Back when TUSD’s Mexican American Studies crisis was at its high point, the central debate was whether the MAS program was fomenting student discontent and inciting revolution or helping students learn more about Mexican-Amerian history and culture, and about themselves.
Meanwhile, in Arizona and around the country, educators were searching for ways to improve students’ achievement and graduation rates, especially for poor and minority students. Successful examples were hard to come by.
MAS supporters claimed, using a combination of anecdotal evidence and some, but not enough, data, that the program boosted achievement and graduation rates. The claims made intuitive sense to people who supported the program — people like me — but they weren’t strong enough to be convincing. However, if they were accurate, it meant MAS detractors were hellbent on destroying an educational program which was succeeding where so many others were failing.
At the request of the U.S. courts looking into TUSD’s desegregation status, UA assistant professor of education Dr. Nolan L. Cabrera created a more rigorous, academic study of the data. His conclusion: MAS students showed a significant rise in achievement and graduation rates compared to similar TUSD students who hadn’t participated in the program. Cabrera had a short window to complete his study, so he didn’t have time to dig into the data as deeply as he wanted to. MAS detractors questioned the validity of his study.
Now, Cabrera and his colleagues have taken the time to add more data to the study and add complexity to their analysis. The updated study has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, which put it through a peer review process before publication. The new study reaches the same conclusions as the earlier work.
Here’s a summary of the study’s research methods and conclusions from Education Week:
Overall, this latest analysis included more than 26,000 Tucson students who were members of the graduating cohorts of 2008, 2009, 2010. The researchers used additional information on prior student achievement. They found that students who elected to take MAS courses were actually at a disadvantage before they took the classes, which, in most cases, were offered only to high school juniors and seniors. In grades 9 and 10, the MAS students had lower grade point averages than their non-MAS peers. They also had lower scores on 10th grade state exams. Additionally, 77 percent of MAS students came from families with incomes low enough for them to qualify for free or reduced-price meals.
By contrast, 66 percent of non-MAS students qualified for free or reduced-price meals. MAS students were also more likely to be English-language learners (15 percent versus 8 percent), or Hispanics (85 percent versus 56 percent). However, they were less likely to be identified as special education students (10 percent versus 19 percent). The statistical models in the study teased out the way in which MAS impacted student achievement by accounting for these and other differences between those who did and did not take MAS courses.
After accounting for these differences, the researchers found that MAS students were 9.5 percent more likely to graduate from high school than their peers who attended the same high schools but did not take MAS courses. In the latest analysis, Cabrera and his co-authors expanded upon their comparison group to include both MAS students who attended the six MAS schools as well as those who attended schools that did not offer MAS. This barely budged their results: MAS students were 9 percent more likely to graduate than their peers at MAS and non-MAS schools. The same was true for state exams. MAS students who failed one such exam were nearly 7 percent more likely to pass that exam after taking a MAS course.
Does this mean absolutely, conclusively, the MAS program benefited students academically? The answer is no. This kind of study is always open to question and further analysis, especially in the very complex, multi-faceted world of education. But it’s strong, convincing stuff. I’ve seen much thinner data and analysis used to sing the praises of educational strategies as well as charter schools and vouchers.
Assuming the program did benefit students, the question is, why? Was it the curriculum and materials that did the trick? Was it the fierce dedication, the passion MAS teachers brought to their classrooms? Was it a combination of the two? It’s impossible to know, but it’s an important question because of the inextricable mix of style and substance which creates the education students receive in the classroom. A seminal text can make the clouds part and let the light shine on a student’s forehead. So can a teacher’s tone of voice, body language, and that indefinable something that tells students, “I care about you, I believe in you, and you need to believe in yourself as well.” Put the two together, strong materials and inspired teachers, and your chances of reaching students rise exponentially.
TUSD has instituted new Culturally Relevant Curriculum curriculum in its schools. Whether the new program will show similar positive results which the data indicates the MAS program had is something we won’t know for a few years.
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2014.
…and the damage will have been done. These kids deserve an education, not an indoctrination. They would be better served to give them an education from the 1950s and let them get a jog and learn how the world works.
Oh I forgot…the NEA doesn’t like how the world works, do they?
Why would you assume the program helped students? TUSD’s own statistician reported that kids who took at least one MAS class did not do better than kids who did not take any.
Cabrera was a strong advocate for the MAS program before he undertook this study. He was not just as a disinterested researcher. Any report he does on the MAS program has to be viewed with the same skepticism that a study done on vouchers by voucher-advocate Jay Greene from the University of Arkansas should receive. Greene’s studies on vouchers also produce results that do not match up with studies done by disinterested researchers.
The quote you took from Education Week notes that in Cabrera’s study there were twice as many special education students in the control group as in the MAS group. Maybe you think that can somehow be evened out through statistical mumbo-jumbo. That notion is laughable. This is what is called deliberate sampling bias. Any group that contains twice as many special education students is going to do worse than the group that doesn’t. David, you were a real teacher. If you ever had the opportunity to teach identified special education students you know that is true. Studies done by Cabrera on MAS and studies done by Greene on vouchers have equal validity…virtually none.
No one (that I heard) ever claimed that the MAS program was inciting revolution. In particular, the state never claimed that the program violated that provision of the statute.
Cabrera’s study has bones (as ed researchers used to say); it has all the earmarks of a a solid effort and is well documented. So let’s stipulate (as lawyers still say) the findings are accurate and the MAS program was beneficial to the students enrolled in the classes. That said, one of the points Cabrera makes in his discussion of the results is that research and policy are often at odds due to political and economic constraints. Research findings are merely the currency used to support various, competing policy initiatives.
It has been proven over time and across states in very solid studies (Tennessee, Wisconsin, California) that smaller class sizes result in dramatic positive changes in student learning outcomes, especially in grades K-3 and among minority populations. If it were the case that research drives policy, it would seem that federal, state and local education governance would be laser-focused on funding smaller classroom ratios of students to teachers in the earliest years.
Instead, the federal and state interventionists are hammering local districts and teachers with the blunt instruments of No Child Held Back, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards while doling out billions to privateers in the for profit sector under the guise of “school reform.” Where are the research results supporting those billion dollar initiatives? (There are none, research cannot be conducted a priori, there has to be something in place to research and evaluate).
The best research available is easily countered in the public arena by shoddy partisan work or no research at all – and here I am not commenting on Cabrera’s study – but the “research” conducted by for profit educationists. The recent Pearson/Apple Axis fiasco in LA USD is one example of political and economic clout to sell almost a million dollars of eduwares on the basis of unsupported glitz.
The best research available cannot guarantee successful policy initiatives, especially in a small localized study in a combustive environment.
The report also said that 1 of every 5 students in the cohort of graduates who had the opportunity to take the classes did so.
An average of 20% of the graduates at each offering school is quite high, given the specialized nature of the program. Keep that figure in mind the next time a board member tries to minimize the number of students who took the courses. The figure often used is that only 5% of ALL TUSD high school students took the courses. That is a very different cohort. It includes students from high schools where MAS was not offered. It may also include 9th and 10th graders for whom the classes were not offered.
The class should be optional at best since there are no other classes given for any other ethnicities it would be unfair. There are more than Caucasian and Latino ethnicities in Tucson. Latino is not a minority either
In Tucson
White alone – 239,112 (45.6%)
Hispanic – 228,510 (43.6%)
This does not make you minority
David, David, David. You’re mentioning of vouchers & charter schools is important because charter schools also claim a better percentage of graduates though I strongly suspect if those graduates were tested a year after graduation they would not score as high as students receiving a traditional public education. It would be interesting to see if the same would be the case here.
The charter school graduates are teaching the public school students. How many different ways can you guys slice and dice statistics, before we realize,…”hey, some of these graduates can’t even read.” And they never failed a grade.
I missed the link showing statistics and all I have is experience, two different hirees who were both graduates of the local charter school. Neither could do simple addition yet they had accelerated and graduated sooner than the peers they left in high school. I spent a lot of time teaching them how to read a measuring tape, breaking the inches down into fractions and then transferring the numbers to the material needing to be cut. Both were hired through the local temp agency and neither lasted very long. But they never failed a grade.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
But back to the main topic. In my experiences within the school districts around the state what I HAVE seen is the Indians and migrant kids do much better when they were not around the white kids who were generally bullies. Not ALL the white kids are bullies but it takes only a few bullies to be disruptive to the rest so, while I’m overly skeptical of even “peer reviewed” studies I’ll consider some of what is here based on my own experiences.
Rick Spanier says: Cabrera’s study has bones (as ed researchers used to say); it has all the earmarks of a a solid effort and is well documented. So let’s stipulate (as lawyers still say) the findings are accurate and the MAS program was beneficial to the students enrolled in the classes.”
Why would we do that? You might as well stipulate that Jay Greene’s pro-voucher studies done at the University of Arkansas are well-documented. Like Greene, Cabrera was an advocate for the program he is assessing. Like Greene, he has used biased sampling to ensure the results he wanted to get. Both Greene and Cabrera produce studies that appear (on the surface) to be valid and reliable, but are, in fact, highly biased.
Ask yourself why Professor Cabrera would select a control group with so many identified special education students. Surely, he could just as easily have found a control group with the identical ratio of special education students to non-identified special education students. In fact, given the far greater numbers of TUSD students who never took an MAS class, Cabrera had to go out of his way to create a control group with such a high percentage of special education students. This is bias by design, and it resulted in comparative achievement numbers radically different from those presented by TUSD’s own statistician. According to the TUSD figures, there was no difference in the performance of MAS students and non-MAS students on any of the measures of success generally used, i.e. graduation rates, scores on the graduation tests, and admission to colleges.