G.F. Brandenburg is a retired teacher who keeps close watch on the D.C. Schools and national trends. He is the blogger who discredited Michelle Rhee’s claims about miraculous results when she taught for three years in the early 19902 in a Baltimore school run by a private firm called Educational Alternatives Inc. In a comment about “the KIPP challenge,” he points out that experiments in privatization have been tried and failed. In “the KIPP challenge,” I called on KIPP to take over an entire small district to show what they could do and erase all concerns about skimming and attrition.

This is from Brandenburg:

There was one experiment similar to what DR and AR propose: a baker’s dozen of Baltimore elementary schools were assigned either to Edison/Tesseract or to remain as BPS. A detailed study was done by some researchers at UMBC; links to the study are at my blog. I won’t pretend to recall all of the details, but I recall from what I wrote and graphed a few years ago that there was essentially no difference between the two groups of schools in performance on the tests they were using at the time.

Except at one school where the principal and one of the teachers (one Michelle Rhee) devised a two-fold way of producing a small increase in apparent test score results:
1. Push out enormous percentages of students from one year to the next, and
2. Take advantage of the fact that the testers simply disregard the score of any student whose scores are below a certain level.
At that school, Harlem Park, attrition was much higher than at any other school studied, and the numbers of students whose scores were set aside was much higher than in any other school studied.

We all know that Ms Rhee later rode this small, fraudulent blip in scores to fame and fortune.

And what about this Edison experiment?

The city of Baltimore canceled the experiment because Edison schools actually cost MORE than the regular public schools AND produced results equal to or worse than the regular public schools.