David Safier

by David Safier

Supporters of BASIS charter schools really shouldn't be so touchy. When Tim Steller wrote a column that put BASIS' second place finish in the U.S. News & World Report national high school rankings in perspective, he was deluged with "How dare you?" comments at the end of the article. Steller made the same observations about University High, but he got few comments from those parents. I guess UHS folks are a more secure bunch than the BASIS Boosters. At worst, you can accuse Steller of praising the two schools with faint damns. Yes, both schools give a high quality education to great students, but maybe they don't deserve as much praise as they get based on their scores on dubious national rankings.

Why are the BASIS people so thin skinned? My take is, they've swallowed their own Legend whole, the one that says BASIS has created a model of excellence that other schools should follow. They ascribe to the line in that old John Ford western: "When the Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend." They're upset that Steller didn't print The Legend but stuck with The Facts instead: that BASIS provides a rigorous education for the academic elite, those who have both the intelligence and the motivation to keep up with the school's high expectations. The BASIS model can only be duplicated in other equally selective schools.

An op ed in today's Star responds to Steller's column. The author, Alex Swindle, went to UHS and currently teaches at BASIS, so he knows both schools from the inside, but the only way to describe his op ed is defensive. Shorter Swindle: Tim, you don't love and honor BASIS (and maybe UHS) nearly as much as you, and everyone else, should.

Some examples from Swindle's op ed.

[For Steller] to demean the work of the students and teachers at two of Tucson's best schools is unfair and unhelpful.

Demean? Really? Steller says BASIS and UHS are selective — that's true — and their U.S. News & Report rankings are based solely on AP courses and tests, which makes the ranking methodology highly questionable. The worst he does is question BASIS' reason for being so AP-heavy. Not very demeaning.

by David Safier A few weeks ago, I proposed that TUSD open a second campus of University High School, for a number of reasons. More out-of-district students are applying to UHS, which is good for TUSD, but when the current school reaches its limit, some of those students will have to be turned away. The … Read more

by David Safier

My headline, "There aren't enough 'Great Teachers' to go around," may sound like garden variety teacher bashing, but actually it's just the opposite. The meme, "We just need more Great Teachers," is one of the many ways of blaming our current crop of "bad" — read, union — teachers for our schools' problems. Just get rid of all those lazy teachers feeding off the government trough, the argument goes, replace them with "Great Teachers," and our children's achievement will soar. We don't need more competent teachers or more very good teachers, mind you. Only "Great Teachers" need apply.

Most of us have had only a few teachers we would categorize as Great. We've had lots of teachers we would categorize as very good, good, mediocre and bad. But Great? That's a rare designation we reserve for the miracle workers, those truly exceptional individuals who cause you to quicken your pace as you walk toward their classrooms and make you sit up and take notice of everything that's going on in class, to put in the extra time and effort, because you can't help yourself. Studies indicate teachers like that can actually make students' learning soar. It would be wonderful if we had schools filled with Great Teachers, but is that realistic?

The numbers make it unlikely we'll ever get a country filled to the brim with Great Teachers. Right now, we have about 55 million school children in grades K-12 in the U.S. To educate them, we've hired over 3 million teachers.

Three million teachers. Is it reasonable to expect that many professionals in any field to be Great? Well, one out of three ain't bad. A million Great Teachers would probably do the trick, but that's still asking a hell of a lot. Do we have a million Great anythings in this country?

We have lots of good doctors. But Great Doctors? Would anyone say we have even 10,000 doctors in the country who are so exceptional, they can detect that invisible something in our symptoms and test results, then give us laser-precision care? How about Great Lawyers? How many lawyers have such transcendent legal minds and skills, they can give their clients spectacular legal representation?

by David Safier I don't like to see the comments on one of my posts hijacked, where comments have no direct relationship to what I wrote. That's what happened on one of my recent posts about BASIS, where some commenters used that space to criticize Sonoran Science Academy charter schools. However, I know there's a … Read more