Geoffrey Canada gave a TED talk recently in which he did two reprehensible things:
1. He boasted that his charter school has a 100% graduation rate.
2. He used his talk to knock the public schools.
Gary Rubinstein, the extraordinary detective of miracle-school boasting, checked the New York state website. Canada did not tell the truth.
After reviewing the data, Gary writes: “So the 62 graduates in 2012 had been the 97 6th graders in 2006. This does not represent a 0% dropout rate, as Canada implied to John Legend, but a 36% dropout rate.” The graduation rate is not 100%, as Canada claimed, but 64%.
But there is an even dirtier secret that Gary discovered. Canada has TWICE kicked out an entire class. A few years ago, Paul Tough wrote a book about Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone called “Whatever It Takes.” Tough tells the story of Canada firing the entire entering class–three years after they started sixth grade–because their persistently low test scores embarrassed the bankers and lawyers on his board.
When I debated Geoffrey Canada at Education Nation in 2011, I asked him why he kicked out the class, and he denied it. He said that he had closed the school because its performance was not good enough. That won him a round of applause from the sympathetic audience, but I knew he had not closed the school. Paul Tough’s description of the mass ouster of the entire class was detailed and clear. He fired the eighth graders in May, when it was difficult for them to find high schools that had room for them in New York City’s choice system.
Let me be clear. I admire the work of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The zone offers children and families a broad array of social and medical services. It is a well-funded cradle-to-college-or-career pipeline. HCZ does what all schools should do, if they had the money to do it. I personally like Geoffrey Canada. He is a very likable guy, but he feels compelled to make these outrageous boasts because (I think) it is what the corporate reformers on his board want to believe.
HCZ has the resources to offer amazing facilities and services to those who enroll in its charter schools. Three years go, according to an article in the New York Times, HCZ had $200 million in the bank, and some billionaires on the board, so the school can afford to help children in ways that public schools cannot afford.
“In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school.” Students also get free health care and dental checkups.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the schools in Harlem offered the same services and small classes? The HCZ high school has classes under 15, with two teachers, but the typical high school class in the NYC public schools is 32-35, with one teacher.
Canada is blessed with the resources that public schools in NYC can only dream about.
Nonetheless, Canada used his time on TED to lambaste the public schools for failing to match his success.
I just wish that Canada would use his celebrity and media access to advocate that all public schools should have the resources he has, instead of castigating them for not being as good as the school he runs, with such munificent provisions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why wouldn’t he lambast public schools. It’s what provides him the means to earn $439,000 p/year according to form 990.
Better 65% than 10%, it’s is a start.
If Trump wins this election
Maybe J.Canada should be
in line to contribute his insight.
Mark Goldsmith should be
call to give his insight on the
prison systems return of inmate’s
problem.
He has a very common sense
answer, which he has introduced
So HCZ has all the resources that the liberal side of the debate have been asking for: lots of money, social services and free health care, and yet they have to lie to cover up their 36% drop out rate. Are they just too damned demanding or do we need to reevaluate the solutions being offered on both sides?
Yes — we need to reevaluate the solutions being offered on both sides. That is, “solutions” which focus only on what schools should be doing are no solutions at all.
Privatization is not going to change the fact that we have nearly one-fourth of our nation’s children living in poverty.
Lowering standards for educators (teachers, principals and superintendents), like our legislature and state board of education did in Indiana, will not improve student achievement. It will simply weaken the teaching profession and discourage “the best and the brightest” from choosing a career in education.
Blaming teachers unions and teachers for “bad teachers” doesn’t change the fact that children come to school with problems outside the ability of schools to overcome.
This doesn’t mean that schools need to keep teachers who aren’t doing their job. It doesn’t mean that schools shouldn’t improve instructional approaches…and it doesn’t mean that we should ignore appropriate evaluations of students, teachers, and administrators.
It does mean, though, that we need to expand the concept of “school reform” to include social, health, and economic reform. Politicians, pundits and policy-makers need to accept their responsibility for the factors which contribute to low school achievement.
One thing that always bothers me about stories like this… there’s always someone who wants to “just believe.” I understand the need for a positive attitude… but there’s a positive attitude, and then there’s denial. This runs rampant in the reform movement… this thought, that if you “believe it,” you can “achieve it.” Nice sentiment, but there’s a psychological term called “magical thinking” being practiced here. There’s a thought process that people engage in where they believe that they “speak things into being.” This is where I draw the line… saying something DOES NOT CAUSE IT! Just because you think it, just because you say it, DOES NOT MEAN IT WILL HAPPEN!!! Does this make me a pessimist?
It makes you a critical thinker, which is antithetical to “The Secret,” which Oprah promotes as well. Yes, it is magical thinking and, sadly, that fosters false promises. If I only had a dollar for everytime someone believed and set out to earn even a fraction of Oprah’s kind of wealth.
I think the increasing disparity between the common man and the super-rich in this country, including the millions of college graduates who are unemployed and under-employed today, are clear evidence that it takes a whole lot more than a positive attitude and believing to achieve upward mobility even into the middle class.
And, Chi, the way of the privatized schools is and will be no critical thinking allowed. They will have their child–then adult–automatons.
Hannah: good points.
But, IMHO, we need to make an Edubullyspeak-to-English translation. We hear “if you believe it, you can achieve it” and according to common usage it sounds very uplifting and benevolent. However, every profession [licit and illicit] has its own specialized jargon and can assign new or different meanings to terms in general usage. In this case, what the edubullies are really saying is “if you believe it, you can [help me achieve] it” with the first “it” being “my bs” and the second “it” being “wealth, celebrity and influence beyond my wildest dreams.”
And when these folks talk to each other, they know exactly what they’re saying, even if we don’t quite understand what they are really getting at. **See Diane’s comment below re the “Education Nation” parlay where Mr Canada spoke.**
Thank you again for your posting.
🙂
Canada should be thanking the public schools. They took on the students he fired.
Just grossly unfair to grade them as “failing” for providing universal public education, when charters obviously have a completely different mission.
There’s a word for a school that can fire a whole class. The word is “private”. They’ve set up a publicly-funded private school system.
This is man is just another reform bs artist. This act is really played out.
The sad thing is that we have people like Bill Gates looking to make another billion using liars like Geoffrey Canada to cover up his new scheme with his message of supporting teachers and improving graduation rates. Canada begins recruiting his students before many of them are born, educating parents about what is required so that his school can be successful. What a novel idea, imagine of we forced parents to be educated about what makes a public school successful. Funny thing about numbers, we can make them say what ever we want and Bloomberg is a perfect example of that. My current graduating class started out with 100 freshman, now we are looking at 35 possible graduates. Will it be 35 out of a 100 at the end of the year or 35/35? using Canada’s formula, 35/35
Can someone follow the fired 8th graders?
See where they ended up? That might be really interesting.
Also, it recently came to light in Ohio that charters are closing pursuant to the state law when they score poorly and then simply reorganizing (legally) changing the name on the building and re-opening.
“Closing” a charter seems to be a very fluid concept here. Might be worth taking claims of a school that was “closed” and reopened (as Canada claims here) with a grain of salt. If the closing is simply legalistic redefinition of an entity.
And when they reopen they get new start up charter grants from U.S.Ed and elsewhere. In New Orleans, New Schools for New Orleans and The New Teacher Project administer many of those grants and get a cut for their services. Why would they want the schools to succeed?
“Can someone follow the fired 8th graders?”
It would be great is there is any follow-up on those students – some of them might have graduated elsewhere.
Are students typically forced to transfer to another school when a charter school is closed and then reopened?
Brighter Choice charter school in our area just took a full page add out in our newspaper stating they provide an urban public school education!
I’m getting direct mail advertisements for charter schools that are 60 miles away. I haven’t seen this before. We don’t have any local charter schools.
I’m wondering where they bought the mailing list and whether it’s a list of parents with kids in public schools.
Could it be the inBloom connection? They store everything including our blood types and our childhood dog’s name. Nothing, NOTHING, is confidential since Gates/Murdock teamed up and turned our kids’ 400 data points into GOLD$$$$$!
Diane, you should add one additional fact. Even with all those resources by the wonderful standard of test scores Canada’s kids perform worse than the city average. I do not remember all the details, but he has no basis for the outrageous claims that he makes when all the facts are known.
An additional concern that I have is the instant credibility provided by having the TED Talks venue to spread this misinformation. TED Talks carries a reputation that has been beyond reproach. What filters do they use to make sure their sponsored presentations truth runs much deeper that the celebrity/wealth status of their speakers (i.e.Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, etc.) The power of the venue plays into the “just believe” comment from above. I am one who has been very impressed by the TED Talks series and now am questioning the perceived apolitical status of this venue.
Mark, I have come to the conclusion that Ted Talks is the FOX NEWS of the American liberal class. Remember what TED stands for: technology, entertainment and design. There is a built in ideological slant in both the overwhelming percentage of speakers and audience. There is a reason monopolist monsters like Bill Gates love it.
HCZ resource levels, teacher compensation, class sizes and relative outcomes are included in this post: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/what-do-the-available-data-tell-us-about-nyc-charter-school-teachers-their-jobs/
Gary also points to the extremely high teacher turnover. I watched your debate with him at EduNation and he even said that the wrap around services were not the main element but his ability to fire people. I don’t think he really has to since they leave on their own anyway. High turnover is indicative of chaotic schools.
Norm, at the “Education Nation” parley, I felt that Canada was playing to his audience and funders, so he knew he would get a positive reaction by claiming that he had the guts to close his school (though he hadn’t) and by claiming that the key to his success was not the heavy expenditures on wraparound services but rather his ability to fire teachers. I recall that Melinda Gates was in the studio audience. These are the memes that his funders like.
When I first read about the Ohio charters being closed and then re-opening I thought it was simply a way around the law governing closure of charters. Now I’m wondering if closing down and then re-opening (same school, different name and different legal configuration) is a way of getting rid of students who perform poorly on standardized tests, and starting over with a new batch:
“Charter schools also are permitted to close their doors and shut down operations when cited for multiple violations, only to re-open the next day under a different sponsor, in a different building under a different name and continue to receive our tax dollars.
As charters close, oftentimes at mid-year, hundreds of children are shuffled back to their public schools without adequate records and a significant loss of instructional time. Just as tragic is the students’ loss of community and social connections, which contributes to academic deficits and delays.”
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2013/04/06/charters-dont-deserve-state-windfall.html
This is terrible! And I wonder what Canada (or other people supporting the current practice of charter schools) would say to justify shuffling students like this.
Even if all 100% of the 80-something students graduated, it’s nothing to brag about – this is among how many students in NYC? Claiming that this model of operation works in general based on such evidence is nonsense.
Regarding resources available to Canada: his nearly $400,000 package of salary and benefits.
Step back and ask why HCZ is the one to provide healthcare to its students. Step back and ask why there’s a deficit in quality education across this country. The reason educators are bickering is because we’re fighting for the scraps from the tables of billionaires.
If only the extra per-pupil funding HCZ had spent could have followed those ‘fired’ students to NYC’s public schools! The billionaires’ philanthropy could have continued to do the children some good, instead of coldly dumping them because their scores were embarrassing. Just a little of their largesse, and the students could have continued with after-school tutoring, medical and dental care, if only they had a commitment to child — instead of to winning at test scores. All of the children may not have been able to attend an Ivy, but they could have been prepared for high school and career.
Correction: that word is villainthropy. Remember it. Use it.
Geoffrey Canada. Michelle Rhee. Wendy Kopp. Joel Klein. Bill Gates…..the list goes on.
They are all charlatans of the first order.
Sadly, there are plenty of people who (1) pay attention to them and what they say (which is very often flat-out wrong), and who (2) are willing to work with them (that is to say, who are willing to cash in).
Sucker born every minute??
The Ted Radio Hour (NPR; March 11, 2013) had physician Brian Goldman discuss the need for doctors to reveal/share their greatest mistakes — the best successes often come from the biggest (and most fatal) mistakes — a need to change the culture of the medical community to encourage medical transparency. I often think that the medical and education communities have much to learn from each other — we are both in the field of working with people, not statistics (ideally).
In an ironic twist, Bloomberg reporters were spying on the US government. And its news competitors. And even the Pope. Mama mia!
“The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are also investigating whether reporters tracked employees. Bloomberg terminals sit in the highest echelons of power — including central banks, rival news organizations, Congress and even the Vatican.”
Charter, choice, private, chance are all doing the same thing as traditional public is forced to do. They are just better at playing the age old games of creating the “best” schools by only keeping the highest scoring kids. Immoral;!
Yes, this is the “secret” of all private, parochial and magnet schools. “Everyone” knows it too, except maybe the impoverished parents who are being conned into thinking their kids will miraculously get a better education if they just move them to the school down the street. The lucky ones will, but the rest will be further marginalized as they are deemed not good enough.
So Canada is a shameless lying self-promoter in the style of Michelle Rhee, why am I not surprised. As for TED, oy. I first found out about TED from their Saturday show on NPR, called the TED Hour. Throughout the show the acronym was repeated over and over and over; TED this, TED that, TED, TED, TED, TED, TED, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. At no point did they explain what the letters in TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) stood for. TED is a kind of cult, very self-congratulatory, very peacockishly preening, lots of self-promotion, self-laudatory and painfully self-promotional. You would think they had invented the cure for cancer with all the posturing and gushing. In short, TED is vastly overrated.
I agree entirely Joe.
Even with those “munificent provisions” Canada cannot “make” students score high on standardized tests. So, he sends “his failing kids” back to the public schools, then insults the public schools for accepting them.
And all to please those with money.
By Canada’s “firing” an entire class, as far as his schools go, it is not his schools that are failing the students– it’s the students failing “his” schools– and “his” investors.
Kinda blows a hole through the reformy logic of “no failing kids, just failing schools,” eh?
Canada may be able to claim a 100% graduation rate depending on how the state calculates it. In AZ, if a student graduates from ANY school within four years it is counted as 100% graduation rate. So, the students who dropped out of Canada’s school may have graduated elsewhere and he can still claim them–if that makes sense. That is why AZ charters can carry on about their success.
I had read that Canada had fired 18 teachers in Feb. because the studetns in a particular school did not test well enough.
Geoffrey “Elmer Gantry” Canada provided us with Waiting For Superman, the Triumph of the Will of the anti-teacher and anti-education movement. He runs around with Michelle Rhee promoting his anti-tenure, anti- union and anti-public education agenda. His TED talk was analogous to a used car salesman hawking lemons. His Harlem Childrens’ Zone is merely the Potemkin Village of the school priviatization movement.
If I remember correctly, Canada did tell the truth at the beginning of the HCZ. He definitely admitted expelling the poorly performing eighth graders for low achievement and even admitted that when his “miracle scoring” students took a different standardized test (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) they scored much lower than they did on the state test that they were “prepared for.” Also, I always remember an article from Fast Company that told how the reporter found the students in history class studying from test prep booklets instead of textbooks. She was not impressed. And Canada admitted that he would not send his own son to his charter school.
Here is what I find so baffling: Why did a Harvard researcher just accept the test scores presented by Canada and then declare his school a miracle? Does anyone have insight about this? Thanks.
David Brooks wrote an article about HCZ a few years back and declared it was a miracle school that had closed the achievement gap. But it wasn’t true.
Forgive me if I sound naive, Diane, but do you think these esteemed journalists and others are lying, or do you think they are just accepting what they are told without asking any questions or doing any investigating?
I am truly baffled by the whole thing.
Forgive me, Linda, but if you studied the interviewers tone and body language and even choice of words direct toward Geoffrey and compared to the same directed toward Diane, there was a clear bias against Diane.
And if I were sitting in Diane’s seat, I would have posed to the host, “Are you are here to moderate and interview, or are you here to editorialize and pose your own views. . . please clarify for me and the audience.”
Diane, you outshone Mr. Canada, who I used to admire but now see how his good intentions and propert philosphies get drowned out by his hypocrisy and his contempt for unions, collective bargaining, and most of all, his unwillingness to acknowledge the ills of poverty and to advocate for a more equitable society where wealth is distributed within some balanced reasonable way.
At $400K plus a year, Canada choses to let his wealth define his values about the poor. He can be and has been bought.
Robert Rendo
http://thetruthoneducationreform.blogspot.com/?view=snapshot
It’s incredible to hear dereformers continue to repeat innovation innovation without giving any specifics as to what kind of innovation we are looking for. A charter school itself does not mean innovation if they are simply teaching the same way but expelling their undesirable students. The fact that public school principals don’t throw out the bad students isn’t for a lack of innovation on their part.
We actually like kids. His words, right?
If I recall, he scraped his plans for a middle school because his elementary students weren’t “making the grade”. But let’s take his side for a second…..If the performance of his school wasn’t making the grade, why would he close it instead of trying to fix it. Or, is that the new paradigm–close a school instead of working to make it better?
Hey, if it’s not profitable then all else doesn’t matter!
Linda Johnson: As to your question, I would wager that what you wrote about “just accepting what they are told w/o asking any ?? or doing any investigations” is, unfortunately, most often the case. A few years ago, a magazine journalist wrote an article about all the schools in our metropolitan area, One school district’s student/teacher ration stuck out like a sore thumb (& this was the district we resided in and where my daughter went to school!)–15-to-1. 15-to-1 for a large public school district?! What, were they counting all the crossing guards, administrators, custodians and lunch personnel?! My neighbors and I knew, for a fact, that not ONE of the schools in this district had a 15-to-1 student/teacher ratio! (And, I can tell you that other districts exaggerated their numbers, as well, but not one of them this blatantly!) So–of course I called the reporter, and he said, “That’s what they told me,”
and refused to look into it any further.
Thank you. I agree that this is what’s happening but what a difference from the days of Woodward and Bernstein!
Journalists these days seem to be nothing more than stenographers who print whatever those who pay them the most want printed.
He has more than $400,000 reasons not to tell the truth, and a reputation built on half-truths.
Charters love to kick out their low achieving students and then the publics bear the brunt by a sudden influx of untaught kids right before standardized testing time. Last school year about 200 students from Capitol High, a charter in Baton Rouge Louisiana, put out their low achievers who were sent over to Tara High, a public school that had previously had a very good reputation. Chaos ensued and a first year teacher I knew made his final decision to stop doing K-12 and ran to a junior college. I had been trying to keep him there all year and thought I had him convinced to give it more time, because I knew in the long run he would be a good teacher and a good role model.
I couldn’t watch the TED video of Canada because I was too annoyed, after watching the Education Next video, by the way he talked to Diane, because he kept increasing the volume of his voice –as if people are more likely to believe half-truths and lies if you shout them.
This is so disgusting. I hope he is taken down a few notches. Give him his due for creating a school that demands excellence. But he gets to choose his students. Don’t berate public education. Canada is not public education and he should realize the difference.
Diane,
Do you know what the per-student dollar spending is at HCZ and what it is at a Harlem Public School? I am curious how these objective figures compare.
I think I saw a figure of $5K/student on their website. Any thoughts on where to find/calculate this figure for public schools in Harlem?
-Larry
Larry Velez,
Bruce Baker studied spending and other issues at NYC charters, compared to district schools: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/what-do-the-available-data-tell-us-about-nyc-charter-school-teachers-their-jobs/
HCZ and KIPP spend much more than district schools.
Charter schools should not be allowed to pick their students. The DOE should send kids to them just as they are sent to the Public Schools – all comers. They should all have the same resources and the same books. The only thing they should be able to pick are the teachers. Then we would see which schools are better and who is learning/teaching better. As a retired teacher, I can tell you that it is not the teachers or the teaching that is primarily at fault, it is the lack of discipline in the classroom and throughout the school; the unnecessary pressure from on high by administration and officials who listen to the yammering of so-called experts; in the high schools it is also the absence of pen, pencil and notebook on the part of the students and often insufficient or no TEXTBOOKS at all. Review books, especially in science classes cannot take the place of textbooks. Books taken home rarely make it back to school; those that do were never opened, and no consequences for not returning them or for the lack of pen, pencil and notebooks. No one, not even Einstein could learn without writing down something. Einstein wrote plenty. Students and, I’m afraid DOE, want the learning to be by osmosis. Even technology needs something to be written down. So, goodluck to this new form of basic education. You should expect more terminological inexactitudes.
Geoffrey Canada, despite many of his more laudable efforts, has become a puppet of the corporatized education reform movement. Paul Tough seems to think that applauding “tough love” measures like beating up on public schools and kicking out low performing students is the way to go. TED’s no longer the excellent adventure for “new” innovations and ideas that it claimed to be just a few years ago. Welcome to the century of regression.
Saw the TED talk today. He is right and wrong. As soon as it comes down to money he is wrong. He does prove what I tell a;l my teacher friends. Educators should not be in charge of education. They should educate. Marines should be in charge of the system.