The Games BASIS Plays

1. Wow. Thanks, David, for exposing some schools that actually require their students to push themselves academically. It’s downright shameful. Thank goodness we don’t have to put up with that in our public schools.

2. David did not make one salient argument as to why the rankings are wrong.

3. He’s writing this as if the other top-schools in the rankings aren’t incredibly selective, too.

   Why are the Ivy League schools at the top of American university rankings? Selectivity. This line of argument would suggest that Yale and Harvard don’t belong at the top of the America’s university rankings.

   Is this an argument about fairness cloaked as an argument against the ranking methodology?

4. Thanks, David, for once again providing ACCURATE coverage of how the rankings work. I share your frustration that the Star’s reporters STILL don’t seem to get it. (And, sad to say, in the cases of some kinds of education news (like news of how AP requirements at UHS were changed to try to help UHS keep up with Basis in the rankings) bloggers and representatives of the Star don’t just fail to get it, they REFUSE to get it and REFUSE to cover it, even after having direct conversations with several parents of children enrolled in UHS when the policy changes were made. Oh well. Such is life in Southern Arizona. Most people don’t care, and among those who do care (including “education journalists”), most don’t understand.

   From the comments above, it looks like some further explanation of why AP scores should not be used as a measure of academic achievement is necessary. For those who are interested:
   https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/ap-classes-are-a-scam/263456/?single_page=true&utm_content=buffer64594&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

5. Here’s a lead for you, should you care to follow it, David, and it may be related to another fact mentioned in the Star article you’re covering here: UHS dropped from 15 to 27 in the rankings this year. Why? I heard through the parent grapevine that TUSD has increased enrollment at UHS significantly in recent years without a commensurate increase in teaching staff. It is said that some UHS AP classes have 40 or 50 students in them. All this would need to be verified and fact checked, of course, but word on the street is also that because of the changed conditions at UHS, Tanque Verde and Catalina Foothills parents who had previously chosen to enroll students in UHS, raising TUSD enrollment and funding thereby and bringing in kids very capable of raising the district’s rankings and test scores, are choosing to enroll or open-enroll younger siblings of the UHS kids in Catalina Foothills High School or private college prep high schools.

   Here’s another piece of intel communicated from folks at the ground level: TUSD’s teaching shortage, in addition to overfilling classes to the point where teachers cannot meet the needs of all the students assigned to them, is also putting many of these same teachers teaching 40 or 50 kids on 6/5 contracts, eliminating their planning periods.

   But TUSD doesn’t need to spend the REDforED money exclusively on teacher salary improvements, do they? Now, so we hear, is the time to ensure janitors and bus drivers are well paid, too.

   HEADS UP: the Dem’s ongoing willingness to sacrifice quality of education delivered to students in order to create leverage for politicized agendas will destroy whatever good will the REDforED movement garnered. Time to STOP forwarding the agendas of ignorant tools of the machine to whom winning a round in their ongoing personal feud with Ducey means more than doing what is sound for teachers and students in our schools. Those who want to mix in education policy should get a college degree, and then a masters or two, and should spend some time teaching. When you have non-educators with personal scores to settle driving education policy, you will drive our education system (and students with it) into the ditch.

6. Here is some additional intel for you all. Elite high schools across the country are backing off the everything AP is amazing philosophy. They are moving towards dual enrollment as they are realizing many colleges are no longer accepting the AP credit and they are also realizing that many AP courses are a mile wide but an inch deep. Hence you see many of the National powerhouse high schools falling down the list while Basis schools take over the top spots. It seems like nationally Basis is one of few who cares anymore.

7. A few responses to comments about BASIS. Yes, BASIS does make students push themselves academically. The courses are rigorous and demanding. But so do many public schools, or sometimes specific teachers in public schools. Saying otherwise is either public school bashing or ignorance.

   Yes, lots of other schools are selective, like BASIS. But that’s only one part of what I said. The main point is, BASIS’s ranking is pushed up the list because of the number of AP courses students are required to take. And only a school with select students could demand that.

   Finally, yes, I think some schools are backing off AP courses, with good reason. The teachers have to cover a certain selected amount of information in AP courses, which limits their flexibility and creativity, and depth of study. While I think there’s nothing wrong with AP courses per se, making those the only accelerated courses in a school does a disservice to students.

   Next comment, about UHS and TUSD.

8. About my emphasis on BASIS over University High. A number of my earlier posts about the rankings mention both UHS and BASIS, but this year the UHS ranking is lower, so it didn’t seem to make sense.

   Beyond that, I’m more likely to take a critical look at BASIS than UHS. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, obviously. But UHS is like a lot of other selective high schools around the country, and when TUSD brags about it, it’s bragging about having a strong selective high school. That’s reasonable. BASIS, on the other hand, has been used for years by charter school supporters as “proof” that charters are better than district schools. To do that, they’ve lied and exaggerated on a number of fronts. If BASIS simply said it offers a rigorous education to a select group of students, I wouldn’t mention it much. But I’m going to call the school and the charter school cheering squads out for lying or, as in the high school rankings, for purposely gaming the system so they look like they have the top schools in the country.

   As for whether I should focus more on TUSD. TUSD-bashing has become a custom in Tucson and, I would say, a bad habit. As Hamlet said to Horatio when he told his friend about the King (Hamlet’s uncle) having a kettle drum and trumpet play when he’s drinking, “It is a custom/More honour’d in the breach than the observance.” TUSD is a lot like other districts of similar size and socioeconomic makeup. Like all of them it has its own particular strengths and weaknesses. When people pick it to death, they do more harm than good. I do criticize TUSD at times, but I also criticize the critics who I think are mean spirited and destructive.

   Finally, one commenter who likes to adopt different anonymous handles for each post also likes to tell me what I should write about. Jim Nintzel, the Weekly editor, has not once told me what topic I should write about or how I should approach a topic, nor have any other editors of blog owners since I’ve been writing. I write about what interests me. Maybe that’s why I haven’t burnt out from writing multiple posts every week for more than a decade. FYI, I don’t take directions well. I didn’t as a teacher. I don’t as a blogger.

9. As a former English teacher you should be able to recognize irony, Mr. Safier. Do you think that when someone who knows your commitments and connections recommends that you write about TUSDs abuses of its teachers and constituents, they actually believe you will do so?

10. This is nothing more than an argument for TUSD. But that is already over. Done. Put a fork in it.

    When you read the qualifiers to make the “list,” the one that jumped out at me is that they are allowed up to a 20% failure rate. Is that much better than the average public schools, or are 50% failing in those?

11. I worked at BASIS Oro Valley. And also taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Wilmington to be exact which is poor and gang infested. My brother asked me what he should do with his son in terms of private or public. I, without a second thought, told him private. My brother could afford it. His son took IB classes, went to university, graduated andnow is living his dream life in Madrid. His education from junior high until senior year in high school cost $150,000. Kids attending BASIS pay zero and most end up at Ivy League schools. I worked hard for my grades and was accepted to UC Berkeley and UCLA. It was fantastic to be surrounded by hard working students and stellar professors rather than attending a mediocre university that I would liken to high schools with ashtrays. There were no discipline problems at BASIS. Public school teachers spend so much time attempting classroom management and acting as social workers. Sorry David, but BASIS rocks in my book.
    Mary Cuevas

12. “As for whether I should focus more on TUSD. TUSD-bashing has become a custom in Tucson and, I would say, a bad habit. […] When people pick it to death, they do more harm than good. I do criticize TUSD at times, but I also criticize the critics who I think are mean spirited and destructive.”

    So when TUSD is…
    A) filling scores of teaching positions with long term subs who have no teaching credentials
    B) putting 40-50 kids in every class where there is a credentialed teacher
    C) putting credentialed teachers on 6/5 contracts with no planning period
    D) losing out-of-district enrollment of high performing students at UHS and causing UHS to drop 12 positions in the rankings

    …and in this context TUSD decides to take some of their REDforED funding meant for increasing teacher salaries and solving teacher shortages and apply it instead to improving wages for janitors and support staff and bus drivers…

    …David Safier thinks pointing the problems with allocation of resources out is “TUSD bashing” and “a bad habit” and “mean spirited” and “destructive”?

    Seems like deciding to apply the funds to anything other than increasing teacher salaries and recruiting more teachers is what’s “mean spirited and destructive,” but hey, why should anyone try to understand actual conditions in the schools and how funds can be applied to improve them when, party orthodoxy tells us,”TUSD bashing has become a bad habit in Tucson and it is mean spirited and destructive.”

    Some bloggers and commenters are GOOD FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING better than memorizing and regurgitating the local political machine’s brain-anesthetizing party line. And unfortunately, when it comes to improving educational services to the poor, that party line is certifiably 100% worthless.

13. Most BASIS grads do not go on to Ivies… most of them go to U of A. Nothing wrong with that, but maybe not the outcome one would expect from the “best high schools in the country”. Anyone considering BASIS for their kid: just try to get some info from them on where BASIS grads go to university. They straight up won’t tell you.

    As David Saftler alluded to, top universities like Stanford and Harvard are not as hot on AP exams as one might assume. It’s actually state schools with admissions “formulas” that care the most about AP exams.

    I tend to agree with the idea that BASIS has effectively figured out how to juke the US News ranking. The ranking is all about AP scores and the entire Basis curriculum from 9th grade onward is focused on AP exams. The primary directive of a BASIS education is not to get your kid into MIT or Stanford, and definitely not learning for learnings sake… but to always be on top of the US News ranking.

    This isn’t to say that this is a bad education. It’s probably better than most places, and definitely better than other schools in AZ. Unfortunately, education is dismal in this state, and BASIS is likely as good as it gets. However, this ranking might make people assume BASIS is on the same level as powerhouses like Bronx Science and Stuyvestant, or expensive private prep schools. This is certainly not the case.

14. Saying BASIS is the best high school in the US is like saying MENSA is America’s best college. Its nonsense, a total non-sequitur. It fulfills a single limited function of what a high school is supposed to do and even then, it can push only the top 40% out. What sort of “top” high school can’t graduate 60% of its class? Have we officially moved to the obstacle course model of education?

    That said, I’m sure the kids who survive the curriculum get a good education. But what exactly is the value added? Why can’t motivated kids just take 11 AP classes at a normal high school? (And also have access to sports, band, debate…)

15. “This line of argument would suggest that Yale and Harvard don’t belong at the top of America’s university rankings. “

    Response to Popcontest:

    Exactly. One research study examined all those students who were accepted at Harvard but instead went to the local state university. Result? Wages ten years later were the same. As close as you can get to a double blind experiment in education.

    Most of our observations in education as to cause and effect are a mirage.

    But, BASIS results may or may not be a mirage. The NELS study examined results for 10,000 8th graders all the way on up through adulthood. It found no yield from Advanced Placement exams. Once you compare an apple with an apple, which you can do with these large sample longitudinal studies, the only Advanced Placement class in which AP students outperformed their peers was Calculus.

    So, the whole foundation of the U.S. News and World Report ranking is dubious.

    When you extract a continuous sample of Arizona students i.e. all 8th-grade students who were with us all the way from 3rd grade, you can do a similar extract for our school system. The continuous BASIS students averaged the 58th percentile in academic gains, a considerable chunk above average, with the average gain on the AIMS being 15 points and AzMerit being 25 points, BASIS came in at 18 points and 30 points, a 20% advantage.

    A recent study out of Stanford ranking all the school districts in the nation by Sean Reardon, suggests that such gains would be in the top 3 percent of the nation of school systems.

    But, with such a continuous database, you can ask and answer the question- “what were their students’ gains when they were at different schools?” Why can you analyze this? Because many BASIS students spend part of their time in other schools, either before they enter BASIS or after they leave.

    Answer? 56th percentile, 2 points less than when they were at BASIS.

16. Y’know, John, when you’re right, you’re right. This is one of those rare times — there have been a few others — when I agree with the thrust of your arguments and your use of data.

    The lion lies down with the lamb. Jupiter aligns with Mars. A stopped clock is right twice a day (and in the spirit of good will, I won’t venture to say which of our clocks has stopped.)

17. Basis does make public the colleges to which its graduates are admitted. It’s a wide-ranging, impressive list. http://www.basised.com/achievements/college-acceptances-scholarships/

    If it’s true that “most BASIS grads do not go on to Ivies… most of them go to U of A” as someone commented earlier, that may have more to do with the cost of attending an Ivy League school vs a state university.

    Since no one has been unable to find out where Basis grads actually end up going to college (because “They straight up won’t tell you”), I’m wondering how the commenter knows so definitively that most of them go to the U of A.

18. The difference in the responses noted above is between where they go to college and where they are admitted. Basis is NOT forthcoming with where they GO to college, but IS forthcoming with where they are admitted.

    Like UHS, Basis finds ways to cloak the fact that most of its students cant afford to go where they are admitted and end up at the U of A. Also like UHS, it adds up all scholarships OFFERED and advertises huge figures to students it is trying to recruit. But those huge numbers are not relevant: not all scholarships offered can be accepted because you only go to one university, not to every one that admitted you and offered you scholarships.

    The nastiest fact that both the UHS racket and the Basis racket conceal as they try to recruit smart kids to exhaust themselves for 4 years cramming for multiple choice tests and helping them play their rigged AP and rankings games: top-tier institutions do not grant merit aid (scholarships based on academic performance), and the so-called need based aid of too many institutions depends on middle class families being willing to remortgage their homes to pay for college and / or the students being willing to load themselves up with inadvisable, life-altering amounts of undismissable student loan debt. We guarantee to meet 100% of need! actually means, Were happy to help you become deeply indebted! Need-blind admissions! actually means, Have your high performing student apply, helping us drive up our number of applicants, drive down our ‘percent admitted’ rates, and raise our college board scores for the admitted class. Then, if you dont want to go as deeply into debt as our financial aid package will require you to do, well give your admitted students place to a richer student with less academic merit on our wait list.

    They are ALL gaming the system and exploiting students: Basis, UHS, and the admissions and financial aid operations of most American colleges and universities. A large part of the point of the expensive, hard cord marketing students with high PSAT scores will receive from top tier colleges is not to recruit those students to attend, but to game the colleges’ stats and rankings. They want you to apply, not attend. There is actually a whole consulting industry that has grown up out of helping colleges use tuition pricing and discounting to get the maximal revenue out of their student bodies.
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2014/07/30/the-invisible-force-behind-college-admissions/#73b6914670a5

    Moral of the story: send your kid to a high school with flexible requirements and good extracurriculars where they will be encouraged to develop as a whole person, not to an AP-cram factory like Basis or UHS. For most of the kids who go to these schools, if they think all their multiple choice test cramming will launch them into top tier private colleges, they are sadly misled.

19. Got to give USN&WR credit for becoming the arbiter of academic success. One time they were a failing news magazine behind Time, Newsweek and The Economist.
    I think this says that selective academic institutions have better results than non selective one. No argument…I’m sure Princeton, which takes about 6% of all applicants, does better than U of A which takes over 50%. I think the scope of selectivity is critical as well. Basis draws from AZ based populations. Prestigious private high schools like Andover, Choate, Lawrenceville etc draw from a global population. A lot of people throughout the world want their kids to go to the top US colleges. The best high school students from Europe, China or Korea are quite good. And they routinely offer scholarships, so they would pass through the free lunch ( as well as dinner and breakfast) gate .
    So I guess I question that Basis is the ” Best in the US”. There are many US high schools that have been doing it a lot longer and draw from a far larger academic population.

20. Mr Safier wrote…

    “To do that, they’ve lied and exaggerated on a number of fronts. If BASIS simply said it offers a rigorous education to a select group of students, I wouldn’t mention it much.”

    Uh, the principal of BASIS Tucson North already told you that. Why do you continue to obfuscate?

    “While I recognize that we cannot currently serve every child in Tucson, I do hope that what we are doing at BASIS can be shared with other schools and districts.”

    https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2014/05/06/the-head-of-basis-tucson-north-responds

21. Cynthia, all the principal of BASIS Tucson North said is that the schools can only serve a limited number of Arizona’s students. There is nothing in her statement that implies the students served are academically select. Sorry, that doesn’t cut it.

    Recently a BASIS bigwig admitted that parents with academically capable students are more likely to choose BASIS, the first admission I’ve heard from BASIS that its students might not simply be a random collection of students who they turn into academic superstars. However, they tout their rankings without admitting that they’ve given themselves an advantage by making students take lots of AP courses. And too many reporters are complicit by reporting the rankings as more significant than they are. As long as that’s happening, I’ll keep correcting the record. (And, to be completely honest, if someone told me their child wasn’t challenged and was unhappy at their current school, I would tell them to take a look at BASIS to see if it was a good fit. I would be surprised if you could find a serious criticism of BASIS’s curriculum or approach to education in the numerous posts I’ve written about the schools.)

22. You are playing semantics Mr Safier…

    We are a very specific type of thing, for anyone who is willing to give it a shot, but not for every kid, said Dr. Bezanson

    https://www.abc15.com/news/region-northeast-valley/scottsdale/watchdog-charter-school-group-takes-aim-at-best-high-school-ranking-list

    Is UHS open to any kid willing to give it a shot?

23. David Safier on 04/21/2016 at 11:42 AM in the blog linked here:
    https://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/04/20/its-time-once-again-to-take-a-look-at-this-years-best-high-schools-list

    “[…] I don’t like the overemphasis on AP courses. By definition, they demand that teachers teach to the standardized AP test. That has to be problematic in an area like history, for instance, where there’s a major question of what should be emphasized in the curriculum. But the AP test demands the curriculum cover certain areas or the students won’t do well on the test. The same is true in other areas. Environmental sciences? That’s an evolving subject, and a teacher might want to focus in on one issue and cover it in depth, but the AP test demands the teacher move on to the next subject.

    “I was always a teacher who tried to follow student interest as well as curriculum. For some reason, my high school decided not to go the AP route. College credit courses were linked with local colleges and universities, so we teachers decided what to teach, we created our own tests, and we evaluated the students based on our own criteria.

    “The emphasis on AP coursework is part of our overemphasis on standardization. Let’s hope it’s peaked. […] I believe there’s a trend toward denying college credit for AP courses. So in my opinion, both BASIS and UHS are doing the students a disservice by requiring so many AP courses, though I prefer UHS’s decision to make the tests optional. I think the education at the schools could be just a rigorous without all those courses, and it might allow teachers to be more expansive, creative and student centered in their approaches.”

    That looks to me like a “serious criticism of BASIS’s curriculum or approach to education” in a post you’ve written about the schools, David.

24. (The above quoted passage is in the piece’s comment stream.)

25. College readiness & U.S. News ratings aside, it does seem as if you should forget TUSD if your child excels at Math. In this year’s Southern Arizona Middle School MathCounts competition, the top individual score was by a student at BASIS Oro Valley, followed by one from Sonoran Science Academy in second place and a student from Orange Grove Middle School in third place.

    In all, 34 students from 12 local schools advanced to the state-level MathCounts Competition, which was held March 24 in Phoenix.

    Tucson-area schools that went to the state competition were: Orange Grove Middle School, BASIS Tucson North, The Gregory School, BASIS Oro Valley, Sonoran Science Academy, Coronado K-8 School, Pusch Ridge Christian Academy, Emily Gray Junior High School, Sonoran Science Academy on Broadway, Tucson Hebrew Academy, Old Vail Middle School and Amphitheater Middle School. These are all charter, parochial, or private schools, or public schools from districts that border TUSD. Not a single finalist was from TUSD – by far the largest district.

    All 4 state finalists 22 years ago were from two TUSD schools – Alice Vail & Booth-Fickett. I couldn’t find the March 24th results, but last year all finalists were from Phoenix area schools. BASIS may not meet your standards, but several BASIS & other charter schools obviously do better at teaching Math than any Middle School in TUSD.

26. MMP maybe it was just an off year for TUSD. How did they do last year?

    Well wait until those teachers get that pay raise. TUSD will be winning everything.

27. Congrats on your digging to find me criticizing BASIS. If the best you can find among the dozens of posts I’ve written over a number of years is a criticism of the AP format because it over-determines the curriculum a teacher must use, and paints the use of the courses at UHS in a similar light, that pretty much makes my case.. What I’m saying applies to high schools around the country — district, charter and private — which use AP courses as a large part of their college prep curriculum. And if I remember correctly, my statement was a comment I made in reply to a question from a commenter who asked what I thought about AP courses in general, not something I chose to write about in a post.

28. I didn’t dig, I remembered the comment and pulled it up. No, your criticism does not apply to high schools around the country, because what differentiates Basis and UHS from other high schools is Basis and UHS require students to have a curriculum composed almost exclusively of APs. Other high schools provide other curricular options — a benefit to faculty as well as students — and allow students to choose how many APs they take. Some of us watched UHS transition from continuing to allow some degree of choice into a more rigid almost-all-AP requirement model as it was trying to find ways to keep up with Basis in the national rankings. One of the many topics that you and other local education reporters and bloggers have found of insufficient interest or import to cover.

29. Don’t gloat too much David. As I wrote in my post, BASIS academic gains are at the 97th percentile of all school districts in the U.S. Further, the 3% that had higher gains are overwhelmingly districts much smaller than BASIS and much more likely to be statistical flukes.

    Likely, among school districts, its size or larger, BASIS is at the 100th percentile.

    Further, BASIS has become the school of choice for Asians in Arizona. From 2013 to 2017, Asians in Arizona leaped from being ranked 11th to being ranked 5th in the nation (National Assessment of Educational Progress).

    Likely, BASIS was the driver for that leap.

30. David,

    I am a former BASIS teacher in Texas, an educator with over 20 years experience, and a university teacher. I would love to talk with you about my experience at BASIS. For so long I have been wanting to write about the things I witnessed there–the inequities, the treatment of kids, the developmentally inappropriate curriculum, etc., but I find it hard to know where to begin, or to even pinpoint my audience and purpose. I’d love to chat if you have time sometime.

31. JBARTLETT:

    David Safier is interested in two things related to Basis:
    1) demonstrating, contra the rhetoric of charter advocates, that the Basis student population is selective for academic high achievers and is not a random sampling of the general student population in the region
    2) pointing out that the rankings in which Basis places so highly are based on AP test rates.

    He is not interested in the intellectual poverty of an AP cram program. He is not interested in what has to drop out of the lives of secondary students when the vast majority of their time must be devoted to maintaining GPA and maximizing test scores in an AP cram program. He is not interested in what is developmentally appropriate. He is not interested in how students are treated as the institution tries to game the rankings system and prioritizes its own stats over the soundness of its curricula and over student wellbeing. He is not interested in whether the franchise delivers on its implied promise of feasible, affordable admissions offers at top-tier colleges for graduates of its cram program.

    In fact, as he wrote above, if he knew a student who was not challenged in an ordinary program, he might very well recommend that they enroll in Basis.

    Safier is a political propagandist, not an education journalist. He cares about whether his pals in office who pitch the Democratic partys ANTI-PRIVATIZATION bill of goods get re-elected, about whether they get their hot hands on more public funds, and about whether the flow of public funds to alternative schools is mercilessly cut off. That is all. Its a complete waste of time trying to engage him on topics like quality of education or student wellbeing.

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