Under its charter-school program, Arizona allows individual education providers--both for-profit and nonprofit--to contract with the state to educate children. The program is generally considered the most ambitious in the country.
Free from most of the restraints of the state's labyrinthine Education Code, charter schools have an undeniable potential to offer real improvements over standard public education. These schools are able to limit their size and provide a boutique-style, individualized education often absent from public-sector schooling.
But charter schools serve just 1 percent of the state's total school population. They're not likely to replace the neighborhood school anytime soon.
Symington wanted more than open enrollment and charter schools. He pushed long and hard for Arizona to be the first state to use a system of public-money vouchers to pay for private-school tuition.
But Symington lost a vicious, three-year legislative battle over vouchers. He blamed the public teachers' union for the loss, and has made a habit of nearly demonizing teachers ever since.
When the state gave public schools a minor budget increase for inflation, it came with a caveat: None of the money could be used to pay teachers' salaries.
The state's undeniably archaic, seniority-based teacher pay schedule is by far the largest share of every school budget. But teachers saw the salary restriction not as reform, but as punishment.
Conservative Republicans, meanwhile, began to blame educators publicly for the global downfall of education.
The hatred-and-blame game has continued to this day.
In a September speech, Symington contended that "westill have the agonizing problems of low test scores and high dropout [rates]." He even claimed that entrance-exam scores for the college-bound had fallen.
Actually, Arizona students have, on average, scored about the same on national tests in each of the past four years. They are a few notches above the national average in nearly every category. Scholastic Aptitude Test scores--the bench mark for admission to college--are up slightly, too.
But there are ominous problems in Arizona public schools, particularly in the state's resource-starved inner-city schools. Those problems involve poor and minority children who drop out of school at astonishing rates or, if they stay in class, lag further behind their more affluent suburban counterparts with each passing year.
Arizona's style of education reform has offered little new money and less short-range hope to these schools and these students. If anything, state funding cutbacks are widening the divide between wealthy and poor school districts, and will continue to do so, if state and federal budget projections are to be believed.
And, as Republican leaders propose new programs that affect relatively small numbers of children, reform of the existing education system--the system that will teach the vast majority of young people well into the next century--has ground to a standstill.
After spending vast amounts of time and money to develop standards and testing for public-school students--a system of measuring the actual performance of public schools--the state Education Department recently abolished its own skills-assessment program.
Lisa Graham, the state superintendent of public instruction, says she has a new standardized testing program on the drawing board. As yet, it does not have a shiny name or a prominent place in the rhetoric of the education revolution.
