The Horne Ultimatum
Fail them all ... That's not your job ... And bills on the move.
Tom Horne wants teachers to flunk more than half of Arizona’s students.
Of course, that’s not how Arizona’s top school official would characterize his proposal to require teachers to fail any child who misses nine or more days of school in a year.
But it would be the effect of what even he calls “radical efforts” to get kids back in schools after the pandemic — unless parents and students radically change their behavior.
“You can’t teach a student who’s not there,” Horne explained at this week’s State Board of Education meeting. “So we need radical efforts to solve this problem. A lot of what I’ve seen in studies is what I would consider soft solutions, like talking to the parents… We should bring back the old system, which is nine absences and you flunk the course.”
Horne is right that Arizona is facing an absenteeism crisis.
But his half-baked idea of flunking any kid who misses nine days of school ignores the research about how to solve the problem.
And it’s indicative of his “punish first, ask questions later” approach to education.
Since the Covid lockdowns and school closures in 2020, Arizona school kids have been struggling to regularly attend classes — at one point we were number one in the nation for chronic absenteeism, though we’ve since bounced back to number 15.
Missing school days — especially in early grades — can put a serious dent in a student’s lifetime learning potential. It hurts a student’s ability to read at grade level by third grade, which is a key indicator to basically all other academic success.
Chronically absent students are less likely to graduate on time, less likely to graduate at all and less likely to go to college.
And chronic absences can impact the entire class, straining teachers and setting an example for other kids, who are more likely to be absent if other students are absent, according to one study.
School administrators, researchers and education advocacy groups have spent a lot of time discussing the complex roots of the problem and coming up with evidence-based solutions to get kids back in class.
The Arizona State Board of Education recently adopted the results of a report detailing several tiers of evidence-based strategies to help ensure that Arizona students are actually attending schools, for example.
None of those evidence-based solutions included failing students who missed nine days.
Right now, each school district adopts its own policies on how many absences result in a failing grade. Horne wants schools to change their policies to automatically flunk kids with excessive absences. He also suggested at Monday’s Board of Education meeting that it could be done legislatively.
“That’s not really a route any district has seen as a success. It is taking a punitive path versus taking a partnership path,” as Mark Eley, the principal at Kyrene De Los Cerritos, told AZFamily’s Mickaela Castillo yesterday.
Roughly 30% of Arizona students were “chronically absent” in 2023, according to a recent report from the Helios Education Foundation. But the definition of chronically absent is missing 10% of school days, or 18 days.
Horne’s plan would be to punish any kid who misses just nine days, or halfway to chronically absent. (Not including excused absences. Also, every five days of tardiness would count as one absence.)
The Arizona Department of Education, which Horne oversees, said it didn’t know how many students missed nine or more days of school. The Arizona State Board of Education also didn’t know how many students are halfway to chronically absent, nor did the Helios Education Foundation, which authored the study that sparked Horne to action.
So when we say 50% of students would flunk under this policy, that’s just a conservative guess. Nobody actually knows how many students a policy like this would impact.
Horne didn’t bother to find out before proposing the idea.
But he’s sure it won’t come to that.
“I want the parents to be motivated to get their kids to school so the kids would get an education. It's not about flunking half the kids, for God's sake,” he told us. “The parents would change their behavior, I have no doubt about it.”
The thing is, Horne’s probably right.
If there were severe consequences, many students and parents would take classroom time more seriously. Our trend toward a pajama-based society is not good for most students, and it’s going to require some discipline to break.
But tough love isn’t going to work in all cases. And flunking kids who are struggling, rather than working with them, is going to leave a lot of students behind.
And even if Arizona’s chronic absentee rates dropped to pre-pandemic levels, that’s still about 10% of students at every grade level every year “chronically absent.” And remember: Horne’s plan would flunk kids for only being halfway to chronically absent. Horne doesn’t know how many kids that is.
Why nine days instead of eight or a nice round 10?
“That’s my understanding of how they used to do it,” he told us, though he couldn’t specify who “they” were, other than to say he doesn’t think it was a statewide policy, when this policy existed or why it went away.
And while the policy is in line with Horne’s general nostalgic approach to school discipline, it isn’t popular among the academic crowd. It’s also counter to the research, evidence and science in the field.
Read On Arizona recently brought together a task force of more than 30 educators, administrators, policy wonks, researchers, tax hawks, teachers’ union representatives and others to examine the problem and provide “evidence-based strategies” to keep kids in classrooms.
The result was a detailed 77-page report, delivered to the Board of Education, that offered up three tiers of strategies to help reduce absenteeism by acknowledging the root cause, which is often a combination of problems at home like housing insecurity, lack of transportation or having to watch siblings while parents are at work. Or it can simply be illness, or illnesses in the family.
In fact, research suggests that punishing students for missing school can result in a negative feedback loop that actually causes them to miss more school days, as they fall further behind and feel even more discouraged.
One of the most effective tactics to keep students in classrooms is simply to build relationships with families before the problem starts, according to the report. In Window Rock USD, for example, teachers reach out to parents early on in the school year with some positive feedback — setting the stage for more buy-in from parents if absences become a problem later in the school year. That’s a tier 1 tactic.
Tier 2 tactics are more aggressive, like small group mentoring around attendance and engagement.
Tier 3 tactics can be like Litchfield Elementary School District’s C.U.T.S. Program, which cites students with excessive absences to the Maricopa County Juvenile Court, which works with families to ensure students attend school regularly.
That’s a pretty intensive intervention.
But one thing the tactics all attempt to avoid is taking students out of school as a punishment for missing school.
Suspending students for excessive absences is still legal in Arizona, but it’s a tactic that has fallen out of favor with academic researchers and even Republican politicians for a lot of reasons, including that it’s disproportionately applied to Black, Latino and Indigenous students, according to an investigation by the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting.
But also, it just kind of defies logic — what is achieved by suspending a kid for missing school?
The same logical questions apply to Horne’s proposal to flunk absentee students.
If a student misses the first nine days of school and flunks the class or grade, why would they bother showing up for the other 171 days of school?
The sword of Damocles: As the Trump administration ramps up threats to withhold funding from schools that keep DEI policies intact, Maricopa County School Superintendent Shelli Boggs put Valley schools on notice that they need to get rid of those policies immediately, the Republic’s Alexandra Hardle reports. But it’s not clear what authority she has, or even what federal education officials are legally allowed to do. Boggs’s letter to schools noted her office doesn’t have the authority to enforce compliance directly, while the Feb. 14 message from the U.S. Department of Education also noted their demand “does not have the force and effect of law.”
Troubled districts get a hand: The City of Phoenix is buying a parcel of land from the Isaac School District, which is in dire financial straits, for $3.1 million, KTAR’s Serena O’Sullivan reports. The city is buying another parcel from the Alhambra School District for $2.3 million. The city plans to quickly sell the land to a developer, with the condition that it be used for affordable housing for at least 40 years.
We don’t need $5.4 million from the city of Phoenix,
but a couple of dollars a month from you goes a long way.
Moral decline: It wasn’t the violence of a fictional school shooting that two grandparents in Gilbert highlighted when they complained to the Higley Unified School District about a book their 11th-grade grandchild read at school. It was the description of a sexual act that prompted them to complain to the district, and then the Arizona State Board of Education, saying it “exacerbates the moral decline of our youth,” the Republic’s Madeleine Parrish reports. The school already required parental consent to read the book, but the public firestorm led the district to put a teacher on paid leave for seven days, revamp the permission slip, and ultimately pull the book, “Nineteen Minutes,” from the list of books teachers could assign.
Putting down the phone: State lawmakers are moving ahead with a bill that would limit the use of cell phones during the school day, 12News’ Kevin Reagan reports. The state House approved HB2484 on Monday with bipartisan support. The bill would require every public and charter school board to put policies in place that restrict access to social media sites and limit the use of cell phones, with exceptions for “educational purposes” and emergencies.
Another one down: Amid a drop in enrollment, the Cave Creek Unified School District decided to close a second elementary school, the Republic’s Hardle reports. District officials previously decided to keep Lone Mountain Elementary School open and close Desert Sun Academy. But the vote was close and one member of the governing board changed their mind at a Monday meeting, deciding the fate of Lone Mountain. The rationale from the board was that if Lone Mountain stayed open, schools throughout the district would have to cut programs like music.
Play ball, hit the books: Arizona State University is partnering with Major League Baseball to help players continue their education, KTAR’s Heidi Hommel reports. Former Diamondback Chris Young led the effort after he earned an online degree in business administration. Now ASU is offering a program built around the 162-game MLB schedule that also includes courses in Spanish for international athletes.
It’s “crossover week” at the state Capitol — marked by long days of rapid-fire votes in the state House and Senate as each chamber attempts to push hundreds of bills over to the other chamber to stay ahead of those bill-killing legislative deadlines.
If you need an update on the bill-to-law process, Arizona Senate Democrats put together this handy little guide. We’re approaching step six of eight, but don’t let that fool you — the Legislature will likely be in session for several more months.
Three bills we’re keeping an eye on are up for a vote in the House and Senate today:
SB1441 would require school board candidates to run for office as partisan politicians, with their party affiliation on the ballot alongside their name. Critics worry it’ll further politicize school boards.
SB1226 would require schools to develop policies to limit students’ access to cell phones during the school day. But it got watered down via an amendment from its original of fully eliminating cell phone use in schools.
And HB2578 would allow a monument to murdered journalist Don Bolles on the Arizona Capitol lawn, which would be educational for all the students who visit the Capitol and don’t know Bolles’ story.