Weighing Penny Kotterman and Jason Williams

Kotterman has also served for six years as president of the Arizona Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union that specifically advocates on behalf of Arizona public education. She also served six years as a member of the National Education Association's Professional Standards and Practices Committee. She currently owns her own consulting firm, which helped advise Governor Janet Napolitano on matters of public education.

After graduating from Boston College with a B.A. in political science, Jason Williams worked with Teach for America as a teacher for three years in East Oakland, teaching math and science to 6th graders. In 2000, Williams moved to Arizona where he served for five years as the Phoenix-area Director of Teach for America. Currently, Williams works with a variety of education-focused committees and groups, including the PAC that he founded, AZ School Works.

In 2006, Williams won the Democratic nomination for School Superintendent, but lost the race to current School Superintendent Tom Horne. 

Jason Williams is strongly campaigning on the platform of instituting gateway years at Grades 3, 8, and 12. In brief, students at these grades would need to demonstrate proficiency to a state-wide standard (it's unclear to me if this would involve administering additional state-wide standardized tests or not). Students who do not pass these standards will not be promoted to the next grade.

Williams argues that implementing such gateway years will help students achieve the level of education they need in order to stay competitive in the national market. In addition to demonstrating personal growth via their personalized portfolios, students must meet a certain universal standard in order to progress through their education, says Williams.

Williams further says that such gateway years would only be implemented with appropriate support for students and teachers. Students in danger of not demonstrating sufficient proficiency would be identified at least two years prior to the gateway year, and would be offered opportunities and interventions to bring them up to speed, such as summer schools, tutoring and student action plans.

Penny Kotterman argues vehemently against the implementation of gateway years, saying that instituting high-pressure grade levels will stress students and teachers, and reduce the quality of learning in classrooms. In the Clean Elections debate between Kotterman and Williams, Kotterman suggested that implementing a state-wide proficiency test at these grades will encourage teaching towards the test (and possibly even teacher "fudging" of results) in order to push students along.

Instead, Kotterman advocates measuring student growth principally through the aforementioned personalized student portfolios, and performance on the AIMS test (see below). 

It appears as though Penny Kotterman generally favours the current use of the AIMS test to help assess student growth. However, Kotterman writes on her website that she would like change how data from the AIMS test is collected and analyzed. She would like to use the results of the AIMS test to help identify schools with struggling student populations, and specifically to help develop programs that would improve student achievement in these schools.

Kotterman also says that she would re-examine the AIMS test in order to ensure that certain populations of students are not disadvantaged by the test's contents. And, to be sure, there's plenty of data out there to show that some of the most common standardized tests out there (including the SATs) are culturally biased.

Jason Williams would like to completely overhaul the AIMS test program (he identifies changes to the state's student assessment program as his "top priority"), and opposes what he calls the "watering down" of AIMS standards in order to improve student graduation rates. He believes that lowered standards damages students' college- and career-readiness.

Williams also argues that the AIMS test emphasizes certain topics to the detriment of other topics students need to succeed. He believes that additional or altered standardized tests should be implemented that assess students on a more broad range of criteria than those addressed by AIMS. In a recent Tucson-area debate, Williams cited an ASU study showing that 70% of social studies teachers were told to teach less history in order to teach towards the current AIMS test.

Jason Williams' background with Teach for America clearly informs his position on this issue. Williams believes that public schools can do a better job of recruiting non-traditional teachers, and to built a "talent pipeline" to Arizona's schools. Not surprisingly, he also believes that doing so will help elevate the quality of education in public schools.

While Williams acknowledges that improving teacher pay will produce a financial incentive for effective teachers to come to (or remain in) Arizona schools, he also suggests that monetary incentives are not the sole (or even most effective) method for attracting these teachers. He promises to work with teachers and administrators to develop a broader incentive program for attracting high-quality teachers to Arizona's low-income schools (which would likely include appeals to a teachers' desire to teach).

Penny Kotterman's 30 years of experience as a traditional teacher influence her position on this matter. Kotterman argues that recruiting non-traditional teachers are not beneficial to Arizona's students — and that students need teachers with a demonstrated commitment to the teaching profession. On her website, she explicitly writes,"Teachers are the backbone of our educational system. They are dedicated professionals, and we need to honor their profession while recognizing that just as desire alone is not a qualification to teach, merely holding a certificate is not sufficient in today's economy, and continuous improvement is required."

Kotterman emphasizes that teachers must demonstrate talent in teaching and professional growth, and that Arizona must use financial incentives (see below) to recruit and retain these teachers in Arizona's schools. 

Penny Kotterman, not surprisingly given her experience with teachers' unions, advocates strongly in favour of improving teacher pay in order to honour and reward teachers. And, it's true that most high school and secondary school teachers are paid abysmally given their integral role in preparing our children for their future: the average high school teacher makes about $35,000 annually, which is less than the annual salary brought in by the manager for your local Starbucks.

Although Kotterman believes that teachers must demonstrate continued excellence in the classroom in order to earn higher compensation, Kotterman also proposes that teachers' base pay be raised, so that it can become a competitive profession against other fields. Notably, an increase in teacher base-pay is not performance-based, and would apply to all teachers.

Jason Williams argues primarily in favour of performance-based increases in teacher pay. Teachers would be paid according to combined indicators of their performance in the classroom. Williams would reward teachers who can demonstrate that students have experienced personal growth over the year, regardless of what their start-point is using the aforementioned personalized student portfolio; an example Williams gives is that a teacher should be rewarded if a student who enters the 4th grade reading at a 5th grade level leaves reading at a 6th grade – not a 5th grade – level.

Williams would also reward teachers based on demonstrated professional development and continued career training.