SEDONA AZ–Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Republican candidate Beth Price worked in the Community College doing assessment and statistical analysis. “I found that fifty percent (50%) [of students] could not do tenth grade math and twenty-five percent (25%) could not read and write at the tenth grade level. That was just unacceptable. Reading, writing and math were just basic and that was required for everything. We had to remediate that. It took a year, only a year, for the students to catch up but when they came in the students were about two years behind,” Price said.

So the Republican candidate began searching for the reason why. Beth Price believed that “it couldn’t be the students themselves because they quickly caught up the two year gap in just one year at Community College.”  Price worked as a substitute teacher in K-8 and then went and worked in a high school office where she “found that the AIMS assessment showed the students coming into high school two years behind.” Price returned to the Kindergarten through Eighth Grade (K-8) schools to learn more.

“I found out as I was talking with students and teachers and staff that they were having problems and I knew they were,” Superintendent of Public Instruction candidate Price said. “Because  they were not teaching a curriculum to have students doing reading, writing and math by the sixth grade. So I worked at Pearson, they do assessments for other states but not our state, and I found out that other states, the best of other states, were doing reading writing and math at the sixth grade level. Why can’t we do it at that level?”

Republican Primary candidate Price’s plan to improve the situation is to have students in first through sixth grade work through the entire basic reading/writing/math curriculum. Currently basic skills are taught through the eighth grade. Beth Price would have this completed by sixth grade and said, “This is the only way to compete because we are way down at the bottom in Arizona. I want to bring Arizona up to number one. And I know from grading these assessments at the sixth grade level, those students can write an essay perfectly with proper spelling and punctuation. They can do that in other states, why can’t they do it in our state?

‘I did it when I was in school and I don’t know how we got so far behind. We need to have a learning environment in the schools so that teachers and parents and students and staff are all working together. We need to do that for the students so that when they get into seventh grade, they can take career exploration and they can take history and they will be able to read their history and science books. I have found schools where the kids couldn’t read their science books.”

“And I think that we need to look at the charter schools,” the Republican Primary candidate for Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Beth Price added. “I am getting feedback from students and parents that the charter schools are not doing what they should be doing. They are funded by public funding and so they should be doing what they are supposed to.”

‘We found that at our Community Colleges, once we did the remediation, the students excelled. We had some of the best of all the Community Colleges in the nation, in Arizona. We don’t have dumb students. We shouldn’t say that our teachers aren’t capable of teaching. They just need the tools. We have all sorts of technology to make it interesting. Students can get on the Internet and look things up. We have the world at our fingertips and we need to use to those resources.”

For more information go to www.bethpricecg.com  

Article written by Joni Dahlstrom, sedonaeye.com Staff Writer   JoniD@eSedona.net   Sedona Times Publishing Election Central  c2010