In case you had not noticed, there is a mayoral election going on in New York City.
The Democratic candidate, Bill de Blasio, is the front-runner, currently about 40 points ahead of his Republican challenger Joe Lhota.
De Blasio has made clear that he will strengthen the traditional schools that enroll 95% of the city’s public school students. Charter school advocates are outraged that he would show favoritism to the 95% over their 5%.
Lhota has the financial backing of the Koch brothers, and he has promised to open more charter schools, following Mayor Bloomberg’s lead. Thus far, his promise to be just like Bloomberg hasn’t helped him much in the polls, but he recently released a campaign ad tying himself firmly to the issue of charter schools. When several charter schools closed for the morning so their students, parents, and staff could hold a political rally, marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, Joe Lhota marched with them. He seemed not to realize that this very action demonstrated that charters are not public schools; any public school principal who closed his or her school to march the students in a political action would be fired.
This commentary comes from an insider in the New York City Department of Education, who knows the facts about charter schools in New York City. Forget the claims; forget the boasting; forget the tales of miracle schools.
Read this:
The current mayoral election in New York City has brought long overdue debate and discussion to the real outcomes of corporate-style management of public schools. No longer are New Yorkers compelled to listen to false and exaggerated claims about charter schools. Finally, after years of massaged data and blatantly false claims about charter schools, there is hope for an honest approach. Bill de Blasio, the progressive Democratic candidate, for mayor has committed to creating an equitable system for all children. His opponent has gone on the attack and wants to double-down on the failed education policies of Mike Bloomberg. Let’s take an honest look at charter school performance in New York City.
Do charter schools in New York City allow parents choice? At some charter schools 24%-68% of the students are lost from each cohort. Up to 7 out of 10 parents at these charter schools do not see their child complete schooling at the charter school they chose. Other “high performing” charter schools suspend 25%-40% of their students a year in order to see gains in test scores. This means that each year up to 2 in 5 parents at these charter schools has their choice forcibly taken away by the very charter school they chose to send their child to. In one particularly egregious case a charter school pushed out 1/3 of its student body in order to improve test scores. If you are the parent of an English Language Learner or of a student with special needs you won’t have much choice since charter schools tend to accept very few of those students. And if they do accept your child it seems that at least some charter school chains will attrite English Language Learners and students with special needs at very high rates. So do charter schools in New York City allow parents choice? Not at all.
Are charter schools in New York City accountable? In one story, New York City Department of Education under Mike Bloomberg refused to share data on the state of special education in charter schools. In another story a charter school chain sued New York State to prevent an audit of how it used public money. New York State backed down. Joel Klein, former Chancellor in New York City falsely claimed that charter schools “closed the longstanding achievement gap.” He made this claim even though the data showed it to be an outright lie. In 2007, when the big push to open up even more charter schools began, the data showed that charter high schools had an on-time graduation rate less than half that of public schools. Even so, more charter schools were opened. As many sources have pointed out, little of the data that can be found for public view on the official web pages of public schools can be found on the official web pages of charter schools. The lack of transparency about schools that receive so much public money is astounding. So are charter schools in New York City accountable? Definitely not.
Do charter schools in New York City have better scores? In 2009 a report showed that students in charter schools made less progress than those in public schools. In 2010 the data showed that public schools were 24% more likely to get As or Bs on the New York City school report cards than charter schools. In 2011 yet another analysis showed that charter schools are more likely to get Ds or Fs on the progress section of the New York City school report cards than public schools. In fact, charter schools were twice as likely to get Fs than public schools. Charter high schools had half the college readiness rate of public high schools. This year charter schools saw bigger drops in performance on the Common Core exams than public schools. Additionally charter schools performed worse on average than public schools in English and the same as public schools in math. This is all the more concerning given the creaming, the extremely high suspensionand alarming attrition rates. Despite these competitive “advantages” charter schools overall do worse than public schools. So do charter schools have better scores? The data says no.
Who pays for charter schools in New York City and how much? As a whole charter schools in public buildings receive almost $650 more per student in public money than public schools. When the fact that charter schools have fewer high needs student is accounted for charter schools in public building receive $2,200 more per student in public money than public schools. Many charter schools spend a lot more money per student than public schools. KIPP spends over $3,000 more per student. Other well-known charter chains spend $4,300 more per student than public schools. Some of these sums come from hedge fund investors and corporate managers who believe that money should determine how schools run rather than the input of parents and educators. They will donate to charter schools up until they destroy public schools. Then the donations to charter schools will stop. What is the evidence for this? Because if they really cared about providing all children with opportunity they would support Bill de Blasio’s plan to ensure that every child in New York City has access to a quality pre-K program. As James Heckman, a Nobel prize winner in economics, shows in his new book Giving Kids a Fair Chance early intervention has the greatest social and economic impact. Instead, the head of a business leaders’ group said “it shows lack of sensitivity to the city’s biggest revenue providers.”
Clearly the facts support Bill de Blasio. Let’s put Bloomberg’s divisive policies behind us and return to a focus on equity and opportunity in all of our schools and for all students in New York City.
Additional Reading:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15582159.2011.548242?journalCode=wjsc20 “English language learners are consistently underrepresented in charter school populations across 3 academic years.”
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2010/7/20%20hcz%20whitehurst/0720_hcz_whitehurst Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools is middle of the pack in terms of student test score outcomes.
http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/what-do-the-available-data-tell-us-about-nyc-charter-school-teachers-their-jobs/ an examination of charter school data
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/TTR-Hoxby-Charters.pdf notes significant flaws in a non-peer-reviewed report claiming slightly better results for charter schools in New York City
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting that the whole paragraph on charter quality cites school ratings that no one thinks are valid (right? or are we suddenly fans of school ratings now?). The high-quality research of CREDO and Caroline Hoxby shows that NYC charters are doing better than regular public schools when serving the same children.
You’re missing the point, which is that even by their own debased standards of judging schools based on high stakes exams, the overwhelming majority charters do no better or worse than public schools.
I believe this poster was referring to the CREDO study that focused specifically on charters in the city of New York. It showed that 63% of NYC charters outperformed traditional district schools in math while 14% did worse, and that 22% percent were better in math but 25% were worse.
Click to access CredoReport2013.pdf
“Their own”? I think the charter schools would probably prefer the growth measures in high-quality studies, which show them to be doing better. So unless you really do believe in the low-quality rankings yourself, you shouldn’t be holding them against charter schools.
They are not serving the same children. Public schools have all of the special ed and children with problems, the place of last resort when they are “encouraged” to leave the charters.
Any comparisons between charters and public schools are apples to oranges comparisons as the student populations are quite different in demographics.
Time after time, these “same population” notions are debunked, most famously perhaps by Valerie Strauss in her epic takedown of Steven Brill and his lack of rigor. Besides, the larger point is that this hybrid charter schools undermine democracy and fragment resources that should be used for actual public schools. But yes, no one should accept a narrative that equates quality schools with aggregate test scores.
A significant part of the growth on the CREDO study came from the closure of 8% of poor performing charters.
This poster is also unaware that Hoxby wrote a paper detailing how the original CREDO (2009) was biased: “The CREDO study contains a statistical mistake such that its estimate of the effect of charter schools is biased.[. . .] In addition, the CREDO study
violates several rules for the empirically sound use of matching. It is not possible to say exactly how such these violations affect the estimates, but the best remedy is to fix the violations along with the
biased estimator” (http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/memo_on_the_credo_study%20II.pdf). And that bias continues in the 2013 study. Hoxby argues most eloquently that the CREDO is not “high-quality research.” It seems that your experts are in conflict here.
In addition, Loveless and Di Carlo, looking at and breaking down the data separately, came to the same conclusion: Loveless: ” The two sectors perform about the same. Claims that the CREDO studies demonstrate the success or failure of one sector or the other are based on analyses that make small differences appear much larger than they really are” (http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2013/07/03-charter-schools-loveless). Di Carlo: “The overall finding is that charter schools vary widely in test-based performance, and on the whole are not meaningfully better or worse” (http://shankerblog.org/?p=8579).
The CREDO study openly admits its own shortcomings with a failure to adequately match students and with the disaggregation of the data.
As for Hoxby’s NYC research, she has openly come out and stated that people have misinterpreted her conclusions. She has not replicated her study nor offered an addendum. Her study seems to contradict the RAND, CREDO, and almost all other smaller city studies that have all stated that TPS and charters produce similar results.”The EPI also had this to say about her study: To summarize, Hoxby’s estimates of charter school proficiency advantage is not robust to alternative weighting strategies, and is not sustained when there are controls for observable differences in school socioeconomic composition” (http://www.epi.org/publication/bp158/).
No one is against reliable research and quantification. On the contrary. People are against deception and lies, even when they take the form of statistics.
Hoxby is a fellow of a conservative think tank funded by donors with a vested interest in privatization. The quality and replicability of her research has been challenged by multiple scholars here and abroad, going back over ten years. This suggests that Hoxby is neither disinterested nor reliable.
Another day, another political obnoxious email from mayor wannabe Eva Moskowitz “Thanks again for helping make Tuesday’s march such a tremendous success! Your dedication to your children’s education – and the futures of thousands more NYC kids – was strong and resonated in extensive media coverage. These are important issues of monumental consequence, and with your help they have gained prominence on editorial pages and in public debates. Public opinion is with us, as a Siena College/New York Times poll reported; but we still must educate our city leaders.
I want to share this clip of the march and encourage you to share it widely – this is one way we can “keep marching,” keep the focus on the importance of our children’s rights to an excellent education: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sooiilDpbPI&feature=youtu.be“
Here we go with the money again. N.Y.City charter schools receive $650 more than the normal regular public school and with the donations, which are not stable it is much more. N.Y. has over $22,000/student which is really high. Charter schools receive this + the $650 + the thousands extra from the billionaires + they get rid of anyone they do not like + no problems of any kind like behavioral problems, ESL, special ed and parents that do not kiss their XXXX. At LAUSD the revenue is $11,785, we have over 280 charter schools, the most in the U.S., and it is growing at 10%/year. They have revenue from $3,200-9,000 that we know of. Even the head of the I-Division with oversight and responsible for the payments does not know named Cole-Guitierrez, I have asked him. Not one charter school operator I have talked with knows the districts income. Last night at a meeting a principal made a statement that the district is going through great budget lowering problems. I had to shut her down for spreading falsehoods from the lie generator Administration, ie. Deasy and crooks. The revenue/student is constantly going up while they drive students off for test scores. In 2001-02 with 86,000 more enrollment only 14,500 or 2% did not come to school everyday. When Monica Garcia became Board Prez. it was 40,000. She began the so called “Reform Board” we call the “Deform Board.” This last year it was 117,000 or 17% of all students did not come to school everyday for a lost revenue of $1,250,000,000, is that enough? So, the revenue/student goes up and Deasy et al say we are losing money when it is really because they do not care if they come to school what they do is send them to other agencies like the L.A. County Sheriff’s and L.A. Police Departments, social services, welfare, medical and such at really high costs. Real good policy and good for the taxpayers isn’t it?
So, if you were a charter school and your scam was about to end and you will have to operate like everyone else and you are not doing a good job now would you not have fear and need to change your underware? It is about time their scam comes to and end. N.Y. people take these numbers and run out what it is costing the system totally and per student. Take that and compare the other data such as the drop out, run out, who stays and their scores and such over time and build the welded box with no out let around them and weld it shut. Never leave a way out, be complete, then watch the fun as they scramble to get out of their fantasy world.
http://nonprofitquarterly.org/policysocial-context/23072-professor-i-won-t-write-teach-for-america-recommendations.html
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