TUSD’s University High is Number One in Local National Merit Scholars! (and That Doesn’t Mean a Whole Lot)

1. ” You have to look very hard to find good stuff, and even then, all “conclusions” should be considered works in progress.”

   Why didn’t we do that with global warming? That theory has been full frontal embraced by public education.

   http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/the-amazing-story-behind-the-global-warming-scam.html

2. Here’s some interesting data:
   On Septmeber 10, 2015, the Star published an article indicating that 25 UHS students had been named National Merit Semifinalists.
   http://tucson.com/news/local/education/southern-arizona-seniors-named-national-merit-semifinalists/article_fe1f2425-a391-55f5-9b40-c4eb063f87a6.html
   The National Merit Scholarship Corporation indicates on its website that of 16,000 semifinalists named, 15,000 become finalists.
   http://tucson.com/news/local/education/southern-arizona-seniors-named-national-merit-semifinalists/article_fe1f2425-a391-55f5-9b40-c4eb063f87a6.html
   That’s about 94%, so for the UHS cohort of 25, between 23 and 24 students should have been named finalists.
   On the same web page linked above, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation indicates that of the 15,000 finalists, about 7,400 become National Merit Scholars. That’s about 49%, so for the UHS cohort of 23 or 24, if the percentages at UHS were similar to the percentages of finalists becoming scholars nationwide, 11 or 12 UHS students should have become “Scholars.” Only 5 received that designation, less than half of what might be expected.

   Why? Is it because the recent increases in non-optional AP requirements at UHS make it harder for students at the school to maintain the kind of extracurricular and community service records that result in advancement from National Merit “finalist” to “scholar” classification?

   I think you should look into this, David. “Caveat emptor” is a great motto when looking at the self-promoting claims of schools like UHS and districts like TUSD. Parents of excelling students in the greater Tucson area should be fully aware that they may be handicapping their students’ chances of developing the kind of portfolio that will most benefit them in college admissions and scholarship applications when they enroll their students in a school like UHS.

3. Excellent point, “Why is TUSD’s percent of ‘scholars’ lower than it should be?”

   I suggest that Safier do some of the myth-busting number crunching for which he is famous. How do the percents of semi-finalists advancing to scholars in other schools locally compare to UHS/TUSD’s percent, which is unacceptably low?

   How do percents of UHS finalists advancing to scholars in the years before the TUSD Board majority changed, Sanchez was brought into town, and the AP requirements at UHS were changed compare to percents of UHS finalists advancing to scholars in 2016? (2016 is the first graduating cohort at UHS to have been subjected to the changed AP requirements. 2017 will also reflect some of the damage done — they were sophomores before the ludicrous requirement that all students in in 10th grade take AP Chemistry was removed. Then the class of 2018 will be the first graduating class required to take an AP “college” course as a freshman. The class of 2019 will be the first graduating class required to take two AP “college” courses as freshman.

   Mr. Safier: as an unbiased “caveat emptor” researcher, turning your impartial attention on all SCAMS running in the field of education, you will no doubt want to provide more coverage of the SCAM that is UHS/TUSD, and highlight the disservice the school does to its incredibly hard working students. Most of them would have received PSAT scores to qualify them as semi-finalists no matter where they attended high school. If I understand the numbers correctly, the decision to attend UHS significantly DECREASED their chances of advancing to the “scholar” stage.

4. Ya know…David…I …just….think the public education system is more complicated HERE IN TUCSON….and with respect, if you only have the perspective of looking in from the OUTSIDE instead of on the ground experience with children in the system…..many times your opinions don’t ring quite true.
   This is one of them. By forcing UHS to conform to open entrance protocol, you do a great disservice to two communities….one is the kids that just don’t fit the UHS mold, and the kids that do get in under the relaxed current criteria….you just don’t get that it is a bad fit….ARGH. Your bias against what UHS does for students that fit and need that extra umph in their education is just wrong. I’d like you to look at the low end achiever schools….those perfectly fit the kids of that ability. To shove those in with different abilities would screw both populations.

5. But isn’t that exactly why parents and students are better served by all the options that are now available. Publics,charters, privates, parochial schools so that there is something for everybody. I don’t know why everybody runs down education in AZ. We have more good choices than most states.

6. Underfunded, dysfunctional public schools and under-regulated, under-professionalized privates and charters. That’s “something for everybody?” Perhaps, but it’s not the “something” our children need and deserve. Only those who’ve never seen a state with a high-functioning public education system could look at our ongoing ALEC-created disaster in this state and think that it is all as it should be.

7. I’m looking over the list of Natonal Merit Semifinalists who were in the running for the Scholars award. BASIS Tucson North had 12. BASIS Oro Valley had 3. Cat Foothills had 8. And UHS had 25. That’s one in 12 Scholars from BASIS Tucson, one in 3 from BASIS Oro Valley, one in 8 from Cat Foothills and one in 5 from UHS. I’m not sure what kind of conclusions you can draw from that spread. UHS let its students down? It could be true, I guess, but nothing in these numbers indicate that.

   Let me add to my “grain of salt” idea. We have no idea how high the finalists scored. Most probably, some of them just barely made the cut or were somewhere in the middle, meaning they had little chance of being named Scholars. How many of those were from each school? We have no way of knowing. With such limited information, it’s ridiculous to try and draw any inferences about how the schools themselves contributed to the Scholar awards.

   So I stick to my original idea, that we shouldn’t make any inferences about the quality of the schools from their number of Scholars. All we should do is offer our heartiest congrats to the Scholars themselves and their families.

8. ALEC did not erode the public schools in AZ. Those wounds are self inflicted. Just take a look at the school boards the parents have allowed to be empowered. Then look at Admin expenses at TUSD and Middle Management that steals money from the classroom.

   By the way I have never seen a true opinion on how much is needed to fix it. More is not an answer.

9. Nope, sorry, David, not buying it.

   According to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, passing from semifinalist to finalist to scholar status has to do with GPA, extracurriculars, essays, and college counselor recommendations, not with “how high the finalists scored.” If any school — Basis, CFHS, UHS, wherever — has a percentage of students well below the national average passing from semi-finalist to scholar status, that raises questions about the conditions in the school/s in question that may be unsupportive of students obtaining the GPA, extracurriculars, writing development, and college counselor recommendations that enable them to move from one stage to the next of the process. Wouldn’t we expect “highly ranked” schools like Basis and UHS to have a higher than average rate of students passing from one stage to the next? No, not if we’re paying attention, because if w’ere paying proper attention we know that the rankings are based on gaming the AP/IB testing system, NOT on producing the sorts of well-rounded, fully developed high school graduates that do best in competitive college admissions and scholarship competitions.

   How about doing what one of the commenters above suggested, and comparing rates of students passing from semifinalist to “scholar” status at UHS before and after the advent of the increase in forced AP enrollment introduced since the current Board majority and Superintendent gained control of TUSD and started trying to turn UHS into a Basis-copycat school?

   Someone who knows the history of UHS for the past decade and more has noted that the # of Flinn recipients at UHS seems to be on the decline, and she has attributed this to various changes to the school that occurred under current TUSD-central administration, including the retirement of the college counselor at UHS who used to handle the Flinn counseling process and the RIF transfer of a TUSD middle school counselor with no previous experience with college counseling or writing college recommendations into one of the two college counseling positions at UHS that writes recommendations for Flinn, National Merit, and competitive college admissions.

   What do we call these kinds of administrative decisions, David? The proper word is MISMANAGEMENT. Anyone who votes for Juarez or Foster in the upcoming TUSD Board elections is not a friend of TUSD or of the students in this sadly malfunctioning district. Anyone who writes in support of the current TUSD administration and governance — or pulls punches when reporting on the district’s affairs — is, in my opinion, IRRESPONSIBLE.

10. You want to know the state of public education in Arizona…picture a child lying in a hospital bed hooked up to numerous medical devices with multiple intravenous bags dripping and the hushed whispers of too many voices making diagnoses and prognoses about the fate of the sick child. The government wants to pull the plug and says the child should have already responded to the slow drip of funding, the charter schools offer miracle cures for more money, and the religious-based schools say it’s a matter a faith without mentioning that their miracle cost more money too…and all the while, the sick child wastes away.

11. The correct link to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation website mentioned in “Why is TUSD’s percent of scholars lower than it should be?” post above is:
    http://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&gid=2&pgid=424

12. I think the UHS bashing I’m reading in the comments is a symptom of what I’ve been talking about in my “grain of salt” posts — using data to “prove” a point that you want to make rather than evaluating whether your conclusions are supported by the data. In this case, there’s not enough there there in the National Merit Scholar awards to support any conclusions other than the fact that a number of students in the Tucson area were deemed worthy of the awards. You’re welcome to read more into the numbers if you wish, but you’re seeing what you want to see, not what’s there.

13. You’re not going to get away with calling the reasonable commentary above “UHS bashing,” David. From what I can tell in reading it carefully, it seems to be UHS parents with DIRECT EXPERIENCE of the school during the past three years since the board majority changed looking at a statistically significant datum — the fact that UHS had, this year, less than half of the national average # of students advancing from National Merit Semifinalist to National Merit Scholar — with what they have seen on the UHS site: increases in the # of required AP courses and ill-advised changes to the staffing of the college counseling department.

    The fact is that you do not have direct experience of TUSD schools and what has been happening in them during the past three years. Instead, you have relationships you would like to maintain with people who support the current TUSD board majority and Superintendent, people who believe, wrongly, that “continuity” is more important than competent, honest management of a school district serving close to 50,000 students.

    In that you do not have on-the-ground experience of TUSD, I ask that you please stop commenting on the district and speculating about what certain number results may and may not mean. People who have seen the negative impact in students’ lives of policies and staffing decisions made during the past three years are much more credible sources on this topic. Further: if you have not been a parent of a student whose secondary and collegiate education was delivered by PUBLIC (not PRIVATE) institutions, please think more carefully about disparaging commentary from people who HAVE had that experience. It is an experience which, in the current “corporate reform” & over-testing context, is a painful one. You should know better than to insert your irrelevant theoretical speculation into discussions about what parents and students suffering from the current sad mismanagement of public education institutions are saying.

    Shame on you.

14. One monumental difference between UHS and BASIS/CFHS is per-student funding, and when this factor is incorporated, UHS and its achievements are especially praiseworthy. As a charter corporation, all BASIS students receive more money than UHS students. Both CFH and BASIS students enjoy campuses that look more like Google tech parks than high schools. Meanwhile, UHS students struggle beneath gigantic backpacks through overcrowded hallways, sit in classrooms without heating or air conditioning and dutifully tape together crumbling books. Undaunted, they earn Flinns, Merits, and Gates Millennium Scholarships. In fact, those Merit finalists who didn’t become Merit Scholars earned more lucrative and exclusive awards than the Merit. I hope that sanity prevails and UHS gets at least a half-hearted high-five from a generally unsupportive community.

15. Sabasabas:

    ” In fact, those Merit finalists who didn’t become Merit Scholars earned more lucrative and exclusive awards than the Merit.”

    A totally unverifiable assertion. How could you possibly know this? Do you know personally the 20 UHS students who were National Merit semifinalists and did not make it to the National Merit scholar status? Do you know specifically what each of these students received in the way of “lucrative and exclusive awards”? If so, pony up the information.

    BASIS students attend schools in newer buildings, but they have nothing resembling the fine arts and athletics facilities available at UHS.

    You seem to be a poorly informed partisan for UHS. If you have real knowledge of the community, please reveal exactly what it is. Are you, perhaps, a former faculty member in the Spanish depatrment? Someone by the name of Sabas used to teach at UHS, but is no longer currently on the faculty.

16. Yes. I am currently, not formerly, a teacher at UHS. I am probably more aware of the issues involved in Safier’s blog than most respondents.

17. Currently a teacher at UHS, commenting on a Tucson Weekly blog at 9:10 a.m. on a day when school is in session. Interesting.

    Perhaps during your lunch period today you can run down to the college counseling office and get the data you need to verify your unverifiable assertion that “those Merit finalists who didn’t become Merit Scholars earned more lucrative and exclusive awards than the Merit.” Please list the awards these students received, numbering them 1 through 20: what are the specific names of the “exclusive” awards these twenty students earned and what is their exact dollar value? Where will these students be attending college?

    I doubt you will be able to do it. To my knowledge, the UHS college counseling office only has data of that sort from students who choose to report it, and not all students report their awards or where they intend to matriculate.

    If you are in fact a UHS faculty member, do the broader Tucson community a favor, will you? Stop mindlessly promoting the school based on unverifiable assertions. Become informed about what is actually going on in your own school’s sadly underfunded and inadequately staffed college counseling department. Learn the realities of the college admissions, college aid, and college scholarship field, which has changed a great deal in recent years, so that when you talk about what a great job UHS is doing your words can actually be ACCURATE and worth reading.

18. Perhaps you’re unaware that this is AP week. All of my students are at Santa Rita taking AP Statistics and AP World History exams, leaving me in the rare but welcome position to have time to defend my students and school on this forum. Enjoy your day.

19. Sabasabas:

    You’re not “defending your students and school” if you are communicating inaccurate information about them, are you? Unless you provide the information requested above, you have simply proved that you are irresponsible and accustomed to making unverifiable assertions based on unobtainable evidence.

    Are these the kinds of practices for dealing with data and evidence students are taught at UHS? How sad.

    Perhaps you will take the trouble to stop by UHS college counseling while your students are off taking their high stakes, multiple choice, corporate-produced tests and become more informed about the institution you love to defend?

20. While I’m sure it’s unnecessary to iterate to such a highly-educated and circumspect readership, privacy laws prevent my revealing the names of award recipients. I know them well, as they sit in my classroom every day. Many of our students choose to reveal their awards at our honors ceremony, and members of the public are welcome to attend. Others will be recognized at Centennial Hall on May 25th for their achievements. My students are heading to MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and even U of A. Until AP and IB stop rewarding students who are doing college level work with lower tuition, I imagine that such high stakes tests will remain popular among students whose families will benefit most from their achievements.

21. …and you still wonder if public education is broken? It is in TUSD.

22. You don’t have to violate confidentiality requirements and give the names of your students to provide, in a list numbered one through twenty, the information requested of you above — not the names of the students, but the names and $$$ value of each of the twenty “more prestigious and more lucrative” awards which you inadvisably and inaccurately implied in your first post that you could provide. You have proved repeatedly in your posts, which are all accessible through the Tucson Weekly website, that you are prone to throwing false assumptions about funding levels and conditions on other TUSD sites and at UHS’s publicly funded college prep competitors in Tucson into these comment streams. Yes, many of the readers of these comment streams are “highly educated” and some of us are broadly informed about education funding, education policy, TUSD, and the conditions in various local college prep institutions. We are, many of us, quite capable of detecting bad information and false assumptions when we come across them. So please make an effort to be more accurate and “circumspect” in your own commentary in the future.

23. Buyer beware: who teaches your kids when you enroll them in UHS?

    Below are:
    –Excerpts, 2011 through present, from Tucson Weekly commentary by “sabasabas” who writes above that she is a current member of the UHS faculty. The complete archive of sabasabas posts is accessible by clicking on the posting name underneath any of her posts.
    –Excerpts from articles where faculty members were quoted in recent articles in the UHS student newspaper, The Perspective.

    Excerpts from Sabasabas’ commentary:
    September 2011: “I teach Writing 100 at Pima Community College and have often used [Danehy’s] column to illustrate rhetorical strategies or satire. I strongly support your points about personal responsibility and the general lack thereof among what seems to be an enormous underclass of needy citizens who feel entitled to that which most of us have worked hard to obtain. Lest we forget, a majority of PCC students are attending school on the taxpayer dime. Either go to jail, get a job, or go to school says the probation officer, and they are in. I often have to sign off on their dole vouchers each week, except for the students who so blatantly plagiarize that I force them to drop my class. Most of those in the direst straits are already teen parents, and until the entitlements stop they will continue to use their reproductive parts as an ATM. Kudos to Pima for enforcing a minimal standard of achievement to force this group to re-consider early breeding, gaming addiction, and gang banging as viable life strategies.”

    February 2014: “BASIS is just another cream-skimming AP charter school like University High. If TUSD ‘skimmed’ special education students and warehoused them in once school, lawsuits would proliferate faster than a Justin Beiber arrest video. Oh wait, we already did that (Howenstine).”

    July 2014: “The media acts as if this call for funds is somehow nefarious or from a secret cult. The secret cult is the federal government, not a hard-working local sheriff. Taking the ‘liberal line’ and attacking all who disagree with their position on open borders seems to be the tack here. Babeu is a voice of reason, and if you want to blindly support the scary corporate feds, do so.”

    September 2014: “Let me apprise you of life on the front lines at TUSD. I teach at UHS, ranked by many as the #7 college prep school in the nation. My ‘classroom’ is a mold-ridden, mosquito-infested FEMA trailer plagued with rats. We have no paper, ink, or books. My students purchase their own books. This is because Grijalva considers UHS to be an ‘elitist’ school.”

    September 2015: “P[alo] V[erde] is a mid-town school with mid-town problems just like problems in the surrounding area. Poverty and homelessness abound. […] schools can’t be expected to reach into every home and turn every kid not only into a model student, but also a model citizen. It sounds like the rumor mill is in full swing and hysteria has set in. Expulsions with no paper trails may or may not be an issue, but even if an expulsion had been noted in Mojave, law dictates that he’s got to be enrolled in school. Maybe we should fund a jail-style-prep-charter – oh wait, we already do.”

    April 2016: “we [at UHS] are shamefully underfunded compared to other TUSD high schools.”

    Excerpts from current UHS faculty’s commentary in the 40th anniversary edition of the UHS student newspaper, The Perspective:

    Paul Karlowicz, teacher of the senior course “AP US Government” and UHS Site Council Parliamentarian was quoted as follows:
    On the “Senior Slave Sale” tradition at UHS, which used to take place in Arcadia Park : “under the big trees, Dr. Hosmer, Jack Nolan, and I would take turns as the auctioneer, auctioning off the seniors to the highest bidder, and like they do today, they were dressed up in certain costumes and asked to do certain menial tasks. What happened is that early on, one of the guys that was being auctioned off was a body-builder, and when the girls in the crowd got him to take off his shirt and flex his muscles…the bids were crazy, up to $500…[this caused the auction to] turn into a sort of beauty contest for a while; girls showing up in their swimsuits, and the bidding became crazy.”

    John Hosmer, teacher of the junior course “AP US History,” on the “Senior Slave Sale”: “The sale was originally designed to raise money, and no one really thought about its impact on various students and how it might apply to women, minorities…[oftentimes acts] were bordering on immoral…[seniors would] do things to get attention so that they could raise the price that the would [sell for]. It wasn’t until a very courageous young African American student said ‘I find this offensive’ that things started to change…”

    The inappropriateness of this spectacle needed to be brought to the attention of faculty members and administrators in this school by a student? Wow.

    This issue of The Perspective also includes information on the school’s founders, including Reginald Barr, who, “[s]ince retiring from UHS, [has] developed and has run a system of charter schools located throughout the state of Arizona,” C. Diane Bishop, who “now serves as an administrator for Sacred Hearts charter school in Phoenix.”

    In another article in The Perspective, Paul Karlowicz is quoted as follows:
    “I wanted to teach at UHS from the first moment I had heard about the school. During the 1985-1986 school year, I was a ‘Permanent Substitute’ teacher and a student teacher at Catalina High School. The teachers there did not like UHS at all. Oddly enough, their descriptions of UHS faculty and students, however, appealed to me. Even though they used negative, vulgar terms to describe the school, I privately thought UHS was the place for me. I liked the idea of a school designed for bright, energetic students who wanted to go on to college. I liked the idea that teachers teach an academic subject rather than manage student as they do in regular classes. I also liked the challenge of the Advanced Placement courses and the AP Exams. In the fall of 1986, I applied for an open position at UHS. I almost got the job. However, Jack Nolan, who had a Ph.D. and had both of his daughters enrolled at UHS, applied at the last minute and got the job instead. That year, I worked at Secrist Middle School. My experience there convinced me that I was not cut out for regular public school teaching. When another position opened at UHS in the fall of 1987, I transferred into the position.”
    [One of the things that has changed at UHS over the years is] “the dominance UHS students have on the Rincon athletic teams and fine arts programs.”
    “Frankly, TUSD schools do not prepare students as well as other schools for success at UHS.”
    “I always believed that we are training future leaders at UHS. So, my greatest positive memory at UHS was of a TUSD central office committee meeting for School-Based Management. This was when the concept of empowering School Councils was becoming popular in the 1990s. A UHS student named Min Hank Ho served on this committee with me, several other TUSD teachers and principals, and TUSD central office administrators. At one meeting, the Assistant Superintendent lost her temper and verbally assaulted Min Hank about his views on the empowerment of School Council. He said something to the effect that students, parents, and teachers know better than central office staff about what constitutes good education.”
    “Politically, what I have learned from teaching at UHS is that people who claim to be liberals really aren’t that liberal […] Liberals tend to be critical of UHS, therefore, actually advocating the denial of appropriate education to bright kids.”

    The complete article with Karlowicz’s recollections can be viewed here:
    http://www.uhsperspective.org/2016/03/29/karlo-the-ultimate-perspective-on-uhs-story/

    In another article in The Perspective, John Hosmer quotes a UHS founder, Leo Croteau:
    “Think of the hundreds of lawyers, or doctors, or engineers that will accelerate their learning with us. Think how much further along this PRECIOUS CARGO will advance because of our classes. Over the next few years our students will pass AP exams in greater numbers than anywhere else in America.” (Note the absurd and ignorant assumption that passing AP exams in greater numbers than anywhere else in America should be regarded as the standard for excellent college preparatory education.) Hosmer adds, in his own words, that at UHS today, “a new generation of educators now devotes countless hours of their own time and energy to continue the original mission of ministering to THE VALUED FEW.”

    It’s not clear whether the Tucson Weekly commenter “sabasabas” is actually a UHS teacher, as she claims, but Karlowicz and Hosmer are longstanding members of the faculty who often represent the school to the broader community. A public high school like UHS that provides appropriately challenging curricula for gifted students in academic subjects while allowing co-enrollment with a neighborhood high school in fine arts and extracurriculars might, in theory, be a good idea. (However it should be noted that those, like Karlowicz and Hosmer, who favor evicting students from one of TUSD’s neighborhood high schools so UHS can be separated from Rincon and moved to its own site don’t like the fine arts and athletics co-enrollment aspect of the school’s current situation.)

    But what can be said about the wisdom of entrusting the formation of young people’s ideas to people capable of writing the passages quoted above?

24. What is even more surprising than the CONTENT of the quotes by the two UHS faculty members given above is the fact that these men felt comfortable saying these things TO STUDENTS and having these words published IN THE SCHOOL’S STUDENT NEWSPAPER. The faculty members quoted evidently have no self-awareness and no concern for how these statements come across to those who are not part of the UHS student population — a population whose egos they seem to be attempting to inflate with their elitist rhetoric.

    How would the statements quoted above come across to Rincon students, for example? Rincon students have the “opportunity” to enroll in a certain number of UHS classes. These men evidently do not regard students who don’t meet UHS admissions criteria as the type of student they are “cut out” to teach (Karlowicz) or part of “the valued few” it is appropriate for such luminaries to “minister to” (Hosmer). And these men are among the teachers Rincon students will encounter, when registering for UHS classes? I wonder how Rincon students are treated when they show up in Karlowicz’s AP US Government or Hosmer’s AP US History.

    For a long time I wondered what specifically people meant when they talked about UHS’s “elitism.” Looks like this is it, and it’s UGLY.

25. The Magnet School teachers absorbed a certain air of superiority in the 80s, but soon found out that TUSD was simply race baiting and they were the pawns in a flawed attempt to elevate ignorance.

26. Nine area high school students were recently named National Merit Scholars. What some of you may be interested to know is that the National Merit Scholarship Corporation releases the names of National Merit Scholarship winners over several months, in, I believe, four different press releases. The press releases often do not tell you the exact amount of the scholarship, which can be one-time amounts, or renewable amounts. The awards can be as low, I think, as $500 to $2,500, but they can also be full-ride scholarships to prestigious schools. Some of these scholarships are sponsored directly by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, some are sponsored by private businesses, and some are sponsored directly by universities. Just to be a semi-finalist you have to score in at least the top one percent of scores for your state on the PSAT/NMSQT.
    The National Merit Scholarship Corporation also releases press releases about scholarships awarded in the National Achievement competition, which are awards for the top-scoring black students and the National Hispanic Recognition program, awards for the top-scoring Hispanic students. Finally, there is also something called a National Merit “special” scholarship. These are sponsored by corporations and they are awarded to students whose parents work for the company but whose scores weren’t quite high enough to put them in the finalist category.
    I would argue that 30 or 40 years ago being a National Merit Scholar was very prestigious partly because the scholarship awards were significant compared to tuition costs. However, I don’t think the awards have kept up with costs, and I’ve known National Merit Scholars who received only small scholarships. It is prestigious, still, in that to be named a semi-finalist you had to get a very high score on a test, and that can serve to attract other scholarships. If the amount of the award determines prestige, there are other more lucrative awards out there that don’t get the same publicity.

27. National Merit Semi-finalists, Finalists, and Scholars receive large scholarship offers (some of them “full ride” offers) from some public universities. The amount of the awards they receive from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation itself — awards which can be applied at any school the students attend — seems at this point to be $1000 per year for a finalist and $2500 per year for a Scholar — next to nothing compared to the cost of attending college these days, as Dolores de Vera points out. Becoming a National Merit designee thus ends up creating a rather large financial incentive for these students to attend one of the public universities that offers large National Merit scholarships rather than to attend a private university that does not. This is particularly true for those students who intend to attend graduate or professional school after completing a college degree, and have to think about how to cover the cost of 7 or 8 years of higher education, not just 4.

    But beyond the $$$ issues associated with National Merit, the issue that several of the commenters here have touched on (% of students advancing from Semifinalist to Scholar) is an important one because it highlights problems with conditions in secondary education institutions that all students who attend them experience, not just National Merit designees. Because things like National Merit awards, College Board AP test taking rates and scores, and rankings like the US News and World Report’s (all based on students’ performance on corporate-produced multiple choice tests) get a lot of publicity, administrators who are resume-builders and publicity-seekers rather than true educators alter policies and conditions in secondary education institutions in ways that support increasing awards / scores / rankings and undermine students’ ability to have a well-rounded education. A well rounded education properly includes curricular opportunities for research and extended writing projects, deep engagement in one or two extracurriculars and in a meaningful, sustained form of community service — not just cramming for multiple-choice tests, which is the constant diet of students in schools like UHS and Basis, which require students to take between 8 and 10 AP courses to graduate, courses which culminate at year-end in high-stakes, corporate-produced multiple choice tests and determine that instructors will gear what happens in the classroom throughout the year to what maximizes scores on these tests. What does this mean for students? Here’s one example: When I was a high school senior, I spent several months researching and writing a 20-30 page paper on a poet, which involved reading literature, history, and literary criticism, forming my own ideas, expressing them coherently in writing, presenting them orally to classmates and defending my point of view. My UHS senior had no such assignment; instead, he spent weeks filling out xeroxed packets of vocabulary terms he had to look up and write definitions for so he could get the highest possible score on the year-end multiple choice AP tests in the four AP courses he was taking. High school seniors are capable of much more than this, but some schools in which they enroll cannot resist the opportunity to use their senior year to milk them for as many more AP scores as they can produce, rather than by giving them the sorts of experiences that will best prepare them to do the kind of work they will actually be required to do in college.

    Bottom line is that the fact that AP cram schools are producing bumper crops of National Merit Semi-finalists (based only on the multiple choice PSAT test) is unsurprising — these students have been trained to be expert multiple-choice test takers. That they have lower than expected percentages of Semi-finalists advancing to “Scholar” status, given the national averages, is also unsurprising, and is one of many measures that can be looked at that show the extent to which these institutions have created conditions that facilitate these students doing well on standardized tests, but have NOT created conditions that facilitate students having what could properly be considered an excellent “college preparatory” education during their high school years.

28. I do not believe we yet have the data to show the percent of Merit Scholars is lower than it should be. (I used to be an education reporter in another state; now I am a substitute teacher in public and charter schools in Tucson.) When I was a reporter the National Merit Corporation sent out FOUR press releases with names of scholarship winners: one in April, one in May, one in June, and one in July, if my memory serves me. The last one might actually have come as late as August. I think we have AT LEAST two more lists coming out. The last list was always the list of those who won university-sponsored scholarships.

    Counselors told me that kids who didn’t advance from semi finalist to finalist usually failed because when they took the official ACT or SAT they did not score as well as when they took the PSAT. So their high PSAT score appeared to be a fluke rather than a reflection of their knowledge and ability. Some also failed because they were cocky and did not follow through to fill out the application in a serious way, or they did not seek/get good recommendations.

    There are also cases where kids are named finalists, but they receive no scholarship. That does not necessarily mean they are unworthy. The Merit Finalist who applies to 14 different colleges probably has more of a chance at snagging a college-sponsored National Merit Scholarship than the Merit Finalist who applies to just one school (that may not even offer National Merit Scholarships, or only offers a small number). The corporations that sponsor scholarships will set criteria that their scholarship funds will go to a student who is interested in a certain kind of career; or their scholarship may only go to a student from a state where the company has an office. Those corporations have the option to decide “Gee, no one fits our criteria, so we think we’ll just give our funds to the child of an employee who didn’t do as well on the PSAT.” Those or that National Merit “special” scholarships.

29. Dolores:

    We know that there were 25 National Merit semi-finalists from UHS named last fall, and that 5 of them became National Merit scholars (20% of UHS’s semi-finalists became scholars). Nationally, there are 16,000 semi-finalists and 7,400 scholars (46% of semi-finalists become scholars). That means that UHS has less than half the rate of its semi-finalists progressing to scholars than the nation as a whole does. Whether or not other scholarships (corporation- and university-sponsored) will be announced in future press releases does not affect the ratio of semi-finalists to scholars locally or nationally: that has already been determined and announced.

    It’s my understanding that progressing from semi-finalist to finalist to scholar depends on the content of the application, and that includes: GPA, a personal essay, a counselor recommendation, SAT and AP score reports, a list of outside-of-school activities (extracurricular, community service, and work). Board scores are one single component of an application that will reflect to a great degree: 1) the quality of the college counseling services the school has (did the counselor write a decent recommendation? were student provided with information during their freshman year about what kind of a portfolio they needed to build to succeed in these kinds of competitions? 2) the strength of a school’s writing programs and its ability to allow for significant extracurricular and community service.

    The comment stream on this blog post of Safier’s seems to indicate that there are UHS parents who see a relationship between weaknesses in UHS’s college counseling programs and increases in AP requirements which make participation in extracurriculars and community service difficult to maintain while also maintaining the requisite high GPA. I have read your posts carefully, and there is nothing you have written that seems to me to the undermine the legitimacy of any of the arguments parents who have direct experience of the UHS community are making.

    I’ve read a lot of commentary about UHS and policy changes made at the school during the last three years since the TUSD board majority changed. It seems to be the case that certain parties are trying to correct for the downward pressure on scores and rankings that was brought about by changes the desegregation authority made in 2013-2014 to the admissions standards at the school. They seem to be doing this by increasing AP requirements, which results in higher rates of AP test taking, awards from the College Board, and higher US News & World Report rankings. The same policies which are boosting test taking rates and rankings are, according to many of commenters, having a negative effect on the already high academic stress levels at the school and a negative effect on the school’s ability to facilitate more complex kinds of curricular activities than the content-cramming required by AP tests multiple choice and simplistic short-answer essay format.

    This kind of self-interested administrative mismanagement in policy-making is a bigger “scoop” than how many National Merit scholars the Tucson area has this year. If we had the kind of education reporting we need locally, we would not be having to rely on close reading of comment streams to detect it: we would (and should) be hearing about it in our mainstream media.

30. Supporting Public Ed,

    You say in your post above “Nationally, there are 16,000 semi-finalists and 7,400 scholars.. . . . ..Whether or not other scholarships (corporation- and university-sponsored) will be announced in future press releases does not affect the ratio of semi-finalists to scholars locally or nationally: that has already been determined and announced.”

    Actually, there WILL BE around 7,400 scholars announced AT THE CONCLUSION of this year’s competition. We know the ballpark number of how many scholarships will be awarded, but the full list of winners has NOT been released.

    This is a quote from the May 11 news release from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation:

    “Today’s release is the second announcement of winners in the 2016 National Merit Scholarship
    Program. On April 20, more than 1,000 recipients of corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship
    awards were named, and on June 1 and July 18, some 4,000 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship
    winners will be announced. By the conclusion of this year’s competition, about 7,500 academic
    champions will have won National Merit Scholarships worth approximately $33 million.”

    http://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/images/gid2/editor_documents/16_merit2500scholar.pdf

    I stand by my contention that more names are going to be announced, and that the total at the end of the competition is what you need to draw your conclusions. [However, if you read the earlier press releases there is a warning about drawing any conclusions at all about school quality based on number of scholars. I also contend if a finalist doesn’t get an official National Merit Scholarship there are various reasons this could be that have nothing to do with the quality of the candidate’s application or advising.]

    I only wanted to provide that bit of clarification about how the competition works, as I covered it for many years in another community, and I know it can be misunderstood.

    I don’t have any close knowledge of changes at UHS. I can only tell you it is a wonderful place to sub! I happened to sub a creative writing class the last time I was there, and some of the kids were motivated enough to be working on novels. I had a pretty positive impression of the school.

31. Ms. de Vera:

    The University of Arizona grants $12K per year to National Merit Semi-finalists and $18K per year to National Merit finalists. The fact that these are some of the “university sponsored” awards that will be announced later does not affect, as “Supporting Public Ed” stated above, the ratio of National Merit Semi-finalists to National Merit Scholars. The “scholar” awards have been announced and that ratio is at this point clear.

    University High School STUDENTS are fantastic. I know many of them and their families well and I feel very strongly that these students deserve a school and a district that is more responsible in implementing policies that actually serve their best interests.

32. The answer to the commenter’s question above, “Can TUSD stop sucking?” seems to be, sadly, a resounding “NO. It cannot stop sucking,” not under the current toxic governance and administration. Whatever they do, they will do it shabbily, dishonestly, incompetently. If they have magnet schools, they will not be communities that deliver academic excellence and racial integration. If they are under a deseg order, a situation which brings the possibility of improving both social justice and funding for the district, they will botch implementation, antagonize the deseg authorities and waste millions of dollars through their adversarial litigiousness. If they have exam schools for gifted students, they will not be institutions that formulate policy based on students’ academic and extracurricular needs and best interests rather than administrators’ PR and resume-building needs and best interests.

    With the current field of TUSD board candidates, there appears to be no good solution: vote for Foster or Juarez in November 2016, and we’ll get more of the same kind of mismanagement we’ve had for the last 3 disastrous years. Vote for Stegeman and Riegel and we’ll get the kind of mismanagement we had during the shameful MAS controversy. The only outcome that holds any hope for producing improvement would be for Putnam-Hidalgo to replace either Foster or Juarez and to then act as a swing vote, blocking the worst excesses of both the Grijalva-led and Stegeman-led factions on the Board.

33. Why is TUSD’s percent,
    You are mistaken. All the scholarship award winners have NOT been announced. Kids who win University-sponsored awards that are announced by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation ARE and WILL BE official National Merit Scholars who will factor into the national and local ratios. Only about 3,000 of the 7,400 names of winners nationwide have been announced. Go back and read the quote from the press release.
    Believe me, I’ve written up these news releases for years, I have a good idea of how the program works. It is confusing to many people.
    To complicate matters, PSAT scores and National Merit designations like “Commended Scholar” and “semi-finalist” are used by schools and private organizations as a screen to identify and award scholarships. You say U of A gives $12K to any semi-finalist. Ok. Such scholarship winners cannot properly call themselves “National Merit Scholars” even though they received a scholarship on the basis of a score on the National Merit test.
    You say U of A offers $18K to National Merit Finalists. Ok. My guess is their names WILL appear in a future press release from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. Finalists whose awards are announced through the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (including those to be announced June 1 and July 18) ARE part of the total number of 7,400-7,500 official National Merit Scholarship winners, or National Merit Scholars.
    In short, there almost certainly will be more winners announced from the Tucson area, and yes, they are official National Merit Scholars if the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announces them. Some of these kids and their schools have already been told of their awards, by the way. I used to deal with parents calling up the paper asking “Why haven’t you written a story about my kid’s National Merit Scholarship?” The answer was I was waiting for the official announcement from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, so I didn’t leave names of winners out.

34. Ms. De Vera,

    YOU are mistaken.

    You are corresponding with a former National Merit SCHOLAR who is the parent of a current National Merit FINALIST. I know very well from first-hand experience how the National Merit designations and scholarship disbursements work. There may be more corporate-sponsored and university-sponsored awards announced, but there will be no more National Merit SCHOLARS (those who receive $2500-per-year awards from the National Merit Corporation rather than the $1000-per-year awards finalists receive) announced.

    Just to verify that my understanding is in fact correct, I will phone the National Merit Scholarship Corporation on Monday morning and will post again with the results of that phone call.

35. Why is TUSD’s,

    Fair enough. I’ll check back to see what you find, as I don’t know everything. (I never heard finalists were guaranteed to receive $1,000; it was not stated in any of the news releases I received. Students and counselors told me it was possible to be a finalist and receive nothing, which would be a huge let down for a competition that carries as much prestige as this one does. I mean, these young folks scored in the top 1 percent! Some families are under the impression that a National Merit Scholar is a shoe-in for a full ride scholarship, but unfortunately that is not the case.)

    I really think the link below tells me what the definition of a National Merit Scholar is, though I am interpreting: A National Merit Scholar is one of about 7,400 students who are awarded a National Merit Scholarship, and there are three types of Merit Scholar Awards.

    http://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=1758&gid=2&pgid=424

    More importantly, congrats on your scholar’s success! Hope for you it results in an avalanche of money!

36. Ms. De Vera:

    I spoke with the National Merit Scholarship corporation. You are correct that the 7400 total # of National Merit Scholars includes both the first batch named, whose names were just published in the AZ Daily Star and the second and third batches to be made public in June and July. So you are also correct that no conclusions can yet be drawn about how TUSD’s percentage of finalists becoming “scholars” relates to the national percentage.

    The National Merit Scholarship website gives three categories of awards:
    –National Merit® $2500 Scholarships
    –Corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards
    –College-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards

    The copyright mark they include on the first category of awards seems to imply that it is only the first category of award recipients (those just announced here and in the Star) that can be properly termed “National Merit Scholars,” while the second and third categories are properly termed recipients of “Merit Scholarship” awards, not “National Merit Scholars,” but the corporate rep I spoke with this morning said all three categories of recipients should be termed “National Merit Scholars.” Whether or not these 2nd and 3rd batches can properly be called that or not, their names will not be made public before the end-of-the-school-year award ceremonies and graduation ceremonies take place in Tucson, which seems less than optimal in terms of the impressions it creates in the general community about how many previously-named semifinalists at each school have made it beyond the “finalist” stage of the process.

    Bottom line is that this process and the communications about it ARE, as you say, confusing. Both Huicochea’s article in the Star and Safier’s article here said nothing about additional “National Merit Scholars” to be designated at later points, but seemed to indicate that these 9 were this year’s “National Merit Scholar” designees, period, end of story. We received the same impression thirty years ago at the high school I attended. “Here, at the end-of-year award ceremony, are this year’s ‘National Merit Scholars.'” Now I wonder if there were others who had not been named yet. Or perhaps the process has changed in the interim.

    In any case, thank you for hanging in there and posting repeatedly to try to clear up misconceptions.

37. But further analysis should still be done, “Why Is TUSD’s Percent,” to determine to what degree a 25:5 yield at UHS of Semifinalists to the first category of awardees (“National Merit® $2500”) is as it should be. This cohort represents the “top” award category, whether or not there are corporate and university sponsored awards granted later. With a student body with CogAt scores at the level these students’ were at when they were admitted to UHS as freshmen, it could be argued that this school, if it lives up to the idea that it provides significant “added value” to these students over what they would receive in a normal high school, should be producing “Scholar” to “Semi-finalist” ratios much higher than the ratios normal high schools are producing. Your initial surmise that the way the school is functioning may actually depress outcomes for students who might have had the opportunity to do better in other settings has not in any way been ruled out. It corresponds pretty well with most of the stories I’ve heard from UHS parents during the last three years since the policies began changing.

38. Supporting Public Ed:

    Value ADDED? Nope. Try value SUBTRACTED: specifically, the value of a humane, thoughtful, non-corporatized education. The takeover of our public schools — including UHS — by factory-model one-size-fits-all cookie cutter curricula is much to be regretted.

39. Supporting Public Ed,
    I’m not sure how you concluded that students who received National Merit Scholarships sponsored by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation are somehow in some “top” category over the other scholarship winners. Many of the University-sponsored scholarships and corporate-sponsored scholarships are more lucrative (though the press releases will not specifically state how much each student earned). Remember, all the scholarship winners (and the finalists and semi-finalists) scored in the top one-percent of the state! They are virtually ALL impressive scholars. They all write on a college level, they all have significant extra curricular accomplishments. I’ve met and written about many of them (where I used to live), and they ALL knocked my socks off.
    Also, if you read the news releases on the National Merit Scholarship Corporation web site, many include bold-faced disclaimers warning the press (and public) not to draw conclusions about school quality from the number of semi-finalists and finalists. I’m sure they’ve put those disclaimers on there precisely because so many people out there do try to draw conclusions.

40. Dolores:

    I’ll tell you how I concluded that students who received National Merit Scholarships are somehow in the “top” category over the other scholarship winners. I phoned the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and discussed how the process works with them. They take all the finalists and have a team of college counselors and college admissions professionals determine which of the finalists they think have the “greatest potential to excel in college level studies,” and give them the “National Merit® $2500 Scholarships.” No doubt all the finalists are worthy, as you say — and some of the recipients of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will receive higher $$$ awards than the $2500 award, but it is incorrect to say that the granting of the specific batch of awards under discussion here does not represent a value judgment on the part of the NMSC. That value judgment has been made, in part, based on the applicants’ extracurricular and community service activities and the counselor’s recommendation.

    As for the disclaimer — there are disclaimers on everything. They don’t mean much. When people who have had children enrolled in an institution are reporting that changes made to the school’s policies have made it more difficult for high-performing students to maintain their GPAs at the same time that they maintain the kind of well-rounded portfolio of activities outside of school that enable them to get the best possible results from their competitive college applications and scholarship applications — or that the curricular demands during their senior year don’t allow them enough time to write the essays and do the travelling required for competitive college admissions — both of which I have heard from UHS parents during the last three years — those reports needs to be looked into. Both the Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Weekly have done and are doing a VERY poor job covering the full range of governance and administrative decisions in TUSD during the last three years, including the policy changes made at UHS, which keep popping up in the comment streams but never receive a decent investigation from our so-called education reporters in Tucson.

    There was this piece in the Arizona Daily Independent:
    https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2015/12/17/tusd-ap-scores-show-disparities/
    which seems to indicate that TUSD’s recent College Board award was won by increasing AP requirements for UHS students, not by making AP curricula more accessible district-wide, but so far none of our major print media organizations have taken up the challenge of looking into the matter. Safier certainly won’t. To do so might compromise his friends’ (Foster & Juarez) bids for re-election to the TUSD Board. They and Adelita Grijalva are the Board members who constitute the majority and they have been resolutely looking the other way or smiling and applauding while Sanchez mismanages the district, from top to bottom, from east side to west side, at UHS, in the magnet schools, and elsewhere.

41. Dolores de Vera: why are you trying to confuse parents about what their children’s awards and scholarships mean? “National Merit Scholars” are those who receive the $2500 awards granted by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation. Others may receive scholarships through the process, but they are not “National Merit Scholars.” They are finalists who receive merit scholarships.

    If you are being deployed by TUSD to muddy the water about all this so that it’s not clear to the general public how many UHS students out of the 25 semi-finalists actually received the TOP award the NMSC grants, that is…what shall I say? “Not worthy of respect” would be one way to put it, though those words are, in my opinion, not quite strong enough for the type of activities the district’s spin doctors engage in.

42. Post #43 Now, is there any reason that you think education is a mess? Just look at this. And we haven’t even resolved National Merit Scholarships. You want these folks to have deseg money? What’s the point?

43. David W:

    We’re in the midst of determining locally whether what all this (which includes ALEC-inspired defunding of public schools as well as administrative mismanagement of public schools by Sanchez and his ilk) means is that they are, as you believe, a lost cause. If the current Board majority in TUSD retains its death-grip on power in the district after the November 2016 elections, many of us who at this point still believe that the institution is worth fighting for may finally wash our hands of it and start working to expand access to responsible charters and privates and advocate for better oversight of these alternative institutions.

    There comes a point where, even for those who support public education in theory, the actual incompetent practice of governance and administration in some of our local districts is so degraded, so irresponsible, so indefensible, that people who care about the wellbeing of children in these schools need to stop supporting them. We’re almost there.

44. God bless you for your patience. I gave up long ago.

    You can see exactly where they’re headed:

    Milwaukee Public Schools Budgets Nearly $500,000 To Promote Black Lives Matters

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