By Nicholas Trujillo/Arizona Sonora News Listen to the audio version of this story above. In an empty classroom at Tucson’s largest public high school a teacher can’t quite reach the top of the white board. James “Jimmy Grande” Bourland (yes, Grande is his nickname) has used his love of journalism to teach the art of storytelling…
Are Arizona students prepared for college? Recent data says no. The 2016 “Condition of College & Career Readiness” from the ACT testing organization shows Arizona behind the national average in all categories: English, reading, math and science. Only 23 percent of Arizona students meet the benchmarks in all four subjects, compared to 26 percent of…
Natalie Guerrero Hernández wants to be a nurse when she grows up. Possibly. “Medicine. Or also architecture or graphic design. Those are the things I like the most,” she said. Natalie is a soft-spoken, hard-working 14-year-old who gets good grades and has big dreams for her future. She’s thinking about college and the importance…
Lexi Noble, a 10th-grader in the Flagstaff Unified School District, had little time to prepare for a prototype of Arizona’s new civics exam. Her AP World History teacher emailed “us the study questions the day before we took it,” she said. “I was not even aware we were taking the test until I got the email.”…
In the United States, Hispanic students are almost twice as likely to drop out of high school as their peers. Locally in Arizona, where a growing Hispanic citizenry is already a sizeable chunk of the population, the trend in academic underachievement within the demographic is especially troubling. In Tucson, one student who refuses to become…
