Monday I wrote about seven Arizona schools that have been accused of cheating on the high stakes AIMS test. I decided to look at the percentage of students on free/reduced lunch at the schools, and here's what I found.

Two schools have more than 90 percent of their students on free/reduced lunch—Wade Carpenter Middle School and James Sandoval/Crown Point High School. One has over 75 percent—Integrity Education Centre. One has over 50 percent—Red Rock Elementary School.

Two—Edge and Children's Success Academy—are charter schools that don't report their free/reduced lunch percentage, like lots of charters which don't furnish student lunches. The Star's Tim Steller wrote about Edge in 2013.

Edge High School in Tucson takes in students from difficult backgrounds - about one out of 10 is homeless, many are parents or pregnant, some are sixth- or seventh-year seniors - and helps them graduate.

Last year the state recognized each of Edge's three charter high schools - with a D grade. Two more years of D's and the schools will be on the road toward a failing status.

All I can find about Children's Success Academy is that it's on E. Bilby near S. Nogales Hwy in Tucson with about 80 students and a B state grade. It's in a low income area, and most of the nearby schools have C and D grades, which means its students are likely from low income families, though I can't say for certain.

The outlier here is Metcalf Elementary with 34 percent of its students on free/reduced lunch. It's a new school with no state grade I could find.

Here are a few schools not—repeat, not—on the list, along with their free/reduced lunch percentages: Copper Ridge Elementary in Scottsdale Unified (3 percent); Sonoran Trails Middle in Cave Creek (7 percent); Catalina Foothills High (12 percent).

Diane Douglas' Department of Education has asked the Attorney General to investigate suspicious erasures on AIMS tests from seven Arizona schools. There's a whole lot to unpack in this story, more than I want to write about in one post. I'll probably write more about it later in the week.

The ADE found that AIMS tests at the seven schools had an unusual number of wrong answers erased and correct answers bubbled in. Though it's always possible that the schools are full of unusually diligent students who looked over their tests, found mistakes and corrected them, it's extremely unlikely—wildly improbable, statistically—that's what happened. It's far more likely adults took the tests after they were handed in and changed wrong answers to right answers. Who those adults are—teachers, administrators, support staff or a combination—is an unanswered question at this point.

The seven schools are Edge, Children's Success Academy, Integrity Education Centre, James Sandoval/Crown Point High School, Metcalf Elementary School, Red Rock Elementary School and Wade Carpenter Middle School. They're a mixture of district and charter schools from around the state. The last on the list, Wade Carpenter Middle School in Nogales, has gotten a reasonable amount of press for the probable cheating. I wrote about it in March. The others are new to me.

But there's nothing new about the problem, and it's likely not limited to those seven schools. We've known for years that cheating on high stakes tests is going on around the country. A USA Today study done a few years ago found erase-and-replace patterns in lots of schools, and an AZ Republic study found instances here in Arizona. Most of them haven't been confirmed because, who wants to dig deep enough to find out if adults in some schools changed answers on high stakes tests? Not the schools, certainly. And not the state departments of education in most cases. Things like this are embarrassing and cause lots of bad publicity. Better to ignore the cheating entirely or take care of the problem behind closed doors.

This looks to me like one of those "Democracy is messy" issues, where some people claim they want to clean up the mess a bit. The problem is, proposed solutions often subvert the democratic process, which is messy by design. That's what's wrong with the latest policy revision suggested for the TUSD board.

Here's the basic story. Right now, TUSD board meetings begin with a call to the audience where people can stand up and say what they want to say, praising or condemning TUSD policies and people, making suggestions for district changes or, in some cases, blathering incoherently. After the audience members are finished having their say, board members can respond to what's been said. The change, proposed by board president Adelita Grijalva, is to keep the call to the audience as is, but eliminate the responses from board members. It's a wrong-headed idea. If it comes up for a vote, the board should vote it down.

[Full disclosure: I hate meetings, at least meetings with large groups of people and formal agendas. I'm less an agoraphobe than an agenda-phobe. Having to sit through the endless noodling, pontificating, extemporizing and self-aggrandizing makes me crazy. That's why I only show up at board meetings when there's something going on I'm really interested in. I know some people enjoy these things. Not me. So I only occasionally witness what goes on at the meetings first hand.]

[Worth noting: Approximately 3,000 teachers and 4,000 support staff in TUSD don't give a damn whether the board members talk or don't talk after the call to the audience. They're out there where the rubber meets the road, in the classrooms, the buildings, the grounds and the buses, going about the district's day-to-day business of teaching and supporting kids. Issues like this one make the news and are chewed over endlessly by me and others, and they can have lasting consequences, but they're not directly related to the good, often great, work going on in the schools every day.]

At the end of our Access Tucson TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, Ann-Eve Pedersen and I have a short discussion of the ups and downs, pros and cons of TUSD's newly created Internal Auditor position.

Employing his unique 60-Minutes-Meets-Monty-Python style, John Oliver explains pretty much everything you need to know about standardized testing.

Some people argue that too many people go to college these days. High school grads sign up for community college without the necessary academic skills, and others go to a state university and drop out before they graduate. It's a waste of their time and money, these people argue, and it's a waste of taxpayer money as well.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that this is a big argument in right wing circles that advocate for spending less money on education. It's one of the Goldwater Institute's favorite higher education topics. But that shouldn't matter. The question is, do too many people go to college? Are they wasting their money, and ours?

According to a column in the Sunday NY Times, the answer is no. A college education makes a difference, especially for students who graduate but even for those who don't. Obviously, there are plenty of anecdotal examples of people who were lousy high school students, then excelled in college—the column has a good one—but the column cites a few studies indicating that marginal students attending a four year college earn more than similar students who don't.

For those of you who haven't learned about the charges against the Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray, I'm getting ahead of the story. During a 16 minute press conference, Baltimore State Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced criminal charges for the six police officers including assault, manslaughter and murder. You'll be able to hear those charges discussed endlessly in the media over the coming hours and days. But I want to focus on what she said at the end of her prepared statements, addressing the youth of Baltimore.

"I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your moment. Let’s ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause, and as young people, our time is now."

What a refreshing change of tone from the "thugs" mantra that's been repeated endlessly since the Monday night violence in Baltimore. Mosby gave the youth of the city the kind of respect adults should afford young people. She didn't shake her finger at them. She didn't warn them they will be punished if they act out. Instead, she empowered them by putting them at "the forefront of this cause" and telling them "our time is now." The fact that she's 35, the youngest person in her position in any major city, gives her the right to include herself among the young people who, we hope, will help bring greater social justice to the country.

I'm a little late for the party. The Star covered WaPo's Most Challenging High Schools list a week ago. But I was out of town, so now I'm making up for lost time.

The reason this is a big story locally is that three Tucson schools cracked the top ten, including two BASIS charters. BASIS Oro Valley is number one and BASIS Tucson North is number six. So what does the list mean? Here's a hint. The two BASIS campuses are both fairly new, as is BASIS Chandler, which came in number two. The more established BASIS campuses scored lower.

Before I get into the rather simple math (the list is created using a ridiculously simplistic equation), let me say I like the fact that this list calls the schools the most challenging, not the best. That's actually a reasonable description. BASIS and, I imagine, the other schools in the top 100 (University High is Number 37) make students work their asses off. They take lots of academically rigorous classes, and excellence is expected. Are they the best schools in the country? That's an impossible question to answer. What does "best" mean, and how do you measure it? But challenging? You bet they are, and students entering those schools should understand the academic challenges they'll face.
So, how are the rankings created? It's a very simple—too simple—formula: Take the total number of Advanced Placement tests (or International Baccalaureate or Advanced International Certificate of Education) given at the school and divide it by the number of graduating seniors. Here's how that looks as a mathematical equation:


To get the highest score, you need to maximize the number of students who take the tests (they don't have to pass them, just take them)—meaning you require lots of those nationally tested classes—and minimize the number of seniors.

Let's look at the BASIS Oro Valley, the top scorer on the national list with 20.44. It had a total of 206 high school students, and only 25 of them were seniors. Seniors made up one-eighth of the student body. Why so few? Oro Valley is almost brand new. This is only its second senior class. To get its 20.44 challenge score, its high school students would have taken a total of 511 AP exams, or 2.5 per student. That shouldn't be tough, since taking lots of AP classes is a requirement. Students even take one in the eighth grade.

If the school had just five more seniors, the Challenge Score would have been dropped from 20 to 17.

The NY Times has painted the most complete picture of New York's powerful and controversial Success Academy charter schools I've read to date. The schools claim high test scores for low income students, and the claims bear out, with some clarification. Critics claim the charters use pressure cooker tactics to get students to perform and overwork their teachers, and those claims bear out as well, with some clarification. There's plenty of information in the article for supporters or detractors to latch onto.

According to the article, the 43 Success charters, located in poor areas of New York, have very high rates of students passing the state tests, higher in some cases than schools with more affluent students. If the testing in the schools is legit, and I haven't read anything indicating that the students are helped during the testing or the test papers are doctored in any way, that's impressive.

Comedy Central has picked a new host for the Daily Show. Trevor Noah, who just joined the show in December, is a South African comedian. He's been only been on the show three times so far.

From the New York Times:

The appointment of Mr. Noah, a newcomer to American television, promises to add youthful vitality and international perspective to “The Daily Show.” It puts a nonwhite performer at the head of this flagship Comedy Central franchise, and one who comes with Mr. Stewart’s endorsement.

“I’m thrilled for the show and for Trevor,” Mr. Stewart said in a statement. “He’s a tremendous comic and talent that we’ve loved working with.” Mr. Stewart added that he “may rejoin as a correspondent just to be a part of it!!!”

But the decision also invites questions about Mr. Noah’s experience and visibility (or lack thereof), and why the network did not choose a woman to crack the all-male club of late-night television hosts.

Michele Ganeless, the Comedy Central president, said in an interview: “We talked to women. We talked to men. We found in Trevor the best person for the job.”

Ms. Ganeless added: “You don’t hope to find the next Jon Stewart — there is no next Jon Stewart. So, our goal was to find someone who brings something really exciting and new and different.”

Jon Stewart has not announced when he will be leaving the show, but I expect that news will be coming now that a replacement has been selected. 

No-one can replace Jon Stewart. But together with the amazing team at The Daily Show, we will continue to make this the best damn news show!

— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) March 30, 2015