Segregation and desegregation in Tucson schools has become such a hot topic recently, I decided to do a little research to see how the ethnic and racial numbers break down in TUSD schools. As I looked over the numbers, I began to be curious about what they look like in Tucson’s charter schools as well. I’ve read often that charters tend to be more segregated than district schools, and I wanted to see if that was true here. I found that all the data I needed is on the Arizona Department of Education and TUSD websites.
I gathered together enrollment stats on 75 charters in Tucson—I believe it’s a fairly complete list of the city’s charter schools—using information from the Arizona Department of Education website. Then I did the same with the 85 TUSD schools listed in the enrollment stats on TUSD’s website. TUSD keeps its enrollment information current, compiling each school’s ethnic and racial composition on a daily basis, but the most recent numbers I could find for charters is from October, 2014, so I used the same date for TUSD to create an accurate comparison.
Of Tucson students in publicly funded schools (I didn’t include private schools in my research), 73 percent are in TUSD schools and 27 percent are in charter schools. Hispanics make up 61 percent of the total student population, 25 percent are Anglo and the remaining 14 percent are divided among African American, Native American, Asian American and Multi-Racial students.
Here is a graph showing the overall ethnic and racial compositions in TUSD and Tuscon’s charter schools.
There’s a large difference between student populations in TUSD and in Tucson charter schools. Charters have 11 percent fewer Hispanic student and 16 percent more Anglo students than TUSD. Though the numbers of other students are far smaller, it’s clear that African American, Native American and Multi-Racial students are underrepresented at charters compared to TUSD—there’s a consistent one-to-two ratio—while Asian American are slightly overrepresented at charters.
The numbers indicate there’s a significant white (and Asian) flight from TUSD schools to charters, which indicates that charter schools are more segregated than TUSD schools. But the difference may be greater or smaller than the numbers imply. After all, students attend a variety of schools with unique ethnic and racial mixes, not the TUSD school district or charter schools as a whole. So my next question is, what are the ethnic and racial compositions of the schools students attend?
The chart below shows the percentage of students in TUSD and Tucson charter schools who attend schools with various ethnic and racial compositions.
I used a 60 percent Hispanic student composition as the mid point for the chart since that’s the city average, then I moved out from there to greater or lesser concentrations of Hispanic students. A 50 to 70 percent Hispanic population seems like the sweet spot to me since it’s plus or minus 10 percent of the city average. I would consider those schools to be fairly well integrated. In either direction from the 50 to 70 percent range, students are increasingly segregated, with either a disproportionate number of Hispanic or Anglo students.
The chart shows that TUSD and charter schools have dramatically different distributions of Hispanic and Anglo students, more so than their overall ethnic and racial makeup suggests. The most striking difference is in the number attending schools with 30 percent or fewer Hispanic students. For charters, it’s over a third of the students—35 percent. For TUSD, it’s 2 percent. On the other end of the scale, TUSD has significantly more students in schools with 80 percent or more Hispanic students than charters—28 percent compared to 18 percent. In the other categories between those two extremes, TUSD and charter schools have reasonably wide variations except in the 50 to 70 percent range where they’re within 3 percent.
The numbers on the graph can be mixed, matched and interpreted in a variety of ways, but the clearest conclusion is that many charter schools have very segregated Anglo populations, indicating that the white flight from TUSD is very often toward more segregated, predominantly Anglo schools. I haven’t looked at the TUSD schools geographically, but I suspect the schools’ racial and ethnic mix is similar to that of their neighborhood populations. If that’s true, the mix in TUSD schools is more reflective of people staying put than seeking schools out of their neighborhoods.
Looking at the student populations at individual schools also yields interesting results. The 10 schools with the lowest percentage of Hispanic students—under 24 percent—are all charters, and they make up 19 percent of the charters’ total student population: The Rising School (0 percent), BASIS Tucson (14.5 percent), BASIS Tucson North (14.7 percent), Khalsa School (18 percent), Hermosa Montessori (19 percent), Academy of Tucson Middle School (20.3 percent), Sky Islands (22 percent), Academy of Tucson Elementary School (22.2 percent), Academy of Tucson High School (23.3 percent) and Satori Charter School (23.6 percent). In TUSD, Collier Elementary (24.9 percent) and Fruchthendler Elementary (25 percent) have the lowest percentage of Hispanic students.
The school with the highest percentage of Hispanic students is in TUSD—C.E. Rose Elementary (97.3 percent)—and the next three are charters—Southside Community School (97.2 percent), Toltecali High (95.4 percent) and Alta Vista High (94 percent).
If you just look at TUSD schools, it’s clear the district hasn’t been successful in its efforts at desegregation. But looking at the district next to Tucson charter schools, it’s also clear that the segregation is far greater at the charters.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2015.
Sorry – perhaps I missed something. Are charters under desegregation orders? Do they levy taxes on residents within a district for the specific purpose of achieving integration? No?
So why exactly is it relevant that schools not drawing money from the community in support of integration aren’t integrated?
Whereas in TUSD, which has been levying desegregation taxes for 40 years, the public has a right to expect integration, and a right to be pretty damn mad that their elected representatives lie to the public about the fact that it’s the district, not the deseg authority, that is starving schools hat are supposed to be receiving funding to INTEGRATE.
Spin away, David. Make more graphs, why don’t you? People understand what your role is.
Poor Adelita. She had a chance to follow in her father’s footsteps, but she blew it on an arrogant, megalomaniacal young schemer from Texas. Looks to me like in return for the faith she placed in him, he has destroyed her political career.
Or are you inferring that charters are somehow “racist” in their admissions process?
Look to the parents. Parents that understand the failings of the public school system left first. Others will follow. No story here.
Desgragation, Intergration, it’s all been a waste of money for the past forty years. Student go where they feel comfortable with their own kind. The same goes for neighborhoods. Minorities are not getting the short end of the educational stick, but there’s always an excuse for failure.
David Safier:
I’m sure you will agree with me when I say that the recent controversies over integration in TUSD — and the various media responses to them — have been utterly fascinating.
I know you study the Arizona Daily Star and its operations very closely. Perhaps you have even been involved in some of the behind-the-scenes meetings that have no doubt taken place with various TUSD-reps, discussing how to do “damage control” in the wake of the ruling issued by Judge Bury on November 19. I can only imagine what the reaction must have been — how humiliating the receipt of this ruling and its orders were for the current TUSD board president (Adelita Grijalva) and the Superintendent she brought to town (H.T. Sanchez) ! And in the wake of it, so much attention from so many talented people must have gone towards preventing the ruling from being accurately and straightforwardly covered in the Star.
Now that Ms. Huicochea has been successfully persuaded (who was involved? Ann-Eve Pedersen, no doubt, and Kristel Foster and Congressman Grijalva, and who else…?) from doing another one of the many pieces she has published that have been damaging to TUSD — about the playground safety problems, for example, or the revocation of magnet status for some TUSD schools, or the outsourcing of TUSD subs or the conflicts of interest on the audit committee — you turn your attention here to busily making graphs about racial diversity in charters. (Perhaps you should compare charters and TUSD on “academic achievement” while you’re comparing them on racial diversity. I wonder what those bar graphs would show?)
Perhaps next you will write a piece about the district’s great accomplishment in earning this wonderful AP award from the College Board? Or perhaps Maria Ines or Tanner will handle that topic, because you know better.
The only commentator who has won my heart in all this is Morales of Three Sonorans. He gets too snarky sometimes, but overall he’s dead-on in his interpretation of the district including in these most recent pieces:
http://threesonorans.com/2015/11/20/federal-judge-issues-order-public-has-been-misled-by-tusd-on-deseg-and-adelita-grijalva-needs-to-get-her-facts-straight/
http://threesonorans.com/2015/11/12/az-daily-star-exposes-shenanigans-of-ht-sanchez-and-his-tusd-school-board-majority/
The second piece is my favorite on this controversy, with this classic passage:
–According to [Adelita Grijalva’s father, Congressman Raul Grijalva], the Plaintiffs and Special Master have no understanding of “reality” and must learn to ‘accept the NOW.’ Regarding people from “back east” being so bad, does this mean that Grijalva does not agree with the Supreme Court’s Brown v Board decision, since none of the judges were from Kansas and thus didn’t understand the ‘reality’ of accepted-racism at that point of now? The reality of NOW is that TUSD has failed to comply with federal court orders to DESEGREGATE for four decades now, and over 24 of those years have been with a Grijalva on the TUSD school board (Raul and his daughter Adelita).”
Kudos to you, Morales. Thanks for being one of the few people in town capable of telling the TRUTH.
Looks like Tucson has a Grijalva problem.
White guilt, not even once.
The three charters Southside Community School, Toltecali High and Alta Vista High are all southside schools located within the Sunnyside School district.
Children are children regardless of their ethnicity. Stop using them as pawns in your petty little race games for money and blame. We are all Americans.
Children are children regardless of their ethnicity. Stop using them as pawns in your petty little race games for money and blame. We are all Americans.
David, David, David. Have you learned nothing in this life or are you truly a bigot? How do these stats equate to “white flight”? All you have here are stats. Parents sending their kids to a school which probably promotes itself as a place of intense learning. Could it be the other groups have chosen to NOT attend these schools for other reasons? Are those reasons listed on the websites?
Your hiatus was not long enough. You don’t have the gumption to do something about it but you DO have the courage to incessantly whine. What a proud example you must have been for your students. Thank goodness you are “retired”.
Nice to see TUSD Board member Kristel Foster weighing in.
Ms. Foster:
— Do you think that Safier’s comparison of integration in TUSD schools and charter schools is relevant in the immediate wake of the November 19 ruling issued by Judge Bury? If so, why is it relevant? How is it relevant? Please be specific, and please include your perspective on why the court ruling included the direction that copies of court documents be posted on the TUSD website and be sent directly to the President of the Board. Was there a problem that developed in the district this fall that those orders were intended to correct? If so, what was it? If a problem occurred, how can you, as a board member, help prevent it from happening again?
— As an elected representative, what do you feel your role is in helping the public understand why this country has federal laws relating to desegregation in public schools and what the relationship of these laws is to how taxes levied to achieve integration should be applied and how their application should be documented and reported? While you’re at it: what do you understand the purpose of “magnet” schools to be in districts under desegregation orders? Ms. Grijalva was recently quoted elsewhere in this publication, saying, “These programs were created to offer more options for children of color.” Is that a correct or incorrect understanding of the purpose magnets should serve in a district, if the district is trying, “in good faith,” to remediate segregation?
— Did you contact Alexis Huicochea or anyone else at the Arizona Daily Star by e-mail, by phone, or by any other means in between November 19, when Bury’s court ruling was issued and November 23, when Ms. Huicochea’s coverage of the ruling was inconspicuously included in an article that was NOT prominently placed which had this positive headline: “TUSD: More time to show progress at magnet schools”? If you did contact anyone at the Star during this time period, what was your intent in doing so? What role should elected representatives be playing vis a vis the local media? Ensuring that the public gets accurate information about what’s going on in the district, or….?
— What is your opinion of the Superintendent’s 2015-2016 goals? Do they relate in any way to achieving integration and developing a constructive relationship with the desegregation authority, which could begin to decrease the unreasonably large amount of money the district has been paying to lawyers as their relationships with the courts and Special Master has become more adversarial? To your knowledge, were there areas of the 2014-2015 Superintendent’s Goals that could or should have been more adequately addressed?
The answers to these questions will be helpful to voters with progressive leanings as they try to decide whom to support in the next TUSD board election, where I imagine you will be running again.
Thanks in advance for getting good information to the public on these topics.
How many of the 61% hispanics are illegal?
All Safier has done here is point out how successful the racist and bigot LaGorda Grijalva and her daddy have been at purging TUSD of whites.
If you ain’t brown, you ain’t down in TUSD.
Some interesting questions above have been asked of Mr Safier and need to be addressed. The only way to fix to TUSD is to get to the bottom of this. And it will never happen as it is. Let’s make this job1 David.
The network of schools for Native American children run by an obscure agency of the Interior Department remains arguably the worst school system in the United States, a disgrace the government has known about for eight decades and never successfully reformed.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/how-washington-created-the-worst-schools-in-america-215774#ixzz3sWa6mOo9
Is TUSD about to surpass them?
Good question, Jonathan K. Separate but equal never works, and there are good reasons behind the federal law’s support of integration.
Ms. Foster: Why have you not answered the questions addressed to you above? They were all excellent questions, directly related to the topic of this piece by Safier, and well worth taking the time to answer. Please don’t expect us to believe you haven’t been checking this comment stream to see what was added after your comment.
I’m particularly interested in your answer to this question asked above:
–“What do you understand the purpose of “magnet” schools to be in districts under desegregation orders? Ms. Grijalva was recently quoted elsewhere in this publication, saying, “These programs were created to offer more options for children of color.” Is that a correct or incorrect understanding of the purpose magnets should serve in a district, if the district is trying, “in good faith,” to remediate segregation?”
I am involved with progressive politics, and in talking with other progressives recently, I’ve found that most people who follow TUSD agree that your track record in office is disappointing. Many of us had expected much, much better of you.
Here’s another question, one I will definitely be bringing up in conversations with other progressives: “Does Kristel Foster’s voting record on the TUSD Board indicate that she supports progressive principles, or does it indicate that she supports particular people, whether or not their actions and decisions are in line with progressive principles?”
David Safier could have, and, for our sake, should have taken a look at the expensive analysis that was conducted by TUSD in a study completed by Applied Economics entitled Student Demographic and Enrollment Analysis, which also captures the fact that it is mostly white families leaving TUSD to have their children attend charter schools. It is called white flight. For anyone enchanted with graphs, charts, maps and the sort the report can be found at:
http://tusd1.org/contents/distinfo/boundaryreview/Documents/AEFinalReport.pdf
The study was completed in February 2013, yet was not presented to the Governing Board until March 2014. That is a long time to allow a consultant’s report to gather dust. The Board presentation can be found at: http://tusd1.org/contents/distinfo/boundaryreview/Documents/AEPresentation.pdf
So at the end of examining all of the charts, graphs and maps…what may any reasonable person conclude? For one, that if TUSD wants to attract students back to the District, it must improve its schools. And two, if TUSD wants to retain its current students, it must do the same. HT and his Board (or is it Bored?) majority keep doing things that take them in the opposite direction. Improve instruction; improve the school environment (such as in hiring highly qualified teachers early enough so that all classrooms are staffed), and comply with the USP. Instead, they go off on some HT strategical plan and goal crusade that has NOTHING to do with any of these objectives.
In so far as getting a response from Krystal Foster- she will have to check with HT Sanchez and Adelita Grijalva to get their approval or be told what to say before she makes any statement. She is the poorest excuse for leadership of the whole lot. She has now been the clerk for three frigging years, which tells anyone paying attention that her Board majority peers do not have the confidence in her to put her in as Board President. They are right. She is weaker than anyone could have predicted. She is a white woman who desperately wants to be Chicana. She is infatuated with her subordinate which strips her of dignity in the way that she relates to him. She is a wanna-be progressive who has shamed the very meaning of a progressive through her votes. She is NOT her own person and the person she is does not deserve to have a seat on any elected post.
People keep asking why the TW’s David Safier has been such a sell out in his TUSD coverage. Any TW objective writer should stay out of Board politics. Not David. He was in thick during the last campaign promoting Jen Darland. Any TW objective writer should get outside of HT’s world and attempt to see the District beyond the scope of one man and his block of three votes. David has done a great dis-service to TW readers. Perhaps as a man with a Napoleon complex, he relates much too well to the TUSD Napoleon.
TUSD needs LEADERSHIP. Grijalva parrots HT; Foster parrots Grijalva (as does Juarez) and Safier parrots them all. TW needs a real and objective writer to cover public education. Safier is not it.
It was suggested by many to take a look at the conversation in response to the Safier analysis and I am fascinated why hisarticle has gotten so much traffic when the one by Maria Ines Taracena got comparatively little.
tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2015/11/23/the-tusd-magnet-schools-dilemma-continues-will-there-ever-be-a-gray-area
Make sure to weigh in on her article! It exposes Adelita Grijalva’s lack of basic knowledge about desegregation and exposes her beyond belief. Perhaps the Plaintiffs will use her own words to show the Court how little she really knows.
The real issue is all about the recent ruling by the Court and not Safier’s distracting and shallow analysis. All he does is divert us away from the rattling that the Court gave TUSD and specifically, Adelita Grijalva. The Court basically said- Board President Grijalva, you have been informed [by the Superintendent and whomever else speaks to you about desegregation from TUSD]. You are the Board President and it is YOUR responsibility to understand what is going on. The rulings from the Court will now be
delivered to you directly- read them and understand them because it is YOUR responsibility to do so.
The insulting and racist argument now being repeated by TUSD’s HT and Grijalva to promote a platform of “separate but equal” is not going to fly. Case law dispute this backward thinking!
If the Ochoa-Casa Maria’s (Brian Flagg and Cesar Aguirre) bigots do not want brown children (also Sanchez’ and Grijalva’s position) to sit next to white children it would be a tragedy to support the school (or any other school with the same mindset) with desegregation money. Things in TUSD may be separate but they have never been equal which is what the Court Order’s purpose is really all about. The Sanchez birthed bigoted promotion is false and Grijlava, Flagg and Aguirre are just too stupid to figure this out.