Lance Hill reports that Steve Barr has hired a principal at a salary of $115,000 for a charter school with an enrollment of 13 freshman students. Perhaps the reason enrollment is so low is that Barr hyped the schools as “the most dangerous school in America” on a TV show in Oprah’s channel. Some parents pulled their kids out. But now Barr can demonstrate how he “turned around” the “most dangerous school in America.”

Categories Charter Schools, New Orleans

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Vinh says:

July 21, 2013 at 4:18 pm

What does it mean that a floundering charter can be merged with another charter in the original article?

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- Louisiana Purchase says:
  
  July 21, 2013 at 11:23 pm
  
  They’ll move the entire party to another charter school that has more students. What happens to the $115,000 principal then?
  
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Linda Johnson says:

July 21, 2013 at 4:38 pm

The American people have been preoccupied but they are not stupid. It’s only a matter of time before these hustlers are deprived of hard-earned tax money.

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- Kathy says:
  
  July 21, 2013 at 5:20 pm
  
  Hoping Linda is right about the pre-occupation because we are nearly a nation occupied BY these hustlers. That is precisely what they are and so refreshing to get the terminology straight. Hustling the very lives of our children is despicable.
  
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schoolgal says:

July 21, 2013 at 7:11 pm

Meanwhile if a teacher has less than 35 students in a class, all hell breaks loose.

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- Cosmic Tinker says:
  
  July 21, 2013 at 8:15 pm
  
  The TFA “teacher” most often shown at the school on the OWN show always had considerably less than a dozen students in her class and she was constantly overwhelmed and crying.
  
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- teachingeconomist says:
  
  July 21, 2013 at 8:53 pm
  
  The NCES reports that the pupal teacher ratio has pretty steadily declined from about 27 to 1 in 1955 to 16 to 1 in 2010. Is the NCES just completely wrong?
  
  Link: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp#info
  
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  - Elder Wise says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 9:32 pm
    
    The statistics for class sizes and ratios that I’ve read don’t resemble my personal experiences in urban and suburban public schools in the 50s and 60s.
    
    Class ratios at schools I attended in my urban school district ranged from 45 – 65 to 1, while classes I attended in a suburban school district ranged from 10 – 20 to 1.
    
    I don’t know if that disparity has been accounted for in national statistics but, in my professional experiences, urban and suburban school districts have continued to have disparate class sizes and ratios in my area.
  - teachingeconomist says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 9:48 pm
    
    I found one table breaking down pupil teacher ratio by location. The highest is 16.8 per teacher in large cities, the lowest was 12.8 per teacher in remote rural areas. It is a bit dated as the table is for 2004-6.
    
    The table is here:http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_086.asp
  - janietta lusk says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 10:22 pm
    
    It has been my experience that tables like that take the number of students in the school and divide by the number of “educators” in the school to get the ratio.
    Unfortunately, that doesn’t give a very accurate indication of the true ratio of students to teachers IN the classroom, especially when some of the adults used for the ratio don’t actually teach in a classroom.
    So, the answer to your question is complicated. Yes, the NCES is wrong, but not completely wrong. It is actually showing the thing we often complain about…money is being siphoned away from the classroom and into other things, like testing administrators and other jobs (some actually helpful, others-not so much) which count in the total number of teachers at a school. That makes it look like the ratio has gone down, when the classroom teacher is actually seeing the same number of students.
  - teachingeconomist says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 10:25 pm
    
    Is there a way to know what data at the NCES is completely fraudulent and what data is not?
  - teachingeconomist says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 10:38 pm
    
    I did find information about the average number of students in a classroom. For elementary it declined from 29 in 1961 to 22 in 2006. For secondary it increased from 27 to 29 over the same period.
    
    Total number of students a teacher taught declined from 132 to 87 for secondary school teachers and departmentalized elementary school teachers.
    
    Are these numbers more in line with your experience?
    
    The table is here: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_074.asp
  - Louisiana Purchase says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 11:25 pm
    
    The problem with those “studies” is that they count every certified teacher in the building and then divide by the number of students. That includes administrators, counselors, librarians and other support services, and special education, as well as rural schools. Utah states its “average” class size is 22. I never have less than 30.
  - teachingeconomist says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 11:43 pm
    
    Unfortunately I have not found the data by state. Did you look at the second table I linked to? Again a bit dated, but the best I could find.
    
    There was a post a few days ago by a teacher in Los Angeles saying that class size varied a lot in his school. Special needs classes were very small while the main line courses were large. Might this be why the mean class size is different from your experience?
  - Elder Wise says:
    
    July 22, 2013 at 2:38 am
    
    States often have considerably lower caps on class sizes and ratios for students with special needs in self-contained classrooms .
    
    Also, when a special ed student is integrated in a general education class, he might have an aide assigned to work with him –and only him, not with other kids– for part or all of the day.
KrazyTA says:

July 21, 2013 at 8:18 pm

Anyone else wondering where the “too much money is spent on schools” edubullies are when Diane posts something like this?

Their silence is deafening.

🙂

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- FLERP! says:
  
  July 21, 2013 at 9:33 pm
  
  Are they around otherwise on this blog? I don’t recall them.
  
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  - teachingeconomist says:
    
    July 21, 2013 at 10:14 pm
    
    You are not supposed to pivot the cameras during special orders.
  - Megan Pledger says:
    
    July 22, 2013 at 2:25 am
    
    Alexander Russo from Scholastic’s “This Week in Education” says he posts here to take us down a peg or two. He must do so anonymously because I’ve never seen any handle that looks like his or any back story that sounds like his.
kayfreshmanenglish says:

July 21, 2013 at 11:24 pm

I have no problem with small classes, esp for at-risk youth. He doesn’t sound interested in motivating them – calling the school “dangerous” reinforces their view of themselves as outcasts. I also hope he hires subject teachers and doesn’t use the small size as an excuse to have them do some/all subjects on the internet. But, I would love to see him campaign for small class size.

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