In these hard economic times, especially in the newspaper business, it’s wonderful to see that the hometown newspaper continued to give out these awards. It’s a big honor for the recipients and their families,” she said.

The Citizen used to give winners watches. For a brief time, it changed to gift certificates, and, in the last few years, $500 scholarships.

It rarely was easy to choose who would get that scholarship.

By the time we got to the handful of finalists who would come in for interviews, we were overwhelmed by the breadth of knowledge and experiences one young person could cram into four years of high school. In 2000, 2003 and 2005, the Citizen chose two winners each.

In just the last few years, we have had winners who have started organizations, been to Africa to teach children English, and had to flee a hostile homeland for speaking out against political injustice.

We expect that among our winners, we may have a future chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and maybe even a president of Iraq.

Super families

Throughout the past 51 years, a handful of families have been great producers of students nominated for the award. Two pairs of siblings have won the award. And four times one family has had a winner (or winners) and a finalist.

Duoc Ngoc and Nga Thuy Duoug, both high school teachers in Vietnam, and their children fled that war-torn country and came to Tucson just before the fall of Saigon in 1975.

Daughters Thuy Ngoc and Thu Mai won in 1988 and 1990, respectively, and son Quang was a finalist in 1989.

T. Herman and Teddy K. Moore raised two winners, Julia in 1980 and Eric in 1984. Gabriela and Frank Konarski’s son John was one of two winners in 2000 and daughter Patricia was a finalist in 1998.

When we were interviewing Jessica (Miller) Hartley in 2007, 10 years after she won the award, her sister, Rebecca Miller was one of our finalists. Their parents are Dane and Mary Miller.

Another Vietnamese family, headed by Ho Cam Thai and Canh Thi Phan, had a daughter, Hong Anh, who won in 1996 and a son, Hai Anh, who was finalist in 1993.

Early on, before we named finalists, the Rev. John and Hazel Coatsworth had three children nominated: David in 1966, Wendy in 1972 and Cindy in 1977. David won the award.

Super schools

Catalina Magnet High has had the most winners, 11, from the second contest in 1958, won by Robert Kirk Young, to the 2004 winner, Mariana Gramajo-Sherman.

Tucson High had the second-most winners at seven: The first winner from THS was Emma Gee; its most recent winner was Katherine “Kata” Pettit in 2003.

Desert Christian High School, whose students rank extremely high in volunteerism, had two winners in the past three years: Carina Groves and Ali Rawaf.

The contest is the longest project the newspaper has had in its more than 138 years of publication.

In 1964, Jon Hoffman said he wanted to become a dentist. He did, practicing here for 31 years before retiring in 2005.

The award “made me feel very good about myself. I had worked very hard to earn it.” And 45 years later, “I still have the watch the Citizen gave me. It’s had a lot of wear, but I can still read the inscription.”

Some who didn’t win have lived up to the promise we saw in them as nominees. Hundreds of them, we’re sure. We’ve heard from a few.

Lauren Johnston Lowe, a 1998 nominee, guards children’s rights as a lawyer in the Child and Family Protective Service division of the state Attorney General’s Office.

Jack Gillum, a 2002 nominee, is database editor for USA TODAY, the nation’s largest newspaper, with a daily readership of more than 3.5 million.

We thank all the nominees through the years who showed us what teens really are like and how they planned to make our world better. We’re sad we cannot bring you many more years of examples.

Citizen file photo

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Year: Recipient, School

1957: Emma Gee, Tucson High

1958: Robert Kirk Young, Catalina

1959: Russell Sidney Nielsen, Sunnyside

1960: Margaret Ann King, Salpointe Catholic

1961: John Moffatt, Catalina

1962: James R. Davis, Catalina

1963: Joel M. Vavich, Tucson High

1964: Jon A. Hoffman, Catalina

1965: Diana Lee Baum, Flowing Wells

1966: David R. Coatsworth, Pueblo

1967: Jennie Tom, Flowing Wells

1968: Douglas Barry Wilson, Rincon

1969: James Wood, Salpointe Catholic

1970: May Gin, Flowing Wells

1971: Carol Gilman, Catalina

1972: David Galligan, Catalina

1973: David W. Quinto, Canyon del Oro

1974: Douglas R. Linkhart, Palo Verde

1975: Sari Horwitz, Tucson High

1976: Mark Barker, Amphitheater

1977: Thomas R. Harrell, Tucson High

1978: Wayne E. Yehling, Tucson High

1979: Bari Weick, Tucson High

1980: Julia Elise Moore, Amphitheater

1981: Heidi Van Voris, Sabino

1982: Lynn Marcus, Catalina

1983: Daryl Clarke Johnson, Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind

1984: Eric J. Moore, Amphitheater

1985: Fong Sau Tom, Palo Verde

1986: Tinamarie Federico, Pueblo

1987: Flint Callaway, Sahuarita

1988: Thuy Ngoc Duong, Santa Rita

1989: Brad Alan Chvatal, Sahuaro

1990: Thu Mai Duong, Santa Rita

1991: Ross Crowley, Flowing Wells

1992: Shannon Clark, Catalina

1993: Wendelyn Julien, Amphitheater

1994: Francisco Manuel Hernandez, Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind

1995: Julie Martin, Desert View

1996: Hong Anh Thai, Catalina

1997: Jessica Miller, Flowing Wells

1998: Clair Donovan, Catalina

1999: Heather Ayn Davis, Immaculate Heart

2000: John Konarski, Desert View; Alia Gecobe Peera, Santa Rita

2001: Jennifer Musty, Salpointe Catholic

2002: Marcella Marie Acosta, Santa Rita

2003: Christopher Courneen, Pueblo High; Katherine “Kata” Pettit, Tucson High

2004: Mariana Gramajo-Sherman, Catalina

2005: Annalyn Rose Censky, Salpointe Catholic High; Kevin Joseph Lopez, Ha:Sañ Preparatory and Leadership School

2006: Carina Groves, Desert Christian High

2007: Amber Rose Horvath, St. Gregory College Preparatory School

2008: Ali Rawaf, Desert Christian High

Tucson-area districts are worried about losing capital funds saved for new schools and other improvements. The loans, registered warrants, come from the county treasurer’s office and districts pay interest on them.

The budget deal, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer on Thursday, closes a $650 million budget deficit for the current fiscal year by taking $400 million from the school districts and universities and using $250 million in federal stimulus funding.

It pushes $100 million of state aid for universities and $300 million of state payments to school districts into next fiscal year.

Sunnyside was expecting $6.4 million Friday, spokeswoman Monique Soria said, “and now we won’t get it until next fiscal year.”

Another wrinkle: Districts that have saved money exceeding 4 percent of their maintenance and operations budgets, which is the state cap, will not get the money at all because the plan requires districts to pay back their share of the $300 million from the excess funds.

The Tucson Unified School District, which had expected $32 million Friday, doesn’t have carryover money the state can “sweep,” spokeswoman Chyrl Hill Lander said.

Neither does Marana Unified, said Chief Financial Officer Dan Contorno. Still, he’s worried, based on the wording of the legislation, that other funds may be at risk.

Marana has about $3 million in carry-forward funds in unrestricted and soft capital: money being saved for things like new schools, textbooks and replacing buses that break down.

“I think the Legislature intended to protect the 4 percent in M&O (maintenance and operation) plus any balances in unrestricted and soft capital, but that’s not the way it’s worded,” Contorno said.

Amphi’s Todd Jaeger, associate to the superintendent regarding legal counsel, had similar concerns.

“This could impact our programs and our schools that have wisely and appropriately accrued capital funds over time to enable them to make large purchases,” he said.

As for the University of Arizona, roughly $40 million in state aid will be held back until the fiscal year that begins July 1. Johnny Cruz, director of media relations, said UA will have to rely on cash reserves maintained by some of its self-sustaining operations such as the bookstore, residence halls and the Student Union.

Citizen Staff Writer Eric Sagara contributed to this article.

Parents and other citizens are often frustrated by certain policies in public schools.

Arizona, for example, for several years has required students to pass Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards in order to receive a high school diploma.

An exception, called “augmentation,” allows students who fail the test to get a diploma, provided their grades are good and they take remedial courses in math, English or both.

The problem has been that students, parents and even teachers have not always known about this important exception or how students can take advantage of it. Confusion results.

The Center on Education Policy, an independent Washington, D.C., advocacy and research organization, studied policies for at-risk students and English-language learners in Arizona during the 2006-07 school year.

Researchers conducted 364 interviews with students, teachers, administrators and parents at five high schools in southern Arizona.

Three Arizona policies in particular were the focus: AIMS and augmentation, the Arizona English Language Learner Assessment and the written. individualized compensatory plan (a learning plan for English-language learners who have been classified as “fluent” in English but are not making progress).

Serious problems were found with understanding and implementing all three policies.

In addition to the confusion about the augmentation policy, many teachers believed English-language learners passing AZELLA were not necessarily ready for mainstream classrooms, let alone passing high school exit exams.

Once students pass AZELLA, in principle, they are not qualified to receive any language service; AZELLA becomes a legitimate excuse to deprive students of desperately needed services.

Under such circumstances, it is natural that some schools create their own rules of classification and manage to subsidize programs without funding from the state.

Legal arguments, such as Flores v. Arizona, should not be surprising, because the state’s identification, classification and funding system is simply not working for students, teachers and schools.

Another problem area is Arizona’s written individualized compensatory plan. Teachers are to specify learning goals for struggling students to help with their academic progress.

This is a really good idea when a couple of students in each class need such service. But when a school has to write individual plans for more than 700 students, as in some of the schools reported in the study, this well-intended policy turns out to be unrealistic.

This program was abandoned by some schools because they did not have sufficient staff, resources or knowledge to put it into practice.

Policy design is not just theory; this individualized plan program is an object lesson in how idealistic design can contribute to impractical implementation.

The lesson from our work in Arizona couldn’t be clearer: State policies may not only fail in achieving their goals, but also may bring unexpected consequences to students and schools.

CEP’s report captures this reality during 2006-07 and describes a wide range of reactions among teachers and school staff.

We hope, for the students, parents, teachers and other citizens of Arizona, the situation has improved.

But the broader lesson is that the state government and local school boards should make sure their policies make sense when implemented together and don’t conflict with one another.

They should also be sure that teachers and local administrators have the capacity to carry out those policies.

Otherwise, there will be confusion in the public and frustration in the schools.

Arizona is not alone in having school policies that do not fit well together and in requiring policies when there is little or no capability to carry them out.

But not being alone should not be an excuse. Policymakers must make sense out of what we ask our schools to do.

Jack Jennings is president and CEO of the Center on Education Policy. Ying Zhang is a CEP research associate.

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More online

To read the full report, Conflicts Between State Policy and School Practice: Learning from Arizona’s Experience with High School Exam Policies, go http://www.cep-dc.org and look under High School Exit Exams.

Chandler Republican Rep. Steve Yarbrough says the proposed legislation would create new individual and corporate tax credits for donations for tuition grants for disabled and foster children attending private schools.

Yarbrough says the proposal is a reaction to a March Arizona Supreme Court ruling that overturned voucher programs for disabled and foster children. The court previously upheld an existing state individual income tax credit.

A Brewer spokesman did not immediately return a call for comment.

And there is another lesson: One size definitely does not fit all. What is best for one school is not right for another – and the only way to know that is to ask people closest to the students.

Faced with the likelihood of having to make massive budget cuts, TUSD Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen tried something very different. Instead of working with the TUSD board and her top aides to make the cuts, Fagen turned the responsibility over to individual schools.

Site councils – consisting of parents, teachers, principals and staff – were asked to propose ways of dealing with cuts of 10 percent and 18 percent. Because the Legislature is dawdling on adopting a state budget, it is not yet known how deep the education cuts will be.

There is no easy way to deal with the “smaller” cuts of “only” 10 percent. But the site councils came up with a range of ideas that show those working closest to the schools have a deep understanding of what can be eliminated if worst comes to worst.

Two schools that now share a principal with two other schools, decided they didn’t need a principal at all. The site councils at Holladay Intermediate Magnet and Richey Elementary schools decided the best way for them to cut costs was to let lower-paid assistant principals be in charge.

Other schools had other priorities. Alice Vail Middle School opted to make deep cuts to its supply budget. Counselors, librarians and monitors were endangered at all schools – yet some schools felt it was important to keep them and others did not.

Many high schools said they would do away with campus monitors and funding for fine arts.

Some cuts are troubling, such as the possible elimination of arts classes. But as long as site councils are representative of all parents and the cuts don’t eliminate programs required by the state, individual schools should be given as much latitude as possible to best meet the needs of their students.

This marks the first time that site councils have been able to make budget decisions for their own schools. And even though most of the decisions will be grim, those choices are better made by the people in the trenches, not by administrators at 1010 E. 10th St.

We hope legislators will come to their collective senses and find ways to mitigate the cuts to schools. Education must be in the top echelon of state spending responsibilities – and that can happen if lawmakers are willing to get as creative as the site councils did.

Fagen took a risk in turning such critical budget decisions over to site councils. But her confidence in those parents and teachers has been rewarded with laudable creativity.

Betsy Custard’s 12-year-old Cammie attends ASCEND Academy, a private school in Prescott for children with autism.

In March, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a voucher system used by nearly 500 families across the state to help pay tuition at private schools was unconstitutional. That figure included about 300 families of children with special needs; the rest are families with foster children.

While some families benefiting from the vouchers say private schools are the best place for their children, others say that public schools can and do work effectively with special-needs children.

Amanda DeBesk said that Walker Butte has helped her son develop in ways that she didn’t think possible just five years ago.

Most of Gunner’s day is spent on motor skills – on exercises such as wiggling his toes in a bin of rice or jumping into a pile of foam padding. He works with a speech therapist once a week.

“They’ve really worked well with him. On top of the autism, he’s also very shy,” she said. “They took his shyness into account, and now he’s coming around and interacting with the other students and adults.”

Custard, a special education teacher in the Prescott Unified School District, uses a voucher to send Cammie to ASCEND. She said Cammie went to public school in the Humboldt Unified School District for three years, but she moved her to ASCEND because an aide assigned to look after her daughter and other students couldn’t provide the attention she needed.

“If ASCEND isn’t here, I’d have to consider whether or not I would send her to school,” Custard said.

Chris Thomas, director of legal services for the Arizona School Boards Association, said that private schools aren’t necessarily the answer for parents of children with special needs.

“It’s the school’s responsibility to educate these children, and if they can’t do it themselves they make other accommodations,” he said. “They (parents) just don’t have the absolute right to say they want to go to a different school.”

Thomas said that for each special-needs student, a group including three or four teachers, therapists and the parents develops an individualized education plan that sometimes calls for private school if that works better for a certain child.

“We’re not going back to the dark ages here,” Thomas said. “The vouchers came into place in 2006; we’ve been educating these kids for over 100 years.”

Starting June 1 and running through July 24, free breakfast and lunch will be served to kids 18 and younger who live within the district’s boundaries, according to a district news release.

Breakfast will be from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. and lunch served from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the the following locations:

• Billy Lane Lauffer Middle School, 5385 E. Littletown Road

• Challenger Middle School, 100 E. Elvira Road

• Craycroft Elementary School, 5455 E. Littletown Road

• Gallego Basic Elementary School, 6200 S. Hemisphere Place

• Liberty Elementary School, 5495 S. Liberty Ave.

• Santa Clara Elementary School, 6910 S. Santa Clara Ave.

• Sierra Middle School, 5801 S. Del Moral Blvd.

• Sunnyside High School, 1725 E. Bilby Road

• San Xavier Indian Community Education Center, 1960 Wa:k Lane

Margaret Wilch, a science teacher at Tucson High Magnet School, will have six of her students at the fair: Angela Schlegel, Mahwish Khalid, Negin Nematollahi, Michael Wallace, Emily Derks and Alice Glasser.

Also attending this week’s fair in Reno, Nev., are Ebaa Al-Obeidi from Canyon del Oro High School, and Martin Lopez and Mario Valdez, both from Rio Rico High School.

The nine students are the most to ever represent southern Arizona in the world’s largest precollege science contest.

Congratulations to all of them. They are among those who will lead us into the next generation of scientific exploration.

Maggie Shafer will be assistant superintendent for elementaries; Jim Fish, assistant superintendent for middle schools.

The newly created jobs, which will pay between $95,000 and $120,000 annually with a possible $10,000 performance bonus, will include more responsibilities than chief academic officers had, said Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen.

The governing board on Tuesday night voted unanimously for these two appointments, and for three principals:

• Joe, Hermann, acting principal at Banks Elementary, 3200 S. Lead Flower, will become its permanent principal next year.

• Santa Rita High Assistant Principal Frank Armenta will be Cholla High Magnet principal;

• Paul De Weerdt, Pueblo Magnet High assistant principal will become Mansfeld Middle School principal.

In other action the board voted 4-0, with member Adelita Grijalva out of the room, to allow the possibility of a reduction in salaries if Legislative cuts are “substantially” more than the expected worst-case cut of $45 million for 2009-10.

Also, the board majority rejected by a 4-1 vote, a plan by member Bruce Burke to cut the 3.2-person governing board office staff by one full-time employee and one part-time one.

Trimming that office also was a recommendation of auditors the board hire last year.

Burke, who said he wasn’t “making this decision lightly,” said the cuts would bring the board staff in line with comparable staffs in Arizona and across the nation and would save the district $75,000,.

But member Miguel Cuevas said the board should go along with a 12.8 percent cut for $33,000 proposed by the district director of staff services. That cut is being done by decreasing overtime and supplies and discontinuing dues to the National School Boards Association. “I think Mr. Burke is incorrect and missing the bus completely,” Cuevas said. “It’s the employees that make this district.”

But Burke said the board should “set an example” and make the staff cuts plus the reduction in overtime, supplies and dues. “We’d save $100,000.”

Board President Judy Burns said comparison’s can’t be made between TUSD’s board staff and others because TUSD’s takes on more responsibilities. “We’ve already given up one full-timer,” she said. “Our staff archives everything that happens here. No other district does that.”

Clerk Mark Stegeman said the board office also works collaboratively with union groups. He said Burke’s plan “contains merit, but is premature.”