I’m a little late for the party. The Star covered WaPo’s Most Challenging High Schools list a week ago. But I was out of town, so now I’m making up for lost time.
The reason this is a big story locally is that three Tucson schools cracked the top ten, including two BASIS charters. BASIS Oro Valley is number one and BASIS Tucson North is number six. So what does the list mean? Here’s a hint. The two BASIS campuses are both fairly new, as is BASIS Chandler, which came in number two. The more established BASIS campuses scored lower.
Before I get into the rather simple math (the list is created using a ridiculously simplistic equation), let me say I like the fact that this list calls the schools the most challenging, not the best. That’s actually a reasonable description. BASIS and, I imagine, the other schools in the top 100 (University High is Number 37) make students work their asses off. They take lots of academically rigorous classes, and excellence is expected. Are they the best schools in the country? That’s an impossible question to answer. What does “best” mean, and how do you measure it? But challenging? You bet they are, and students entering those schools should understand the academic challenges they’ll face.
So, how are the rankings created? It’s a very simple—too simple—formula: Take the total number of Advanced Placement tests (or International Baccalaureate or Advanced International Certificate of Education) given at the school and divide it by the number of graduating seniors. Here’s how that looks as a mathematical equation:
To get the highest score, you need to maximize the number of students who take the tests (they don’t have to pass them, just take them)—meaning you require lots of those nationally tested classes—and minimize the number of seniors.
Let’s look at the BASIS Oro Valley, the top scorer on the national list with 20.44. It had a total of 206 high school students, and only 25 of them were seniors. Seniors made up one-eighth of the student body. Why so few? Oro Valley is almost brand new. This is only its second senior class. To get its 20.44 challenge score, its high school students would have taken a total of 511 AP exams, or 2.5 per student. That shouldn’t be tough, since taking lots of AP classes is a requirement. Students even take one in the eighth grade.
If the school had just five more seniors, the Challenge Score would have been dropped from 20 to 17.
BASIS Chandler’s score is right below the Oro Valley campus with 20.06. It had 28 seniors out of a high school population of 188. BASIS Tucson North, a few notches lower with 14.93, had 39 seniors out of a class of 250, meaning seniors made up more than one-sixth of the student body. That’s why Tucson North scored lower than the other two. Is Tucson North less “challenging” than the Oro Valley and Chandler campuses? The answer is no. Their curriculum is identical. Tucson North just had a bit higher proportion of seniors.
And that explains why these three BASIS schools, all of which had their first senior class the previous year, scored in the top ten and the more established BASIS campuses didn’t. The longer the school is around, the more seniors, and the more seniors, the lower the challenge score.
Like most of the quick-and-dirty lists we love so much, this one is simplistic and misleading. Most of the top 100 schools are probably more-or-less as challenging for students as those in the top 10, but their AP-test-to-senior class ratios aren’t as advantageous as those at the top.
A Have-You-Heard-Of-This-Tucson-Charter? Note. Ever hear of Accelerated Elementary and Secondary charter school in Tucson? I hadn’t, even though it made number five on WaPo’s Most Challenging list. Maybe this is the reason it’s flown under my radar. It has a grand total of 23 students in its high school, five of them seniors. But I guess those 23 students take a hell of a lot of AP classes, which makes it the fifth most challenging high school in the country.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2015.
This article said that “established BASIS schools scored lower” — actually, that’s not true. In fact, BASIS Tucson North and BASIS Scottsdale are the two oldest BASIS schools, and both scored VERY high!
BASIS Tucson North was #6 in the nation. It is the oldest BASIS campus; it just has a different name than it used to! (It was called BASIS Tucson from its inception in 1998, until a few years ago. Its name changed when it moved to a new building in about 2012, but its reachers / principal / curriculum stayed the same. (The school now known as BASIS Tucson is a K-4 school which opened in autumn, 2013).
And the other “established” BASIS school is BASIS Scottsdale — opened in 2003 — which scored highest of all of the BASIS schools and was therefore named to the “Public Elites” list (for the third straight year). That list means it is essentially higher ranked than the schools which are numerically ranked, according to Washington Post senior education writer Jay Mathews, in his piece accompanying the new rankings.
So, 4 BASIS schools in the rankings. 2 old schools, 2 new schools — all ranked VERY highly. Just thought you’d want to get your facts straight, Tucson Weekly!
Basis North, Basis Oro Valley, Basis Scottsdale.
Where’s BASIS South Tucson or BASIS Nogales?
Actually I think it’s kind of funny that going to BASIS is like a status symbol, so the Blocks are actually leeching children from excellent public schools like CDO and Cat Foothills. The minuscule senior class size means that most students return to those schools, because a well-rounded education with music, art and socializing with a diverse community is a better deal for most kids.
Blue Zona, I appreciate the correction. The new campuses high on the list are Oro Valley and Chandler. As you say, Tucson North is the new high school campus for the earlier school. All three schools have small senior classes, and that, along with the AP-heavy BASIS curriculum, creates their high score.
However, your point about Scottsdale is shaky. It was moved to the “elite” list because its average SAT scores were so high, which means, according to the WaPo articles, it has “no, or almost no, average students.” Again according to the articles, BASIS Scottsdale “has become so popular with the parents of high-achieving students that its average SAT and ACT scores now exceed our limit, and it must be moved to this [elite] list.” That reinforces the statement I’ve made many times: that the BASIS schools attract top students, which means their achievement can’t be compared to schools with a wider academic mix. As Pima Mujer says in the comment above, BASIS can prove the power of its method by opening a school in a low income area and see how well it does educating a sampling of those students.
BASIS provides a challenging curriculum and a challenging environment for students who are able to meet the challenge. The rest either don’t enroll or fall by the wayside. BASIS should state that openly rather than referring to itself as an open-enrollment school to imply it does a superior job with a random assortment of students.
David Safier. At this point you are not a journalist, you are a hack with an agenda. You have yet to write an actual article about BASIS. All you do is leech and piggy back on others work and even the comments on their articles.
If you actually debated anyone on the Board, or any of the teachers, you would be publicly embarrassed and the Tucson Weekly would have to ask you to resign out of disgust.
I double dog dare you to visit basis and actually perform interviews and engage in research.
Oh, and asking a BASIS representative to write an article for the Range is NOT reporting. If you think it is, go back to teaching.
You forgot to mention that the Arizona Daily Star said TUSD’s University High School fell from #28 last year to #37 in 2015. The perceived need to keep up with BASIS in the ratings goes a long way towards explaining some of the ill-advised policies that have recently been implemented at University High School, including requiring all enrolled students to take AP Chemistry and AP Physics 1 to graduate. Not all students have met the math prerequisite for AP Chemistry before being forced to enroll and there is no reason why kids not on a math/science trajectory would need to master the math/science content in these college level courses in high school. (No reason, that is, except to pad administrator’s resumes by showing that even while the school is under pressure to change admittance policies under the direction of the desegregation authority, they will be able to maintain media-generated rankings determined by inane formulas like the one mentioned in your post above.)
And doesn’t lowering the denominator (by increasing attrition rates between junior and senior year, perhaps?) raise the score and hence the rankings? Think about it: if they follow the normal UHS course of study, by the end of junior year they will have taken 5 AP exams. What benefits the rankings more, having them drop out and lower the # of seniors, or having them stay and take the 2 AP courses they are required to take as seniors? Do the math. Let’s say there are 3 juniors and they’ve all taken 5 AP courses and are required to take 2 more as seniors. If all three of them stay, we have 21/3=7. If one of them drops out we have 19/2= 8. It appears that this ranking formula may create an incentive to increase attrition.
Good point, but there’s a small math error. Having 1 of the students drop out before senior year actually raises the rankings even more because 19/2 is 9.5.
Tinkering with education plays more like Wheel of Fortune. And the fortune has been our tax dollars siphoned away to an education super monster.
Cut off the money supply and watch results improve. You must admit that rampant spending has not helped.
A better metric would be the average number of APs that a student graduates with.