After I wrote the post, BASIS and University High Are Top U.S. High Schools, Which Means . . .?, Julia Toews, Head of BASIS Tucson North, contacted me, and we met and talked. We decided that, rather than my trying to explain her position, I would give her the opportunity to write a guest post on The Range. You can read it below.

As a proud Tucson resident who supports full access to the best education possible for all of Tucson’s children, I am glad to have the opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about BASIS. In doing so, I hope to refocus the dialogue about education in Tucson, emphasizing pedagogical practices over selectivity.

First, I would point out that it is a myth that we serve only middle and upper income students. A full 30% of our students come from zip codes in which the median household annual income is less than $30,000. Moreover, one-third of the graduating class of 2013 qualified for SAT fee waivers (eligibility determined by federal poverty guidelines).

A second myth is that we are selective about who we admit. The truth is that we are an open-enrollment, tuition-free public charter school that is forbidden by Arizona law to be selective in our admissions. When there are more applicants than spaces available, we hold a random, blind lottery, as the law requires.

You may have seen ads for K12 Inc. virtual schools on TV. You might have even seen some online ads here on The Range. It's nearing the end of the school year, and the for-profit virtual schools corporation is drumming up business for next year.

How much K12 Inc. actually spends on advertising is an open question. In a 2012 article, USA Today estimated the corporation spent $21.5 million on ads during the first eight months of that year. Those are publicly funded ads, by the way, since the charter schools get their money from tax dollars. The $21.5 million figure is only an estimate, because K12 Inc. wouldn't reveal the actual number to USA Today. I'm not sure if that counts the money K12 Inc. spends on its online call centers. I'm sure it doesn't count the amount of time teachers spend selling the school to parents of students who are already enrolled, encouraging them to keep their children in another year. Teachers are encouraged to do a whole lot of selling.

The big ad push is understandable since the online schools have a 30 percent student churn rate every year, or more. That's right, one out of every three students leave each year. They have to be replaced. And since this is a for-profit corporation, it has to do more than replace students. It has to grow or die.

Let's see if we can follow the bouncing Huppenthal. Our Ed Supe has bounded hither and thither trying to clarify how much money should go to students using the vouchers-on-steroids Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA). It's not easy to follow where he's been or where he's going, but I'm gonna give it a try.

There's one sure guide we can use to help us follow his meaderings. Hupp loves him some vouchers. He's been all for moving money from public schools to private schools since his days in the state Senate.

Here's the short version. The ESA law says students from charter schools get more voucher money than students from district schools. But Hupp decided on his own to give the ex-district kids the larger amount too. Except then he disagreed with himself and said no, he didn't do it. However, new legislation was supposed to get rid of the funding discrepancy. Except that it didn't. So now Hupp is planning to raise the voucher funding level on his own, law or no law, because, he says, the law really says the funding should be equal, and even if it doesn't, the current funding isn't fair.

Got that?

Here's the longer, slower, more detailed version of the story.

• Tanner Clinch
• A fourth grader from Manzo Elementary School shows off her artwork to visitors at the exhibit.

Back in November, Tucson Weekly ran a story by Robert Alcaraz about the fourth graders from Manzo Elementary School who have undertaken research to help Biosphere 2's researchers and their massive ecology experiment, the Landscape Evolution Observatory. This past Saturday, April 26, Manzo was back again at Biosphere 2, this time to present artwork created by the students from their nine-month long partnership with Biosphere 2 and the University of Arizona's School of Geography and Development. Tanner Clinch was there to cover the event.

A group of bustling fourth graders depart from a bus, bumping into one another, clinging to get the first look at a new art exhibit, which features their artwork.

Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Ariz., hosted the Landscape Evolution: An Art Show on Saturday, April 26, 2014, that showcased artwork by fourth graders from Manzo Elementary School in Barrio Hollywood, a neighborhood west of Tucson. The exhibit featured work by the students who have spent the last nine months working on a seed experiment in conjunction with researchers at Biosphere 2 and the University of Arizona.

Originally designed to replicate the atmosphere and ecology of earth, Biosphere 2 now stands as a research facility to better understand how plants and the environment in different controlled experiments. Last year, Manzo Elementary School approached Biosphere 2 and the University of Arizona School of Geography and Development to work together on a project that would help promote hands-on science and math education in the classroom.

The event on Saturday, held at the Biosphere 2’s B2 gallery, featured art created by the students, which displays how climate change works. Many of the parents of students were there, showing their support and learning how the teachers of their kids have come up with this idea of teaching through research in a presentation, which took place next to the exhibit in the Sahara Room.

(more after the jump)

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

My headline is facetious, of course. It would be ridiculous to get rid of the Master of Business Administration degree. But it's not ridiculous to be concerned about the enormous intellectual brain drain caused by so many top students opting for careers in finance and business.

Lots of people complain that too few students go into the most challenging STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, that we're lagging behind other countries in those areas. But not enough people point out that many of our potentially brilliant structural engineers, mathematicians, medical researchers and rocket scientists are lured away from those valuable pursuits by the siren song of Wall Street and Big Business. Our society, and most likely our economy, would be far better off if more of those talented young adults pursued vocations which move our knowledge base and our society forward instead of going into what one writer calls "lucrative but socially useless jobs." Blame our schools, if you wish, for our loss of a competitive economic edge over other countries. But don't forget to blame the seductive MBA degree with its promise of outsized financial rewards for people who manipulate stocks, bonds and businesses. It draws too many of our best and brightest young adults away from more socially useful professions.

I read a review of the book "Young Money" by Kevin Roose, which is about the stressed lives of young Wall Street investment bankers who abandon sleep, relationships and any vestige of morality in their quest for bigger and better salaries, bonuses and promotions. According to the review:

36 percent of the 2010 Princeton class who had full-time jobs at graduation went into finance. (In 2006, before the crisis, 46 percent did.) The head of the University of Pennsylvania’s career services tells Roose: “To come to Penn is to, at some point in your undergraduate years, ask yourself the question, ‘Should I think about investment banking?’ ”

A disproportionate number of graduates from Princeton and U Penn, two of our highly selective, prestigious universities, choose the dream of multi-million dollar salaries over professions many of them would find more interesting and rewarding. If half of those aspiring Wolves of Wall Street chose more socially valuable professions — and if similar students in other universities did the same — we might be suffering from a welcome embarrassment of intellectual riches in professions which add value to our society. I'd rather have a brilliant young man or woman searching for better ways to produce non-polluting energy or to treat and cure cancer than searching for that perfect algorithm to increase the earnings of some multi-billion-dollar hedge fund.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Today's edition of Ed Shorts is pot luck, an assortment of stories which caught my eye but I haven't had time to post about. The stories link to articles where you can learn more.

• The Weekly tells Tucson's Opt Out story. In case you missed it, Mari Herreras wrote about a few TUSD parents who have struggled to have their children opt out of the AIMS test, a story I covered on The Range (here and here) but the rest of the local media has chosen to ignore (so far as I know, anyway). The parents in Mari's article happen to be from TUSD, but the district's decision is based on a state-wide edict which affects all Arizona students, and similar stories are playing out in most states. For me, the most disturbing part of the story is that some schools put elementary school children in the uncomfortable position of refusing to take the test rather than accepting their parents' requests.

• The Gates/Murdoch Big Education Data scheme goes belly up. The "ed reform" crowd thought it was a great idea. Gather school data on students into one gigantic database overseen by Rupert Murdoch's education company and housed on Amazon computers. They called it inBloom, and Bill Gates spent $100 million to get it started. At least nine states signed up, then withdrew one by one when people on the right and the left expressed their outrage. New York was the last holdout. When it withdrew, inBloom closed its doors. (Expect to see "Son of inBloom" coming to an "ed reform" corporation near you. There's too much money in data and the "ed tech" sector for this to go away.)

• Raul Grijalva voices his objections to "the culture of testing." In an interview in Salon, Rep. Grijalva talks about our over-emphasis on high stakes testing, his objections to school privatization and his disagreements with the Obama administration on some aspects of education policy.

U.S. News & World Report just published its yearly national high school rankings, and once again, BASIS Tucson and University High scored very well, 5th and 7th respectively. The question is, what do those rankings mean?

First, they mean that much-maligned TUSD has a high school in the national top ten, earning the district bragging rights. Second, they mean charter schools aren't better than district schools simply because they're charters. Half the high schools in Arizona's top ten are district schools, including, locally, both UHS and Catalina Foothills High.

Third and most important, the rankings mean schools with elite student bodies rank high on the U.S. News & World Report scale. If you have lots of high income high achievers for students, with a smattering of lower income high achievers thrown in, and your staff is reasonably good, your school is likely to look good-to-great in the rankings.

As everyone knows, UHS is highly selective. It only accepts top academic students from TUSD and neighboring districts, so naturally those students are going to be among the best and the brightest in the area. BASIS, on the other hand, claims to be non-selective since it has to take all applicants, and if too many students apply, it holds a random lottery. But that's deceptive, and the people who run BASIS charters know it. The fact is, BASIS schools have a four step process which ensures that they accept mostly high achieving students, then weed out students who don't perform at the expected level. A school like Cat Foothills actually takes everyone in its district who walks through the door, but since the district is generally high income, that makes for a very select student body.

The Star article doesn't go into detail about how the schools are ranked, which creates the mistaken impression that the highly ranked schools are actually doing a better job with their students than lower ranked schools. Worse, the Star article parrots the ranking criteria laid out by U.S. News & World Report without looking at them carefully. I understand, it's hard to sort through the criteria if you're not an educator, but a Google search would reveal plenty of people who have examined how the rankings work. There's no excuse for a journalist not doing the necessary research, or consulting with a local scholar who has.

Anyone who's surprised by this turn of events hasn't been paying attention. The generic name for the program is "Education Savings Accounts." Saving up ESA money isn't a bug; it's a feature.

The Capitol Times has the story. Parents who are using the ESAs have accumulated $2.5 million in unspent money over the past three years, meaning one dollar out of every five the state has given to parents to be used for their children's educations has yet to be spent. The Dept. of Ed. disputes the numbers — not because the Cap Times got it wrong, but because the Dept. of Ed. gave out bad numbers. However, the corrected numbers haven't been released, so it's reasonable to assume it's still a big number.

Let's look at why all that money, however much it amounts to, is going unspent. One reason is, some parents get a very large chunk of change every year. The amount is 90% of what the state would give to a public school (district or charter) to educate the child. For most kids, that's a little more than $5,000 a year. But children with special needs have considerably more allotted for their educations, as much as $20,000 a year. In the original ESA legislation, most of the children who qualified were children with special needs, meaning lots of kids had far more than $5,000 deposited in their accounts each year. Parents could choose a private school charging less than they were given and have money left over.

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

Stories about education rarely bring up as many interesting questions as this tale of teacher layoffs in Los Angeles.

The Tale, Part 1: Because of budget cuts, teachers were being laid off all over the L.A. school district. The district's seniority policy dictated that last hired teachers would be the first fired.

Question: Is it good policy for seniority to determine the order of teacher layoffs?
Question: In California where school budgets were already low, why should budget cutbacks be so severe that a significant number of teachers need to be laid off? Enough teachers leave the profession or retire every year that districts should be hiring more teachers to fill the vacant positions, not firing staff.

The Tale, Part 2: Schools in lower income areas had more teachers with less experience than schools in higher income areas, so they lost more teachers. In some schools, that meant losing close to half of their teachers, who had to be replaced by staff transferred from other schools.

Question: Why are children from low income families taught by the least experienced teachers?
Question: Since beginning teachers have lower salaries than experienced teachers, do districts compensate those schools by letting them hire more staff members? In other words, are schools staffed using a set teacher-student ratio, meaning more money is spent on students with more experienced teachers, or a constant amount of funding per student?

• Image courtesy of shutterstock.com

In the past few days, I've posted a video about the local and national Opt Out Movement and an op ed from a principal in Brooklyn, NY, criticizing the Common Core tests her students took and her inability to talk about specifics because of a state-imposed gag order.

The Opt Out movement is growing, though it's in its infancy in the Tucson area. Here are some short items about what's going on, along with links if you're interested in learning more.

• Three Tucson parents joined Robin Hiller on her radio show, State of Education, to discuss their desire to have their children opt out of the AIMS test. Their portion of the show begins around the 14:30 minute mark.

• An estimated 30,000 New York children in grades three through eight opted out of the state test this spring. That includes about 27 percent of the third through eighth grade students in West Seneca (about 800 students) and at least 6,000 students in Long Island.