The latest turn in the dance and duel between TUSD and the decades-old desegregation case is, U.S. District Judge David Bury ruled against three out of four of the district’s proposed changes. The background on the changes is so complicated and convoluted, I’m not going to go through the details. Alexis Huicochea describes the decisions in her article in the Star. The short story is, Judge Bury permitted the suggested changes at Drachman Montessori K-6 Magnet School and rejected changes at Borman Elementary, Collier and Fruchthendler Elementary Schools and Sabino High. All the changes involved adding grades to the schools.
Bury’s decisions are based on his assessment of whether the changes would help or harm desegregation at TUSD. I hope they lead to more integrated (or desegregated) schools in the district over the long term. If that’s what happens, Bury did good. But my concern is that district schools which currently have a more than 70 percent Hispanic population—that’s the line at which they’re considered segregated—won’t end up with more heterogeneous population, and schools with large Anglo populations will lose Anglo students to charter schools and neighboring districts like Vail and Catalina Foothills. If the long term result is fewer Anglo students in TUSD, shrinking both the size and heterogeneity of the district, without a significant increase in desegregation, then the decision is harmful. I fear that’s what will happen.
Anyone who presents the TUSD desegregation problem as a simple issue—either that all the district has to do is A, B and C to desegregate the district and everything will get better, or that TUSD should throw up its hands and forget about the whole desegregation thing—is wrong. I’ve looked at districts across the country to find clear answers for ways to successfully integrate urban districts with a majority of minority students—in other words, districts similar to TUSD—and I haven’t found any magic bullets or magic ponies. No one seems to have discovered the formula for doing it well. But TUSD is bound by law and by its educational mission to keep looking for ways to create more heterogeneous schools.
To show how complicated these decisions are, it looks like none of the players in the deseg dance and duel agree completely about what to do with the latest TUSD proposals. Judge Bury said no to every proposal but the one at Drachman, and he’s the judge, so what he says, goes. Willis Hawley, the Special Master appointed by the court, a man with extensive knowledge of and experience in desegregation matters, accepted the plans for Collier and Fruchthendler and Borman but wasn’t sure about the Drachman plan, the one Judge Bury accepted. Of the two sets of plaintiffs in the ongoing deseg case, the African-American plaintiffs didn’t support any of the proposals while the Latino plaintiffs agreed to the Borman and Drachman plans. Everyone but TUSD rejected the Sabino plan.
If I missed or misrepresented an acceptance or rejection by one of the parties, it wasn’t for lack of trying (and I’m sure someone will correct any errors in the comments). The point is, with five parties weighing in on the possible changes—Judge, Special Master, two sets of plaintiffs and TUSD—every party has a different idea of what should be accepted and rejected. All of them are making their best guess, and I believe all of them have the best interests of the district at heart, but no one knows for certain what are the best ways to improve the district for current and future students.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2016.
I wouldn’t blame Judge Bury if he made a bad decision based on the mess that TUSD has made of education in Tucson. But isn’t it time to get real? We can’t afford integration the liberal way.
If the liberals could create jobs Tucsonans could become upwardly mobile and solve the integration problems themselves, without any expense.
Just hearing Dr Carson this morning talk about solving education problems with future President Trump gives me hope.
Thank you Judge Bury. Hold their radical feet to the fire, and get politics out of education.
Let kids go to any school they want within a reasonable distance. Intergration never works out like it’s intended. All things being equal, it doesn’t matter where a child goes to school. It’s the teaching and parenting that make the difference.
Here’s how NOT to improve the district, David: bring in a young and inexperienced Superintendent with an arrogant, adversarial way of relating to the authority figures making decisions about how $60 million a year in deseg funds get applied. Have him disparage the plaintiffs, judge, and special master in the case and change the law firm handling the case not just once, but twice, drastically increasing the district’s budget for legal expenses in hot pursuit of Unitary Status, at the same time apparently (it has been reported) agreeing with the Arizona legislature that it’s acceptable to start phasing out deseg funds after Unitary Status has been achieved. (?!?!) Let him voluntarily reduce property taxes and hand millions of dollars the district could use to improve student services back to taxpayers in a state with one of the lowest per-pupil funding rates in the nation, and then let’s see him brag about relinquishing this funding as one of his achievements in his state-of-the-district address. Have I said enough yet? Nope, I forget to mention the $400K per year compensation package this school year and the $10K bonuses to central administrators while teachers get by on poverty level wages.
It is unbelievable that you continue to equivocate and talk about how complicated and difficult it is to figure out what to do. It’s plain to anyone who isn’t drinking the Koolaid you imbibe what desperately needs to be done in TUSD: get better, more responsible leadership.
Safier writes, “my concern is that district schools […] with large Anglo populations will lose Anglo students to charter schools and neighboring districts like Vail and Catalina Foothills. If the long term result is fewer Anglo students in TUSD, shrinking both the size and heterogeneity of the district, without a significant increase in desegregation, then the decision is harmful.”
If you’d like to talk about what will cause TUSD residents who want a college prep program to open-enroll in Tanque Verde and Catalina Foothills — or, for that matter, what will keep Tanque Verde and Catalina Foothills residents from open-enrolling in TUSD’s UHS, I suggest you take a look at the way that UHS, under pressure to maintain its scores and rankings vis a vis Basis and to win TUSD awards from the College Board, is moving in the direction of the Basis model, adding more non-optional, required AP courses every year. This has been the consistent trend ever since Sanchez assumed the superintendency.
Off the top of my head I could name 20 families in our acquaintance who have either transferred out of UHS within the past 2 and 1/2 years or elected not to enroll younger siblings of UHS students in the school. Many families with high-achieving students do not want the pressure-cooker Basis model for their children. Catalina Foothills High School and Salpointe both have strong college preparatory programs that manage to offer a wide range of AP courses while keeping their requirements flexible and humane, and both of these schools have significant, sustainable investment from the community which allows them to maintain and continuously improve the facilities infrastructure needed for a top-quality high school science program.
It was announced recently that beginning with the 2016-2017 school year, UHS will be a Title 1 school for the first time. Pundits like Safier continue to talk about “white flight and charters” or “white flight and the rejection of the Fruchthendler-Sabino plan.” They are missing the elephant in the room: what is happening at UHS, and, more to the point, WHY is it happening? It’s NOT demographically motivated. It’s because of the district’s ongoing inability to recruit and sustain external investment and because of the toxic school policy changes made during the last two and a half years.
Has Safier slept the past five years? The “anglos” have already left. Led by the Grijalva’s, H.T. Sanchez let it be known far and wide, if you ain’t brown, you ain’t down. By Safier’s own numbers, 10,000 have already fled and Catalina Foothills is doing quite well.
For liberals that don’t seem to have any competence in math or business, that’s 60 MILLION DOLLARS per year!
Must be whitey’s fault.
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/08/05/tusd-enrollment-2000-to-2015
This isn’t an argument with the comments in the previous “Toxic policies” statement, just a point of information. Here are the yearly attendance figures for University High as reported on the TUSD website, starting in the 1996-7 school year: 624, 612, 631, 645, 600 604, 627, 633, 613, 660, 696, 710, 741, 777, 844, 876, 919, 992, 1015. The last attendance figure, 1015, is for the 2014-15 school year. The most recent attendance figure for this year, 3/11/16, is 1032.
That’s right, David, because they admit more freshman every year. There are still people in the community who remember what the UHS experience was like when there were much smaller numbers admitted and feel that the trend to admit more and more students every year is watering down and depersonalizing an experience that used to be more student-centered. I’m not saying I agree with that opinion, but it’s something you hear from some alums and parents of alums.
To begin to understand what is happening at the school you need to compare the number of students admitted as freshman each year with the number of graduating seniors in that cohort four years later. To further refine that figure you would need to identify the number in that cohort that have transferred out and the number that have transferred in. To round out the picture you would also need to find a way of identifying siblings of current students or alums who were offered admission, but have declined to enroll, and I don’t think TUSD Stats will provide you with a way of doing that. Just a guess.
In my experience, it is increasingly true that professionally educated parents who have other options (can pay tuition, find it feasible to open enroll their students in CFHS or Tanque Verde) are choosing to decline offers of admission at UHS. You can try to cast doubt on what people with direct experience of the community report if you like, but you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and do more homework than just pulling up numbers that show an overall increase in enrollment if you want to disprove the assertion that the school is changing in response to poor administrative decision-making.
Here’s something you wrote in a recent piece, “”there are people who think our obsession with yearly high stakes testing is damaging our children’s educations […] Those people want to encourage parents to opt their children out as a step toward changing or eliminating the current testing regimen. (Full disclosure: I’m an opt out advocate for the reasons mentioned above.)”
Those are your commitments? That’s great. So look into the changing role of AP testing at UHS. Here are a couple of links that might begin to point your public records requests on the topic in the right direction:
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2016/02/02/tusd-ap-data/
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2015/12/17/tusd-ap-scores-show-disparities/
Adding to the University High attendance information I put in the last comment, here are the percentages of Anglo and Hispanic students for those years. In the 1996-7 school year, UHS was 69.1 percent Anglo, 17.8 percent Hispanic. The Hispanic percentage stayed more or less constant through 2003-4 when it was 18.2 percent. The Anglo percentage dropped a bit to 65.9 percent, mainly due to an increase in Asian American students. By the 2010-11 school year, Anglo numbers dropped to 53.6 percent and Hispanic numbers increased to 28 percent. In 2014-15, Anglo students are 50.2 percent of the UHS population, Hispanic students 32.8 percent. This school year, as of 3/11/16, Anglo students are 47.9 percent, Hispanic students 33.8 percent.
From the 1996-7 year to the present, the percent of Anglo students is down 21.2 percent and the percent of Hispanic students is up 16 percent. (I haven’t looked at the overall change in the demographics of TUSD from 1996 to 2016, which means I can’t say how much of the change at UHS simply reflects the changes in the district. If anyone has those numbers handy, please post them in the comments. Otherwise, I’ll try to find them in the future when I have some time.)
Perhaps you missed this, David:
***Here’s something you wrote in a recent piece, “”there are people who think our obsession with yearly high stakes testing is damaging our children’s educations […] Those people want to encourage parents to opt their children out as a step toward changing or eliminating the current testing regimen. (Full disclosure: I’m an opt out advocate for the reasons mentioned above.)”
***Those are your commitments? That’s great. So look into the changing role of AP testing at UHS. Here are a couple of links that might begin to point your public records requests on the topic in the right direction:
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2016/02/02/tusd-ap-data/
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2015/12/17/tusd-ap-scores-show-disparities/
On the whole, I believe increased diversity and access to educational “opportunity” are good things, but it depends on the quality and character of the programs to which students are gaining access, and whether they’re receiving enough support to give them the ability to make the most of those opportunities. If the # of required, non-optional AP exams and the stress levels are being ramped up at the same time that the desegregation funding available to provide appropriate forms of academic and counseling support is being phased down, forgive me for thinking that’s not a positive development.
Whether or not you want to acknowledge it, the degree to which people WITH OTHER OPTIONS AVAILABLE are choosing to enroll in better managed programs with appropriate policies and adequate infrastructure investments is one indication of the quality of administrative decisions being made in the institution. The people transferring students out or declining offers of admission are not RACISTS and this is not so-called “WHITE FLIGHT.” It is a choice to enroll students in responsibly administered programs where they will be able to lead balanced lives with adequate time invested in extracurriculars and community service, where they will NOT be forced into classes they would never have chosen to register for, if given options. I can’t speak for everyone, but among my acquaintances, it is to a great degree a choice not to allow their children’s high school experience to be damaged by administrators who want to milk gifted students for the test scores and rankings they can produce.
One wonders what more needs to happen in TUSD before Democrats who support Sanchez and his Board majority realize the substantial misjudgment they have made. Safier is but one prominent example. Mayor Rothschild and Senator Farley have also been full-throated advocates for the misguided (and often right-wing) policies of the current TUSD leadership.
What happens in TUSD affects the well-being of all of Tucson given its status as the largest school district and as a major employer. Many Democrats in high office have failed to see the long-term damage Sanchez is doing. Let’s see if the Chamber of Commerce makes the right calls in this year’s Board elections, unlike two years ago when they also backed a Sanchez-supported candidate.
TUSD right wing? That is too funny.
What do you call outsourcing subs and negatively impacting their ability to qualify for benefits?
Bragging in the State of the District address that you have reduced deseg levies and given millions back to property taxpayers?
Agreeing with the AZ legislature that it could be appropriate to phase down deseg spending after Unitary Status is achieved?
Disparaging the plaintiffs, judge, and Special Master in the deseg case and trying to organize the TUSD parent community against them?
The dual benefit to right wingers:
–they get the kinds of policies they like, which actually harm public schools’ ability to meet the needs of their students rather than strengthening them, implemented in TUSD
–the credibility of the progressive-in-name-only Grijalva-affiliated politicians running the district is permanently destroyed, and the credibility of the congressman himself is negatively impacted.
The Sanchez superintendency is definitely a win-win for conservative critics of public school systems.
I sometimes wonder if it’s Adelita Grijalva or Ducey’s close associate Lea Marquez Peterson, head of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, who is calling the shots in TUSD. It would be interesting to take a look at Sanchez’s calendar and find out how much time he spends in pow-wows with Marquez-Peterson.
Once again, I learned more from the comments section in a Safier authored article.
Thank God for free speech.