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September 10, 2003

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
·Phoenix City Election
·Recent AIMS Test results
·Deer Valley Rock Art Center
In-Studio Guests:
Mary Jo Pitzl, Arizona Republic;
Tom Horne, State Superintendent of Public Instruction;
Penny Kotterman, president of the Arizona Education Association

>> Michael: Tonight on "Horizon," Phoenix has a new mayor-elect, and he and the city council will be making more money. We talk about the results of Tuesday's election. The AIMS test, we take a look at the most recent numbers, what they mean, some of the issues behind this standardized test. plus, more than 1500 petroglyphs can be seen at the Deer Valley rock art center. Good evening, I'm Michael Grant. Phil Gordon will take the Mayor's seat this January. He won yesterday's election by a very large margin. All of the propositions on the ballot also passed. There was one squeaker, Council District 4, but the results are now official. Subject to canvas. Tom Simplot beat out Jessica Flores by less than 60 votes. Here now to talk about the election results, Mary Jo Pitzl of the "Arizona Republic," who covered this thing like a blanket. Hello, Mary Jo.

>> Mary Jo Pitzel: Hi, Michael.

>> Michael: We expected District 4 to be close. I don't know when we said that we were thinking 57 votes, but I guess so.

>> Mary Jo: Yeah, they delivered on a very close competitive race. It was decided about mid-afternoon when the early ballots that came in late were tabulated.

>> Michael: Anything in particular that you think shoved that race one way or the other? Obviously shoved it Simplot's way?

>> Mary Jo: No, when you lose by that few votes or when you win by that few votes, it could be anything. One neighborhood that you just decided not to walk through and knock on doors. We looked at some of the precinct returns and there was pretty much an east-west split. Flores took 8 of the 15 precincts, yet she lost. Simplot Won seven of them, little higher turnout in those and they broke along geographic lines, you know, more or less, east and west.

>> Michael: That was Phil Gordon's district up until March. Phil Gordon wins basically 3-1. I already knew he was going to win. That's sort of the converse. Were people thinking, however, he was going to win 75% -- 73% of the vote?

>> Mary Jo: I don't think so. His campaign says that they were surprised. It was more than they had hoped for. They were looking for 65,000 votes and Phil got -- well, he got his 65,000, but they thought the margin would be as lopsided as it turned out to be.

>> Michael: Interesting, a slight digression. We're getting to a point with early ballots, particularly in city elections, not that we're complaining, but, you know, election coverage now lasts from about 8 8:00 to 8:15 at night. What did the final tally turn out to be? Was 75, 80% of the vote early?

>> Mary Jo: It was 55,000 of the 91,000 ballots came in early.

>> Michael: So maybe more like --

>> Mary Jo: More than half.

>> Michael: That's absolutely amazing.

>> Mary Jo: In fact, I've taken to calling it counting day, because the real activity that happens is counting the ballots that day. Many of the ballots have been cast weeks beforehand.

>> Michael: And I think there's a lot of candidates, understandably, who are still struggling with precisely how to do that. Because you have turned election day into election month. Back to the Mayor's race, I think by anybody's standard that sort of margin would be a mandate. What does Phil Gordon consider it a mandate to do?

>> Mary Jo: He considers it a mandate to stick to his three areas of emphasis. I talked to him this afternoon. He is going to focus on boosting neighborhoods, cutting crime and improving education, which is a little different wrinkle for this city. The city usually doesn't get into the education business but he would like to carve out a bigger role for the city there.

>> Michael: Let me make sure I have this straight. I buy a bench and I sit on my front porch and I wait for someone to pass by? Do I have this --

>> Mary Jo: You wait for them to pass by, maybe you talk to them, you get to understand what belongs in the neighborhood and what doesn't f and if you see something that doesn't, the mayor-elect wants you to call in that suspicious activity.

>> Michael: What if I have a really deep setback at my yard do do I have to yell at them or should I go to the street?

>>Mary Jo: Put a lemonade stand up and invite them over.

>> Michael: You don't have to answer that. District 1 we were expecting perhaps a closer race than that one turned out to be.

>> Mary Jo: Yes, district 1, two-term incumbent, Dave Siebert, easily won. Did he have to fend off a pretty feisty challenge from Cordova who is making his first run for city council. Cordova is not a stranger to elections. He has run for the legislature before. As it turns out it was pretty lopsided, 68%, I think, Cordova got 28%.

>> Michael: There were several propositions on the ballot. The only one that got some attention and really not a lot of attention, was a pretty substantial pay increase for council members.

>> Mary Jo: You bet, 43% pay raise for council members up to $51,500. And voters approved that 55% in favor.

>> Michael: Mary Jo, the legislature, for example, languished at 15,000, if memory serves, for about 20 years and I think got eight straight raises rejected. They finally came up, to I think the current level is 24. Do you have any theory at all as to, on the other hand, city council pay and Mayor pay has risen fairly steadily and these were some healthy increases. I wonder what it is in the voters' minds that causes them to so differentiate between those two offices?

>> Mary Jo: Probably a lot of it is that the garbage gets picked up, the streets get paved, the traffic lights run, the city sort of works. The state does not enjoy that same kind of reputation. CPS is a mess. You know, the highways are constantly under construction. Prisons are overcrowded. There's lawsuits. There's strife and controversy. I think it shapes people's negative views of lawmakers, and they say they don't deserve the money.

>> Michael: Well, in fact, I suppose you could go ahead and carry that theory out to the other ballot propositions, because all of the propositions on the ballot cleared handily. It's almost like voters were saying, I don't know, if you think it's a good idea, fine, I'll go along with it.

>>Mary Jo: I think so. I this -- one way to read it is there a great deal of contentment or apathy. You can take it either way. But they have lopsided wins on expenditure limit, on extending benefits packages to council members. The other ballot items were small housing items nobody is going to get work you said about.

>> Michael: One small quirk, Tom Simplot takes office next week?

>> Mary Jo: The councilman elect gets sworn in on the 17th. They have to canvas the votes and the council with Jessica Flores on it has to vote to accept the canvas. This is because Simplot is filling the term that the -- the seat that Phil Gordon vacated so he could go run for Mayor. So that will run for another two years.

>> Michael: It's only good until the election as opposed to the normal swearing in, which for all the rest of them will be in early January.

>> Mary Jo: January 2nd.

>> Michael: Mary Jo Pitzl, thanks very much. Arizona Department of Education reports that the 2003 AIMS test results show improvement in math scores. Last week headline from "The Arizona Republic" read students stumble in AIMS math. Two-thirds of sophomores fail. Sound like a paradox? Well, many would say yes. Others would say it goes to show the AIMS test results can be spun in many directions. In a moment we will talk more about the AIMS test. First Merry Lucero introduces us to one statistician who urges caution when spinning the AIMS test results.

>> Reporter: Michael Martin is an analyst for the Arizona school boards association. As a statistician, he crunches numbers into graphs, charts and diagrams to scrutinize information. But Martin warns against comparing schools and students using an average of the AIMS test results.

>>Michael Martin: If you have some kids that are really struggling and as a consequence they drag down the mean, most of the kids in your school are scoring much better than the average and that's good news. But you also -- you have to know that there are some kids in your school that are struggling and you have to look for that.

>> Reporter: Martin illustrates his point using a bell curve.

>> Michael Martin: We usually think of what on this illustration is the yellow curve as the normal bell curve. It's balanced on both sides of the curve, and with that, that means that the middle of the peak of the bell curve is usually where we find the average. It's also where we find the so-called median where half the people score below and it half the score above it. I give you the two examples, the red curve is skewed so that there are a lot of kids that scored high in comparison to the rest of the kids and I give you the blue in which there's the peak of the bell curve, but there were a lot of kids that scored below that peak, and it turns out that if you put all three of those bell curves together, they could all have the same average.

>> Reporter: He calls it Martin's paradox. What he is basically saying is...

>> Michael Martin: You shouldn't be judging a school on the basis of maybe there's a few kids that do well or a few kids do that poorly. You should be looking for the peak of the bell curve, and to do that you need the median as well as the so-called mean or average.

>> Reporter: Martin says using the peak of the bell curve rather than the average would better illustrate where most of the students at a school are scoring, and it's meaningless to compare average test scores among groups of students without knowing the skew of the scores. To non-statisticians, it may sound like a tricky arithmetic lesson. But Martin says it's important, since ultimately at the time results determine whether a student graduates and whether schools are labeled as excelling, meeting standards or failing, based on the standardized test score.

>> Michael: Joining me now, Tom Horne, state Superintendent of Public Instruction and Penny Kotterman, president of the Arizona education association. Good to see both of you again.

>> Penny Kotterman: Good evening.

>> Michael: Let me go to the large view here first. Tom, obviously the Department of Education reported improvement but on the other hand still a fairly dismal picture, particularly for high school sophomores, right?

>> Tom Horne: Dismal picture for right now, but I'm predicting we'll see improvements in the future from at least three sources. First of all, this coming year is the first year the sophomores will have a consequence to what they're doing. If you tell high school students that there's no consequence to them for how they do, a lot of them are going to blow off the test. Elementary kids will do what you ask them but the high school kids are smart enough to know if there's consequence they don't have to try. This year's sophomores know they need to study for the test and they need to fry hard because it has a consequence for them. Secondly, the department is focusing on service. That means we will do everything we can to help the schools, especially those with low test scores. We're going to have solutions team at every low performing school this fall to help them teach the students to the standards to make sure they do everything they can to help the students be able to meet proficiency. Third, we're going to make sure that the questions are good reflections of the standards. So I think there's going to be an improvement in the test. There's going to be a tremendous effort by the department to help the schools. And the students are going to be motivated because there's going to be a consequence if there's no consequence there's no real reason to try hard.

>> Michael: Penny if I recall correctly, you and the Arizona Education Association are not a supporter of the AIMS test, but assuming it is reality, are we making any progress or not?

>>Penny: Let's clarify that little bit. We have never been against the AIMS test. Actually supported the AIMS test and development of standards. The association is against high stakes testing. So, we'll see, if in fact -- I think it will create incentives for some kids, but I don't think it's going to create an incentive -- it's a negative reinforcement system to say if you pass the test you graduate and if you don't pass the test you don't graduate and so, therefore, we assume everybody's going to study harder to make it. The last part about it is we have simply never supported the notion of a single test as the litmus test for graduation.

>> Michael: What's wrong with the concept of validating the high school diploma?

>>Penny: Absolutely nothing.

>> Michael: Saying that, listen, if you have a diploma, you have certain basic skills in math, reading and writing?

>>Penny: I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but I don't believe, never have believed, the only way to measure is that one test at one point in time. Now It is true in Arizona we give our test to sophomores and we give it five total times. So there are lots of opportunities for kids to pass the test. But it's still measuring 12 years of educational accomplishment based up against one tool, and I taught for 18 years, I lived through minimal competency testing in Illinois 25 years ago, I don't think that's the way you should consummate an education career. It's not what we do anywhere else. It's based on a series of things, not one thing. However, given the fact this is the way it is, what we've done is work as hard as we possibly can with the department on just exactly the issues that superintendent Horne has raised and they've made a great deal of progress on those.

>> Michael: Now, Tom, obviously you're a strong supporter of the AIMS test. Let me flip the question around. Why should you have to clear this one particular bar? Why isn't it good enough that I came through high school with a 3.0 grade point average, whatever?

>> Tom: Because there are pockets of mediocrity where you can get good grades without doing much work and learning much. That's been demonstrated. The big force behind accountability has been the business community because of what they're getting in the way of employees out of high schools. There's an interesting study that's been done and they took literature and business literature and put it in a computer and analyzed it for difficulty by vocabulary and sentence structure and they came one a system, for example, the scarlet letter was at 1400, war and peace was at 1200, today and frog, our friends, was at 300. Then they looked at business literature and what was required to get job. The Department of Labor divides jobs into 12 different clusters. For 9 out of those 12 clusters, the minimum reading competency required was above 1200, in other words, above War and Peace, below the Scarlet Letter, but above War and Peace. Construction and manufacturing were at 1300. And the education testing services estimated if we don't do a better job of graduating students with the proper skills by 2020 we'll have 20 million jobs that Americans cannot fill. When we needed computer workers, we brought in 100,000 people on visas. We're not going to give 20 million visas. That means those jobs are going overseas and it's the future of American as a civilization that's at stake.

>> Penny: There's nothing wrong with any of that.

>> Michael: But it's a point you hear over and over again, you're giving us students we have to retrain.

>> Penny: The notion that a single high-stakes test -- a basic one size fits all measurement for every kid in Arizona is going to solve that problem is absurd. If there are pockets of mediocrity, the test scores will tell you that, and that's what they ought to be used to diagnose and deal with. And you ought to do all of the kinds of things that the superintendent is talking about to assist those schools. But I don't believe that given the nature of assessment in general that using one test as the litmus for is that what we should do. So I think you have a system of accountability, not a single measure. There's a difference. And we could debate it forever, Michael, but the other --

>> Michael: In fact, I think we have.

>> Penny: The other situation is I'm not probably going to get my way. The federal government has said you're going to give testing, you're going to do it this way. I think we have to be prepared for the policy implications of what happens. I think there are other issues, for instance, we're given -- somebody raised this the other day and it's always important for the public to remember when they start talking about sophomores failing, sophomores didn't fail. That's their Baseline data year. You don't fail until you've taken the test five times and don't pass it. That's a big difference.

>> Michael: What about the issue Tom raised a couple minutes ago which is hold it, now they're going to have to get serious about it because there are consequences staring them in the face in a couple years? Do you think that's going to change --

>>Penny: I taught high school for seven years. That will work for some of the kids, no doubt about it. But I have a son who just graduated from high school, and he exceeded the standards in every single one of the AIMS tests, and he did so because he knew it was important that he do well on assessments. That's a culture. That's something that you create in a school, and with parents. Parents are really key to that kind of an endeavor. Just simply holding it over their head, if you don't have the skills, is not going to help you. And we have kids in our high schools that don't have the skills and their not going to get them, in my estimation n two years. So that's the issue.

>> Tom: Could I just say, we're trying to hold the schools accountable also. We identified 276 schools, 19% of our schools as under-performing and if they don't improve and we're trying to help them, they're going to be failing, we will have state intervention. So we are holding the schools accountable but we have to hold the students accountable too. In Massachusetts they did this, they had high stakes tests, 90% of the students passed, 10% failed. The 10% that failed when they looked at their records closely had bad attendance records. So one of the things I'm saying to parents is, the teachers are learning how to teach the standards. If the students come to school, they'll be taught the standards. But if they don't come to school, we can't teach them. So we have to focus on attendance. We have to focus on helping the students with their homework.

>> Michael: Here's a reality. Let's say in 2005, I think probably politically you could tolerate 90-10, but let's say it stayed at 70-30, do you think people are going to put one a system that refuses to award diplomas to 30% of the graduating high school students?

>> Tom: We call that a hypothetical question. I'm predicting that it will be closer to the 90-10. I really think that Arizona students are just as smart as Massachusetts students are. It's a question of giving them the motivation, helping the schools do a better job, and being sure that the test is a reasonable one. I've promised to make sure that the test is a reasonable one for those students who show the higher skills and knowledge we test for, we want to have differentiated diplomas, honors endorsements, I'm arguing for tuition waivers. But to get a standard high school diploma only reasonable knowledge and skills should be required, and I think we can have just as high a percentage of students show reasonable knowledge and skills as in Massachusetts.

>> Michael: What's your view on that. That's a remarkable turnaround in only two years.

>> Penny: If it was that easy, we could adopt Massachusetts tests and everything would be fine. Arizona has a set of standards. We don't know yet how the Department of Ed is going to set the proficiency scores. The superintendent has vowed to look apartment system and make them a bit more reasonable and that has always been an issue in Arizona. You can get 90% of your kids to pass depending on where you set the proficiency scores.

>> Michael: Is that called dumbing down?

>>Penny: I don't think so. In Texas they did that, but what they did is gradually increased them as the skills of kids increased. But let's look at assessment in general. Arizona did well on the sat 9 scores. They were increased over the several years. Stable with the NAPE scores, up for SAT, down for AIMS. How do you pick which test measures what kids know?

>> Michael, I dis --

>> Michael: That will have to stay a hypothetical. Penny Kotterman, thank you very much for joining us. Tom Horne, our thanks to you as well.

>>Tom: Thank you. We're not dumbing down the test, by the way.

>> Michael: I know. Or, well, that's the story.

>>>Michael: In North Phoenix ASU has a center dedicated to preserving and learning about the history of man. The Deer Valley Rock Art Center is also home to a collection of books that expands its scope to a worldwide research center.

>> It's like a library. It is like an encyclopedia. It tells a story and our language and our culture is all oral. So this really is our only link to the past, and this is what we're trying to preserve.

>> Reporter: Sheltered in the Hedgepeth Hills north of Phoenix is the legacy of an ancient people. Believed by many to be the ancestors of the Yavapai, Hopi, and Gila River Indian tribes, they left their unique and in during mark upon the landscape. The efforts of modern people in this area focus on the preservation and study of this treasure. Over 1500 petroglyphs. And have resulted in the Deer Valley Rock Art Center. It is one of the few visitor and research centers in the world dedicated to rock art.

>>Peter Welsh: The Deer Valley Rock Art Center has three fundamental purposes. The first and foremost is the preservation of the Hedgepeth Hills petroglyph site. The second purpose is to treat the site and the place with a respect that reflects the variety of people who have been connected to this site for a long time. And thirdly, the idea of connection, of an ancient place such as this to people who live here in the Valley today.

>> Reporter: The center is operated by ASU's anthropology department in consultation with the local Indian tribes. Here Welsh and his colleagues pursue an unusually broad research perspective which focuses on the study of rock art as a cultural and human phenomenon.

>> Peter: There is an urge to interpret them, to say, well, this mark means this. But our ability to decipher that meaning in some direct way is probably fruitless.

>> Kids: There' some right there.

>> Peter: When kids come here there's a real sense of discovery. People go to the site and walk up to a -- all this jumble of rocks and it takes a while to start to see the marks that are there. And then once you do, it's like magic pictures. You can't not see them.

>> Ted Vaughn: But the Prescott Yavapai tribe is trying to do is trying to preserve this, and they're also documenting all of this, and what we're doing is not just for us; it is for all the human speaking people so that they will know and learn our simple way of life.

>> Reporter: In 1999 the Deer Valley Rock Art Center added another dimension to its preservation work. It became the repository for a collection of world rock art research material.

>> Peter: We have been selected by the American rock art research association to house their library and archives.

>> Reporter: That collection includes books, periodicals and archival materials featuring ancient rock paintings and etchings from around the world, from Africa to Europe to Australia with an emphasis on American rock art, including Mexico and the southwest. The Rock Art Center has catalogued the collection and will make it available to researchers in a non-circulating library. They are also making a bibliography of the collection available on their website.

>> Peter: Rock art as a worldwide phenomenon is unified by the fact that people for thousands of years have made meaningful inscriptions and markings on rock surfaces and one of our interests, and one of the things that has driven research, is to try to find something that unifies rock art around the world. They selected ASU because through the Rock Art Center and its establishment ASU has shown a real commitment to rock art research and a stability that the organization felt they could see their collection kept well into the future. As part of the university, the center has a real mandate to support research. So this immediately catapults us into a place where we can be a world leader in rock art studies.

>> Reporter: As an anthropologist, Welsh believes this archive will add to the scope and uniqueness of the Deer Valley Rock Art Center.

>> Peter: What fascinates me about rock art is its continual connection to people. Markings that have been made centuries ago continue to find a meaningful place in people's experience and understanding how that happens is what fascinates me in my work. Something that makes this place unique and special is that rock art exists in the spot where it was made, and it's not like a museum exhibit where we have taken things from one place and put them somewhere else. This is where people stood thousands of years ago and made these marks, saw these vistas, engaged with this place in ways that we continue to do today.

>> Michael: Deer Valley Rock Art Center two miles west of interstate 17. We have a link with more information on our website as well as other information about "Horizon." To get there, go to www.kaet.asu.edu, click on "Horizon," follow the links. You can also get transcripts, find out about upcoming "Horizon" topics. Here's a look at what's coming up tomorrow on "Horizon."

>> It's been two years since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Since then security has been a top priority in this country. But are we safer? Work is constant to improve security places like airports as well as other areas of our life. We'll talk to the Arizona director of homeland security on the at that time status of our safety Thursday at seven on "Horizon."

>> And Friday the Journalists Roundtable. Thank you very much for joining us on this Wednesday edition of "Horizon." I'm Michael Grant. Have a good one. Good night.

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