SPECIAL MASTER'S REPORT ON MAGNET SCHOOLS

DAVID C. BURY, Special Master.

Introduction

This Report is responsive to the provisions of the September 6, 2018 Court Order (Doc. No. 2123 at pp. 25-26) related to magnet schools. The Court's Order states:

In this Report, the Special Master does not recommend that the Court take any action at this time. In its recent order, the Court gave the District explicit direction regarding magnet schools and tasked the Special Master with responsibilities for evaluating magnet schools by making recommendations with respect to their future status. The Special Master is asking that the parties treat this report as directions to be acted upon as he and the parties work collaboratively to implement the recommendations herein. Of course, should they object to any of the Special Master's proposals, the parties should inform him accordingly, and he will initiate a meeting among the parties in order to facilitate efficient progress over the next three months and beyond. The Court has ordered the District to submit a comprehensive magnet plan by the end of the school year. At that time, plaintiffs and the Special Master will have an opportunity to advise the Court about aspects of the plan they do not support.

The Special Master will then report to the Court and the parties with respect to the progress the District is making to improve the magnet schools identified in this report as being at risk of maintaining magnet status. That may include a recommendation that the Court direct the District to develop transition plans for specific schools that do not appear to be making progress necessary to demonstrate that they are able to remedy to a reasonable extent the concerns identified by the Special Master in this report. However, the Special Master assumes that in most, if not all cases, it will be necessary to know how well students perform on the 2019 AZ Merit tests of academic performance before a decisive judgment can be made about the magnet status of any school.

This somewhat unusual approach is motivated by awareness that some of the schools identified in this report have not yet been advised of their vulnerability and that, in any event, the schools deserve the time — even if it is short — to demonstrate that they have the capability to move effectively to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes of their students and to do so in ways that are consistent with the USP.

Criteria

The criteria identified in the USP for determining magnet status fall into two categories: integration and academic quality.

Integration

A school is considered integrated if no race exceeds 70% of the school's student population and the students of any other race do not comprise plus or minus 15% of the District-wide proportion of students of each race in schools with similar grade structure to the school being evaluated (e.g., a K-5 school, etc.). However, it would be very difficult for a school to alter its racial composition for the entire school in a short time. Therefore, the Court approved — for the purposes of retaining and attaining magnet status — that the integration criteria would apply to the entry grade in a given school (e.g., K) with a requirement that that integration status be sustained in subsequent years (e.g., 1 and beyond).

Academic Quality

Academic quality for purposes of determining magnet status involves five measures:

While these different measures usually point in the same direction, that is not always the case. Gaps may differ for African American and Latino students and for different subjects. Schools with high overall performance may have larger achievement gaps than schools where students achieve at lower levels. When such ambiguity exists, the Special Master may use other factors that affect the learning environment schools, such as the levels of school discipline problems.

Summary Recommendation

The Special Master recommends that no magnet school lose its magnet status at this time. However, the Special Master recommends that five of the 13 magnet schools be informed that they might not retain their magnet status beyond the current year depending on whether the District takes appropriate action to address problems in these schools during the current school year.

The five schools that are vulnerable to losing magnet status before the beginning of the 2019-20 school year. Those schools are: Booth-Fickett, Holladay, Borton, Roskruge, and Drachman. The reasons for their vulnerability and general improvements that would be required to sustain magnet status are discussed below.

The fact that only five schools are identified as vulnerable does not mean that all of the other eight magnet schools do not have work to do. This will be discussed in the conclusion of this report.

Analysis

Integration

Three magnet schools were not integrated at the beginning of the 2018-19 school year — Roskruge, Holladay, and Mansfield. Mansfield is six percentage points closer to integration than Holladay. In the two previous years, Holladay was within one point of integration, and it is possible that this year's enrollment pattern is an aberration. But, on academic criteria, Holladay and Mansfield are on different paths. Mansfield was a B school the last two years and is stronger this year than last year. Holladay moved from being a C school to a D school and other measures of academic quality are consistent with the pattern of the school's letter grades.

Academic Quality

Before discussing the individual schools that are vulnerable to losing magnet status primarily because of academic criteria, it seems worth noting that the oft-cited contention that the achievement gaps in TUSD are not narrowing is not completely correct, at least with respect to magnet schools. As Table II indicates, half of the 12 schools that have a number of African American students large enough to permit comparison (Davis does not) saw a decrease in the achievement gap between African American and white students in both math and ELA. Bonillas achieved an astounding 55 percentage point decrease in the mathematics achievement gap over the last three years and a 31 percentage point drop in the gap between African American and whites in math proficiency. The success in narrowing the mathematics achievement gap between African American and white students at Carrillo was an extraordinary 81 percentage points (although there was a small number of African American students). Seven of the 13 schools narrowed the gap between ELA test scores of Latino and white students. In four schools the mathematic gap was narrowed markedly. However, in four of the remaining nine schools the gaps widened but only marginally — no more than 2.5 percentage points. The most successful schools in narrowing the achievement gap between Latinos and whites are Bonillas and Carillo. Table III provides more detailed information than Table II.

Taking all the data available to him over the last three years, the Special Master groups the five schools that are at risk of retaining magnet status beyond the current school year into two categories: schools that require major revisioning and schools that require revitalization that will likely require significant investments in current themes and curriculum.

A Caveat

The data from which conclusions are drawn here are based in some cases on small numbers of students, especially African American students and white students in fewer cases. But no conclusion rests on only one measure of academic performance. And, with respect to achievement gaps, where the gaps are large for African Americans there is often a gap between Latino and white students. Moreover, when small numbers of students are tested, one can examine trends and beyond that, look more deeply at other evidence of student achievement other than state tests. In any event, there does not appear to be objections from the parties to the conclusion that these five schools need significant improvement.

Schools in Need of Major Revisioning

The three schools in need of major revisioning are: Booth-Fickett, Borton, and Holladay. Holladay is at the bottom of most of the measures of academic quality identified above. Booth-Fickett is a D school and Borton is a C school with large achievement gaps for both African American and Latino student in both subject tests. All of these schools lack clear themes. But they are reasonably well integrated. All serve much larger percentages of African American students than does the District as a whole, a reality that warrants continual and more strategic investment.

Booth-Fickett

Booth-Fickett is underperforming academically and, in addition, is characterized by student disruption, low staff morale, and other maladies undermining the quality of education that the school's students experience. These problems and others cannot be remedied without substantial changes, including changes in school staffing, strengthening instruction, especially Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP); dealing with student misbehavior and the lack of civility, including the strengthening of PBIS; family engagement; and making extensive and effective use of data available in the EBAS. The case could be made that Booth-Fickett should cease to be a magnet school. However, the significant changes that are necessary at the school will be much easier to implement if it retains its magnet status now.

Holladay

Until last year, Holladay was integrated as defined by the USP (about 69 or 70 percent Latino). In the last year, the percentage of Latino students entering the school was almost 79% of the kindergarten class. The percentage of magnet students (those not living in the neighborhood of the school), was about 20 percent. This may be an aberration but, as will be seen by examining the academic performance of the school, Holladay is one of the weaker magnets academically (e.g., the state grade for the school dropped from C to D in 2018).

Borton

On three out of five measures of academic performance, Borton is weak and it is just barely above the District average. Moreover, achievement gaps are among the highest in the District (see Table III).

Re-visioning Summary

The District should be well aware of the problems confronting these three schools. Tweaking existing practices is not likely to bring about the substantial improvement necessary to justify their magnet status. The District shall work with the Special Master and the Implementation Committee in the development of a preliminary plan for these schools by November 4, 2018. This plan shall be reviewed within two weeks by the plaintiffs and the Special Master. This plan shall be revised for initial implementation no later than June 2019. This plan shall be consistent with the Comprehensive Magnet Plan (CMP) ordered by the Court.

Schools in Need of Revitalization: Roskruge and Drachman

Roskruge

Student performance at Roskruge is well below the District average. It is a C school. On some tests and in some grades students at Roskruge score below the District average while the student test scores are higher than the District average in other grades and subjects. Moreover, there is little chance that school can become integrated. However, Roskruge is a dual language school, and the USP calls for the District to enhance student opportunities to participate in dual language programs. The District has been studying how it can improve access to dual language opportunities for TUSD students. Students who gain from learning a second language at Roskruge should not be paying a price in terms of quality education. It is hard to find a reason justifying that Roskruge retain its magnet status except to facilitate transportation to a dual language school. But if that is the case, the District should be proposing support for transportation to dual language schools. Such transportation might well be contingent on the effects that transportation-facilitated enrollment has on integration. Rather than consider Roskruge as a magnet school, it seems sensible to ensure, as best the District can, that Roskruge play an important role in a comprehensive dual language plan.

Drachman

Three years ago, the successful implementation of its Montessori theme resulted in Drachman making progress in achieving integration, and it received a grade of A from the state based on academic performance. Seeking to build on the success, the District added three grades to Drachman in 2017-18. Perhaps because Montessori instruction is typically undertaken in the early grades, adding middle school grades seems to have overwhelmed the school, and its student population became less integrated, its academic performance declined and the achievement gaps widened. The District has indicated that it is rethinking the school's structure and curriculum to return to a more conventional Montessori program. Despite its recent decline academically, Drachman students score above the District average in both ELA and math. Should Drachman return to its K-5 status, it will have a well-defined curriculum and approaches to instruction that are likely to find a continuing number of parents interested in its approach. It seems likely that most families in TUSD have a limited understanding of Montessori education.

Conclusion

The Court has made it clear that it is time to strengthen the magnet schools overall. Those schools that are not facilitating integration or providing their students a quality education should lose magnet status so that resources can be used more effectively in other schools or programs. The Special Master believes that little is to be gained by recommending to the Court at this time that several schools lose magnet status. While the reasons for the vulnerability of the schools identified in this report should be clear to all, the stakeholders in some of these magnet schools apparently had not, until recently, received specific direction for improvement targeted to provisions of the USP and related action plans for magnet schools that have implications for their future magnet status. And, the criteria identified by the Special Master are in some ways different from those identified prior to this report. However, even if the schools were judged only by past standards, the Special Master would have come to similar conclusions.2

As noted at the outset of this report, the five schools that are the focus of this report are not the only magnet schools in need of substantial attention. The data in the tables in this report suggest that Tully Elementary School and Palo Verde High School need to improve student performance substantially. Tully is involved in a major experiment that showed great promise in 2016-17 but in its second year appears to have been much less successful. The reasons for this slide need to be discovered. Palo Verde is weak academically but improved its state grade from D to C. Even though Tucson High is a B school, achievement gaps are unacceptably high.

Next Steps

TABLE I

ADE PRELIMINARY LETTER GRADES

TABLE II

AZMerit STUDENTS IN MAGNET SCHOOLS COMPARED TO ALE TUSD STUDENTS PASSING

TABLE III

SIZE OF ACHIEVEMENT GAPS 2017-18

TABLE IV

CHANGE IN ACHIEVEMENT GAP IN MAGNET SCHOOLS

TABLE V

CHANGE IN PERFORMANCE IN MAGNET SCHOOLS