The Horne Ultimatum

95% is the new failing ... Border hawk is the new progressive ... And deep space is the new deep state.

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.

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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.”

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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?

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Guarding the desert: Gov. Katie Hobbs announced a task force to stave off international crime organizations along the Arizona-Mexico border through an executive order her office is calling “Operation Desert Guardian,” the Republic’s Stacey Barchenger reports. The Arizona Department of Public Safety is leading the task force and is charged with looking for security vulnerabilities and dismantling supply chains that get drugs into the state. It will collaborate with border-area sheriffs and get funding through the $28 million Border Security Fund that the state Legislature replenishes every year. The success of the operation is key to Hobbs’ reelection chances amid bipartisan criticism of how she handles border policy.

Cue the appeals: The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down two Arizona laws Republican lawmakers passed in 2022 that require proof of citizenship to vote for president and to vote by mail, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield reports. In August, the U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency stay that required election officials to deny state-issued voter registration forms without proof of citizenship, which the latest ruling reverses. Senate President Warren Petersen said Republicans will appeal the “liberal 9th Circuit” court’s decision.

Hand IT over: Former lawmaker and newly elected Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap is threatening to sue the board of supervisors over an agreement former Recorder Stephen Richer cemented that separates both entities’ election-related duties, KJZZ’s Wayne Schutsky writes. That deal gave supervisors oversight of early ballots and the recorder’s information technology staff, and Heap wants $5 million to get the IT staff back.

We need way less than $5 million to keep paying the little staff we have. Upgrade to a paid subscription so we don’t have to transfer back to the corporate-owned paper business.

Flag hustling: A local vendor is making bank hawking political flags that range from rainbow “F*CK TRUMP” flags sold at recent state Capitol protests to classic MAGA banners at Republican rallies, the Phoenix New Times’ Morgan Fischer reports. Jeff Brown has capitalized off protesters who’ve occupied the Capitol on Mondays for weeks through what he calls a “flag-hustling business.” His pro and anti-Trump flags are Brown’s best sellers.

“I have so many Trump flags. It’ll blow your mind and they all sell,” Brown said. “You either hate him or love him. And his flags saved the flag business.”

Holy houses: The House Appropriations Committee advanced a bill to let religious groups offer up their land for affordable housing regardless of existing zoning laws, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer writes. Some lawmakers don’t like the idea of allowing largely unrestricted housing in vacant land and parking lots, even with a three-story limit. And other lawmakers, like Democratic Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton, are receiving complaints from mayors who don't want the state to control local zoning laws.

Lacking control: A flight instructor listening to the radio during the midair collision of two planes at the Marana Regional Airport that killed two people last week said one of the planes was attempting a touch-and-go maneuver when the other clipped its propeller, per the Washington Post. Only about 10% of public airports have control towers where people direct the flow of traffic, and airports like Marana’s rely on radio communications.

Deleting DEI: Arizona’s public universities have removed language from their policies that reference diversity, equity and inclusion amid Trump’s executive order that pulls federal funding from those engaging in DEI practices, Cronkite News’ Alysa Horton reports. The University of Arizona nixed language in its land acknowledgment statement, while Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University issued carefully worded statements about “monitoring” the situation.

Sen. Mark Finchem and Rep. Leo Biasiucci, both Republicans, are getting some important work done preventing aliens from shaping national policy, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports.

The duo is set to speak at a Florida summit put on by a group that believes President Bill Clinton secretly signed a bunch of economic reforms into law. Extraterrestrials have told the group’s members that they’re working to promote those reforms, believers of the NESARA/GESARA conspiracy theory say.

That conspiracy theory was used to scam investors out of millions and has close ties to the QAnon movement. Both Republican lawmakers speaking at the event spoke at a QAnon convention in 2021.

The March conference Finchem and Biasiucci are attending will cover cryptocurrency, chemtrail conspiracy theories and “collaboration between Space Force and the Galactic Federation.”