It’s no surprise that a number of TUSD schools lost their magnet status. A magnet school is supposed to have something special about it to attract students who are outside the neighborhood, with the purpose of improving the school’s ethnic balance, and the district has failed to meet the court’s required goals for the schools. The six schools are Ochoa Elementary, Robison Elementary, Safford K-6, Utterback 6-7, and Cholla and Pueblo high schools. The schools aren’t closing, but they will no longer be considered magnet schools.
This is a failure for TUSD and its students, an opportunity lost. Most studies indicate that students achieve at higher levels in more integrated schools, especially minority students. On top of that, society benefits when people learn to know each better other across ethnic lines, and integrated schools are an ideal place for that to happen.
However, there’s another side to the story. TUSD is, depending on how you look at it, in good company or bad company in its failure to integrate its schools. The famous 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, made it unconstitutional for states to demand that schools be segregated, but across the nation 68 years later, segregation has increased since 1970, and there are few signs that trend will turn around any time soon. Recently I did a reasonably extensive online search looking for urban school districts whose integration efforts could be called successful. Few came even close to qualifying. One of the rare exceptions is the Jefferson County Schools in the Louisville, Kentucky, area. The way it has succeeded is by creating a county-wide school district, then dividing it into 13 separate clusters, each containing an economic and ethnic student mix, and even this successful plan nearly collapsed any number of times due to intense public pressure. There may be a case of an urban district which has successfully desegregated its schools using the magnet school model, but I haven’t come across it.
Charter schools, by the way, tend to be more segregated than district schools, so going with charters isn’t a deseg solution.
It’s not really surprising that TUSD and other districts have difficulty getting parents to voluntarily send their children to schools outside the neighborhood, especially when it’s white parents who are called upon to move their kids. If white, college-educated parents with middle-class-or-higher incomes live in a neighborhood with lots of similar families, it’s a hard sell to convince them their children will be better off attending a school that’s far away, populated with children from a minority group — mainly Hispanic in Tucson, often African American in other cities — with parents who generally have lower incomes and educational attainment and in a neighborhood where they would feel uncomfortable walking around. It sounds like a better, easier choice to send their children to the close-by neighborhood school filled with children who look like their children and have similar experiences. It’s a classic white privilege situation. Parents who can afford to choose their neighborhood and the schools their children attend are unlikely to give up their children’s educational privilege. They may believe in the goal of school integration in the abstract, but not when it comes to their own children. A host of factors would also keep lower income white families from sending their children out of the neighborhood to majority-minority schools.
TUSD may have to give up $3 million in deseg funding because it’s losing magnet designation at those six schools, or it may be allowed to hang onto the money a bit longer. Either way, there’s one positive which may come out of a bad situation. If the district no longer is expected to make an attempt to attract students outside the neighborhood to these schools, it might be able to focus more intently on the neighborhood students it has and try to maximize their educational experiences. That’s far from an ideal situation, but it may make the school’s mission, which is to serve the students who walk through the schoolhouse doors, clearer.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2017.
“Charter schools, by the way, tend to be more segregated than district schools, so going with charters isn’t a deseg solution.”
Earth to David Safier. There is a large majority that is actually only intent on getting their kids a great education. They are not swayed by politically motivated and propagated problems. Some of us don’t look at skin color, and yet others attempt to profit from it.
TUSD can’t be “fixed” until they become the former.
Please take a look at the Hartford Connecticut experience. It is under a court order (Sheff v O’Neil) and managed by the state-run Regional School Choice Office. They are ALL magnet schools, not charter schools. These are thriving and students are out-achieving their peers from their sending districts. I happen to be principal of one such magnet high school that has been ranked the #1 high school in CT for three years in row, has consistently met the desegregation goal, has students already accepted at service academies and ivy league schools for next year (early admission). How has this happened? Because the plaintiffs in the desegregation lawsuit have not let the state off the hook and takes it back to court every time those with no political backbone try to dismantle the magnet system.
Thank you, Caryn, for putting a pitch for the plaintiffs and the role they can and should play in holding districts accountable. The plaintiffs in the Fisher Mendoza case certainly have tried here in Tucson, but this particular district is a tough case and this particular blogger is an apologist for the irresponsible governing board members and administrators in this district who have recently been disparaging the plaintiffs in Fisher Mendoza and spending millions of our deseg money in picking unnecessary fights with the desegregation judge and court-appointed Special Master.
So unfortunately for the kids in our schools, you won’t be able to persuade David Safier of anything — at least not unless you can first persuade Raul and / or Adelita Grijalva and then get them to issue their marching orders to him. He can’t even be bothered to visit and study the successful magnet schools we have right here in Tucson — he’d prefer to do “online research” to justify and excuse the many failures of his friends in high office.
Tracking demographic enrollment data is key to desegregation efforts. For many years TUSD posted data on its website that was updated daily. As far as I can tell, no new data has been posted since last school year. Am I wrong? Can anyone point to where is the new home for this data? Why the lack of transparency?
More importantly, why did TUSD change reporting this data? What is gained and by whom? Nothing is gained by those who seek integration.
This is not how a district that endeavors to integrate conducts business.
David, you write, “there’s one positive which may come out of a bad situation. If the district no longer is expected to make an attempt to attract students outside the neighborhood to these schools, it might be able to focus more intently on the neighborhood students it has and try to maximize their educational experiences.”
Do you really believe that that is the way TUSD behaves with schools where there isn’t an admixture of the privileged to hold administrators’ feet to the fire, when necessary? That’s incredibly naive, and shows again, in yet anther way, that you have never taken the trouble to gain any direct experience with how this district actually operates.
This is what they do with schools like Utterback that serve primarily low SES constituencies: they neglect them. They underfund them. They fail to fill teaching positions that should be filled, if quality services are to be delivered. They fail to deliver training in behavior management which the desegregation plan requires to the faculty. They take money that the desegregation plan says should be applied in one area and apply it in another area without securing permission for the transfer of funds. And then they blame the poor outcomes produced by their failures in the administration of a public educational institution on the parents, saying if the parents were better, the kids would be better, and the school’s outcomes would be better. These are REAL examples from the REAL world, and they give the lie to the little fantasy-land story you tell here in yet another of your sad attempts to shore up the failing “leadership” of your friends at TUSD (Grijalva, Foster, and Sanchez) and mislead those among your readership who are naive and misinformed.
Much of the information mentioned above is available in the Latino plaintiffs’ representative’s periodic reports. Do you bother to read them? Or do you, like various unprofessional and irresponsible representatives of TUSD, disparage the plaintiffs and their representative and the good work they do in trying to hold the district accountable to delivering good services to ALL students?
“TUSD will now focus more intently on maximizing the educational experiences of students enrolled in the de-magnetized schools.”
Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it. Perhaps now that the three-person TUSD Board majority you endorsed has been broken up we’ll see some progress in the right direction, but, if so, it won’t be to your credit. The breakup of the disastrous majority was the result of voters NOT following the poor advice you gave them:
http://m.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/10/12/my-picks-for-the-tusd-school-board-cam-juarez-kristel-foster-betts-putnam-hidalgo
Janna H. is correct. Even student enrollment has become a deep-kept secret on TUSDs website and has not been posted since last year. Kristel Foster, throughout her lie-filled campaign stated that enrollment had increased, which it most likely has not. Sanchez needs to protect one of his two remaining supporters on the Board and by refusing to disclose what used to be very public information has turned student enrollment into another corruptible issue. As for Safiers article. Once again he is wrong. He started out on the right foot and then got tripped up by comparing TUSD to school districts which have failed in integrating their schools. David has hailed the current administration and the former majority Board at every turn. Sanchez and his former Board majority have fought the desegregation court order with vengeance and the six schools which have lost their magnet billing are victims of his own racist tendencies as well as his incompetency. The fact that Sanchez is Latino should not make anyone assume that he embraces integration or that he understands its importance. Since Sanchez arrived he has stood before several school communities and professed his disagreement with integration, saying that he did not agree with the Courts requirements and that the goals could never be met. Of course, schools such as Dodge and Carrillo have proven him wrong. I work at a magnet school and know firsthand that since Sanchez arrived our school has received little to no support to accomplish both integration and improved achievement. Our school is one which has suffered from not being staffed by certificated teachers and which has not received our reading program. The program was purchased through the use of desegregation dollars to support students make academic strides in reading. Half of the school year is gone and we still do not have the program. If this does not broadcast the lack of importance that our school has I do not know what does.
I have cut and pasted a comment that was made by the Latino Plaintiffs Representative earlier this week in an article about the magnet schools that have been stripped of their title. See it below. No matter what hype Sanchez spouts about why he failed these specific schools, what must be recognized is that there is potential for school closures in the next few years for schools such as Ochoa. If enrollment continues to plummet, TUSDs finances will not allow for low enrolled schools to remain open. By then Sanchez will long be gone. Sanchez, Grijalva, Foster and Cam have failed greatly in supporting the magnet schools and the end result is felt now and will be felt in the future. Safier, along with other Sanchez advocates such as Bryan Flagg and Caesar Aguirre of Casa Maria should understand that they have been duped by Sanchez. The facts speak for themselves.
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/six-tucson-unified-schools-to-lose-their-magnet-status/article_d19f0d4b-8043-5ae3-8acf-0abef0651fea.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
Comment by Latino Plaintiffs Rept.:
I find it amazing that TUSD has attempted to give the impression that the single cause for the Courts withdrawal of magnet status for Ochoa, Robison, Utterback, Safford, Cholla, and Pueblo is based on its failure to integrate the schools as mandated under the Unitary Status Plan, Comprehensive Magnet Plan and individual magnet improvement plans. Yes, this was one criteria that was not met and, in fact, resisted by District officials during the last three years, but other critical factors played into the Special Masters and Courts decision. It becomes more and more difficult for a magnet school to attract magnet students to its schools when staffing the schools with substitutes has become common practice and/or when the schools are riddled with first-year inexperienced teachers. For example several sources have informed me that Utterback was staffed with 14 substitute teachers last year and this year has as many newly hired, mostly inexperienced teachers. As a fine arts school it has been absent a dance teacher for three years in a row (three years ago, it had a substitute dance teacher) and has also ignored hiring a parent liaison. The school has had absolutely no formal parent engagement for the last several years. A group was finally put together for the first time on November 8th which was parsley attended given that it was the night of the election. These deficiencies, of course, impact academic achievement, which, of course impacts adversely recruitment efforts. Add to this the fact that Utterback, along with Ochoa have had interim principals in place since the beginning of the school year. Utterback also has an interim assistant principal.
Most credible educational leaders know exactly what it takes to make a school successful, such as experienced highly qualified teachers, strong parent engagement, an experienced instructional leader, yet, when it comes to the list of six school which have now lost their magnet status, it is almost as though District officials worked against the best educational practices known to bring success to the schools.
It is also outrageous that TUSD Superintendent Sanchez has bragged that it was only 6 of the 11 schools which were at risk of losing their magnet status which have actually lost their status. No pride should be taken in failing these six schools as is blatantly the case.
Excuses offered by District officials in its ongoing failures to implement the desegregation court order are stale. Our students and community deserve better!
The whole issue of how the desegregation money has been handled is so tragic and so outrageous at the same time. Who (other than Mr. Safier) really thinks that a district that won’t give federally mandated funds to the designated magnet schools to improve them will all of a sudden have an epiphany and start caring for and about the neighborhood kids that attend those schools and THEN give the schools the resources they need? Please prove me wrong TUSD, please prove me wrong!
What is the academic standing of the 6 schools that were defunded?
1st purpose of Magnet Schools:
“Magnet schools have a focused theme and aligned curricula in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), Fine and Performing Arts, International Baccalaureate, International Studies, MicroSociety, Career and Technical Education (CTE), World Languages (immersion and non-immersion) and many others.” http://www.magnet.edu/about/what-are-magne…
You can not teach someone with an IQ in the 80s Trigonometry! You can not put a student with an IQ below 80 in a technical class with a student who has an IQ of 110 and expect them to respond the same to the lesson plan. “Interest” is not enough to craft an academic path!
Affirmative Action has only narrowed minority graduation gap by less than 1% in 10 years. http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine…
If college professors can’t do it what makes you think KP-12 teachers can do it?
This article says eventually you will have to choose between Academics or Integration.
“Achievement was lower for BOTH black and white students in schools where black students accounted for more than 40% of the student body, compared to schools where black students accounted for less than 20 percent of the student body.” https://majorityrights.com/weblog/news_com…
This is what Diversity has done to the US:
13 years ago the US IQ was 103 NOW it’s 98. When we sink to 97 we will slip into the 3rd world category:
The IQ Breaking Point How Civilized Society is Maintained or Lost.
It seems like there is a point, somewhere around 97, above which a modern civilization can be maintained and below which things abruptly begin to fall apart.
https://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.…
POSTIMPRESSIONIST: IMHO, the IQs and GPAs we should be concerned with are those of TUSD Board members, TUSD administrators, office staff and teachers. We have no data on these. Glib and smug are not indicators of intelligence.
The history of magnets in TUSD has shown several things. In 1980 when we began the magnet process at Holladay Intermediate Magnet School, we, the teaching faculty who designed the actual instructional program that delivered the magnet focus, planned how to provide every child in the school with fine arts, performing arts, and physical education. The district didn’t. What they provided was a 2 week paid inservice time to create the program. We did the work and created a working schedule for daily instruction. We expected a lot of high performing kids with interested parents would enroll. We got a few of that category. On the whole, what we enrolled from the magnet population was the lowest reader or behavioral problem from a lot of east side and central schools. We received students who were performing poorly in their home schools, or whose parents had conflicts with teachers/principals at the home school, or parents who were seeking free before and after school free child care programs and free transportation. We asked the district how they would evaluate the success of the program; there was no response. All they were interested in was student movement between schools. So we, the teaching faculty, designed a three part evaluation program in which we investigated parent, and student, attitudes and test scores, which we disaggregated by ethnic group, magnet status, and grade. We learned as a result that the majority of magnet parents came for child care, small class size, teacher aides, and finally the magnet focus. That trend remained true for the 10 years I worked there. We worked very hard to develop the academic learning of ALL students and had great success, as indicated by 2 stanine upward movement on standardized testing in the course of a single year. When you move from 2 to a 4, it’s real progress. We also had movement from a 6 to an 8. This is major growth also. Now Holladay is no longer a magnet and no longer provides those opportunities, thanks to central administration neglect over years. The same is most likely true of the current soon to be lost magnets. What a pity!
When unitary status was revoked and the TUSD deseg case was reopened, it was supposed to address the “vestiges” of segregation (Much of the overt discrimination was addressed fairly early on). In 30+ years, the district had gone from 1/3 to >3/4 minority, and the “Green” factors, including student achievement, had been added as criteria. So:
a) Are 20 magnet schools too many given that TUSD now has ~88 schools (the special master has always maintained the answer was yes)?
b) Is 24% of the deseg budget the right amount to spend on magnet schools (including magnet transportation) to address integration, when desegregation/integration is no longer the only goal?
Notice that “demagnetizing” these six schools, while “good” in the long run (freeing up more money for the other magnet schools or other deseg priorities), is “bad” in the short run, since the programs AFAIK will be phased out gradually–that is, the magnet programs for years to come still need most of their magnet staff (and filling these positions has been problematic) while serving fewer and fewer students.
P.S.
The daily enrollment on TUSDStats was produced and maintained by the Accountability & Research department using Mojave SIS data. With the switch to Synergy SIS six months ago, an alternate procedure would have to be put in place to transfer and format the Synergy data for display on the existing pages, and this has not happened.
Why it hasn’t happened–the short answer is TUSD hasn’t prioritized it. Longer answers might note the disbanding of the Accountability & Research department in 2014 (under the auspices of the Efficiency Audit), and the “nerfing” of most of the TUSDStats functionality in 2015, as well as the lack of the word “transparency” (except in the finance sections) in the strategic plan.
GCB1 — thanks for the back story on the creation of Holladay magnet. Very interesting, and your story highlights just how damaging the district’s current inability to recruit fully qualified teaching faculty for magnets (or former magnets) like Utterback is. In a context where the kind of planning and evaluation you describe was done by the faculty and not by central administrators, how can these programs function without proactive, professional teachers like those you describe?
NB, Holladay is still a magnet.
http://www.holladay-tusd1.org
It was one of the schools on the list for possible loss of magnet status in 2015, as reported by the AZ Star in a side bar on this article…
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/tusd-more-time-to-show-progress-at-magnet-schools/article_0f407edc-93f9-55e6-bd42-74d05ac3f0f1.html
“Magnet schools at risk The following schools failed to meet integration or academic achievement requirements for magnet schools: Bonillas, Borton, Holladay, Ochoa, and Robison elementary schools; Booth-Fickett and Safford K-8 schools, Mansfeld and Utterback middle schools; Cholla and Pueblo high schools
…but it was not one of the six schools that just lost its magnet status:
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/six-tucson-unified-schools-to-lose-their-magnet-status/article_d19f0d4b-8043-5ae3-8acf-0abef0651fea.html
“The schools losing their status are: Ochoa Elementary, Robison Elementary, Safford K-6, Utterback 6-7, and Cholla and Pueblo high schools.”
Fact Checker 13: Thanks, interesting information.
Seems like the problem we are still trying to address in this district is the lack of uniformity in quality of services from one school to the next.
When you have some schools where fully qualified, experienced teachers line up to fill positions (UHS, Fruchthendler, etc.) and other schools where classrooms are filled with rotating casts of long-term subs with no teaching credentials, and when the racial make-up of the schools with higher quality services is more white and the racial make-up of schools with poorly qualified staff and poor service delivery is more Hispanic / African American, how can the district expect to achieve “Unitary Status,” which I believe has something to do with delivering good services in a uniform manner throughout the district’s schools, to schools enrolling primarily Hispanic and African-American students as well as to schools enrolling higher percentages of white students?
Can anyone answer this question: Why have some of the more than $60 million a year in desegregation funds the district receives not been used to attach permanent, renewable stipends to hard-to-fill teaching positions in magnet schools? Why have the stipends not been raised to the point where the positions are actually filled? Why have funds allocated for a “family liaison” position and to provide teachers with behavior management training at schools like Utterback not actually been used for those purposes? These are the kind of use of the funds (higher teacher salaries, more support for teachers) that will eliminate some of the problems with “vestiges of discrimination” and improve services to students in schools with high Hispanic and African-American enrollment.
What will NOT help eliminate the “vestiges of discrimination”? Paying Sanchez $500K a year. Giving $10K bonuses to his low functioning central administrative cabinet. Adding an expensive “daycare” program to a K-12 public district that struggles to make its funds stretch to deliver quality services in K-12. Paying for expensive single-occupancy hotel rooms (against district policy, which requires double occupancy) for Board members and Superintendent traveling to out of town conferences on the district’s dime.
In matters large and small, from top to bottom, this district’s priorities in the allocation of funds have been extremely distorted and counter-productive for the past four years and it desperately needs to correct its course.
David Safier has been and continues to be an irresponsible apologist for poor management. He is living in a fantasy land that has NOTHING to do with the realities of what has been going on in the Board Room at Duffy or in the administrative offices at 1010. His politically motivated, corrupt commentary is damaging schools serving almost 50,000 students and it is damaging the community where many of us (unlike Safier) are trying to raise and educate our children.
Magnet schools were supposed to have been given top priority in hiring teachers, not just because it was the right thing to do given the number of vacancies that schools have had, but also because TUSD stipulated to this in last years magnet stipulation. Instead, many of us who work at central administration or at schools as administrators have continued to see the Districts HR Chief continuously fill positions at east side schools, long before the magnet schools even got a glimpse of a teacher applicant. The services that are provided by the HR Chief, Anna Maiden, and her crew are lop-sided and it is very intentional. The pattern is obvious to many of us and it leaves us with one- and only one- reason for the lop-sided attention that is given to schools which preside in wealthier neighborhoods than schools such as Utterback and Ochoa; institutionalized racism. It is not a nice word. Everyone hates it. But TUSDs policies and practices remain to be permeated with bias.
Everyone seems to make comment about the student demographics which have changed since the onset of the desegregation court order. However, what is not mentioned is that TUSD, as an institution has not changed all that much. More than sixty percent of teachers are non-minority and recruitment efforts to hire teachers of color is pathetic. Less experienced teachers are systematically placed at west side and south side schools. West side and south side schools have the largest number of substitutes. Many of the substitutes are NOT certified as teachers. Additionally, good teachers (white and non-white) are leaving TUSD very rapidly. TUSD is one of Tucsons largest employers, yet their HR Chief has no knowledge of the turn-over rate. Yet, it is clear via separation documents that teachers are leaving at a very high rate.
Of course, it does not help to have white superiority thinkers such as “Postimpressionist”
blatantly state that the darker the US gets, the stupider it becomes. Arizona is ranked almost at the bottom of states in its support of public education. We are where Mississippi used to be years ago. The US, and especially states like Arizona, are not investing in public education. Our public school infrastructure is aging with little maintenance and repair invested into our school buildings. With little respect for the profession, many teachers are leaving to more lucrative careers. Kids arent losing IQ points; they are being deprived of a quality education. TUSD needs drastic reform and Tucson needs to call out folks such as Postimpressionist on their racism.
The community gets what it demands. We all need to demand more from TUSD. ALL of us!
Mike N – You can not teach a person with an IQ of 87 Trigonometry. NO MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY YOU SPEND! “Glib and smug are not indicators of intelligence!” Neither is rejection of FACTS!