Want To Be a Top High School? Better Not Have Too Many Low Income Students.

1. “People in Arizona who think it makes sense to give “high performing schools” more money because of the mistaken notion that those schools are doing a better job than schools with lower test scores and higher percentages of low income kids should take a look at the two Newsweek lists. They just might learn something.”

   Please visit the UHS campus and take a thorough assessment of their facilities and available technology before throwing around condescending and dismissive phrases such as this. TUSD has not provided UHS with a new piece of technology in five years and they were recently denied any additional funding for technology or support staff positions, whereas other high schools in the district were given hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of technology. UHS is deliberately put at a disadvantage in comparison to most other high schools in Tucson when it comes to funding and resources. They absolutely deserve a high ranking in the “Beating the Odds” list.

2. It is not about how much money the school has, but how much money the families have. Can parents afford tutors and coaches? Are the kids well-fed? Is a parent able to be there for them, or are the parents overworked? Do the parents understand how school works and can they guide their children through the process? Can the family afford clothes and school supplies? Do older kids have to work to help sustain the family? All these socioeconomic factors affect how well kids do in school.

3. Evidently “workinginthetrenches” does not understand Safier’s point, which has to do with the correlation between STUDENT POVERTY and test scores, not with the correlation between how much a district invests in technology and test scores.

   Is there some sort of proven relationship between a high school that “creams” its student population (selects for cognitively and academically high functioning students) receiving low technology funding from its district and low student test scores? No. Therefore UHS does not get any award for “beating the odds” because it (surprise, surprise!) manages to get good test scores from an extremely selective, high performing student population even when the district does not fund computers for kids who, by in large, already have their own laptops — and tutoring when they need it, and educational supplements when they need them, all handily available through their relatively high-SES families, not through their school.

   Take a look at the table of tax credit contributions available in this district-produced doc:
   http://www.tusd1.org/sdm/documents/handbook.pdf
   Which school has, by far, the largest tax credit contributions in the district in 2014? Rincon / UHS.

   How many high schools in the district have Foundation – Alumni Associations that raise significant amounts of money every year to supplement their budgets? Pueblo? Palo Verde? Cholla? Santa Rita? Guess again. UHS does, and their Foundation buys the schools computers.

   But poor, poor UHS. It must be such a hardship — the teaching conditions, the lack of resources. Must be why, in a district where it is increasingly hard to fill teaching positions with permanent, certified teachers, there are scores of highly qualified faculty lining up and competing for every open position at University High School.

   “in the trenches” indeed. Grow up, take a tour of other TUSD sites some time, and stop ignorantly missing the point when people try to advocate for schools serving children growing up in poverty.

4. More interesting to me than either Safier’s discussion of the rankings or the comment of “workinginthetrenches”– which is both clueless and self-pitying, typical of the the sour-spirited, ignorant, arrogant, uncompassionate denizens of UHS — is the fact that there are 7 schools with higher poverty levels than UHS that place higher than they do in the Newsweek rankings, many of them with MUCH higher percentages of poor students than UHS has. In the Beating the Odds list, UHS falls to 48.

   UHS does not place highly as an exemplar in compensating for the effects of poverty. Unsurprising, in that doing so would require better counseling support and a school culture that does not place “gaming” its stats above student wellbeing.

5. Safire makes a great case for vouchers. Let these parents pick the school which fits them best.

   Now if we could only get the parents to feed them. Progressive policies hurt the poor and lock them up on the plantation.

6. Dear “Break the Shackles, etc”: your position is tellingly disingenuous. The discussion is centered squarely on the factors of economic disadvantage and the attendant impediments to academic success. Vouchers are in no way under discussion, poses a fatuous and distressing distraction to the discussion, and becomes a red herring.

   As to your odd allusion to racist language, re: ” …the plantation.”, and your bizarre ” Break the Shackles” signature, perhaps your dog-whistle to your fellow KKK brothers should be made more explicitly. Please don’t be a coward on this forum. Call these poor, economically disadvantaged students by their rightful names: American citizens.

7. Being “low income” is only a badge of honor in the liberal cesspool of Tucson.

   Parents, if you want the best education and opportunities for your children, work hard, improve yourselves so you can provide for your children.

   Or you can be dependent on liberals and content being ‘low income’.

8. Paul, if you are specifically referring to the poor economically disadvantaged children in TUSD as american citizens, you would only be half correct.

   The other half are illegals, exploited by the liberal public education system to line their pockets and have a permanent second class of citizens to clean their toilets and keep them in power.

   And you are correct, Safier will never have the courage to address it. His entire career has been living off the backs of taxayers and ruining our public education system.

9. The war on poverty has been lost. Much like all the other wars our politicians have waged, they somehow manage to lose them. I agree with the shackled analogy for many of these folks are frozen waiting for something to “be delivered” to them. Forget waiting for it, better yourselves and move forward. You have tolerated a failing educational system and look what you have gotten.

10. Look at number 3, Stuyvesant High School with a 47.3% poverty rate. I guess Stuyvesant is the exception that proves the rule

11. A kid with some food in their tummy and a teacher with sound knowlage of the three R’s is set for success… anything less is a waste of time… those old school one roomers that had to walk up hill both ways turned out ok… with only chalk and small boards! It’s not how much money you have … it’s what and how you have been teaching!

12. If only these teachers did have a sound knowledge of the 3 R’s. Much more focused on indoctrinating our kids with “progressive” ideology.

13. In 2014, Newsweek stopped ranking high schools that serve students below grade 7 — like every BASIS.ed school.

    THAT’S why BASIS.ed schools are no longer ranked by Newsweek.

    The Newsweek methodology is easy to find on their rankings site.

14. Consider this:
    http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2016/08/16/does-black-success-matter-n2205360?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

15. Rather than looking for solutions, it’s much easier to limit discussion to “just asking for more money.”

    But we all now see that it has produced even worse results.

    “U.S. school spending up 375 percent over 30 years but test score remain flat.”

    http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/brat-us-school-spending-375-percent-over-30-years-/

    Read the conclusion at the end.

16. The testing regimes and the “excellent school” lists serve many purposes. For the middle-class parents of children in “good” schools, it gives satisfaction. For those who want to punish teachers and attack tenure and public schools in general, it gives ammunition. “Failing” schools have one and only one thing in common: poverty. Children who started out behind, stay behind, keep falling behind, and then we blame the teachers for not solving systemic societal problems because those six-year-olds without a computer at home or many books or who have parents who work too much to help with homework generally get shoved along to the next grade at minimal proficiency at best. Sure, some have well-pulled bootstraps and succeed, but statistics show most don’t. And for this, we blame the teachers. Put the staff of UHS at Pueblo for a year and see if they forget how to teach. Put a bunch of teaching rookies in UHS and they’ll probably be on a tenure track by their second year. Why? Because testing will show that different students start with different abilities.

    If we’re going to use scientific methods based on testing, and have it affect the careers of teachers, we need to improve the science. A teacher who says a kid is failing isn’t a bad teacher if that kid is failing. A teacher who says a kid is doing great might be if that kid can’t pass a test. But we also need to test these kids before they even see those teachers if we’re to really know, aren’t we? The way things are done, all we know is that poor schools perform poorly. I could have saved everyone millions if not billions of dollars and pointed that one out decades ago.

17. I don’t blame teachers. No, I blame Democrat administrations that are dedicated to keeping people in poverty so they can promise freebies in exchange for votes.

18. You mean like dreamers getting citizenship? And then they will vote for her. That’s exactly what Hillary is doing. SELLING ACCESS. It’s what she does.
    Democrats can’t win ideas based on ideas with results.

    But you can work yourself out of poverty and poor schools. Don’t let them addict you to the drug of promise. Hope and change was never meant for Americans.

19. Why is it so much easier to equate “spending more on schools” with measurable (?) student progress (on what?) than with paying teachers a living wage commensurate with their education and experience as with other professions? Why is it so easy to dismiss all of the extra personnel required to educate many more diverse and neglected students over the last 30 years as “spending more on schools” without acknowledging the societal changes that have required those extra personnel?

20. David,

    Your analysis is just tapping the surface of the complexity of published test scores and the deeper reality of our public education system. Keep digging. Back in 1993, I set off on a journey to discover the best school in Arizona. I started by looking at the school with the highest published test scores only to realize that those test scores were lower than their scores from the previous year.

    As I examined this phenomena on an excel spread sheet, I came to realize that it was theoretically possible for the best school in Arizona, meaning the school that has the highest academic gains, could have the lowest test scores in the state and that the worst school could have the highest scores in the state. The correlation between test scores and academic gains is very low, not zero, but very low.

    In other words, like you are saying, the correlation between test scores and school quality is low.

    Then, in 1995, I discovered a research article by Bill Sanders describing a value added system in which last years test scores, for each student, are subtracted from this years to give a “value added” measure of a schools performance.

    With strict adherence to the value added system, Tennessee went downhill in the ensuing decades. Why? Likely, because we only have value added measures for 4th through 8th grade, yet the academic gains are highest in k through 3, higher in those four years than the remaining 9 years combined. Strict focus on value added measures causes the system to severely neglect the most important years of a students life.

    This problem also exists at the state level. Over a period of six years, the RAND corporation did the three most sophisticated studies aimed at separating school effects (school performance) from home effects (the degree to which the home is responsible for academic outcomes). Massachusetts, the number one state in published test scores, came in 27th.

    This means that education culture is always looking in the wrong direction. It extracts false meaning from the measures of performance. The Superintendent of Massachusetts was not even aware of these RAND studies. He actually believed that Massachusetts was number one. Also, the leadership of the true number one state had no clue that they were number one. In fact, that leadership was very busy changing the policies that had very likely made them number one in all three RAND studies.

    This is, in a sense, a cultural disease, the widespread belief in something which is not true. In this case, it is the belief that schools create the test score that they publish.

    One answer to a disease ridden feedback loop is to shut it down. In 1995, I ran legislation to make participation in testing by schools and school districts voluntary. It got one vote – mine.

    The reality of this problem is that it creates a self fulfilling prophesy. Teachers flee low socio economic schools because they can’t get credit when they do great work. We actually have F rated schools with academic gains (student growth percentiles) higher than the BASIS system.

    I have spent the last year and a half volunteering full time, using my engineering degree to teach math, at a school for the homeless. All of the school employees were world class. The principal came from an A rated school. The teacher training both in quality of delivery and curriculum was unbelievably good. The principal worked so hard and intensely that she literally had a stroke. Everyone was working hard, really hard. The employees of this school very possibly are creating more education value than any other school in Arizona in terms of changing life outcomes for their students. They are an F rated school. That is their reward for their great work. I talked with one teacher who left after three years. She was completely exhausted and worn out, spiritually and emotionally. She had given the mission more than one hundred percent.

    This school has taken the classical education system: lecture, homework, quizzes, tests and modern disciplinary systems pretty close to the limit. If the charter school board thinks they can improve Arizona education by shutting down F schools, they are insane.

    Another answer to a disease ridden feedback system is to come up with an alternative. Every August, the Gallup corporation publishes the Phi Delta Kappa poll. In that poll, parents rate the quality of the school their child attends. In the most recent poll, August 2015, the next one should be coming out shortly, 24% of parents rated their child’s school an “A”. The equivalent of excellent.

    In the Chandler Unified School district, who contracts with WesGroup to mimic the Gallup poll for their district, 75% of parents give their child’s school an A rating, up from 38% in 1998 – 3 times the national average. Unlike test scores which only reflect reading and math, this measure incorporates the entire range of excellence the school district has been able to achieve from the most broad coverage of Advanced Placement classes in the state, to world class technical education to the sports.

    The focus on excellence or the A rating as the standard is the key. Most school districts do a poll and look a the B rating of 80% or higher and conclude they are doing great and nothing needs to change. Last time I checked, their are 76 numbers higher than 24. Unlike any other district or charter school system in the state, Chandler Unified is busy climbing that ladder of excellence and can prove it by measurement. Its called continuous improvement and they are doing it a couple of points a year.

21. “In 1995, I ran legislation to make participation in testing by schools and school districts voluntary. It got one vote – mine.”

    Interesting.

    The post shows a good understanding of the fact that test scores do not reflect school quality and includes some good anecdotes illustrating why this is the case. It would be better if a clearer explanation of why VAM measures don’t work any better than test scores could be added. (Spend a year in a classroom where a student who had previously made good progress every year has parents going through an ugly divorce or a serious health challenge. Compare the progress good teaching produces in a high-SES school where kids don’t go to bed hungry every night with the progress a cohort of kids living in poverty make during the next academic year with the same teacher. VAM doesn’t solve the problem of measuring teacher quality any better than test scores do.

    Unfortunately, parent satisfaction surveys don’t tell you all you need to know either. Most parents can tell you whether their child is happy and likes school, which MAY be one measure of how engaging, humane, and developmentally appropriate the program is (if the majority of the kids aren’t happy and don’t like school, that may be a sign that the program is NOT engaging, humane or developmentally appropriate). But let’s not forget that most parents don’t know anything about the field of education and wouldn’t know how to tell poor educational methods from sound methods if someone asked them to do so. Kids may be happy / entertained in classrooms that are not using the methods that will maximize their cognitive development.

    The bottom line is we need a highly educated, thoroughly professionalized teaching work force that is paid well enough and supported well enough by schools’ structures to attract and retain people who have other options. When you pay teachers $30K-$40K per year and don’t structure schools in way that support the actual needs of students (which often require funding supplementary services) and when you don’t facilitate teachers’ ongoing education and self-improvement in their profession, you cannot do that. GCB1 pretty much nailed it in her much briefer post: “paying teachers a living wage commensurate with their education and experience as with other professions […] providing the] extra personnel required to educate many more diverse and neglected students […] acknowledging the societal changes that have required those extra personnel.”

    Arizona is shockingly far from doing what it needs to do and until it puts people who actually understand education in its decision-making positions, the state, its sadly neglected students, and its shamefully underpaid teachers will continue to languish in the ugly situation they are in today.

    (I speak from personal experience, as a former teacher with degrees from one of the best private universities in the country and a post-baccalaureate teaching degree from the University of Arizona College of Education. I, like many credentialed teachers in this state, am in a situation where I can choose to work or not. Filling one of the available classroom positions in a state where teachers are neither adequately compensated, nor adequately valued and supported by the administrations and governance in their districts, nor adequately respected by the parents of their students is not something I will choose to do, though if I lived in Vermont or Minnesota or another state where education is understood as a profession and the school system is structured accordingly, I might.)

    As for University High School, they get an F. Their rankings will continue to decline. They are in the process of being deserted by the constituencies that had been keeping their test scores artificially inflated — enrollment from neighborhoods within TUSD where families had been leaving the district (El Encanto, Colonia Solana, Sam Hughes, etc.) and open enrollment from Tanque Verde and Catalina Foothills districts. The last three years of toxically misguided policy implementations are having their effects and will continue to do so unless the district gets better governance and administrative leadership.

22. If Sanchez had taken some of the $3 million in deseg funding he gave BACK to TUSD taxpayers and had invested that money strategically, in the RIGHT kinds of support programs at UHS and elsewhere in the district, both the ranking discussed here as well as the quality of experiences of disadvantaged students throughout this sad district would have been better than they are.

23. To: Perspective of a teacher currently not teaching

    Your point that parent satisfaction is something separate and apart from academic excellence is true. Parent surveys are not correlated with academic gains either. At least not a current levels. However, at higher levels, they are. If you want to get to the 90th percentile in academic gains, you have to be constantly improving the relationship with parents because you need perfect teamwork between parents students and teachers to pull that off.

    Also, the massive Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies found that a child’s attitude towards school is the best predictor of future academic gains. Directly measuring the students attitude or indirectly measuring it through the parents attitude is a must if a school is going to be in the business of improving results by managing and improving attitudes.

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