I pointed out in a recent post that there’s a very strong correlation between state school grades—which are based on student AIMS scores—and family income. (One of the two maps I used is at the top of this post.) Ed Supe Diane Douglas, who, as you know, I don’t always agree with, was right on the money on this one when she said, “Standardized and high stakes testing measure demographics, not student achievement or teacher performance.” And now, we have a new article by a promising young journalist that covers similar ground.
The New York Times has a Student Journalism Institute that’s convening right here at UA, and one of its journalists, Ben Bartenstein, just published a story, Critics of State’s School Funding Plan Say It Will Favor Charters. If you skip to the bottom, you’ll find an interactive map that’s far niftier than mine, showing the A-rated schools in the Tucson area along with the family income in the area. (I really need to learn how to do that!)
Most of the article is about Arizona school funding in general, along with a discussion of charters. Bartenstein pulls together lots of good information and a wide variety of quotes from people on different sides of the issue. And he gets it about BASIS. While he acknowledges the accomplishments of BASIS students, he also points out that they’re a very select group. (If only the charter chain will admit to its selectivity instead of suggesting that it takes unformed hunks of student clay and turns them into academic world-beaters, I’ll stop writing about BASIS so much. But as long as they continue mythologizing their schools and making other schools look like failures by comparison, I’ll keep pointing out the truth.)
This article appears in May 21-27, 2015.
David, is ANY Charter school “good” in Arizona, in your opinion. If BASIS does not set the standard, then who does?
Speaking of “selectism” or “winnowing”, let’s look at denomination-based schools. Many of them are eligible for Federal and State Aid. Students and parents who belong to their church or organization pay a quarterly/monthly fee for decreased tuition. How many disabled, special needs and disadvantaged students attend these schools?
Are there currently any stats for public school honor students, programs, schools for the gifted that we can compare against BASIS? That would compare the “cream of the crops” against each other.
Finally David, do we really need BASIS to paint Arizona public schools as failures? Isn’t the general consensus that they are at least failing? The real debate is what can be done to make them succeed, correct?
This map says so much and really dispels the insane idea that “Throwing money at the problem will not do anything”. If more and more funding is going to charter schools, especially ones that are obviously committing fraud or are majorly over funding the administrators( never heard of a teacher being overpaid but hey we could find some in charters), the public schools system will continue to go down. I think we( i.e. the state) should start a major investigation into all charter schools to stop the misuse of taxpayer funds and also to set a criteria for pay. All public school pay is easily accessed.
We also need to have the government come in and see if these schools are desegregated and they too must follow the guidelines set up for public schools. I addition, they should also be qualified to accept special needs children. That would stop a lot from opening and closing if they had to have special ed. students. They wouldn’t open but the good schools would find a way. As far as I know, all public schools must service all special needs students.
We started charter schools in Arizona a long time ago ( early ’90s?) and look at what has happened. Do we keep using our money the same way and expect different results? We have been touted as having more charter schools (my McCain) than another other state. Hmm and we are 50th in money spent and close to that in achievement. Easy to see IMHO how the changes need to happen . Thank you for the information.
Be careful with data on income from the census bureau. The way they gather the data has changed since the introduction of the American Community Survey. Now we get income data more often but it is less accurate. Data at the zip code level can be appropriate but once you start trying to look at data at the census group, tract or block level the margin of errors can rise as high as 40% or more. The map you link to from Ben Bartenstein is one such map as he is using census blocks to present his income data. It cannot be trusted once you look at the actual data table from the Census Bureau.
David is your data at the zip code level? It is hard to tell because you created arbitrary polygons to present your data which are not in any way representative of where people live or where the data was actually collected, basically your polygons do not conform to the geographic boundaries in which that data was collected. You are presenting it in an inaccurate manner.
This all leads to one of the biggest problems of mapping out social phenomenon, the assumption that a population or data point is spread evenly throughout some arbitrary polygon, which we know it is not.
Mapping out social phenomena is wrought with difficulty and it can be hard to trust without the supporting data and some acknowledgment of limitation of data in terms of accuracy.
We really should be getting better data from the federal government on income distribution across the country but since the introduction of the ACS the quality of that data at geographic areas smaller than county level or zip code level is so wrought with error that it is hard to trust. Basically the Feds and Congress have created a situation where even if we know a phenomena is true it can be hard to prove it because they have watered down the data. Why wouldn’t they want us to know? 🙂
Good luck David. Check out the Census Bureau website for mapping tips, the UA library has some free mapping data as well as Pima County governments.
Do you need map making help? I am sure myself or some other more talented individual would be happy to help make maps for you or the weekly in the future.
Old Pueblo, let me correct a misperception. I’m not anti-charter or anti-BASIS. As for BASIS, if I knew parents who were unhappy with their child’s school and it was the right kind of child, I would recommend looking into BASIS, after telling them the way the school is structured. For certain kids, the school works well, possibly better than most other schools. As for other charters, some do excellent work, some do mediocre work, some do poor work, just like school district schools and private schools.
However, there is a multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year push to promote charters over district schools. The money promotes the idea that charters, and privatization, are inherently superior to “government schools.” That’s absolutely incorrect. There are no studies showing a significant difference in overall quality between charter and district schools. These people distort the record of charters and district schools, and I think it’s important to try and counterbalance that.
If you look through everything I’ve written about BASIS, I don’t think you’ll see anything there criticizing their curriculum or pedagogy. I only try to point out, again and again, that their pedagogy works because of the type of students they have, not because it’s inherently superior to the pedagogy of other schools. But in Arizona and across the country, BASIS schools are used by the “education reform”/privatization crowd to “prove” that charters are better than district schools. Read what I said about BASIS in the post above. I mean it. If BASIS says, “Yeah, we have a selective group of students who respond well to the rigor of our curriculum and it wouldn’t work for all children — or even most children,” I’ll make sure everyone knows they have said that, but I’ll stop harping on the point.
Living in Tucson I have seen parents who have been happy and unhappy at Basis. One parent/friend had 2 kids at Basis one who graduated from there and one who didn’t. She told me herself that in Middle School is where they start to weed out those who do not fit in. I’ve had others tell me their kids had a learning disability and Basis was not able to help them. They were removed and enrolled elsewhere where they were able to thrive. One other parent who looked into Basis, had her son shadow a student and she herself went and sat in a classroom or two decided not to enroll her son. She said kids walked around like robots and were missing that happiness that kids should experience at their age. Needless to say I decided to remove my kids from the “enrolled list” and keep them at their current charter, Sonoran Science Academy. We have attended that charter for 5 years. They do have a program for kids with IEPs, tutoring help during the week, Saturday school to catch up and participate in the Federal food program for some students. I would say this chain of Charters is more of a role model than Basis. The campuses are on different parts of town with families of all incomes.
In the end..public, private, charter or homeschool, parent s are the ones who need to pay attention to how their children learn and find the right school for them. All kids are not created equal. Once you find the right school, GET INVOLVED!!!! Help out even if it’s once a semester! If you can’t help with volunteering find the PTA, PTO, Parent Association, Booster etc. and ask what other ways you can help. It’s always the parents who are MIA that complain.
All of the negativity aside, I thank God that parents have the right to choose the school that they believe best suits their child.
Another concern I have is I have heard there are not certified teachers in some charter school classrooms. They can have one certified teacher monitoring as many as 4 classrooms and the certified teacher signs off on the necessary paperwork so that it looks like all the children have certified teachers. Teachers in the role I just described are actually acting as principals and need leadership certificates. I don’t know what they pay these teachers who are not certified.
Also, there are charter schools who do take children with I.E.P.s but they do not have certified special ed. teachers. Sometimes students are told they really don’t have disabilities and that they could help them without a special ed. teacher(I have been told by public school teachers that some of their parents told them this after they came back to the public schools) . The parents were not happy because it took them a while to realize that their children with I.E.P.s were not getting their needs met and stopped making progress.
My point is not that charters are bad. My point is, these rules and regulations were set up for the protection of the children. If your school is doing what it needs to, whether they are charter or regular public schools, and they are expected to follow the same guidelines set up by the state, I am all for the choices that some people need. I do think many school districts that are public do have a variety of wonderful programs with people who do follow the rules set up for the kids. Open enrollment allows choices. The teachers who are certified not only work hard to get their certificates but also to maintain them.
My sister-in- law (in Michigan) and I disagree on vouchers. I said to her the definition of religion is huge. DO you really not care who sets up a ‘religious’ school to promote whatever philosophy they have? Of course she means Christian and that is a problem because I believe that is why the Supreme Court ruled against this. We can’t just have Christian schools. These charter schools IMHO ( not all) are morphing into many changes that are not necessarily healthy if they are not examined as David is doing and others. We need careful monitoring of all charter and public schools and no vouchers. THis is complicated enough. Besides I do think the vouchers would be unconstitutional.
With a voucher the money follows the student. Once we weed out the bad players, vouchers will be the educational option of choice. And then we can get back to educating the children. Right now the best we can say is that we are placating the unions. But what good does that do the student , the parents or society?
While David is at it, I would love for him to get us the figure spent on each student in AZ public schools. (TUSD in particular)
Not the “public consumption” figure, but the real number that includes capital improvements and pensions.
I have been told it may be $18,000 per student. New York was just discovered to have spent $27,000 per.
Lawsuits were filed in NY for truth in funding violations regarding charter schools getting less funding than public schools.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nina-rees/2014/09/22/new-york-families-file-lawsuit-over-underfunded-public-charter-schools