PIRLS 2011 International Results in Reading

Check here to view the entire report.  Following is the Executive Summary.

PIRLS is an international assessment of reading comprehension at the fourth grade that has been conducted every five years since 2001. In 2011, nationally representative samples of
students in 49 countries participated in PIRLS and prePIRLS.

Forty-five countries assessed fourth grade students, and some countries participated in one or more of the other available options initiated in 2011 to permit wider participation at the end of the primary school cycle: four countries assessed their sixth grade students; and three countries participated in prePIRLS, a less difficult version of PIRLS inaugurated in 2011 to be a stepping stone to PIRLS. In addition, PIRLS 2011 included nine benchmarking participants, mostly regions of countries that also participated in PIRLS, including three Canadian provinces, two Emirates, the Andalusian region of
Spain, and the US state of Florida. Malta and South Africa used benchmarking to collect information relevant to their language of instruction policies. In total, approximately 325,000 students participated in PIRLS 2011, including countries assessing students at more than one grade, benchmarking participants,
and prePIRLS. PIRLS 2011 continues the series of significant international studies in reading literacy conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). PIRLS is directed by IEA’s TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College.


The students in PIRLS responded to questions designed to measure their reading comprehension across two overarching purposes for reading: ™ Reading for literary experience; and ™ Reading to acquire and use information. 

The achievement results are reported on the PIRLS scale, which has a range of 0–1,000 (although student performance typically ranges between 300 and 700). PIRLS uses the center point of the scale (500) as a point of reference that remains constant from assessment to assessment.

Top-performing Countries in PIRLS 2011Performance on PIRLS represents the “gold standard” internationally for reading comprehension at the fourth grade. Students with high performance in PIRLS can read, comprehend, and interpret relatively complex information in stories and articles of 800 to 1,000 words.

The top-performing countries in PIRLS 2011 were Hong Kong SAR, Russian Federation, Finland, and Singapore. In addition to the four top-performers, Northern Ireland, the United States, Denmark, Croatia, and Chinese Taipei had high average achievement, followed by Ireland and England who also performed very well and rounded out the top eleven high achieving countries. The US state of Florida and the Canadian province of Ontario also did very well. 

In general, fourth grade students from many countries around the world demonstrated high achievement in reading. Of the 45 countries participating at the fourth grade, only twelve countries had average achievement below the PIRLS scale center point of 500. Countries assessing their sixth grade students
also had achievement below 500, as did the prePIRLS countries (estimated via linking to PIRLS). There was evidence, however, that countries with many very low-achieving students at the fourth grade make substantial gains in reading achievement by the sixth grade.

What are the "Standards" and why do we need them?

Building on the excellent foundation of standards states have laid, the Common Core State Standards are the first step in providing our young people with a high-quality education. It should be clear to every student, parent, and teacher what the standards of success are in every school.

Teachers, parents and community leaders have all weighed in to help create the Common Core State Standards. The standards clearly communicate what is expected of students at each grade level. This will allow our teachers to be better equipped to know exactly what they need to help students learn and establish individualized benchmarks for them. The Common Core State Standards focus on core conceptual understandings and procedures starting in the early grades, thus enabling teachers to take the time needed to teach core concepts and procedures well—and to give students the opportunity to master them.

With students, parents and teachers all on the same page and working together for shared goals, we can ensure that students make progress each year and graduate from school prepared to succeed in college and in a modern workforce.

To view the standards, check here.

Get Ready For America’s Next ‘Education Crisis’

No sector of American society has been cast with the narrative of crisis as much as public education -- and the stakes are about to get even higher.

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Kamira via Shutterstock.com

 

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” has become a popular mantra of the ruling class. Of course, these are not the people who usually experience the brunt of a crisis.

But a pervasive narrative in the mainstream media is that Americans are a people beset by near-continuous crisis, whether it’s the fake crisis of a looming “fiscal cliff” or a real crisis like Frankenstorm Sandy that still has many Northeasterners inexplicably living in the dark in unheated homes.

Arguably no sector of American society has been cast with the narrative of crisis as much as public education. And the fever pitch is about to go higher.

Something’s Rotten In The State Of Kentucky

Just prior to the November election, an article in the education trade journalEducation Week broke that Kentucky had gotten bad news back from its most recent round of school tests. The results were that the percent of students scoring “proficient” or better in reading and math had dropped by roughly a third or more in both elementary and middle schools.

Disappointing results from a state test is not usually an occasion to stop the presses. But, in this case it was, because these were Very Special Tests.

The tests Kentucky children took were brand-new and aligned to new standards promoted by the federal government called Common Core Standards. Kentucky is the very first state to implement the new standards-based assessments, which will be rolled-out in over 40 other states over the next two school years.

Kentucky school officials, who were already bracing for the bad results, tried putting a happy face on it, calling results “better than we thought they’d be.”

But local media outlets were quick to claim that lower scores were proof positive that Kentucky public schools are “in need of improvement.”

Now imagine the scenario when what happened in Kentucky begins rolling out across the country — as state after state implements the bright, shiny new tests and watches in horror as scores drop off “The Proficiency Cliff.” How tempting it will be for major media outlets across the country to cast this as a “crisis” in education?

In fact, some people are betting good money on that happening.

Business Loves A Crisis

This past summer, about 100 private equity investors gathered at the posh University Club in New York City to hear about big money-making opportunities on the horizon.

As reported in Huffington Post, Rob Lytle of The Parthenon Group, a “strategic advisor of choice for CEOs and business leaders worldwide” according to itswebsite, was there to reveal the ripening profit potentials in the public education arena — a $500+ billion market –due to the roll-out of new assessments aligned to the Common Core.

According to the reporter, Lytle told the audience, if the tests are “as rigorous as advertised, a huge number of schools will suddenly look really bad, their students testing way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments will be right there to provide it.”

Recall that states were strongly urged to adopt the new standards when they applied for the US Department of Education’s Race to the Top grant program and for waivers to the onerous No Child Left Behind mandates. Now 46 states are implementing the standards and at least one form or another of the tests that are aligned to the standards. The intent of the standards and tests is to ensure that students are on a pathway to becoming “career and college ready” (CCR) by the time they graduate high school.

John Thompson: Diane Ravitch and the Long View of School Reform

By Anthony Cody on December 17, 2012 10:31 AM

Guest post by John Thompson.

Near the end of David Denby's New Yorker profile of Diane Ravitch (Public Defender), Denby quotes Ravitch saying, "If the testing vampire is slain, the whole facade of faux reform collapses. No test scores, no merit pay, no closing of schools by test scores."

Shouldn't people who cannot agree with Ravitch on anything else join her in repudiating high-stakes testing, and then see if her other positions prove correct?

Like Ravitch, I oppose merit pay, but I would not dig in my heels on it. If a younger generation of educators want performance pay, I'd push for another metric for estimating "performance" but I would not oppose it.

I will wait for Ravitch's new book before deciding how much I agree or disagree with her on charter schools, and whether they are driving privatization. If we are just debating charters as they currently exist, and not charter management organizations, I would not offend charter advocates by using the p-word. But, if we were just discussing the educational benefits of charters, would there be any evidence-based rationale for dramatically expanding them? And that is why I am anxious to read Ravitch's upcoming book. I am worried that she will assemble an impressive case that the school reform movement is morphing into privatization.

Before I entered the classroom, I was sure of two things - that Ravitch was wrong about standards of instruction, and that I learned more from her scholarship than I did from any other conservative.

It only took me two months of teaching before I admitted that my progressivism needed rethinking. I soon acknowledged that it is impossible to build the bricks of conceptual thinking without providing students the straw of information. During the 1990s, when rereading Ravitch, I saw that the excessively idealistic education movements she critiqued were no more or less wrong-headed than many of the theories that I had supported before teaching. It was the combination of her scholarship and my learning by trial and error that prompted the conclusion that if teaching doesn't turn a person into a conservative, that said something about either his sanity or the enduring power of liberalism.

I never criticized Ravitch's initial support of NCLB. How could I? I had twisted myself into a pretzel seeking a way to support the law. Being a team player, I supported NCLB. After all, my union supported it, my city was in the middle of a bipartisan school reform effort and we were having great success in bridging our differences and, as I read Ravitch, she saw the accountability system as an experiment. My assumption was that a conservative like Ravitch, who had a long record of protecting the integrity of the educational process, could be an invaluable ally in assessing NCLB.

It is in that spirit where I hope that it is too early to link most of the "reform" movement with privatization. I hope that the so-called "teacher quality" movement and test-driven accountability advocates will look anew at the evidence. These "reformers" must be depressed by the meager results yielded by their twenty year effort to inspire "transformational" change. Now is the time to persuade them to stop demonizing teachers and join us in producing incremental changes. Perhaps, Ravitch and others can persuade the Obama administration that we need to switch to the win win strategy of investing in prenatal care and early education.

On the other hand, some "reformers" might draw the wrong conclusions from their defeats. They could easily conclude that public schools are obsolete and can't be saved. Accountability hawks might double down on their ideology of "disruptive innovation" to wipe out the "status quo," and then proceed to the (then) only remaining option - privatization.

Just because that worst case scenario is possible, it does not follow that we should offend all reformers by prematurely charging their movement with an ulterior motive. I am hoping that the threat of privatization is not as dire as Ravitch argues. I have learned, however, to always give her a full hearing. And, once she lays out her entire case, who knows how many reformers will become more open to Ravitch's long view of the cycles of history? How many will join us to stop this testing mania and "celebrate the collapse of this reign of error?"

What do you think? Will Diane Ravitch's new book change the minds of many "reformers?"

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.

Why You Can Kiss Public Education (and the Middle Class) Goodbye

All around us, our public institutions are disintegrating, and the most important public institution of all – our public education system – will likely be the next to go.

Photo Credit: AVAVA | Shutterstock.com

Quick - when you hear "public housing," what picture jumps into your mind?  Or "public hospital"? 

All around us, our public institutions are disintegrating, and the most important public institution of all – our public education system – is the next to be ghettoized.

Despite several progressive victories this Election Day, there was one significant defeat in Georgia, as voters approved ofConstitutional Amendment 1 , which changes Georgia’s Constitution to give Republicans in that state the power to create charter schools as part of Georgia’s public education system. The result will be crucial taxpayer dollars being funneled away from free public schools and directed toward brand new, sometimes for-profit, privately-run charter schools.

Even though studies show that costly private schools don’t produce any better educational results than free public schools, for-profit schools have popped up all around the nation in recent years because of how valuable they are to corporate America. In fact, the historic Chicago Teachers Union strike earlier this year was largely in response to the city’s push to open up more charter schools to replace traditional public schools.

Education is a recession-proof industry that will always be in high demand. The corporate money-changers know if they can get their hands on this industry, "reform" it to replace decently-paid teachers and faculty with McTeachers, and then get taxpayers to foot the bill, quarterly profits and lavish bonuses for CEOs can explode.  Even in so-called "non-profit" charter schools, management can make big bucks. 

And that’s exactly what Georgia’s Constitutional Amendment 1 accomplishes. Expect similar amendments to pop up in other state elections in the near future.

This is a major shot in the multigenerational war on public education part of our commons. 

Ultimately, as more states pass charter school amendments like Georgia, and money is sucked out of public schools, then public schools will meet the same fate as the rest of the ghettoized public institutions in America.

Public education will be just like public housing, which most Americans think of as low-income, crime-ridden neighborhoods. Or it will be like public hospitals, which most Americans see as disease-ridden institutions filled with impoverished, sick people. Because, in both cases, these institutions principally serve the very poor, there’s little sympathy for Americans stuck in public housing or public hospitals.  Little sympathy also translates into little funding, which perpetuates the cycle of poverty and the disintegration of our public institutions.  

But up until the Reagan "reforms," public education had avoided this same ghettoizing fate. Historically, our public education system was a marvel for the rest of the world, producing generations of scientists, doctors, and engineers from all races and socio-economic classes. Whether you came from a wealthy family or a poor family, the American public education system didn’t discriminate. As much as possible, it was a multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-class public institution that produced great results.  

But as state governments embrace for-profit charter schools, traditional public schools will be neglected and see their funding cut until eventually they, too, will suffer the same fate that ghettoized public housing and public hospitals.

Even prominent Republicans are owning up to this. After passage of Georgia’s Constitutional Amendment 1, Lee Raudonis, the former executive director of the Georgia Republican Party, penned an op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution warning that passage of the amendment was, “an endorsement for a drastically altering public education as most Americans define it.”

Raudonis foresees a future in which there’s a “new type of public school” as a result of this move toward charter schools. He describes this new public school as, “one for those children whose parents were not motivated enough to move them into a charter or private school or for whom there were none available.”

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking

reviewed by Jonathan Gravells

 “You can personally choose to become more successful by adopting five learnable habits….”

There are at least two ways readers might respond to a statement like this in the introduction to a self-improvement book: one is to think “Really? Wow! Tell me the secret,” and the other is to reach for their revolver…

I should admit now that, perhaps due to natural scepticism, or perhaps because I’m a Brit, I fall firmly into the ‘reach for your revolver’ camp. (Of course I acknowledge, even as I write this, that apocryphal Goering quotes do not lend themselves to open-minded debate.)

So it came as a bit of a shock to me that I actually liked this book a lot. In fact, and of more importance to Professors Burger and Starbird I suspect, I found it genuinely useful. For whatever one’s personal tastes about how the challenges of personal learning and change are presented, the real test of a book like this, to my mind, is whether the core ideas have substance and constitute something worth saying. In the case of The Five Elements of Effective Thinking, they most certainly do.

Burger and Starbird use the four elements of earth, fire, air and water as symbolic of four ways in which we can improve our thinking, and enlist the idea of the fifth “quintessential element” to argue that all these approaches need to be underpinned by a real commitment to change and learning. Earth represents the theme of understanding deeply, fire is used to characterise the process of making mistakes and learning from them, air reminds us to always raise questions and water embodies the importance of seeing the flow of ideas, or the context of where they come from and where they might lead. Whilst these might not be entirely new insights into effective thinking, the authors have done an excellent job of linking them in a thematic structure that captures the concepts in a memorable way.

There are times when technology and social trends can seem to be engendering a lack of sustained attention. The ever-increasing amount of information that is available to us can so easily result in a superficial appreciation at best. So it is refreshing and instructive to find someone reminding us of the need to thoroughly understand the basics of an idea or theory.

How often is fear of failure behind our reluctance to take action, try new experiences and experiment with new ideas? “Deliberately try something you know is wrong” is probably not advice you want given to your brain surgeon or pilot, but this insistence that learning is iterative, reliant on both successful and unsuccessful action and reflection, is nevertheless pivotal to personal development. In other words, the brain surgeon (or anyone else) who fears failure is unlikely to continue learning or to take the decisive action you need from her.

As an executive coach, and therefore a professional asker of questions, the importance of framing the most productive questions in order to create greater insight strikes me as another fundamental ingredient of learning, and one too often overlooked by students and non-students alike. (Listening, an equally underappreciated and under-used skill in effective thinking, is tagged on as a bit of an afterthought.)

But I reserve my loudest cheer for the emphasis that the authors place on locating our learning and understanding in a proper historical context. This rightly challenges the lazy treatment of knowledge as fad; the common assumption that the latest idea or way of seeing things is genius and all that went before is therefore, by implication, worthless. Instead, it rightly recognises that knowledge is built over time, ideas refined and added to, all contributing to the richness of human thought. Our world, in their words, is continuously “under construction,” and every human idea can be improved further. They illustrate this with various examples from calculus to the applications of the light bulb.

So, the chosen elements are compelling, and the way they are presented is persuasive and authoritative, not least because the authors, as highly experienced teachers themselves, argue their case well and provide helpful examples from their experience to illustrate the points they make. The need for commitment to change as a pre-requisite for effective thinking reinforces the importance of an open mind, which crops up at various points in the book. There are probably more useful and profound things to say about personal change, and personally I did not find this chapter quite as convincing as the others. Clearly, learning and change are part of the same journey, but it is a journey that can often feel difficult and painful.

This is perhaps my problem with the ‘anyone can do it’ approach the book takes to self-improvement. Whilst the authors write in their introduction of “sound-bite sentences” that they promise to unpack further, the book can come across as an ‘easy’ recipe that any of us can apply on our way to becoming “extraordinary.” At times it sounds almost like a fairy godmother. (“…youwill think of creative ideas; and you will be successful throughout life…”). Actually, the challenges of personal change can be quite difficult. Understanding deeply takes effort & hard work, the reflection required to learn from mistakes requires considerable self-discipline, coming up with productive questions is a skill that needs honing through practice, and so on. It is possible to under-value these concepts by making them appear too easy. And, in fairness, if you have a go at the frequent practical exercises with which the book is very helpfully dotted, I suspect you will find many of them quite an effort. To my mind this is exactly as it should be, (and not inconsistent with the notion of repeated failure on the way to success!).

The primary audience for this book is probably students looking to improve their learning and thinking skills, and the practical illustrations are often taken from this academic environment, and understandably skewed towards the authors’ knowledge of mathematics and art history. Many of the examples focus on problems with right or wrong answers and this predominantly positivist tone left me wondering what place handling ambiguity and paradox has in effective thinking? Is there any room at all for gut feel or even luck?

Likewise, if one subscribes to the benefit of seeing the flow of ideas, then acknowledging the derivation of some of the ideas presented here might have helped to set some of the authors’ thesis in the context of existing knowledge of how we think and learn. For example, the ways we respond to failure and adverse events have been researched in some detail by experts in positive psychology. Rapid advances in the field of neuroscience are helping us understand better how the brain works. Something like the fire element exercise “Don’t stare at a blank screen” will be recognised by many readers as akin to brainstorming, and so on.

However, that said, I return to my own litmus test: “is the book thought-provoking and helpful?” One could argue that such observations as those above misunderstand the intended audience and positioning of the book. It is, after all, easy to identify what is missing from a book that never sets out to be a comprehensive and in-depth discussion of ideas in the first place. There is undoubtedly much here that would be of practical use to professionals from all walks of life, and indeed other educators, such as management trainers and coaches.

As a practical and helpful guide, particularly for students seeking to improve the quality of their thinking and learning, “The Five Elements of Effective Thinking” is a thought-provoking and useful manual.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: December 07, 2012 http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 16959, Date Accessed: 12/14/2012 5:42:53 PM

Protecting the Choice to Stay: "Education Savings Accounts" and Legislative Priorities

by David R. Garcia  Source:  Teachers College Record, December 07, 2012 Education Savings Accounts" (choice vouchers) are the latest iteration of school voucher proposals and are touted by free market advocates as the future of school choice policies and a vehicle for education reform.  In Arizona, where the state legislature has passed choice vouchers on two occasions, the policy discussion has been framed as a conflict between parental choice and bureaucratic mandates and the courts have sided in favor of parental choice.  More correctly, the public policy discussion should be framed as a matter of competing parental choices; the choice to divert public funds away from public schools and the "constitutionally-supported" choice to send students to public schools.  In setting priorities to resolve this conflict in an environment of scarce resources, I argue that the next available public school dollar must go toward meeting the constitutional mandate to fully maintain public schools on behalf of those parents who have chosen for their students to attend them before allowing other parents to divert public funds away from public schools.  Alternately, if the legislature wants to hold true to their commitment to provide parents with the option to divert public funds away from public schools, a policy option with some legal precedent, then it must first maintain its public schools on behalf of the parents who have chosen for their students to attend them. This latter solution has the potential side benefit of achieving the education reform that advocates covet - maybe in a properly maintained public school system, there will no longer be anymore failing schools or underserved students. In 2011, the Arizona state legislature approved “education savings accounts” (choice vouchers) that direct state-generated dollars that would otherwise go to public schools into education accounts that parents of special needs students can use to purchase educational services, including private school tuition. The next year, in the name of education reform, the Arizona legislature extended the choice voucher program to include the parents of students in failing schools, gifted students and military families. Looking forward, the Arizona legislature is poised to expand the program again and the Friedman Foundation is promoting the choice vouchers “for every American family” (Ladner, 2012), despite little evidence to support the purported benefits (Gulosino & Liebert, 2012). The legal arguments about the constitutionality of the choice vouchers have hinged on decisions about the use and destination of the public funds after exiting the public school system. The public policy discussion has followed similar reasoning. The purpose of this commentary is to propose a fundamental shift in the policy discussion over the exodus of public funds via choice vouchers. I reframe the public policy discussion around the choice voucher program as a matter of competing choices. Particularly, I argue that in the context of insufficiently maintained public schools, a policy that allows some parents to direct any public funds away from public schools conflicts with the Arizona legislature’s constitutionally-mandated obligation to “the establishment and maintenance a general and uniform public school system” (Ariz.  Const. Art. 11, Sec. 1) for those parents who have made the choice for their student to attend a public school, including charter schools. To be clear, I do not argue that as a policy matter the legislature must eliminate the policy choice for parents to direct public funds away from public schools; previous Arizona court cases have held that the legislature can support alternatives to the public school system (Kotterman v Killian, 1999).  What I do argue is that the legislature’s first responsibility must be the “maintenance” of the public system for those who choose to attend public schools and this responsibility should be fully met before it allows public funds to exit the system.    What is the “education savings account” (choice vouchers) program? The choice voucher program sets aside public funds for parents to direct the education of their child. The public funds can be used for a menu of options both within and outside the public school system, although plaintiffs maintain that the options are effectively private (Nieuhaus v Huppenthal, 2011b). To participate, parents must waive the state’s obligation to educate their children and assume the responsibility themselves, and there are restrictions on students reenrolling in a traditional public or charter school (S.B. 1553, 2011). Finally, the amount of the choice voucher is set at ninety percent of the base state per pupil funding amount. Proponents argue that by leaving the remaining ten percent in the public school system all students benefit from the choice voucher program, including students who do not participate (Ladner, 2012). The legal arguments against the choice vouchers have centered on the appropriate use of such public funds after leaving the public school system. In particular, plaintiffs have argued that the choice vouchers violate the state’s aide and religion clauses, meaning that the state cannot authorize the use of public funds to private or religious entities, even public funds deposited in accounts and directed by parents (Nieuhaus v Huppenthal, 2011b). The superior court judge rejected these arguments based on parental choice, concluding that the choice vouchers are awarded to parents, not institutions, and it is parents who direct the public funds via their individual choices, including the choice to pay private school tuition (Nieuhaus v Huppenthal, 2011a). While the legal battles continue, the policy argument remains at a standstill largely because the underlying issues have been framed as a conflict between parental choice and the public school bureaucracy. Supporters have routinely portrayed the public schools as either a faceless governmental entity or as a group of education bureaucrats who are struggling to maintain the status quo against parents’ will. With respect to public schools, there appears to be an assumption that when a parent enrolls a student in a public school, all subsequent educational decisions are state-directed rather than a partnership between parents and schools. The Arizona court indicated as much in their ruling, claiming that the choice vouchers “allow the parent to directly arrange for services needed for the student” (Nieuhaus v Huppenthal, 2011a, p. 2). By contrast, educational decisions within public schools were described as “relying on and/or appealing to public schools to address the need - a process which in the past has proven to be time consuming and expensive” (Nieuhaus v Huppenthal, 2011a, p. 2). The assumption is that public school parents are subordinating their choice to the public school bureaucracy. Rather, the more appropriate framing is to consider student enrollment in a public school as a conscious choice, and the educational decisions made afterwards as a collaboration between parents and educators.  This is especially true for special education students because parents participate fully in their student’s education as part of the team that develops the student Individual Education Plan. The same dynamics that advocates argue will benefit parents who exit the system already occur in public schools. There is no appreciable difference between the parent/school dynamics either within or outside of public schools. If attendance in a public school is regarded as a choice, then the policy question correctly shifts to a conflict between competing parental choices and not a conflict between parental choice and bureaucratic mandates. The implication of viewing public school attendance as a choice presents policy makers with the more vexing question of setting priorities to reconcile these competing choices in an environment of scarce resources. If both decisions are regarded as choices—parents either choose public schools or they choose to use public funds to pay for a private education--then the logical question before legislators is, which choice do they prioritize?  In light of their constitutional obligation to maintain public schools, both choices are not equal. I argue that the choice to attend a public school takes priority. According to the Arizona constitution, “The legislature shall enact such laws as shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a general and uniform public school system” where the system is defined as specific types of schools ranging from common (elementary) to high schools (Ariz.  Const. Art. 11, Sec. 1). Therefore, as long as there are parents who choose for their students to attend a public school, the legislature’s first obligation is to maintain public schools for those who have made the constitutionally-supported choice to attend them. Currently, public schools are not maintained per the legislature’s own standards. The Arizona Constitution directs the legislature to make appropriations for the purpose of meeting the maintenance requirement (AZ Const. Art. 11, Sec. 10). The legislature has passed a series of funding formulas to meet this requirement and these formulas can be used as a working standard of the sufficient maintenance per the Arizona Constitution.   The legislature has not fully funded all the formulas it has passed. For example, in the prior two years (Fiscal years 2011 and 2012) the state has withheld final equalization aid payments to districts and has not funded the state School Facilities Board for a number of years, so that schools do not meet the facility standards set out by the state. Thus, the legislature routinely falls short of meeting its own standard for maintaining public schools. The choice vouchers then present a clear conflict between parental choices when the legislature allows parents to divert public funds away from public schools while, at the same time and per the legislature’s own definition, they have failed to maintain the public schools in support of the choice of those parents whose children attend public schools. The policy discussion shifts from whether or not the legislature can allow parent choice to the more appropriate question of how the state must prioritize the use of public funds. Put another way, the test boils down to how the state must use the next available dollar to fund public schools. I argue that the Arizona constitution requires that the next available dollar must first go to maintaining public schools and when, and only when, public schools are maintained, can the legislature pursue the secondary policy choice to allow parents to divert public funds away from public schools. To allow parents to take public funds from public schools that are insufficiently maintained is in direct conflict with the legislature’s obligation to support the choices of public school parents. I do not argue that the legislature must fund all formulas. There are many pressing economic reasons why states may fall short of their funding formulas. Nor, contrary to previous arguments, am I advocating that the legislature must rescind a parent’s choice to divert public funds away from public schools. Rather, I argue that in an environment of scarce resources, the choice vouchers create a conflict between two different types of parental choices. In setting priorities to resolve this conflict, the next available public school dollar must go toward meeting the constitutional mandate to maintain public schools on behalf of the those parents who have chosen for their students to attend them before allowing other parents to divert public funds away from public schools. Presently, the choice vouchers are portrayed as a win-win – as if there are no losers. But if some parents are allowed to divert public funds away from insufficiently funded public schools, there are losers – those students who choose to attend public schools. The legislature can reconcile the conflict in one of two ways. In both cases, the remedy is elegant and the standard is measurable. First, if the legislature chooses not to fund all formulas, then it cannot allow parents to divert public funds away from public schools. This way the legislature remains faithful to their constitutional obligation to maintain public schools and they do not create a conflict between parental choices. Alternately, if the legislature wants to hold true to their commitment to provide parents the option to divert public funds to sources away from public schools, then it must first maintain its public schools on behalf of those parents who have chosen to attend them. In this case, the standard for maintaining public schools is directly measurable: the legislature must fully fund those laws that it has passed for the purpose of maintaining public schools. Once this is done, there is no conflict between parent choices. The legislature has created a true win-win as both the exited parents and the public school parents have reached their goal of adequate funding to support their educational choices. Finally, the latter solution has the potential side benefit of achieving the education reform that advocates covet - maybe in a system of sufficiently maintained public schools, there will no longer be any more failing schools or underserved students. References Arizona Constitution. Article 11, Section 1. Arizona Constitution. Article 11, Section 10. Education Empowerment Accounts, S.B. 1553, 50th Legislature, First Regular Session (2011). Gulosino, C. & Liebert, J. (2012). Review of the way of the future: Education savings accounts for every American family. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-ESA/ Kotterman v Killian. (1999) 193 Ariz. 273, 290, 972 P.2d 606, 623. Ladner, Matthew. (2012). The way of the future: Education savings accounts for every American family. Retrieved from http://www.edchoice.org/Research/Reports/The-Way-of-the-Future--Education-Savings-Accounts-for-Every-American-Family.aspx Niehaus v Huppenthal CV 2011-017911 (2011a). Superior Court of Arizona Maricopa County Nieuhaus v Huppenthal (2011b) Application for Preliminary Injunction.