Mon, Jul 06, 2009
 Marana High junior Erica Urbina, 17, meets with Jordan Robins, 14, at center, and Ty Sipp, 15, during the Freshman Foundations class. The course is designed to help incoming students learn about time management, communication and note taking, among other skills. It also matches freshmen with students in higher grades. jill torrance / Arizona Daily Star
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Komatsu Equipment Co Resident Field Mechanic Administrative & Professional Jorgensen Brooks Group Counselor Finance and Accounting Charles E. Gillman Company Accounting Specialist Sales and Marketing Everready Glass Sales Reps Administrative & Professional Tucson Urban League CEO/President Trades/Construction RANCHO RESORT MAINTANANCE POSITION Tucson RegionStar Investigation: Schools promote students despite widespread failure
Early intervention strategies can help students succeedSchools use varied programs, from matching kids with mentors to focused career-path academies
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.13.2008
Twenty-nine Pascua Yaqui students at Hohokam Middle School should have repeated eighth grade last year.
None did, however, and the students were promoted even though they weren't ready for high school.
This year, 23 students are in danger of repeating eighth grade at Hohokam, 7400 S. Settler Road, but they have top priority in a Saturday program designed to bring up their marks and prepare them for their freshman year.
The solution illustrates a small part of what experts say needs to happen on a large scale to help Tucson's struggling students.
A 10-month investigation by the Arizona Daily Star reveals that nearly one-third of the middle school and high school students in eight Tucson-area school districts failed a core class last year but still were promoted to the next grade level — evidence of widespread social promotion.
Furthermore, more than 25 percent of middle and high schools in the Tucson area's largest districts awarded passing grades students may not have earned, the investigation found. The schools showed discrepancies of more than 25 percent between student failure rates on AIMS, the state's assessment test, and in corresponding classes — what experts called strong evidence of grade inflation.
The combined effect of social promotion and grade inflation has created complex problems not just for our education system but for the future of the region's economy as the pool of unskilled workers with scant knowledge of basic subjects continues to grow.
The seemingly obvious solutions — more funding for schools and holding back more failing students — may not be the answer, experts say.
A new promotion policy, locally or statewide, should be set in place with coherent and defined standards, they say.
Standardized tests, such as Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, experts add, should be used to clearly identify patterns of poor achievement and address student and teacher shortcomings.
Once students have been identified as being at risk of failing classes, individual intervention plans must not only be established but also implemented with an accountability system for teachers and administrators, educators say.
Some say nothing short of a systemic overhaul of the middle school system is needed as well.
The solutions debate
For Tom Horne, Arizona's superintendent of public instruction, the answer is simple:
Retain failing students.
"When you abolish social promotion, you increase the pressure for intervention programs," Horne said, noting his own daughter had to retake a failed class in summer school.
But simply holding back students and having them retake the same class from the same teacher won't work, educators and academics say.
"Research shows that the student who is retained will be successful for the year that they're retained, but when they move on to the next grade, they have the same difficulties that they originally had," said Heather Campbell-Orr, a school psychologist in the Catalina Foothills School District.
Students who must repeat a grade are 20 percent to 30 percent more likely than their peers to drop out, said Lorrie Shepard, dean of the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There also may be psychological aspects to retention, she said.
"There is typically a stigma associated with being retained," said Shane Jimerson, a professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical & School Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"Students, by the way, refer to it as being flunked or they're stupid. They don't use technical terms. They failed. They flunked. They're not as smart."
Jimerson, who is nationally recognized for his research on grade retention, has found that being held back can result in emotional distress, low self-esteem, poor peer relations and even alcohol and drug abuse.
While educators and community members decry the amount Arizona spends on education — consistently ranked near the bottom among U.S. states — they say that simply throwing more money at the problem won't necessarily fix it.
Systemic efficiency needs to be examined before funding requests are made, said Marshall Smith, director of education for the Hewlett Foundation in California, a philanthropic organization created by Hewlett-Packard co-founder William Hewlett. Smith, who helped lead a recent study of the California public-school system, said many of the study's general findings could apply to Arizona. Smith was deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education under President Bill Clinton.
Such a review might reveal more money will be needed to address specific groups of students, such as English-language learners, or to work toward equity among students from low-income families, he said. But if new funding is possible, he concluded, it must come with some form of accountability.
New policies, strong standards
After reviewing local and state standards for promotion, many educators and academics agree that Arizona needs a new standard.
"If I were making up a policy, I would say that in some critical proficiency areas, we need to have benchmarks for what it means to be doing well, what it means to be doing average, and what it means to be at risk," said Shepard, the Colorado dean.
"We need to be able to tell each student, as they are going on to the next grade, where they are in relation to standards. For those students who are not making adequate progress, we need to have targeted intervention."
Promotion policies for most local districts state that student achievement must "include accomplishment of the standards," though no clear, quantifiable definition of the standards is listed. The Arizona State Board of Education requires that "each student shall demonstrate competency" in various subjects before moving from middle school to high school, but it leaves the definition of "competency" up to local school boards.
Requiring students to demonstrate competence or mastery without further definition of what that means makes Arizona's policy vague, experts said.
Education is nuanced, educators say, and what works for one student may not work for another, but education policy usually doesn't reflect that. So new policies must take into account the varied levels of ability in every classroom.
Retention or social promotion, experts say, is meaningless without remediation. Standardized tests and teacher vigilance can quickly identify if students are struggling with their work.
Teachers need to identify struggling students early in the school year and collaborate with each student, the parents and colleagues to find solutions, educators and experts agree.
"When we see a student begin to struggle in our classes, we discuss at our weekly team meetings (how) to identify common problems and put together a plan to help the student improve," teacher Brian Stark wrote in an e-mail.
Stark is a seventh-grade writing teacher at Corona Foothills Middle School in the Vail School District.
If a problem is identified early on, and the parents and students want success, the process usually works, he said.
"If one piece of that solution is missing, then the chances for retention go up significantly," Stark said.
Local solutions that work
Specific programs, such as those held after school or during summer, can be effective if specific strategies are used, said Jimerson, the California professor.
Successful models of intervention exist — or have existed — in Tucson.
● An analysis of academic trends pointed to success at Hohokam Middle School that not even some TUSD officials had realized.
In the 2001-02 and 2002-03 school years, fewer than one-quarter of Hohokam's eighth-graders failed one or more classes. But for the past four years, failure rates among Hohokam eighth-graders ran between 39 and 48 percent.
Steve Holmes, TUSD's assistant superintendent for teaching and learning, said the lower failure rates during the earlier period were due to Hawk Time, a special program developed for the school by Principal John Michel.
Fifty-five teachers received $5,000 stipends and essentially became student advocates through Hawk Time, Michel said.
"Teachers were assigned 12 to about 18 students. You were with that kid from sixth to eighth grade," he said.
Teachers met with their Hawk Time students at the beginning of each day during an extra advisory period. Together, they reviewed schoolwork, kept an eye on scores and grades, met with parents, made home visits and intervened with other teachers when necessary. The teacher-student relationship was consistent during their time at Hohokam, Michel said.
Hohokam lost funding for the program in 2004. All the assistant principals are now administrators elsewhere, and at the most, Michel estimates, one-quarter of that staff remains.
● Sunnyside has created a summer program to target low-performing students as they make the transition from eighth grade to high school.
Students facing retention are automatically placed in the program, called LEAP, for Language ! and Algebra Preparation, which will enter its third year this summer, said Jan Vesely, Sunnyside's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
"Completion is hinged on a number of factors, most prominently attendance," said N.J. Utter, a secondary curriculum and instruction specialist. "Most students are in the boat that they're in because they have been unable to get to school on a regular basis."
It's unclear what effect the LEAP program has had, as Sunnyside only has electronic records of student grades going back to 2005, and a review of records showed mixed results.
● Six years ago, 51 percent of freshmen at Marana High School, 12000 W. Emigh Road, failed one or more classes, the Star investigation found.
Principal Jim Doty had his staff research smaller learning communities and the effect they could have on student achievement at Marana High.
Today, the school has four academies based on career paths that include courses from the core curriculum, such as science and English, and elective courses that support a specific field of study.
Student achievement already is evident. Last spring, only 29 percent of freshmen failed one or more classes.
All ninth-grade students must take the Freshman Foundations class, in which students learn about time management, organization, note taking, communication, responsibility, test taking and study skills.
"I was really nervous to come to the high school, because I thought there was going to be so much homework, and it was just going to be really hard and stressful," Marana freshman Mary Gaughan said. "Freshman Foundations really helps. It gets you more comfortable."
"Everything we can"
But even if successful intervention models are adopted in all Tucson schools, some still say the problem won't be solved. They say the answer is systemic change.
State Superintendent Horne supports a three-tiered approach.
In the short term, school boards must make clear to teachers that if a student has not mastered the skill, the teacher should retain the student and the school board will support the teacher's decision, he said. Secondly, Horne said, the district should implement a rule that if students don't pass the state AIMS test in eighth grade, they don't go to high school.
"You have to phase that in," Horne said. "Then the long-term solution is once the public accepts high-stakes tests in high school, we should implement it in other grades, as they have done it in other states."
Recent school reform has focused on elementary and high schools, said Holmes, the TUSD assistant superintendent, while middle schools have not been addressed adequately.
A glimpse at TUSD's list of underperforming schools highlights the issue. More than half are middle schools.
"Middle school becomes the crux," TUSD Superintendent Roger Pfeuffer said. "It is the shortest amount of time that you have the kids. You only have them three years."
When middle school students arrive without a handle on the basics, they can quickly spiral into multiple failures during the short span of middle school, Pfeuffer said. When they arrive at high school, ready or not, the state's requirement of credits to graduate kicks in, somewhat relieving teachers of the ability to promote failing kids.
But a lack of credits turns to discouragement and possibly retention, and can lead to dropping out, experts say.
While TUSD has an intervention system in place — it runs the gamut from after-school tutoring to individual education plans and alternative programs — Pfeuffer said that student success involves the young person, teachers, parents and community members. In some ways, he said, school officials are only part of the formula. Student success is a shared responsibility.
"Eventually, somewhere down the line, we have to say we've done everything we can," Pfeuffer said, speaking for educators.
Despite existing research, policy and intervention, the problems of social promotion — and poorly educated students — persist.
In January, an e-mail from TUSD Principal Supervisor Ross Sheard went to Valencia Middle School teachers and counselors regarding last year's eighth-graders, now freshmen at Cholla Magnet High School.
"The study skills, regular attendance and academic preparation that take place in middle school is critical for students to be successful in high school," Sheard wrote.
His e-mail said that more than half of this year's freshman class at Cholla had one or more F's.
● Contact reporter George B. Sánchez at 573-4195 or at gsanchez@azstarnet.com.
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