Sean Ross said that “if you heal a kid, you heal a school. If you heal a school, you heal a community.”
To do all that often takes something that sounds a bit less dramatic: good policy.
The executive director of the Arizona State Board of Education described it this way during Wednesday’s virtual College of Education Dean's Speaker Series at Grand Canyon University.
“I like to compare education policy to a body,” Ross said. “The state board is the mouth that gives shape to legislation or the executive order. In Arizona, the Arizona Department of Education is the hands. They go out and do the work, in conjunction with schools.”
An example was when the state legislature made changes to educator preparation in 2021, requiring literacy teachers in grades K-5 to participate in additional training in reading instruction and intervention, and a passing score on the Foundations of Reading Assessment.
It’s leading to better early literacy for children.
“Huge shout out to GCU for being ahead of the curve on this,” Ross said in the seminar, titled “Who Write the Rules?”
The national average for the Foundations assessment is 65%, but since the law changed, Arizona has increased its score to 82%, “and GCU has the highest scores in the state,” he said.
Ross and the board's policy director, Rico Yanez, was joined by Dr. Dana Drew Shaw, GCU’s vice president of government relations, in the conference designed to illuminate for education students the way public policy affects classrooms.
Shaw said its important to know the policies and those who influence or set them in the state where you work.
“The best policies are the ones where the experts are involved. In most cases, that’s YOU, those of you that are on this call,” she said. “You’re the ones that should be helping to form and create the policy. You’re in the weeds and you know what works and doesn’t work and those are the voices that are most important.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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