A report by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice finds that charter schools in Boston suspend students at much higher rates than public schools.
“Of the 10 school systems in Massachusetts with the highest out-of-school suspension rates, all but one were charter schools and nearly all of them were in Boston, according to the report, which examined the rates for the 2012-2013 school year. The report was released by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, a nonpartisan legal organization in Boston.”
“Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston was by far the most apt to suspend, subjecting nearly 60 percent of its students to out-of-school suspensions during the 2012-2013 school year. City on a Hill Charter School in Boston came in second with a rate of 41percent; followed by the now-closed Spirit of Knowledge Charter School in Worcester with 27 percent, and UP Academy Boston with 26 percent.”
The charter schools said their suspensions kept their schools safe and orderly.
“The report found that 72 percent of the time charter and traditional schools were punishing students with suspensions for nonviolent, noncriminal, or non-drug-related incidents. Those acts can include violating dress codes, being tardy frequently, or cursing.
“The report also raised concerns about disparities in disciplining students of different demographics. Disabled students were more likely to be disciplined than non-disabled peers, while black and Latino students were at least three times more likely to be disciplined than white and Asian peers.
“About 5 percent of the state’s schools accounted for half of the disciplinary actions in the 2012-2013 school year.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The Charter Secret to Small Class Size”
To keep the classes small
You just suspend the chaff
You don’t suspend them all
But quarter to a half
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hahahahahaha. so funny.
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You dial up the consequences, for even small violations, and results like these will follow. We’ve got two charters here in Sanger CA: One, the one in the low-income neighborhood, sends home notes with kids for having their shirts untucked, or forgetting their homework. Meanwhile, the one in the wealthy neighborhood lets kids wear their shirt any which way, and routinely ignores homework violation after homework violation. That one’s got a test for entry, and that’s how they keep the “riff-raff” out.
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So when the promoters and enablers and beneficiaries of charters & privatization say that they will outperform ‘traditional’ public schools in the rankings, they aren’t kidding.
“Of the 10 school systems in Massachusetts with the highest out-of-school suspension rates, all but one were charter schools and nearly all of them were in Boston.”
Is it possible to even entertain the thought of rejecting the notion that 9 out of 10 puts the hard data points of charters & privatization far far ahead of those “factories of failure” and “dropout factories” misleadingly labeled “public schools”?
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
How did I know that she would say that?
😎
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Roxbury Prep Charter School — part of the Uncommon Schools charter management network — is the school that John King, commissioner of schools for New York State — founded.
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Apologies for going off topic, but this just in from Rochester, NY. “Freshly-minted” doctorate of education at age 22, indeed. Shame on the Board of Regents for approving this farce!
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2014/11/23/greater-works-charter-school-rochester-ted-morris/19454317/
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Well my son has been having a hard time getting a job since he graduated…I’ll think I’ll recommend he move to NYC and open a charter…everyone’s doing it!
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Your son would have to stand in line to get the corporate backing first. It would be similar to a job interview to see who could be the biggest liar and most ruthless advocate for corporate Charters. The winners would have to be willing to send their children, parents, and grandparents to concentration camps to be gassed—-profits must come first. Profit is everything. Profit is god.
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No, Lloyd “profit is NOT god”!
“God is profit”!!
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If God is profit, I think we have to capitalize the P on Profit but if god is profit, we can leave it in the lower case. Those who worship “profit” do not worship god. They think they are gods.
I don’t think God even has a credit rating, poor Guy. If He applies for a credit card, the bank would probably deny Him.
:o)
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on the upside, I have heard that it has nothing to do with the timing of the standardized testing……I would hate to think students would be suspended based on a motive of wanting the school to have better looking test scores.
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“Suspended on Test Day”
His day-of-test suspension
Is really just by chance
His ‘D’ ain’t worth a mention
It’s pure coincidence
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Really a shame. I thought we had all realized that there are viable alternatives to suspension. I posted my article, “Suspended Futures” on my LinkedIn profile and have a chapter in my book devoted to supporting at-risk students. Our school was so successful that we were included in a Harvard study.
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This type of information must be widely disseminated, not only for Boston charter schools, but for all charter schools. It directly impacts notions of equal educational opportunity, not to forget the meaning of any scores on standardized tests that these schools post. Importantly, given the public information on suspension rates, what is the state doing regarding maintaining the charter of these schools?
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No one seems particularly interested in fixing Ohio’s charter school problems. They performed worse than the public schools they were opened to replace, again, yet it doesn’t matter.
They’re now pushing to privatize Youngstown. The charter schools in this state perform worse than the public schools, yet they continue to open charter schools and starve public schools.
“Columbus City Schools had 431 third graders not hit the benchmark — 12.4 percent of its class — and Cleveland Municipal City Schools had 386 third graders miss the mark — 14.6 percent of its class.
More than 1,100 of the third graders who did not meet the threshold were from Ohio’s charter schools. In fact, nearly 18 percent of charter school third graders failed to meet the benchmarks, a rate much higher than the state average.”
Charter schools in this state are their own district, so they draw from a much bigger student pool than the public schools. They STILL didn’t manage to do better than the much-maligned public schools, even with that huge advantage.
http://www.marionstar.com/story/news/local/2014/11/20/third-grade-reading-county-schools-pass/70009050/?appSession=909132066252567&RecordID=1767&PageID=3&PrevPageID=2&cpipage=1&CPIsortType=&CPIorderBy=&cbCurrentRecordPosition=1
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“The charter schools said their suspensions kept their schools safe and orderly.”
I find this statement revealing and interesting. In the public schools when a school has a high suspension rate they are critics for not having control of the students and/or motivating the students to study.
For instance, in the district where I taught for thirty years, the thinking in the district office going back to the 1980s, soon after the release of A Nation at Risk—based on fraudulent claims and data—under the Reagan administration was that if a teacher wrote too many referrals for children who disrupted the learning environment in thir classroom, the teacher was incompetent because the teacher could not control the students.
The same thinking from the district office was still in that school district when I retired from teaching in 2005. And there was more: We were told annually that teachers who failed too many students were incompetent because they couldn’t motivate the children to learn.
If we were to use this same flawed logic on those corporate charter schools, then the fake reformers should have branded them as TOTAL failures and closed them down. The fact that the CORPORATE reformers haven’t done that to the CORPORATE Charters reveals the deliberately manufactured double standard designed to destroy the public schools and turn our children over to the oligarchs to treat and mold as they want as they also profit from public funds.
The formula for the corporate reform movement looks like this:
teachers lose + children lose + parents lose + poverty loses + public schools lose + teachers’ unions lose = oligarchs win
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And you know Lloyd that the only thing that matters to the edudeformers is the last two words of your post.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The formula for the corporate reform movement looks like this:
teachers lose + children lose + parents lose + poverty loses + public schools lose + teachers’ unions lose = oligarchs win
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Credo:
The impact of charter schools in Boston are also analyzed separately. Compared to the educational gains that charter students would have had in TPS, the analysis shows on average that students in Boston charter schools have significantly larger learning gains in both reading and mathematics. In fact, the average growth rate of Boston charter students in math and reading is the largest CREDO has seen in any city or state thus far. At the school level, 83 percent of the charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their TPS counterparts in reading and math, while no Boston charter schools have significantly lower learning gains.
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Thimble, kicking out the low-performing students does help the test scores.
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State education officials said Tuesday they had not seen the report yet and could not comment on it. But they said they have been taking a look at suspension rates at charter schools and found in most cases that students are staying at the schools regardless.
“If you go into these high-achieving charter schools, the conduct in the classrooms and hallways is very striking — it is a very positive setting with very little of the disruptions you see in other urban schools,” said Jeffrey Wulfson, a state deputy education commissioner.
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Dr. Ravitch,
The article you posted also links to the percentage of students expelled(http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/19/report-cites-high-suspension-rates-for-charter-schools/AF3y7UxpQJsGtytOP7I6RJ/igraphic.html?p1=Article_Graphic). For all but three schools in the state, the percentage was 0%.
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Semantics, TE, semantics. To misquote a long dead white guy speaking for the charterites: “Expulsion by any other name would smell as sweet if not sweeter.”
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You can’t convince me that “growth” means anything unless the same kids are being tested (and not even then, but that’s a separate discussion). If you kick out all the bad apples after the pretest, but before the year-end test, of course you’re going to see “growth”. Even I could achieve “growth” that way, and I’m not even a teacher.
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Thimble, that is absolutely not true. Here is the enrollment data for the two named charter schools in Roxbury:
Roxbury Prep: http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=04840505&orgtypecode=6&
City on a Hill:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=04370505&orgtypecode=6&
Notice how, at both of these schools, the enrollment dropped by 3/4 and 1/2 respectively. Students are not choosing to stay in these schools.
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The only thing that grows in these “growth” schemes is the height of the pile of manure.
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What if every school suspended students at these rates to maintain order?
Could the public schools increase their scores if they were doing this?
How can you compare one system to the other if they don’t play by the same rules? That’s an invalid comparison.
If charters defend playing by two sets of rules with public schools, then they can’t honestly rely on the comparison to public schools to justify their existence. They have to pick, one or the other. Either they play by the same rules and get the comparison,. or they don’t play by the same rules and don’t get to make the comparison.
They can’t have both sides of this. They can’t have the benefit of the comparison to public schools without the same duty and responsibility to take all comers that public schools have. That’s unfair. It’s skewing the analysis towards charter schools.
Public schools will NEVER win that. They can’t.
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Shouldn’t this be about students winning?
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Given facts on the ground, it should never be about a few students “winning” a pittance at the expense of the vast majority of students “losing” almost everything.
It should always be about a “better education for all.”
No excuses.
😎
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There are not a few students in Boston charter schools. I don’t care if its a traditional school, charter school or voucher school. If the students are performing well, that’s all that should matter. If they aren’t, the school should be put on notice and shut down if it doesn’t improve. No excuses.
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I realize that for some posters, an English-to-English translation is necessary. So I will provide one for my above comment:
[start translation] Given facts on the ground, it should never be about a few students “winning” a pittance at the expense of the vast majority of students “losing” almost everything.
It should always be about a “better education for all.”
No excuses. [end translation]
Or perhaps the Marxist version would settle this once and for all:
“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”
Needless to say, Groucho. Who else?
😎
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Krazy,
Which students should win, and which should lose?
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It seems that an English-to-English-to-English translation of my comment is needed.
[start translation]
Given facts on the ground, it should never be about a few students “winning” a pittance at the expense of the vast majority of students “losing” almost everything.
It should always be about a “better education for all.”
No excuses.
[end translation]
And I would remind commenters not to brag of their foundational Marxist orientation:
“I’ve got the brain of a four year old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.”
¿? Still? Groucho, the only one that counts.
Go figure…
😎
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The bottom line of this is that charter schools can’t have it both ways. They can’t be exempt from the regulations that public schools have to follow, yet insist on a straight comparison with public schools.
They’re getting both sides of that. They get all of the benefit of the comparison with public schools, but none of the duty that public schools have.
No one in their right mind would agree to the terms of this competition. Public schools lose. They can’t win. It’s like putting magnet schools up against an ordinary public school and announcing “they’re the same!” That isn’t true. They’re not.
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We agree here. I think results are all that should matter, with some regulation generally aimed at ensuring schools are taking all comers and not excessively expelling students. Traditional schools should be allowed to innovate as well.
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What???
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Thimble,
Traditional schools is where ALL the invocation WAS taking place until NCLB, Race to the Top, and the Common Core rank and yank agenda of Bill Gates, an idiot among idiots, arrived.
Anyone who admires Bill Gates does so because of his wealth—-not his thinking. It’s envy for a thimble brained fool called Gates.
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Lloyd,
I have to disagree there. The watchword of the traditional school district must be uniformity across schools, not innovation. You can not order students who live on the 500 block of Maple to go to school A and students who live on the 600 block of Maple to go to school B unless you make efforts to ensure that school A and school B are essentially the same.
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I think that you have no idea that I’m talking about when it comes to innovative methods used by a teacher in the classroom.
Innovation by individual teachers has nothing to do with a child being sent to school A instead of school B or one school offering a class in French that another school doesn’t offer.
Choice does not equal innovation.
Innovation happens on an individual basis teacher by teacher—especially when the teachers are allowed to work collaboratively and are offered the support they need to succeed like teachers are in Finland, for instance.
In Finland, the state prescribes the curriculum but leaves teachers alone to decide how to teach the subject and that is where innovation takes place.
Here’s what student choice in Finland looks like, and it doesn’t exist in the U.S. even with corporate Charters.
At the age of 16, students can decide if they want to attend the Finnish equivalent of high school to prepare them for university or enter vocational training. Students who attend vocational school can attend a university provided they score high enough on the matriculation exam. 43 percent of Finish students choose vocational school.
That choice doesn’t exist in the U.S. There is no vocational high schools, but there are in most other OECD nations. In Japan, students may choose to attend a vocational or an academic high school. Most nations offer that choice. That choice doesn’t even exist among corporate Charters in the U.S.
Here’s a question: Can you sow us a country—-with proof and links to that proof—that allows all students to select the public school of their choice no matter where it is located based on individual subjects the student wants to take?
In Finland, school choice is not a priority. Read what The Atlantic has to say about that:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/?single_page=true
There is also no school choice in Shanghai. Instead, students earn their way to the school they attend through brutal tests that pit students against students and the top scoring students end up in the top ranked high schools and colleges. Singapore operates about the same way. The choice the students are allowed to make is based on merit linked to the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE).
In other words, parents may select a school for their child to attend, but that child must earn the seat in that school through the results of the PSLE, and even then that choice depends if there is room for every child who qualifies. But Singapore has only 275.6 square miles or 26 miles by 14 miles compared to 3,806 million square miles for the U.S.
Just because a parent wants their child in a specific school, doesn’t mean they get what they want.
What about France? Although France and the U.S. differ, they resemble each other in important ways. Both share the ideal of the “common school”, practice separation of church and state and traditionally have not subsidized private schools. Each has significant immigrant and minority populations along with the attendant socioeconomic inequalities.
However, there are important differences in their educational environments.
In France, there are virtually no financial inequalities within the public school system because school finance is centralized at the national level and state funding includes a carefully controlled local contribution.
Second, public schools are considered academically superior to private ones (both public and private school educators expressed this belief).
Third, although the French criticize their system, they believe it is fundamentally sound and French students do reasonably well in international comparisons.
School choice as the miracle cure to solve all educational challenges in the United States is unique to the U.S. Neo-Liberal ideology dominated by the Obama White House and his DOE, and there is no proof that this Pollyanna idea will work. It is a theory that growing evidence proves is wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Lloyd,
I think you would find advocates Montessori schools and advocates of Waldorf schools would dispute your claim that those approaches to teaching are not innovative. The only possible way that a school board could allow one district school to innovate in the Montessori direction and another district school to innovate in the Waldorf direction is to allow the students to choose the school. If the school board chooses the school for the student, the school board has to take great care to show the family that the choice is irrelevant for the student.
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TE,
There you go again trying to control the subject by changing direction. I’m talking about individual teacher innovation and your talking about theories like the Montessori schools and Waldorf schools offer—-it is arguable that even in those systems, individual teacher innovation makes a more important contribution than the Montessori or Waldorf theory of how children should be taught.
Since you seem to be stuck with the theories of learning than actual innovative teachin by individual, you might enjoy this piece from the UNESCO.
And Choice, Montessori and Waldorf don’t appear in this piece titled “Most influential theories of learning”.
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/quality-framework/technical-notes/influential-theories-of-learning/
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Lloyd,
Let’s talk aboutmwhatnyoumwant to,talk about: individual,teacher innovation. In another recent post there is an interesting thread about teaching in the great books style. Suppose a mathmatics teacher decided to innovate in that direction and assigned the students in the class to read some of the great works, say Euclid’s Elements or Pascal’s Conic Sections rather than using a textbook. How would that innovation be recieved?
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Talking about “WHAT IF” resolves nothing, because that is talking about an untested theory.
Talking about what has been done before that works is the better approach.
It was my observation during thirty years of teaching in public schools with high rates of poverty above 70%, that whenever the school I was in had a successful program, the reason for that success was because of an individual teacher—or the collaboration in a department or an entire school—-who was innovative in their approach to teaching and/or running the school.
Most of the time when these teachers—or even an innovative administrator—left for whatever reason, the success went with them. I saw this happen several times. In fact, when I stopped being the journalism adviser and teacher, the regional, national and international success of the HS student newspaper that I had worked with went the way of the Dodo.
The problem is that what these innovative, highly motivated, individual teachers do in their classrooms often doesn’t fit political correctness like the recent trend in education reform that choice is the answer to all the manufactured failures that don’t exist.
Innovation comes from the bottom up—not the top down or from fools who think untested theories are the answer—like CHOICE of what school to attend, for instance that twenty years of evidence now has proven is another failure from the top down method.
Finland supports its teachers for a bottom up approach that has worked very well. When has top down every succeeded as well as bottom up?
You avoided answering my question about countries that have successful school choice programs where students may pick the school of their choice no matter where that school is located and the school must make room for that child no matter what the cost is in logistics and $$$$. I suspect you avoided that because there is no country that offers that much CHOICE that is then paid for by the taxpayer.
Why didn’t you stick to the topic and answer that question?
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I forget where I found this. I believe it was a framework from CT in which they list rules for charters. These suggestions should be refined and proposed as laws in states with charters. It is about time they are regulated and required to meet some standards for reauthorization. If they can’t offer anything better than the public schools , they should be closed. They should also have to employ a staff of certified teachers as do public schools.
All charters must require, as a condition of continued authorization, that charters serve the same demographics as their host districts,
through clearly delineated controlled choice policies.
Charter schools must maintain transparent and publicly available
annual records and policies regarding enrollment, discipline and
attrition. Charters must ensure that they do not employ subtle barriers to enrollment, such as strict disciplinary policies or requirements for parent participation as a condition of attendance. No such barriers exist in public schools.
Charters must prove that they meet the specific needs of the host
community in a way the public schools do not. Charters must not be
imposed over community opposition. State officials must assess the
negative impact of charters on a district, including segregation and
funding effects.
Charters must post all contracts and fully disclose revenues and
expenditures. Charter officials, board members and employees must
undergo background checks and disclose any relationships with
contractors, state officials and others dealing with their school.
Parents in charter schools must be allowed to elect charter
board members.
Charters must show evidence annually that their unique educational methods improve achievement.
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Meanwhile, the incredibly cozy relationship between the Administration and ed reform organizations continues.
This is a club. They go directly from government to ed reform organizations.
Is there anyone in the Obama Administration who is ACTUALLY an “agnostic”?
I would like to have an actual advocate for public schools, but it’s clear I’m not getting that. The best I can hope for is an “agnostic”, and we don’t even get that much. We get people who go from government right to ed reform organizations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/11/22/education-secretary-arne-duncans-communications-chief-leaving-for-teach-for-america/?tid=hpModule_9d3add6c-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e
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In Massachusetts, Charters also lead the state in student attrition.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/attrition.aspx
They also lead the state in number of teachers not “highly qualified” or “licensed in teaching assignment.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/teacherdata.aspx
They also have the highest percentage of teachers under age 26. Ranging from 74% at MATCH compared to 5% statewide.
They also lead the state in AP exams in the 1-2 range. http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/ap.aspx
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