David Safier by David Safier I'll start by giving Robert Robb, a conservative columnist at the Republic, a bit of credit. He said it's unfair to simply say Arizona public schools are doing a bad job because our students come out at the low end of the national NAEP test scores, that all we have to do … Read more
by David Safier
This map shows the concentration of state school grades in various areas of greater Tucson. It's a clear indicator that AIMS scores correlate with socioeconomic status. And since the school grades include an improvement component, the map also indicates how inadequate that component is.
An earlier post explains the map and discusses its clear message: student achievement on standardized tests correlates more closely with socioeconomic status than any other factor. That finding is consistent with data collected on national and international tests. It's the closest thing to an undisputed fact you'll find in education research.
But something isn't evident on the map. The schools' grades aren't simply based on their raw AIMS scores. That only makes up half the number that determines a school's grade. The other half is based on a school's improvement — how much its AIMS scores went up compared to the previous year. Proponents of the scoring method claim the improvement component helps level the playing field. A school with a low score, the theory goes, has lots of room for improvement, so it can grow its way into a high grade even if its raw AIMS scores are low. The map shows that theory is a fiction.
by David Safier
I've gotten a lot of response from yesterday's post with a map showing the distribution of state school grades across the greater Tucson area. It's the most dramatic visual representation I've seen of what has been concluded by study after study of schools in the U.S. and around the world: income is the primary determiner of student achievement on standardized tests.
I've created a similar map of greater Phoenix. I don't know much about the demographic lay of the land, but I expect BfA readers in Phoenix will look at the way the state's school grades map out and find they correlate to high, middle and low income areas. It's a bit more complex than the Tucson map, which is not surprising since Phoenix is so much larger, but the clustering of school grades is still dramatic.
The color code I used is the same one the AZ Dept of Ed uses for the grades: Green for A, Blue for B, Yellow for C and Orange for D.
You can see the original ADE map without the added colored clouds below the fold.
by David Safier I haven't done my homework on TUSD's magnet program, but based on what I've read, I would like to see Willis Hawley, the man appointed by the courts to oversee the district's deseg program, give the district a little time to get this thing right before deciding to shut down some of … Read more
by David Safier
I knew what the results would be, but I didn't know they would be this dramatic.
The AZ Dept of Ed has a web page where you can choose an area of the state and see a map with every school in that area and its state grade. I set the map for the greater Tucson area and saw that school grades divided geographically into distinct areas. To show the grade clusters more clearly, I created colored clouds around the areas where most of the schools had certain grades: Green for A, Blue for B, Yellow for C and Orange for D — the same colors the state uses for each grade. This is what I came up with.
The vast majority of the A schools stretch almost uninterrupted from Oro Valley and Marana across the Foothills and down the east side to Vail. B schools are clustered above Speedway and below Orange Grove. C schools predominate in the central Tucson area, east of I-10 and as far south as Ajo. Most D schools are in an arc to the south and west of I-10. (You can see the map without the added colored clouds below the fold.)