There’s a great, reasonably new website in town: Bringing Up Arizona. It’s a researched-based site about education headed by Richard Gilman, a former Daily Star reporter and editor who also was a senior vice president at the New York Times and publisher of the Boston Globe.
You can find a number of interesting reports on Bringing Up Arizona, but my favorite part is a series of slides called “Overcoming the Education Divide.” In 15 slides, it illustrates the overwhelmingly strong correlation between Arizona’s school grades and students’ family income. Using the Tucson and Phoenix areas, it shows the “A” schools concentrated in the affluent areas of town and the grades descending from there as family income lowers. Anyone who wants solid data on the subject — maps, scatter graphs and bar charts — that’s the place to go.
I did some similar research, though not nearly as thorough, and presented my analysis in a segment of the cable access show I do with Ann-Eve Pedersen, “Education: The Rest of the Story,” which is at the top of this post.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2014.
Spot on. Thank you!
Tell us something we didn’t know. What is your solution? Raise the income of everybody in Central Tucson? Will that change the test scores? Two other factors you don’t mention is intelligence and values.
Frank most of the high poverty areas are rural or in the South Tucson area not central Tucson. I don’t think anything at all was mentioned about raising income. I agree that specifics were not given about how to address this issue, but it is important to communicate that what is currently being done as far as school improvement plans and putting the majority of blame on the teachers is not working. Only then can a solution be found that may work to solve the problem. Intelligence varies greatly as I am sure you are aware. That does not mean that only the brightest have the potential to learn and to be successful. As far as values, well, that is a very subjective topic in and of itself.
Frank, it should be, “Two other factors you don’t mention are intelligence and values.”, not, “Two other factors you don’t mention is intelligence and values.”, which is what you wrote.
David, thanks for publicizing Richard’s hard work.
I have an idea. Take all the money from the foothills and give it to south Tucson. Then the map will be reversed!!!
In other news the sun came up this morning.
So long as the media and politicians get away with blaming teachers for society’s failures the condition of public schools in poor areas will not improve significantly. There may be islands of success, but as a whole the public schools will not improve.
One of the goals of those who promote charters and private schools is to cherry pick the best students from traditional public schools, leaving those with poor skills, poor attitudes and poor behavior to struggle in traditional public schools. The Education Trust has pushed the notion that quality teaching can undo virtually all the problems caused by failed social institutions…including poverty, dysfunctional families, drugs and violence. The reality is that most of the Education Trust’s claims are bogus, based on studies done with miniscule samples of students who were not chosen randomly.
The Obama administration, through its policies that scapegoat teachers and promote charter schools as some sort of panacea, has reinforced the notion that schools should be responsible for curing all of society’s ills. Until we recognize that the current corporate based approach to education change (it is not worthy of the name “reform”) has failed miserably we will never make headway in closing the achievement gaps between the middle class and the under class and between whites and Asians on one hand and Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics on the other.
It’s not the teachers fault at all. Anyone who thinks that is crazy or stupid. Maybe tired teachers.
There is a place in heaven for ALL teachers.
Economic achievement gaps are well established. The question is how do we develop a strategy to close them. Half of Arizona’s school grading formula is driven by academic growth. The gains of the students scoring in the bottom 25% of last year’s test are double weighted.
What David’s maps actually show is that TUSD has a lot of room for improvement in driving academic achievement gains and overall academic proficiency.
Matthew! A blast from the past! Hope to hear more from you.
Your video makes a powerful argument for why it would be a crime to devote any additional resources to our educational systems in southern Arizona. Thank you for busting the myth that more funding for education will raise student performance. “…we have to address the economic and social causes of poverty”. David Safier makes the argument against increased funding for education and makes the point that until economic and social poverty issues are addressed in Tucson, schools will not make up the difference. Given this crisis of poverty here David, would you agree that doing everything humanly possible to bring good paying jobs to Pima County should be our highest priority, over nearly all other concerns.. for the children?