A Superior Court judge denied a request to allow students who didn’t pass the AIMS test to graduate high school, but he left the door open for the students to be awarded diplomas retroactively.
In a May 15 ruling, Judge Kenneth Fields said granting a temporary restraining order for the plaintiffs in the Espinoza v. State of Arizona lawsuit exempting graduating high school seniors from passing the state’s high-stakes test would have prevented the state from being able to defend its position.
However, he scheduled an evidentiary hearing for July 5 and 6, saying the plaintiffs make a “credible challenge” that state education funding is inadequate to properly allow students to pass AIMS.
“Plaintiffs have made a strong and credible argument in support of their position that the state’s system of funding public education is inadequate and that they would succeed on the merits,” Judge Fields wrote.
Ellen Katz, director of the William E. Morris Institute for Justice, the group that brought the lawsuit, said the denial of the temporary restraining order is not a setback in the case and she was encouraged by the judge’s ruling.
“If anyone were to read this order, they would walk away thinking the court thought we had a strong case,” she said. “It does not mean the state has a good case, because it doesn’t.”
Horne: Current funding
level adequate
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, however, said the current state funding level is properly educating students. The most recent Department of Education estimates predict 98 percent of the students with enough credits to graduate will pass AIMS and receive diplomas.
He said those figures will play a large role in the state’s defense against this lawsuit and praised the judge’s decision to deny the temporary restraining order.
“I’m hoping that we’ll not be interfered with in future years,” Mr. Horne said.
The suit states it was “filed on behalf of all students in the Class of 2006 and each succeeding senior class who have met or will meet all the requirements for graduation by the end of their senior year, except they have not passed the AIMS test.”
The lawsuit asserts the state’s education funding is “arbitrary” and “not based on educational need.” Forty-four states, the lawsuit continues, spend at least 20-percent more per student than Arizona.
The education funding system in state statute was created in the late 1970s and has only been adjusted in the last 25 years to account for inflation and retirement costs. When the AIMS test was instituted, no additional funding was provided.
Because the funding system is inadequate, the suit says, students have not been provided the services and programs they need to meet the state’s academic standards and pass the AIMS exam. The suit ultimately requests that students be exempted from passing the AIMS test in order to graduate until the state adequately funds education.
The dearth of funding impacts poor and minority students especially hard, Ms. Katz said. The lawsuit cites Arizona Department of Education public records that show economically disadvantaged students passed much more infrequently — in some cases, less than half as often – as students who did not come from poor families. Of the more than 1 million students in the state, roughly 40 percent are considered economically disadvantaged by federal standards.
Similarly, white students passed the AIMS test substantially more often than their black, Hispanic and Native American counterparts. In almost all cases since 2004, minority students passed the AIMS test at less than an 80-percent rate of the white students.
As of December 2005, about 10,000 high school seniors, or about 20 percent of the class of 2006, had not yet passed the test, though Ms. Katz figures that number would likely be near 40 percent if the state also counted the students who dropped out of high school.
Mr. Horne said the latest graduation estimates — and the eventual graduation rates — will make those earlier numbers moot.