The Star’s front page story about Pima county school districts’ scores on the AzMERIT test has its facts right, but it doesn’t include all the relevant information. As a result, readers are likely to draw the wrong conclusions—that TUSD and Sunnyside are doing a terrible job educating their students, while Pima county’s suburban districts are shining stars in Arizona’s educational firmament.
Hank Stephenson, the new education reporter at the Star, is a good journalist who does the necessary leg work and phone work to get the story—far, far more of it than I do as a humble blogger—but with this article, he’s earned a spot at the top of the front page by telling only part of the story, which does a serious disservice to our two districts with the lowest income students. Unintentionally, I believe, Stephenson has followed one of the Star‘s unwritten maxims: If TUSD bleeds, the story leads. So let it bleed.
TUSD must be doing a terrible job educating its students, or so the story makes it sound.
Southern Arizona’s largest school district is dragging down the county’s results. Students in the Tucson Unified School District performed well below the state average on the standardized test and were also outperformed by students in eight of Pima County’s nine major school districts.
Sunnyside must be doing even worse, according to the story.
The test results were even worse for Sunnyside Unified School District, which scored the lowest of any of Pima County’s nine major districts.
The article paints the two districts as lead weights pulling down the county averages and has them shame-facedly admitting that they have to do better. If you read the article closely, you’ll notice a short aside, a statement from the Sunnyside spokesman giving a possible explanation for his district’s low scores, but you have to be looking for it.
[Victor Mercado] noted that Sunnyside faces external factors that make it hard to compete with other districts — it’s one of the poorer districts in Pima County and has a large number of English language learners.
Hmm. Could poverty have anything to do with low scores in Sunnyside and TUSD and help explain why their passing rates are less than half what you find at Catalina Foothills? You wouldn’t think that’s a relevant bit of information from the overall thrust of the article, but if you look at the vast majority of educational studies on the subject in the U.S. and around the world, you’ll find a consensus that test scores are directly related to parental income. So maybe it makes sense that students in high rent districts have overall better AzMERIT scores than students in TUSD and Sunnyside. Maybe it makes sense to include some socioeconomic data in the article.
In fact, the correlation between AzMERIT passing rates and parental income is clear in Pima County’s school districts. Here is a table with the approximate percentage of students on free or reduced lunch in the nine districts, listed from low to high, and their AzMERIT scores in Language Arts and Math.
The overall correlation between F/R lunch rates and AzMERIT passing rates is unmistakable. The trend is, when the percentage of students who qualify for the lunch program is lower, the AzMERIT passing rate is higher. Flowing Wells, as usual, is a happy, surprising exception to the general rule. It outperforms TUSD even though it has more students on F/R lunch. But even the exception helps prove the rule. Flowing Wells is held up as a district that defies the odds with its standardized test scores, but its laudable educational efforts only boost it one slot, from eighth to seventh place in the county’s AzMERIT scores. It might be doing twice the job of Catalina Foothills educating its kids given the challenges its students face due to their socioeconomic status, but it still has half as many students passing the test. (Tanque Verde scores a bit lower than you might expect, but it’s a smaller district than the other eight, so it’s hard to know what its scores mean.)
This isn’t an excuse for TUSD and Sunnyside. It’s an explanation of the correlation between income and educational achievement. I’m not saying the two districts are doing great and they should stay the course. Both of them should make every effort to improve student achievement. But it’s not helpful—worse, it’s harmful—to compare their test results with the high rent districts surrounding the Tucson core without making the relevant socioeconomic comparisons.
This article appears in Sep 7-13, 2017.
Safier, you ignorant slut…
Child IQ correlates strongly with Parental IQ (specifically with maternal IQ); Parental IQ correlates strongly with Parental income, and family wealth (although the correlation is weaker). We should probably expect higher test scores from wealthier districts in view of these facts – wealthier districts probably have brighter kids.
A comparison of what the average rate of per pupil funding has been for Flowing Wells for the last 30 years with what the average (deseg augmented) rate has been in TUSD for the last 30 years might help make the point that it’s not just how much money is received, it is HOW THAT MONEY IS APPLIED that makes a difference for student learning. While we’re discussing the quality of local coverage of education, let’s not forget that, though some media commenters are weak on effectively advocating that money be applied in ways that have the best chances of helping low income students, the Star has not always dropped the ball on this important topic. For example, Steller did a good piece on how counter-productive it was when TUSD used desegregation funds to pay expensive lawyers to pick fights with the desegregation authorities, rather than using it for more student-benefit-focused purposes like augmenting the salaries for hard to fill teaching positions in low income schools. I’d be willing to venture that there was zero (or perhaps less than zero, negative progress in student achievement) associated with that particular application of funds, which occurred under the last board majority in TUSD, and Steller’s commentary nailed it. The Star also had some good pieces on how 123 and 301 funds were applied, though the district’s defenders and apologists didn’t seem to be fans of those pieces.
Let’s hope the Star does a decent job, going forward, watching TUSD funding allocations closely and commenting on the degree to which these allocations are made in ways that actually stand a chance of benefiting educational outcomes. That’s the kind of boring, detail oriented, budget focused media commentary that stands the best chance of actually improving services to the district’s students.
“Flowing Wells, as usual, is a happy, surprising exception to the general rule. It outperforms TUSD even though it has more students on F/R lunch.”
Flowing Wells has a higher percentage of non-Hispanic white people than TUSD. Flowing Wells is 62% non-Hispanic white; TUSD is 52% non-Hispanic white. These figures are from the census tracts (i.e., the general population) – the student population is probably less non-Hispanic white for both districts (since young people skew Hispanic), but the relative difference between the two districts is probably about the same.
Nathan K, a comment on your comments. First about Flowing Wells. When I wrote the post, I was curious about the same thing you mentioned, the different percentage of Hispanics and whites in the districts. What I found in the Dept of Ed data on the test scores is that Flowing Wells Hispanic students got a higher average score than TUSD Hispanic students. Other factors may come into play, but a crude conclusion is that Flowing Wells is more successful with its Hispanic students. Interestingly, Flowing Wells’ average white student score is lower than white students at TUSD. That’s probably because TUSD has more higher income white students than Flowing Wells. My conclusion is, Flowing Wells students score higher than similar students in TUSD. Of course, there may be other factors I’m not considering.
On the earlier comment about IQ, an interesting analysis of IQ concludes that the same child could have a 14 point higher IQ score if she/he were raised in a home with educated, higher income parents than less educated, lower income parents. The author concluded that if there can be that much variation based on nurture, the “natural,” genetics-base IQ concept is highly overrated as in indication of intelligence. So while you’re right that children of higher IQ parents tend to have higher IQ, it could have as much or more to do with environment as with innate intelligence.
There is a unifying culture of economic success that, unfortunately, is dismissed by many people – including many educators. It’s not about the amount of money in the school system – if it was DC, Philly and NY would have the best public school systems in the world. But they suck, because the culture most of their students come from sucks. Until we start getting honest about this, inequalities in education and every other area of human endeavor will continue to get worse.
David, can you link the Dept. of Ed data? I’m looking at the AZ merit data now, but it’s disaggregated for the various TUSD High Schools, so it’s not useful to me.
Also, with regarding to IQ effects of parental education, which study are you talking about? 14 pts. in IQ is an enormous swing – you don’t see swings that large when you start feeding kids who are clinically malnourished. I’ve seen some studies that purport to find improvements in the 3-5 pts range when looking at separated adopted siblings (e.g, the UVA/Lund study – just recently, but not a twin study, unfortunately), but never 14 pts.
Nathan K, here’s the ADE page to link to its incredibly detailed breakdown of AzMERIT scores. http://www.azed.gov/assessment/azmerit/
The book I got the IQ information from is “Intelligence and How to Get It” by Richard E. Nisbett. His first two chapters cover the topic. I’m far from an expert in this field, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of his conclusions, but this is a well written, thoughtful book with lots of references. Much has been written on the topic of IQ testing, including the way the original tests were written to conform to the idea that students at toney prep schools must be more intelligent than students elsewhere, so if lots of the prep school students get certain answers right, those must be good questions, and if they get them wrong, they must be bad questions. It’s hard to get rid of cultural bias in questions on an IQ test or other standardized tests, which is among the many reasons they should have a secondary role in the assessment of student achievement.
Recipe for failing to defend the best interests of the poor:
Note correlation between low income and test scores. Imply that low SES school districts, no matter how hard they work, cannot be expected to do better with poor students.
Mix in pop-psych skepticism about the kinds of standardized tests that are used to measure student progress. “They don’t mean anything anyway, once you factor in cultural bias, etc.”
Give a nod to the notion that governance and administration in low SES districts can always do better, of course. Then, always fail to report on any specific areas where governance and administrative decisions and funding allocations are failing to serve the most vulnerable students. Look the other way when Title 1 funds are used to reduce class sizes across the board, creating hard to fill positions in low-SES schools. Look the other way when too many classrooms in those schools are staffed with long term subs with no teaching credentials. Look the other way when management of the subs is outsourced to a for-profit company and the subs’ wages and compensation are reduced to make room for that company’s profit margin. Look the other way when Board candidates you have endorsed receive large campaign donations from a marketing executive at the company to which they voted to outsource sub labor. Look the other way when desegregation funds are used to pay expensive lawyers to file objections to the desegregation authority’s decisions, while no stipends that can attract qualified teachers are attached to hard to fill positions in low SES schools. Look the other way when teacher training in behavior management that the desegregation plan requires is somehow not funded and not delivered. Look the other way when a magnet school does not hire the “family liaison” (social worker) the desegregation plan requires, but uses available funds for an attendance clerk instead.
The sad fact of the matter, David, is that part of the reason low-SES schools do not do better is that there aren’t enough people in the media watching funding applications closely and holding administrators’ feet to the fire when the kind of shoddy decisions listed above are made. In high-SES districts, parents watch the quality of these kinds of governance and administrative decisions like hawks, and no Board member or administrator who doesn’t deliver student-supportive decisions will survive. In districts serving low-SES populations where some parents may not know what to ask for (and where higher concentrations of low-SES parents exist in some schools than in other schools) the media’s extra vigilance and support is needed.
Subtract test score points in the scores of TUSD students for every single one of those decisions listed above which some combination of media ineffectiveness and public apathy failed to hold the district accountable for: subtract points for having an uncertified sub “teach” math for months to middle schoolers. Subtract points for paying someone to count student absences rather than paying someone to work with families to help them figure out how to support more regular attendance and homework completion.
Now: ask the media to play the role it properly should play and admit that the kind of “coverage” that chooses to look the other way is complicit in the harm that is done. (And let’s not fail to note that those who work behind the scenes to manipulate coverage and BLOCK valid information from getting to the public are even more culpable than weak reporters or strategically selective bloggers.)
How can any reasonable adult, “educated” or not, not correlate poverty with academic results? We are a country that does not value or pay teachers as professionals while we have a growing group of working poor, moving frequently, struggling with hunger and instability. Try going to work hungry and tired which is what we are asking of many of our young students. Growing up in a midtown trailer park without reliable education closes off the world to these kids. NO comparison to an affluent situation.
I don’t speak all the fancy education language but as a parent who grew up in the TUSD school District and whose 4 kids all went to FW schools in Elementary-2 graduated from there, the other 2 from other schools. I know there is just a huge difference in the philosophy of two.
Flowing Wells expects the best of their students and has high expectations of the students and teachers. They encourage parent participation in
The classroom/activities. They have had high quality leadership and are able to lead and get things accomplished. They do well with what they have. Are they perfect, no.
TUSD is top heavy with an administration who appear to only care about their own agenda and the big salaries they make. Lawyers have gotten rich on stupid lawsuits about who should go to what school. I know that the African Americans who went to Catalina High in the late 1970’s did not want to be bused away from their neighborhood schools, it should have been a choice.
Too much worrying about politics and not enough on basics and fundamentals. TUSD needs to come off it’s high horse and get back to letting teachers teach and kids learn.
What would happen if the state decided that there was a need for an AzMERIT test for jumping, like whats the highest the student can touch. There of course needs to be a pass-fail height. What criteria do we use? Like if one is going for career in the NBA jumping is more important than for career as a checkout clerk. But in any case, some expert might arbitrarily set the pass fail height at 9.
As one would expect, there will be a lot of short students who wont get close to touching 9. It is possible, that through extensive training, to increase one’s jumping height. So bring on the best coaches. Of course jumping training takes time, so it would necessary to cut back on other courses. Even with the training, a large percentage, if not all, of short kids would fail. Some schools have a greater number of short kids, so the failure rate would be higher for those schools. Very interesting, and the public needs to know. Along the way, some graduate student would conduct a study, and their finding would be that short kids had short parents; its in the DNA. Another variable is race, and the study would show that Asian-American kids failure rate was much higher than Finnish-American kids, and yes, the Finnish-American parents were taller. So what is this AZMerit testing intended to accomplish? Is it kind of like an IQ test? It shows that some human children are smarter than others, just like some are taller than others. And, that smart parents tend to have smart kids. Biology 101?
Is this AzMerit Testing all about nothing very much. Back in the old days, I attended a small country school in Southeastern Ohio. There were 27 in my graduating class. We had the same old maid English teacher for five years. Yeah, same ole, same ole. Baldy, our math teacher, was also the superintendent and bus driver for away BB games, had been a floor walker for a department store. One of classmates, who barely made it through Algebra I, was the first multimillionaire from our class. My best friend who had to take bone-head math and English when he entered college; became a Vice President for the Bank of America. I eventually got a PhD and taught at ASU for a while. Now that was back in the good ole days and I know the situation has changed. But is the emphasis being placed on AzMERIT tests justified? The goal as I see it, is a good quality-of-life for the individual, the student, now and then in the future. Will a 10% increase in the AzMERIT test scores produce a 10% increase in the quality-of-life of the individual? Bottom line: we don’t have a clue.
Student Growth percentiles are a fair way to compare school districts. These largely wash demographics out of the comparison.
The two year growth measures will be even better.
This is a good discussion thread but anyone who has been in low-income classes knows that AZMerit is measuring critical skills for success: how to read and how to perform mathematics.
And, as David note over and over in these columns, academic results are a huge function of household wealth and structure. If you run a simple regression line through just the data David posts here, some differences, as David notes, are still there but other differences disappear. For example, Sunnyside goes from being the lowest district to being one of the top four – barely. Vail, Flowing Wells and Tanque Verde are the other three of the top four and they are substantially above the regression line.
The most important school district in the state and one of the most expensive, TUSD is below average.
Look at Vail and Flowing Wells – a history of superstar superintendents who served for decades under school board members who also served for decades without conflict with each other.
Great education cultures grow like an oak tree from a seed – they aren’t turned on by hiring a new superintendent.
So very well said above!
Great education cultures sometimes grow naturally without much oversight from gardeners in certain climates and in certain types of soil. In other climates and types of soil, in order to produce decent growth and a healthy plant, gardeners must apply supplementary water, stake the tree, and fight noxious pest infestations. The tragedy of TUSD is that for decades there has been no such team of gardeners in the legislature or in the Department of Ed. They alternately starve it, attack it, and neglect it, until it has become so weakened and infested with disease that those who have looked closely at its actual condition have trouble envisioning how it can be brought from where it is to a place where it could be called a responsible, high functioning public institution.
It’a true that hiring a new Superintendent cannot miraculously cure a diseased organism that has for decades been neglected and abused by those who should have been maintaining its health. But it’s also true that hiring an underqualified megalomaniac as Superintendent of a massive, troubled public school district can precipitate in just a few short years an intensification of the organism’s maladies that would normally have taken a decade or more.