Accountability starts at home in Arizona

As Nelson Smith and other national leaders often say, charter schools must take care of business on the quality side, or the movement is at risk. We agree. This is one of the fundamental insights we bring to the charter improvement game.

In Arizona, the pursuit of school quality is job #1. The Arizona quality model mines data from the state AIMS test to identify patterns of longitudinal growth. This is similar to the Colorado Growth Model that is being adopted on a national level. The level of sophistication required to do this with fidelity is higher than most volunteer leaders or part-time oversight can manage. That's why it is encouraging to see experts like Rebecca Gau and her colleagues toss around phrases like disaggregation and hierarchical linear modeling without blushing. Since Colorado and Arizona share a micro-border at the Four Corners, we count them as neighbors, and we're proud to see charters on the rise across the West.