Claims made in last week’s filing by MALDEF on behalf of the Mendoza plaintiffs in the TUSD desegregation case have raised questions about the accuracy of the studies done by TUSD and University of Arizona employees.
MALDEF claims that District’s “participation in culturally relevant courses of instruction focused on Mexican American cultural and historical experiences improve students’ graduation rates and test scores.” They cite a report done by MAS founder Augie Romero and one conducted this past year by University of Arizona staff.
Romero’s study, which MALDEF claims found “that low income students who had enrolled in MAS courses had a 7.8% higher graduation rate than low-income students who were not enrolled in MAS courses. It also found that very low income students who had enrolled in MAS courses had a 14.7% higher graduation rate than very low income students who were not enrolled in MAS courses. In the 2009-10 school year, seniors who took MAS courses had a 10.9% higher graduation rate than their peers who had not enrolled in the courses.”
What MALDEF fails to tell to the Court is that Romero’s study was debunked by numerous scholars including the District’s own statistician. The most glaring manipulation of numbers was the comparison of graduation rates of MAS seniors, to those of lower level non-MAS students. Statistically, students in their senior year will graduate at higher rates when compared to a wider pool of students on lower grades.
In fact, TUSD’s statistician, David Scott found in his study of Romero’s study, “Disaggregating the ACT scores of the 2011 graduating class reveals that Hispanic students who attempted MAS course credit scored on average 1 to 2 scale score points below Hispanic students who did not take MAS courses.”
MALDEF then cites an analysis requested by Willis Hawley, the Special Master in the case. According to MALDEF, that study was supposed to examine “the relationship between participation in the TUSD MAS courses and student achievement, including That study, An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Mexican American Studies Participation on Student Achievement within Tucson Unified School District, submitted June 20, 2012, by Nolan L. Cabrera, Ph.D., Jeffrey F. Milem, Ph.D., Ronald W. Marx, Ph.D., University of Arizona College of Education, has been challenged by statisticians and academics for its skewed results.
Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., Department Head and 21st Century Chair in Education Reform at the University of Arkansas advised Doug MacEachren of the Arizona Republic that the “study still suffers from selection bias. That is, students who choose to take this elective course are different from students who do not. Any difference in outcomes may be caused by the characteristics of students who would choose to take a course, not necessarily the course itself.
In fact, this study exacerbates the selection problem by focusing only on students at schools where MAS was offered so that they would have a chance to take the course: “To address the concerns raised about the comparison samples in earlier studies, the analyses described in this report assessed the impact of MAS participation on demographically-similar students within the same schools.” The virtue of including students who never had the chance to take MAS is that their non-participation was not a function of self-selection. By focusing only on schools where MAS was an option, the only reason students would not take MAS is that they chose not to. Again, this seriously confounds the effects of being the kind of kid who chooses to take an elective course with the effects of taking the course itself.”
The study has also been called into question according to education experts, “because the percentage of identified special education students in the non-MAS control group is significantly higher…in some cases more than double…the percentage of Special Education students in the MAS group.” Cabrerra claimed to MacEachren that the study controlled for those differences, but he also claimed that his bias for Mexican American Studies did not impact the study. He asserted that anyone would find the same results, to which other educators responded, “yes, if you compared MAS students, who were not special education students to special education students, you would most likely arrive at the same result.”
Cabrerra Report percentages of Special Education students in the samples for each year:
| Year | MAS | Non-MAS |
| 1 | 10.2 | 15.6 |
| 2 | 10.2 | 21.3 |
| 3 | 11.4 | 18.8 |
| 4 | 9.5 | 20.8 |
Still others question Milem’s work. Milem testified about the success of the classes in the appeal in which Romero’s study and the audit were exposed as faulty. Then he created a study to support his stated opinion. As one long time educator said, “even at the cost of gross sampling errors that make the study nothing more than misleading propaganda. The inappropriate research methodology is self-serving at best.”
It serves his employer as well. The University’s College of Education has been a beneficiary of the TUSD MAS largess over the years. In the appeal before Judge Kowal, Jeffrey Milem testified that the Transformative Education Institute, founded by Augie Romero, and sponsored by TUSD’s Mexican American Studies department brought the University, “Some of the country’s most outstanding scholars in the areas of transformative education and critical pedagogy.”
“We’re really, really happy with our partnership with the College of Education,” said Augustine Romero during the last joint Transformative Education Institute conference. “When (the college’s) dean, Ronald Marx, came on board he was really looking for different ways to establish a stronger relationship,” he said. “What it means for us is this stronger connection between the College of Education and TUSD.”
The “Transformative Education Institute” presented experts in an analysis of policy, theory, ideology and policy development generally done through a Marxist perspective. Indeed, Marxist transformative education theory was highlighted at the summer conference. Socialist/Marxist transformative policy for schooling and education including Freirean perspectives is offered to educators in TUSD.
Desegregation monies were used to purchase massive volumes of guest lecturers’ books to be handed out to attendees at no cost and for lecturers’ speaking fees.
The monetary benefits didn’t stop at the conferences. TUSD’s Mexican American Studies department and the University of Arizona had a revolving door. Students from TUSD’s MAS classes would enter the university’s MAS program, and then those graduates would be employed in one form or another by TUSD.
MALDEF then cites the discredited Cambdium audit. MALDEF claims, “A curriculum audit by Cambium Learning of TUSD’s Mexican American Studies Department from March 7, 2011 through May 2, 2011 commissioned by the Arizona Department of Education (“Cambium Audit”) supports these findings. Among the Cambium Audit’s findings are that “[Mexican American Studies Department (“MASD”)] programs are designed to improve student achievement based on the audit team’s findings of valuable course descriptions aligned with state standards….”
MALDEF fails to mention that Judge Kowal ascertained from extensive testimony that that Cambium was “highly irregular.” While auditors clearly stated that they saw only a small fraction of the class materials and the classes themselves, they determined that the classes should be reproduced and offered to more students.
However, according to testimony, auditors only reviewed 9 out of 180 possible lesson units. One witness concluded that it is inconceivable that this 5% of the curriculum could constitute a representative sample from which to draw any conclusions. The audit itself found that, “3 of the 9 units contained “an overabundance” of political material.”
John Stollar testified that Cambium’s work could not be considered an audit by most standards, “I don’t believe that they had sufficient information.”
According to testimony the district had blocked efforts to conduct a complete audit. Contrary to instructions, TUSD administrators gave Mexican-American Studies teachers a heads up on the timing of classroom observation. At the time, Assistant Superintendent Maria Merconi discussed her concerns about this in an email to Superintendent Pedicone’s assistant Karen Bynum. In addition to providing those teachers who were observed the necessary notice to “sanitize” their lessons, Superintendent Pedicone also allowed the MAS Director and MAS teachers to refuse to cooperate with auditors and ADE investigators.
Evidence showed that Abel Morado of Tucson High School went so far as to allow the MAS teachers themselves to hand pick students for the focus group portion of the audit. The ideal focus group was to be comprised of past and present MAS students randomly selected by principals. Yet, THS Principal Abel Morado emailed Mexican American Studies Director Sean Arce, and MAS teachers Curtis Acosta and Maria Frederico Brummer, asking them to “select students for focus groups.”
Despite this evidence, MALDEF claims “Among the Cambium Audit’s conclusions is that between 2005 and 2010, students who failed the reading and writing AIMS subtests in their sophomore year and then took a MAS course during their junior year “were indeed more likely than the comparison group to pass these two AIMS subjects by the end of their junior year.” Romero’s debunked study is cited as the source.
MALDEF is not alone in passing off faulty studies, in a column this past weekend, Doug Mac Eachren with the Arizona Republic points out the Special Master’s willingness to do the same. “Hawley took months of testimony on revising the status plan but seems to have enshrined with biblical status a study produced by a group of University of Arizona education-college professors.”
MacEachren asks “and what did Hawley’s chosen UA ed-school profs conclude in their study?
Why, it looked at four years of the hyperpolitical MAS classes and concluded, contra anything ever published in honest academic inquiry, that 11th- and 12th-graders suddenly experienced a life-changing academic epiphany. As a result of taking classes steeped in Marxist theories of oppression and revisionist history condemning the vile, plague-bearing “European invader,” they magically became better students.”
MacEachren concludes that “the new study by UA ed-school profs is a spiffed-up version of the infamous “nine cohort studies” cobbled together by former (and, perhaps, future) Mexican-American Studies director, Augustine Romero.”
MacEachren notes that the news study’s authors include “Nolan Cabrera, who specializes in “theories of inequality, oppression and stratification.” His dissertation focused on “Male, hegemonic Whiteness in higher education.” Another, Jeffrey Milem, served as an expert witness for the MAS program in court, arguing the wonderfulness of “critical race theory,” which puts racial issues at the center of all education.
MacEachren asks whether the judge or a anyone else “really believe these guys were going to produce a study that concluded classes laced with Paulo Friere’s Marxist oppression theories would not cure all education ills? Really?”
The public will soon find out. The deadline for responses in the desegregation matter was last Friday. The matter is now under advisement by Judge Bury.
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