In my last post, some comments about University High led me to look at how the school’s total enrollment numbers have changed over the years, and that led me to look at changes in the school’s ethnic balance. The TUSD website is a statistics-rich environment with detailed numbers about enrollment and attendance starting with the 1996-97 school year and continuing to the present, broken down by gender and ethnicity, school and grade. So I dug into the tables to see what I could find. Here are some stats, with a bit of analysis to follow.
• In 1996-97, UHS had 624 students. In 2013-14, it had 992 students.
• In 1996-97, 431 UHS students were Anglo (69.1 percent) and 111 were Hispanic (17.8 percent). In 2013-14, 493 were Anglo (49.7 percent) and 322 were Hispanic (32.5 percent). No question, the total number of students at UHS went up over the years, even as the total TUSD student population dropped. The percentage of Hispanic students increased as well. But the district has a far larger percentage of Hispanic students now than in 1996. At the same time, more out-of-district students are attending UHS than previously. That’s where the numbers start getting complicated. Basically, the ethnic balance at UHS has changed in pretty much the same way as the ethnic balance in the district, but the number of students who have come to UHS from outside the district has increased. I’ll sort the various factors out as well as I can below.
By the way, none of what I’m writing is about the quality of UHS, its curriculum or anything like that. It’s only about crunching enrollment numbers to see what I would find.
To see how well UHS is doing at attracting Hispanic students, I looked at the total number of Anglos and Hispanics attending TUSD high schools and used those numbers to figure out the percentage of each group enrolled at UHS.
• In 1996-97, 2 percent of Hispanic high school students were enrolled at UHS. In 2013-14, that number doubled, to 4 percent.
• In 1996-97, 6 percent of Anglo high school students were enrolled in UHS. In 2013-14, that number was slightly more than double, at 13 percent.
From that standpoint, it looks like the comparative chances of an Anglo and Hispanic student enrolling in UHS stayed about the same or increased a bit for Anglo students. Both in 1996-97 and 2013-14, Anglo students are about three times more likely to go to UHS than Hispanic students. However, there’s one complicating factor here. There’s been a large increase in out-of-district students enrolling in UHS. I don’t have any stats about the ethnicities of UHS students from other districts, but it’s a safe guess that most of them are Anglo, a sizable number are Asian-American and only a small number are Hispanic. If I’m right, that would bring the percentage of TUSD’s Anglo population attending UHS down a few points to about 11 percent, which would mean that TUSD’s Hispanic population at UHS grew at a bit faster rate than Anglo students who live inside the district boundaries.
The positive news is: More Hispanic students are attending UHS, and the percentage of Hispanic students has increased appreciably since 1996-97, from 17.8 percent to 32.5 percent, while the Anglo percentage dropped from 69.1 percent to 49.7 percent. The less positive news is: The percentage of Hispanic students enrolled in TUSD has also gone up appreciably, meaning that the changing percentages at UHS are more a reflection of an overall demographic shift in the district than a successful effort to enroll a larger percentage of Hispanics in the school.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2016.
Interesting information David. Could it be said that the loss of Anglos (19.4%) and the increase of Hispanics (14.7%) has contributed to the under enrollment at other TUSD High Schools and the closing of elementary and middle schools?
Is the UHS a curriculum that should be adopted by all TUSD High Schools?
No effort needs to be made to increase hispanic enrollment. We are paying to educate illegals. That is a given. For the time being.
It’s very sad that someone like the author would be such a racist bigot. I thought we were all equal under the eyes of God and the law and to assume that one hispanic is the same as another is quite degrading. What a despicable human being.
“I don’t have any stats about the ethnicities of UHS students from other districts, but it’s a safe guess that most of them are Anglo…and only a small number are Hispanic.”
You’re wrong about that, David. In a public meeting about proposed changes to UHS admissions that took place during the 2013-2014 school year, Sam Brown, the TUSD director of deseg at the time, said that the percentages of minorities coming in from out of district were higher than the percentages coming in from TUSD. One of our acquaintances whose kids did K-8 in Catalina Foothills selected UHS in part because the institutional culture at UHS is more receptive to Hispanic students than the institutional culture in CFSD is, so that might in part explain what is happening there.
The Tanque Verde district didn’t have a high school before 2005, and most Tanque Verde residents open enrolled in Sabino, Sahuaro, and UHS. Those kids and kids from other places where high school offerings were limited (Green Valley was one) had the ability to apply to UHS, but that privilege was not granted equally to all out of district residents across the board. The story I’ve heard from people who have a long term involvement with UHS is that at the time that Tanque Verde established its high school, some parents involved with the UHS Foundation and UHS Site Council put pressure on the district to change its policies and admit more out of district students. This policy change (not ever growing demand and improved reputation) is part of what is reflected in the increase in out of district enrollment. (No doubt TUSD admin realized opening the gates wider was a way to bring some outside money into the district and offset somewhat it’s appalling overall annual attrition rates.)
If you are trying to imply that the increase of minority enrollment is somehow a reflection of demographic trends in the district and not the result of conscious, concerted effort, you are wrong about that. There is someone in the sadly understaffed UHS counseling office who works very hard to increase recruitment to targeted populations and to support enrolled minority students. Her hard work is part of the reason that the attrition rates are now lower for minorities than they are for Anglos. If you ever develop the inclination to do some research with real human beings, rather than just noodling around on TUSD Stats developing impressions that mislead you and others who have no direct relationship with the community, you could phone her and ask some questions. Her name is Carmen Hernandez.
You have, unsurprisingly, ignored entirely the repeated requests that you analyze ATTRITION (not enrollment) at UHS and that you look into trends in the use of AP testing at the school, and in my opinion through your silence on this topic, which you have known for more than 2 years now needs to be looked into, you have entirely forfeited your right to claim membership in the group of people working to combat the toxic mis-use of standardized testing in our public schools. Congrats. All that can be expected of you is misleading district-sourced propaganda.
One revision to my above comment: one of our acquaintances whose students had attended CFSD K-8 enrolled the students in UHS for high school because of a PERSONAL IMPRESSION / BELIEF that UHS is a better environment for Hispanic students than CFHS. I have no direct experience of CFSD and cannot confirm that that impression / belief reflects reality. All I can say is that it was something felt and expressed by a parent who did have direct experience of District 16.
UHS is a high school serving the gifted. It is a special needs school. Many students who enroll here need this kind of peer group. Many have been bullied in other settings. None of the other public districts provide this option (gifted students only) at the high school level. This explains why, when the gates were opened, out of district enrollment increased.
Why are 8 AP courses at UHS required, not optional? Other than Basis, there is no other high school locally that I know of that forces students to take the AP version of courses whether or not they want to. Not all students are ready for AP Physics (required at UHS junior year). Not all students want to take the other 7 required APs.
It’s not right to provide a service to a special needs community that no one else in Tucson provides, and force these students, in exchange for access to a gifted peer group, into a high-stress curriculum that is not flexible around their personal strengths. Yes, the role of AP testing at UHS needs to be looked into.
It is my belief that UHS has been converted into something that it didn’t start out as. Much like TUSD started as a great school district. Now, not so much.
Lugenpresse.
You write: “The percentage of Hispanic students enrolled in TUSD has also gone up appreciably, meaning that the changing percentages at UHS are more a reflection of an overall demographic shift in the district than a successful effort to enroll a larger percentage of Hispanics in the school.” You have not even begun to provide the statistical analysis that would be required to make that causal inference. One obvious problem is that it ignores your own observation in the previous paragraph that the students attending UHS from inside TUSD are disproportionately Hispanic, relative to the school’s total student population.
Separately, concerning Rat T’s comment, I don’t know of any data supporting the conclusion that UHS’s academic standards have slipped.
I made no reference to academic standards.Simply contesting evidence from 1970s to current levels of satisfaction by those involved. It gives the appearance of inmates running the asylum.
Dr. Stegeman:
You may know of no evidence that UHS’s “academic standards” (?) have slipped, but you do know that UHS’s admissions criteria were changed in response to the desegregation order. Both the TUSD Board and the Desegregation authority were involved in approving / rejecting various versions of the proposed changes. Beginning with the applicants testing for entry in the 2014-2015 school year, the district had to invite a cohort that didn’t quite make the cut score based on the CogAt and their middle school GPA back to campus to undergo a second round of evaluations of their “motivation levels.” Because of this change to the process, additional students who would not have been admitted under the criteria applied previously were admitted, and the cohort had a higher percentage of minorities that the cohort admitted without the “motivation” test.
UHS’s policies RE required AP courses have definitely changed under the current Board majority / Superintendent, though I’m not sure these changes have been coming before the Board. The changes seem to be made at the Site Council level. Recently, two required, non-optional AP courses were added to the freshman year curriculum: first AP Human Geography, then AP Environmental Science. The AP tests taken by students in the first run of AP Human Geography did not produce results up to UHS standards, but AP Environmental Science was added to the curriculum before the problems with AP Human Geography were successfully resolved. The district does not explain the rationale for these changes, but the best guess of several parties looking into the situation is that they are being forced to artificially inflate the rankings and earn UHS awards from the College Board, in a context in which the cohort being admitted has been changed by the desegregation authority and a resultant drop in rankings and test results is feared by TUSD administration and some parties on the UHS faculty.
Unsurprisingly, there is “spin” coming from all quarters: Stegeman’s comment about no slippage in UHS “academic standards” was in many ways as misleading as Safier’s so-called “crunching” of UHS enrollment figures, which involved reporting meaningless data and making several unfounded assertions about it.
Students graduating from UHS this year report that this graduating class is the first in recent memory to be smaller than the graduating class before it. It is likely that this is at least in part because of increased attrition in response to AP requirement policy changes, which included changes to AP Chemistry requirements affecting this group during their sophomore year, 2013-2014. These policies have since been reversed, but not before they had their effect.
Just to take one example of the kinds of rankings systems public school administrators are trying to game in manipulating policies about the number of required AP courses in schools like Basis and UHS: The Washington Post rankings increase as the # of seniors decreases, because the WaPo rankings are based on the number of AP exams taken at a school divided by the number of seniors at a school. As the denominator goes down, the quotient which produces the ranking goes up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/how-americas-most-challenging-high-schools-works-the-selection-method/2015/04/14/cfdd9e44-e30a-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html
Are the non-educator journalists cooking up rankings systems like this really so math-illiterate or so unanalytical that they don’t realize that this system provides administrators with a perverse incentive to add AP requirements (and stress levels) with the dual result of increasing the number of AP exams (numerator) and increasing attrition, which decreases the denominator in the fraction that produces the quotient / ranking?
Presumably TUSD Stats gives Safier the ability to analyze trends in attrition at UHS, as well as trends in enrollment. Why doesn’t he accept the challenge commenters keep putting before him? I wonder.
David, some time ago you did a fascinating piece on Basis, where you tracked how many enrolled freshmen ended up graduating as seniors. You noted that there were substantial dropouts along the way, such that Basis could, without lying, assert a 100% graduation rate (but of a very shrunken cohort of students). It would be very interesting to see this same “crunch” done to UHS over, say, the last 5 or 6 years. At the time you did the Basis article, if I am not wrong, there was some expressed sentiment that they had been “singled out”….such a new article on UHS would allow you to compare the two data sets.
Wonder how tired the front-line Democratic politicians and propagandists are of finding themselves in a position where they have to defend the indefensible, i.e what is going in TUSD under Sanchez’s leadership. It must be harder and harder — even for a committed member of the machine like Safier — to be a designated, obligatory defender of leadership decisions that, in spite of all the variegated shades of smoke being blown, appear ever more clearly to the public for what they are: inept and irresponsible.
Well UHS is a test in school . It’s not like you can just enroll. You have to test into it . The enrollment comes from all over town and the percentages from each individual high school are small . So if you decide to go you are traveling and leaving the majority of your friends unless you are already in the tested into the tusd gate middle schools . They are not keeping anyone out , you apply test and if you get in you go or you decide not to .
If you take a look at the GATE program and those kids that are tested, offered self-contained class placement, and who actually partake, you will find certain populations don’t take advantage of the offer. I know parents who had their kids tested at the strong suggestion of teachers and when a self-contained placement is offered,decline it because the school the child would have to transfer to was not close by (too far from home) or that siblings would be separated and to these parents these are big issues (even though free bussing is offered). This happens with the UHS testing of all TUSD 7th graders. There are too many who test in and will have the grades but parents don’t want to deal with having a child in a school far away or “away from their friends/family”. Sad, but happens. Maybe if more parents of these populations are made aware of the benefit of this special ed placement and are willing to support their child in it, there might be an increase of minority enrollment in UHS.