Highly respectable judges of school quality like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and Stanford University’s Education Opportunity Project give Arizona schools high marks. The online finance website however ranks Arizona 49^th out of 50 states.

Measuring the quality of a K-12 system is a complex endeavor, but not nearly as much as the marketing firm Wallethub makes it. For a succinct explanation of what Wallethub does and the basic problem with their K-12 rankings, I cannot improve upon that provided regarding a previous Wallethub state K-12 ranking:

WalletHub is a personal finance website that makes its money from advertising and premium listings on the site. It has come up with a brilliant marketing strategy. It collects data from other sources, tosses it into a blender, and spits out a list of the best and worst states and cities about various things…WalletHub, however, isn’t a serious social science research outfit, as this report amply demonstrates.

If you peer into the blender of Wallethub’s, you once again see a goulash of weird ingredients that don’t really belong together. 

Imagine looking into a blender to see grapes, ice cream, vegetable stew and Purina monkey chow with a cup of chocolate syrup and you might get in the neighborhood. Specifically, the Wallethub rankings include a mixture of measures that are inputs rather than outputs, others that are projections about the future, and others that are merely regulatory in nature and have nothing to do with school quality.

Direct measures of academic achievement are few and far between, and predictably the bartender has thrown the wrong ones into the mix. Most analysts agree that the best measure of the quality of a school system is not the overall levels of academic achievement, but rather academic growth over time.

Academic achievement is important, but it is also highly correlated with socio-economic characteristics. We know for instance that upper quintile families spend approximately five times as much as bottom quintile families on student enrichment activities. If the higher income kids show higher levels of math achievement than low income students, is it because they attend higher quality schools, or is it because they go to Kumon? We cannot be entirely sure.

Academic growth on the other hand is not nearly as correlated with socio-economic status. Measuring academic improvement over time tells us where students start and how much they learn over time. Kids can have different starting and ending points but a measure of academic growth can tell us how much they learned between those two points in time.

linked state academic exams across the country to give both a comparable growth and achievement score for Grades 3-8 in the country. The below chart shows academic growth (the dotted east-west line) by academic achievement (north-south line) for public schools in Arizona. Each dot represents an Arizona public school. Note that the dotted east-west line represents the national average for academic growth:

The first thing you should notice here is that far more schools are above the dotted line than below it. That is because Arizona schools lead the nation in academic growth during this period. 

Arizona not only has many above-average-growth schools, it also has some of the highest growth schools in the country. The highest performing schools rank among the highest performing schools in the nation whether you use growth, proficiency or both.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) also shows Arizona students made stronger than average academic progress across a variety of 4^th and 8^th grade exams since 2009.

Arizona schools, like schools in all other states, must continue to improve. Our schools, however, are a strength, not a weakness. Arizona families can access world class public schools through both charter school and open enrollment mechanisms. Arizona not only has fantastic schools, families do not have to buy their way into their attendance boundaries in order to access them.

Matthew Ladner is the director of the Arizona Center for Student Opportunity.

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The Local First Arizona Foundation last month announced its new Rural Marketing Cooperative program, created in collaboration with the Arizona Office of Tourism.

The program is designed to help drive tourists to rural and tribal parts of the state by following a “robust” media advertising plan that includes online, print, outdoor and Arizona Office of Tourism (AOT) publications.

Every year, AOT releases a list of large, reputable advertisers and offers half-rate pricing to rural and tribal marketing organizations, chambers and tourism associations by using matching funds from the AOT budget.

“This year, under the Arizona Rural Development Council, the AOT is co-oping branding, which is a first,” said Liza Noland, director of rural programs for the Arizona Rural Development Council (AZRDC), the rural-focused arm of the  (LFAF).

Starting with 2019-2020 program, the AZRDC is offering three different packages for rural groups: branding, which can be either for the community or an individual chamber or tourism organization; development of community profiles, an “all-encompassing snapshot” of a community, which employers often use to attract new workers; and marketing consulting, including help developing a marketing plan.

“That is kind of new, because it’s not just advertising; it’s actually on that branding and development side,” Noland said. “Before, they were co-oping your spend. Now, if you select some of our pieces, they’re actually co-oping the planning, which just helps people utilize it better.”

Before, the challenges were three-fold, she said. The program was under-utilized, it was overly-complex — which contributed to it being under-utilized — and rural organizations and communities did not have the budget to afford effective advertising.

“Now, I think rural communities are starting to really realize their uniqueness,” Noland said. “So many of them, especially across the state, have something so cool… either just unbelievable outdoor recreation, or they’ve become a very , or they’re a mining community, or they’re a saguaro community — they have all sorts of things.”

People in rural communities have begun to recognize that Arizonans “want to visit rural,” and they want to take the opportunity, Noland said.

“Everybody’s moving to get people to come visit,” she said. “Now, we just need to tell them what to expect.”

´ˇ˛őĚý of marketing their diverse assets and offerings, consumer demand for rural tourism continues to grow, and the Rural Marketing Co-Op is intended to help rural stakeholders “take the lead role,” she said.

Hiring an ad agency to do a brand package, even for a small community, could cost anywhere from $20,000 to upward of $70,000, Noland said.

The AZRDC is offering the same service for $10,000, but the Rural Marketing Co-Op match from AOT brings the cost down to $5,000.

“We’ve heard from three [communities] already that are excited, and then we’ll see… what else we hear,” Noland said. “It’s been received positively so far.”

The AZRDC’s goal is to keep Arizonans in-state when they travel, bringing much-needed money to Arizona’s rural cities and towns rather than spending it out-of-state. The Rural Marketing Co-Op is intended to get the message out so people know the destinations available to them.

“There are billions of dollars spent every year by Arizonans traveling to Southern California for weekend getaways, and our goal is to divert 10 percent of that money back to rural Arizona,” Noland said. “It would completely change the face of rural Arizona if we did that.”

The AZRDC encourages any rural destination marketing organizations (DMOs), tribes and tourism-marketing groups who are interested to .

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