Horace Meister, a regular contributor, has discovered a shocking instance of contradictory research, posted a year apart by the same “independent” governmental agency. The first report, published a year ago, criticized New York City’s charter schools for enrolling small proportions of high-need students; the second report, published a month ago, claimed that the city’s charter schools had a lower attrition rate of high-needs students than public schools. Meister read the two reports carefully and with growing disgust. He concluded that the Independent Budget Office had massaged the data to reach a conclusion favoring the powerful charter lobby. Eva Moskowitz read the second report and wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal called “The Myth of Charter School ‘Cherry Picking.’” Horace Meister says it is not myth: it is reality.
Meister writes:
In January 2014 the Independent Budget Office in New York City released a report on student attrition rates in the charter school sector in New York City.[i] A year later, in January 2015, the very same office released an “update” of the earlier report.[ii] The story behind this “updated”[iii] report reveals all that is wrong with education policy in the United States.
The original report had a number of fascinating revelations. It turns out that, as a sector, charter schools in New York City are using student demographics and attrition to boost their “performance” in ways that public schools cannot. This, of course, is not an indictment of any particular charter school or the dedicated staff in a specific charter school. It is an indictment of the overall corporate reform policy that favors charter schools over public schools, allows the charter sector to operate under a different set of rules than public schools so that charter schools can employ these sorts of gimmicks, and then dares to claim that charter schools are somehow better overall for students than public schools.
What did the original report reveal?
- Charter schools in New York City serve a much more advantaged student population than public schools. The very first table in the report showed that charter schools served 80% fewer English Language Learner students than nearby public schools. Charter schools serve 1/9th the proportion of the highest needs special education students as nearby public schools. Charter schools served a much more economically advantaged student body than nearby public schools—with three times as many students paying full-price for lunch than nearby public schools.
- By only accepting students in certain grades charter schools are able to artificially boost their outcomes as compared to nearby public schools. “The increased incidence of transfer to a traditional public school, instead of a charter school, might be due to the fact that many charters limit admissions to traditional starting points (such as kindergarten for elementary schools).” Of course it is the students with higher needs and higher absentee rates who are most likely to transfer at points other than the traditional ones. And, of course, it is illegal for public schools to bar students from admission at points other than the traditional ones, though this tactic is widely employed by charter schools. The disruptions caused by in-migration are also eliminated.
- Students with low test scores are more likely to leave charter schools. “The results are revealing. Among students in charter schools, those who remained in their kindergarten schools through third grade had higher average scale scores in both reading (English Language Arts) and mathematics in third grade compared with those who had left for another New York City public school (Figure 3)… One important difference between the two types of schools, particularly manifest when the percentage of students meeting or exceeding proficiency standard is used as the metric, is that the gap between the stayers and movers was significantly larger in charters compared with those in traditional public school.”
- Special education students with the highest needs are significantly more likely to leave charter schools than public schools. After leaving the charter schools these students go to public schools. “The attrition rates are higher for special education students who start kindergarten in charter schools than for special education students who start in neighboring traditional public schools. Only 20 percent of students classified as requiring special education who started kindergarten in charter schools remained in the same school after three years, with the vast majority transferring to another New York City public school (see Table 5). The corresponding persistence rate for students in nearby traditional public schools is 50 percent…Of those continuing in the same charter school, 10 percent were identified as special education students by the third year, and of those transferring out to another charter school, 16 percent were special education students (see Figure 2). But of those transferring out to another traditional public school, fully 27 percent were classified as special education students.” Of course the highest need special education students are also, as a rule, the students who perform the poorest on standardized tests.
Reading the original report a couple of unanswered questions suggest themselves. How do individual charter schools or charter school chains differ in the extent to which they employ the four tactics described above? Why did the report only look at the data on students in kindergarten through 3rd grade? In middle schools, where every grade takes high-stakes standardized tests, does the charter sector employ the four tactics to an even greater effect? How does the fact that charter schools only accept students who actively apply to their school impact the overall attrition patterns? As the original report asks, do “other factors such as unobserved differences in student characteristics contribute to some of the gaps in mobility patterns?”
An objective observer would expect that any updated report, such as the one the Independent Budget Office just released, would address at least some of the above questions. But it did not. Instead the “Independent” Budget Office folded under the pressure brought to bear by charter school advocates and their paid researchers. Immediately after the original report was released, a “researcher,” paid for by the Walton Foundation, complained that the report only looked at the highest need special education students and not all special education students.[iv] While true, this has no bearing on the four tactics that the report conclusively showed the charter sector employs to game their results.
A couple of weeks ago, the “Independent” Budget Office, caving to the pressure, “updated” the report to include a cohort of students through 4th grade. Their “finding:” across all special education students, such students are slightly more likely to remain in charter schools than public schools. The media parroted these claims. This “finding” is, however, entirely bogus. Instead of using the categories that generally correspond to the level of need (namely whether the student requires a self-contained class or can be supported in mixed classes or even classes that are entirely general education), the report uses the named disability category (namely speech impaired, learning disabled, other health impaired, all other disabilities) of each student. This, of course, tells us nothing about the severity of each student’s need within the category. Instead it covers up the fact, which we already know from the original report, that charter schools are much more likely than public schools to selectively attrite the students with the highest level of special education needs, the very same students who are most likely to bring down their test scores. But now special interests and the media can trumpet the fact that charter schools in New York City keep their special education students at higher rates than public schools.
Ignored in the new analysis is the fact that the charters serve an entirely different mix of special education students, i.e. students much, much less likely to require the highest level of accommodations and supports. Importantly, the “Independent” Budget Office did not just add these broader-brushed approaches to the analyses of the original report; it declined to repeat, with the updated dataset, the analysis of the sky-high attrition rates of highest need special education students at charter schools. It declined to repeat, with the updated dataset, the analysis of higher attrition among students with low test scores at charter schools. It declined to repeat, with the updated dataset, the analysis of student creaming by charter schools. It declined to break down the updated dataset so that we could learn more about the tactics employed by individual charter schools and charter school chains. It declined to even look at the unanswered questions about charter middle schools.
Fortunately, for those interested in the truth, at about the same time, other data were released showing just how much the charter sector in New York City relies on tricks, rather than true educational innovations, to produce their “results.”[v] The data break down the comparisons between charter schools and public schools, school by school and district by district.[vi]
It turns out that the charter sector suspends students at rates up to twenty-six times higher than public schools in the same geographic region, despite the fact that the charter schools serve only a self-selected student body.[vii] These data may explain how charters are able to selectively attrite the most troublesome students who bring down their test scores. They harass the students until they leave for the public schools, which are of course morally and legally obligated to accept every student.
It turns out that public schools serve up to five times as many students living in temporary housing as charter schools in the same geographic region.[viii] This little fact may be one of those “other factors,” mentioned in passing by the “Independent” Budget Office, that explain why public schools have a slightly higher overall student transition rate than charter schools. Obviously kids with no permanent home are more likely to move around and switch schools.
It turns out that all of the highest-flying charter schools serve a much, much more advantaged student body than the local public schools.[ix] It is almost shocking to see not a single charter school represented among the schools in the top quarter of student need, in any of New York City’s 32 geographic regions. The gaps in student need are even higher when looking at charter schools co-located in the same buildings as public schools.[x] In co-locations the public school serves up to six times as many students living in temporary housing, up to twenty times as many English Language Learners, and many multiples the number of special education students as the charter school in the very same building!
What we have here is a failure to tell the truth. The “Independent” Budget Office, aided by a compliant press, has whitewashed the story of inequity that it itself had helped flesh out just a year earlier.
The data could not be any clearer. Charter schools have no secret sauce. In fact, they are creating more segregation and greater inequity in our school system. The time has come to end the charade. Charter schools must be folded under the umbrella of the public school system. We must then have the difficult conversations that have been avoided due to all the tumult and distractions caused by the charter school corporate reform agenda.[xi] How do we serve all students in a nation with significant, perhaps increasing, opportunity gaps? What can schools do to help mitigate the overwhelming disadvantages that students growing up in poverty face? Since it is obvious that schools can’t do much in isolation what can we, as a nation, do to support schools in their work of providing opportunity to all students?
[i]http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014attritioncharterpublic.html
[ii] http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2015charter_schools_public_schools_attrition.html
[iii] Apologies in advance for the generous use of scare quotes. But it’s almost impossible to tell this sordid tale without them.
[iv] This researcher had, by this time, already made many claims about special education students and charter schools in New York City that had been debunked. See for example http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-why-the-gap
[v] http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/secure/charter-school-suspensions.pdf
[vi] The fact that the teacher’s union had to collate this data and not a single “independent” journalist could be bothered to do so, despite the regular appearance of newspaper stories and editorials praising charter schools, tells us just how biased the media is when it comes to education policy. It suggests that media outlets would benefit by being more skeptical of charter school claims when deciding upon and reporting upon their stories.
[vii] http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/secure/charter-school-suspensions.pdf
[viii] http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/secure/demographics-charters-v-traditional.pdf
[ix] http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/secure/peer-index-explainer.pdf
[x] http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/secure/colocated-schools-sharing-buildings.pdf
[xi] It may not take a conspiracy theorist to assume that this conversation is exactly what the special interests groups that back charter schools want to prevent from happening.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
Here’s the part I found most interesting:
“The gaps in student need are even higher when looking at charter schools co-located in the same buildings as public schools. . . In co-locations the public school serves up to six times as many students living in temporary housing, up to twenty times as many English Language Learners, and many multiples the number of special education students as the charter school in the very same building!”
Co-location is a double-edged sword because it allows for a very clear and accurate comparison of student populations . Charter school operators need to be very careful about what they wish for. That free rent thingy might come back to bite them in their collective a$$es.
Calling all statisticians!
Calling all statisticians!
At $500K+ a year in salary for herself, Eva’s truths have no other choice but to feel good and right. As one devoted reader posted on another blog a while back, no one will be seeing Eva Moskowitz work part time at Walmart to earn some much needed extra income.
Therefore, it is high time – and the perfect time – to conduct an in-depth empirical study on the attrition rate of teachers in charter schools vs. public schools in the last 10 years. What exactly does the teacher turnover rate look like in proportion to the entire teaching populations in both types of schools? At what rate do teachers leave in both types of schools and how do the reasons vary qualitatively for leaving? What is rate of non-voluntray termination in both types of schools and what accounts for them? What are the driving motivations behind teachers not staying?
Let’s see how free market forces here might reveal a true picture of supply and demand on both the employer and employee sides in both types of schools.
H-m-m-m-m . . . .
Let the games begin . . . .
It appears that the IBO has a difficult time distinguishing the difference between attrition and transition in comparing student groups. Quite convenient, eh?!?!
The commercial media run the commercials they are paid to run.
This shouldn’t be news to anyone …
Reblogged this on aureliomontemayor and commented:
#CHarterChicanery again. Fie on thee Eva M. #EdBlogNet @idraedu
The charterite/privatizer crowd are a bunch of cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st century creative disruptors that are leading the “new civil rights movement of our time”?
“Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.” [Mark Twain]
Just the same old same old: the gang that can’t shoot straight.
Already nailed to the wall in the 19th century.
😎
Remember “Understanding by Design?” This is “research” by design. You figure what results you want to get; then you pick and choose data to support your conclusion, and ignore the rest. The corporate owned pawns, the media, blast the “success” to the unknowing public. The bogus message gets spread all over by the oligarchs. Mission accomplished=mind control.
Google “independent budget office site:dianeravitch.net” to see how Diane referred to the Independent Budget Office before they published a report she didn’t like. (Hint: she didn’t put “independent” in quotation marks.) This reminds me of her treatment of CREDO: they were great when they produced a report that fit her narrative and corrupt when they stopped doing so.
I guess the IBO has become corrupt under De Blasio’s watch.
FLERP,
Mayor de Blasio did not change the staff at IBO. Nor did he hire them.
I’m just trying to figure out when the IBO became a corrupt institution that massages data and publishes untruths simply to satisfy the demands of lobbyists. That’s a pretty serious charge.
Ken,
The post was written by an independent researcher. He carefully documented every point. Would you care to disclose that you are a major supporter of charters?
I’m a proud supporter of charters! So what?
Ken,
Institutions are not static in time.
Time magazine’s journalists deserved a measure of respect until, management introduced ranking by benefit to advertisers. PR professionals now outnumber journalists, 4.6 to 1, with a pay differential of $20,000.
University academic research had a measure of respect (70% of faculty are now day laborers) and then Koch-type villanthropies increased their donations, with strings attached (see Greenpeace Koch article on higher education).
Think tank information, like NBER’s papers, were once vetted before they became policy, then Rogoff-Rhinehart-type research, favoring plutocratic interests, turned up immediately, directing governmental decision-making.
The Democratic Party, at the time of FDR and the Republican Party, at the time of Eisenhower, worked for Americans who built the nation, not the hedge funds.
Public schools were once democratic institutions benefitting their communities then, Pres. Obama turned them over to business.
(See Netflix CEO, Reed Hasting, on Youtube, calling for autocratic boards of education).
To expect any person’s support for an institution to remain constant, is to ignore the power of the new government/business axis.
It’s just like you Mr. Hirsh to suggest using Google instead of doing actual research. I suppose your poorly worded ad hominem against Professor Ravitch is necessary because you have nothing substantive to say about the cogent essay she posted Mr. Meister. I am astonished that Moskowitz’s greed finds anyone to defend it, but there you are. At the end of the day what the charter school industry perpetrates on Students with Disabilities is unconscionable.
What are the specific objections you have to Horace Meister’s analysis of the report?
😎
I agree, KrazyTA. If the report is weak, then Ken should address that. Because he didn’t, his attack of the messenger seems rather unnecessarily hostile and immature.
TheMorrigan: you are most polite. And I think the better for it.
I was going to suggest that you replace “seems rather” with “is” but that would deflect attention away, again, from the important issues at hand like charter skimming/creaming, midyear dumps, pushing/counseling out, etc.
Thank you for keeping it real, not rheeal, so that we don’t end up in Johnsonally sorts of cul-de-sacs…
😎
Ken,
Don’t remember if I’ve asked this before, but how are you connected to public education?
Thanks,
Duane
He’s a resident of New York City, an equal stakeholder in its schools along with me, Flerp, Bill de Blasio, Eva Moskowitz, and everyone else who lives here.
Their reputation will always be in jeopardy if they (habitually) encounter conflict of interest that will compromise research ethics–e.g., Gates, Eli Broad.
This one doesn’t, period.
I would like to know @Ken Hirsh is why people like you support charter schools. I googled you and based on what I found, I would guess that you do not have children. I do and they attend a DOE school. Prior to having children in elementary school, I found the corporate charter school situation kind of strange, but I didn’t have much of an opinion on it. Once I had a child in a public school and saw how decisions were made at the highest levels of state and city government to favor charter schools over public schools, I had a WTF moment. Now I am adamantly against corporate charter schools. I just don’t understand why people like you want to ruin public education.
Ken and FLERP. Stop being ridiculous. Each report produced by the IBO and by any other organization should be evaluated on its merits. Clearly this new IBO report is badly flawed and plays to a particular audience.
A Teacher: what you said.
Horace Meister has pointed out some very serious flaws. For example, selectivity in the data and redefining categories without making it clear that they have been redefined and how that affects the analysis.
What struck me the most was his call for looking specifically at co-locations because that may come closest to answering the question of whether or not charters serve the same student populations. That the report did not address this is, IMHO, particularly damaging.
I await further comments, but at this point it appears to me that it is not a report so much as a leaflet promoting a brand.
They could have done much much better.
😎
It’s not “clear” to me that the new IBO report is “badly flawed.” I think it can be taken for what it’s worth alongside the initial report. My gripe here is with the accusation, based on nothing but the conjecture of “Horace Meister,” that the IBO has intentionally manipulated data to reach a predetermined conclusion at the urging of lobbyists. That would be an incredibly serious allegation if anyone of importance took it seriously. I’m sure the report’s author, Joydeep Roy, would be dismayed to know that one of the nation’s most esteemed education experts has used this platform to accuse him and his office of fudging data to please the charter sector. Especially since Mr. Roy appears to have been writing reports that debunk pro-charter research for at least a decade.
After years of research papers that were benign, the work of an economics professor (who toured the state capitols, sounding a pension alarm), faced condemnation. Charges of either negligence or fraud, if he testified to the same, as a public official, were leveled.
The economist’s major defense, that pension plans shouldn’t draw conclusions based on the extrapolation of past returns, into the future was laughable. The researcher’s reluctance to identify who paid for his junket, was telling.
Without an effective means to hold researchers accountable,
the first question to be asked when evaluating research, is who makes money from the paper’s conclusions. If the answer is plutocrats, the burden of proving the paper’s validity, should reach the same stratosphere, as the wealth of the oligarchs.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Discover more of the lies and deceit of Eva Moskowitz—corporate Charter school Queen—and then ask yourself how is Eva worse than a welfare queen.
Eva Moskowitz is a lying, manipulative, unscrupulous, corporate Charter school Queen.
Now, I suggest that you ask yourself how she is much worse than one of the few cheating Welfare Queens—that are so rare, when one is caught, headlines appear in the major media and sweep across the country.
In fact, you can always tell when a crime is rare by the attention the media focuses on it. For instance, street gang killings take place every day and are so common the national media pretty much ignores most of it.
Maybe one reason that the corporate owned and controlled biased media isn’t reporting on the corporate war on the non-profit, transparent, democratic public education is because the fraud is so widespread in the corporate education reform movement.
Horace Meister’s post did not touch on what is the most interesting of the district-charter comparisons that were recently prepared by the UFT. This report shows the proportion of high-needs students at every K-8 school in New York, district or charter: http://www.uft.org/files/attachments/secure/peer-index-explainer.pdf
In almost every district, the high-needs gap between district schools and *other* district schools is greater than it is between district schools and charters, and nowhere is this gap more pronounced than in the area of children who require a self-contained setting. PS 321 doesn’t have a single self-contained student on its register. PS 29 and PS 6, where Carmen Fariña used to work, and PS 8, which is her neighborhood school? Not a single self-contained child at all three schools. What about unzoned progressive schools like MSC, Castle Bridge and the Central Park Easts, where attention is paid to the whole child, where the importance of diversity is so loudly and frequently trumpeted, where kids are opting out like crazy, and where the excuse that families living in the zone are wealthy and have arranged for a private school placement for their child doesn’t apply? Collectively, these schools educate two –2!—children with the most severe disabilities.
These gaps existed long before there was such a thing as a charter school in New York City. Residential segregation, exam schools, “lottery” schools—there’s one set of options for the well-to-do and the connected, and another set for everyone else. This arrangement was unremarkable, enabled and tolerated and supported by everyone involved, until a new option was invented that was free to parents (unlike parochial schools) and that threatened to reduce headcount at DOE schools.
Statistically compared, public school house far more SE students in various settings than charters. Tim, you comparing Tims to Ghandis. While you flatter yourself, you don’t fool us.
Your cherry picking those public schools that don’t have any self contained is incomplete in an objective overview of SE kids and where they end up.
If public schools were not starved of funding and provided for as they are in Finland, SE settings would never be an issue, because in Finland, high stakes environments and public funding are issues that do not exist, as they do here and as advocated for by people like you.
You love to hate public school while never addressing inequities that exits outside the realm of education.
Please bore other people with the very mediocrity you have elevated as your highest level of expression . . . .
Poor Tim . . . .
Cx:
. . . . public schools house . . . .
. . . . you’re comparing Tims to . . . . . .
. . . . equities that exist . . . .
Except that you constantly fail to realize @Tim is that introducing charter schools into poor communities of color is how the powers at be abrogate the responsibility of educating poor people of color. Charter schools aren’t a choice, but just a civilized way of saying to these communities, “We’re not really interested in educating your children, but this will make us look like we care, while we let our friends make tons of money and collect their political donations.” Think of other services privatized in this culture – prisons, ancillary military services – and that’s the company that these corporate charter schools keep. It’s not a compliment.
Bingo!
This made the SJQuotes page http://socialjusticequotations.tumblr.com/post/110636101923/i-ntroducing-charter-schools-into-poor
Beth, I look at the situation differently. If anything has come close to an abrogation, it was the conditions in residential-district model schools that educate high concentrations of at-risk kids. Without those conditions, the state charter school law never would have seen the light of day.
When you say that non-profit charter schools, which are open to any resident of New York State and subject to public meetings laws and strict reporting requirements, and who without exception want to do the very best they can for kids and see them lead happy lives, are in any way similar to for-profit private prisons and military contractors, you’ve completely lost me.
Tim, You employ the same silly debating tactic in almost every single comment you make on this blog. The lies and dishonesty of charter school special interest advocates are pointed out and you start talking about G&T programs. Do you plan on addressing or responding to the obvious lies and mistruths of Eva and other charter spokespeople? Or do you just want to change the topic? If you just want to change the topic, we can only assume you are some sort of troll who wants to obfuscate what is happening in the charter sector.
That’s a nice attempt at deflection, A Reader, but none of the schools I cited are G&T or even contain a G&T program. They are either good old-fashioned zoned schools or unzoned schools that accept children first-come, first-served until there are more applicants than seats, at which point a random lottery is used to determine admissions. Even a quick glance at the report reveals that the overwhelming majority of schools serving the smallest proportions of high-needs kids are traditional zoned schools.
Here’s a real-life example: District 3, which covers the uber-liberal Upper West Side and Harlem, has some of the largest district-district gaps in the city. When a plan was recently floated to de-emphasize (but not eliminate) geographical preference for school zoning in order to diversify the schools, the reaction from the usual suspects who are so quick to brand charters as segregationist was pretty hilarious: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150206/upper-west-side/plan-would-send-kids-schools-based-on-special-needs-not-location.
And to answer your question, I have called out charter schools and the entire sector for telling half-truths and for failing to adhere to the spirit and the letter of state law. I nevertheless support charters because they offer agency and choice to families who our tolerant and liberal part of the world has insisted live in concentrated segregated poverty.
When supporters of district schools come up with a serious plan* to address the issue, I’ll be happy to reconsider.
* a serious plan will involve your school, your community, your kid.
“. . . to families who our tolerant and liberal part of the world has insisted live in concentrated segregated poverty. ”
How is that so? How has the “liberal part of the world” done so?
Tim: Then what exactly are you trying to say? You agree that charter schools and their advocates are lying. You agree that they are in no way, shape or form better than public schools (they just cream kids and kick out kids). You agree that charter schools are not a solution, they are just part of the problem. What is your point?
You are putting words in my mouth—calling out a charter advocate or network for overblown claims or inaccuracies is not the same as agreeing that they all lie. Nor do I assume that their results are always simply a byproduct of creaming. Pedro Noguera has a really sensible take on this: substantial differences in teaching, leadership, and school quality often hide behind the demographics, in all directions.
The point is that until the defenders of the district model come up with a better plan for dealing with these district gaps; as long as there is a demand for charters; and as long as charters comply with state law and the ones that don’t are closed down, I will support charter schools. And I’ll call out the hypocrisy of charter detractors, many of whom are safe and sound behind zone lines that cream and segregate far more than charters do, and who have the nerve to demand that parents zoned for segregated schools stay right where they are and “fix” them.
Tim, You comments and claims swing back and forth. Let’s stay focused. What, if any, issues do you have with Horace Meister’s analysis? If you have none, stop trolling.
will you next tell us about “failing public parks” and why they should be privatized? failing public hospitals and why they should be privatized? failing public highways and why they should be privatized?
No, my focus is fine and has been so in every comment in this thread. Horace Meister’s analysis ignores the wider high-needs gap between district schools.
Tim: You are so silly. You write that the “analysis ignores the wider high-needs gap between district schools.” Now you are lying. All the data show that the gap between the charter school sector and the public school sector is huge. Horace is not talking about individual cherry picked schools. He is talking about the entire charter sector. You are also ignoring the other 3 key issues he identifies from the original IBO report a) charters preferentially attriting students with low test scores b) charter preferentially attriting high needs special education students c) charters not accepting students in most grades when public schools all do. Again, stop trolling.
Tim, if you have a single bit of evidence that the wider gap between district schools is anything other than affluent parents moving into a zone AFTER the lines were drawn because they wanted that school, please explain your theory of what it is. One thing we know is that it is not due to the out of school suspension of K and 1st graders. Because the suspension rate at 321, which includes 4th and 5th graders is 0%. The suspension rate at PS 29 – 0%. Compare that to a typical Success Academy school like Harlem Success Academy 5, which only had Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd graders and yet gave 12% of them out of school suspensions! And the year before, gave 14% of the Kindergarten and first graders — yes 5 and 6 year olds — out of school suspensions! That’s the unethical way to get rid of those kids.
If the only way for you to justify a charter chain like Success Academy’s blatant unwillingness to educate the toughest students is to whine that about affluent zoned schools not having enough poor students, than you obviously have something else going on. Scarsdale High school doesn’t “cream” students — it just benefits from so many wealthy students living in the zone. PS 6 doesn’t “cream” students – it just benefits from so many wealthy students living in the zone. But Success Academy creams students, because apparently, they don’t think they can be successful if they don’t suspend 5 and 6 year olds. Why?
Sounds like someone is wasting his time making himself an excuse only to reveal the character of apologist.
Speaking of unapologetic edupologism.
Common among people who have a habit of trolling for sport.
Like this link. http://japologism.com/
NYC public school parent, if you think those wealthy areas are wealthy (and almost invariably starkly non-integrated) solely because of “market forces” or people’s personal preferences, you are mistaken. Read “American Apartheid,” which is surprisingly digestible for an enduring classic work of sociological research. Google “Ta-Nehisi Coates housing” to find his recent blog posts and long-form works on the subject.
Tim, the problem is that while there are some charters that adhere to the spirit and letter of the law (and I salute them), the ones whom Cuomo and hedge funders are rewarding with funding and free space are the ones that don’t! I know charter school supporters are unwilling to criticize the powerful charter operators and their half-truths, but at some point, you have to distinguish between the two. I really don’t see the teachers’ union so quick to knee jerk defend truly bad teachers or principals. On the contrary, they want them gone quickly, too. But nary a word is said by the charter industry about the charter chains that don’t educate their share of special needs kids, do have very high suspension and attrition rates, and subsidize their public funding with huge amounts of private dollars in donations.
There are so many good charter schools doing the tough work of educating the students truly failed by public schools. It’s too bad the constantly touted high test scores of the charter schools that aren’t interested in the most at-risk kids make those ethical charter schools look terrible by comparison! And I wish people in the charter industry would call them on it instead of pretending there’s no difference in the kids they educate and the means they use to keep students or encourage them to leave.
“There are so many good charter schools doing the tough work of educating the students truly failed by public schools.”
Please give examples and/or research naming these schools.
Whether you agree with the decision or not, reading “Meister’s” commentary would make one think IBO secretly changed the metric used for special education students in the cohort being studied. Fact is, we stated the change on the front page and provided more explanation on page 2. But don’t just take my word for it, read it yourself: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2015schoolattrition.pdf
And about that pressure IBO caved to: examples, please? Or is innuendo sufficient?
Hey Doug sounds like you want to make excuses for a shoddily done report that reflects very poorly on your agency. Your report states on the first page “To produce this timely update to last year’s report, we have focused on the major observations from the prior report. We have also used a broader definition of special needs students than we did in the previous report.” This was an outright lie. You ignored the 4 key findings that “Meister” summarized around charters selectively losing students with low test scores and self contained special education students, charter creaming, and charters refusing to backfill. You did not “focus” on them like you claim. You entirely disregarded them. Additionally you did not use “a broader definition” of special education students. You changed it entirely.
Since you work for the IBO maybe you can explain WHY you made all the changes and WHY you did not update any of the other findings. Why didn’t you include comparisons of middle schools? Why didn’t you break the findings down by individual charter schools (and public schools for comparison)? There appears to be no valid methodological reason, leading any rational observer to conclude that you were playing games for other and likely suspect reasons. Were you or some of your colleagues at the IBO promised a job at the hedge fund of one of the charter supporters if you gamed the report?
Innuendo is sufficient, sadly.
Doug, this is why I have a hard time buying into data, metrics or research regarding education. Simply by changing one definition, which is of questionable validity no matter which way you define it, the entire metrics are thrown into disarray. Had this metric been shifted in the opposite direction, charter advocates would have had a tantrum.
Ultimately, this is the problem with quantification of education. Any group, with a vested interest, can slant numbers to suit their intended research findings. It’s true on all sides.
Hey Doug sounds like you want to make excuses for a shoddily done report that reflects very poorly on your agency. Your report states on the first page “To produce this timely update to last year’s report, we have focused on the major observations from the prior report. We have also used a broader definition of special needs students than we did in the previous report.” This was an outright lie. You ignored the 4 key findings that “Meister” summarized around charters selectively losing students with low test scores and self contained special education students, charter creaming, and charters refusing to backfill. You did not “focus” on them like you claim. You entirely disregarded them. Additionally you did not use “a broader definition” of special education students. You changed it entirely.
Since you work for the IBO maybe you can explain WHY you made all the changes and WHY you did not update any of the other findings. Why didn’t you include comparisons of middle schools? Why didn’t you break the findings down by individual charter schools (and public schools for comparison)? There appears to be no valid methodological reason, leading any rational observer to conclude that you were playing games for other and likely suspect reasons. Were you or some of your colleagues at the IBO promised a job at the hedge fund of one of the charter supporters if you gamed the report?
There are a number of NYC charter schools who are focused on helping all students and don’t care if their test scores are good. They generally lag at the bottom of the rankings, and you don’t find too many middle class parents there because they are designed to help the students with no options. It’s interesting to compare this with Success Academy, which has spent ungodly amounts of money advertising to affluent families zoned for good (but overcrowded) schools. The “good” charters would never waste money trying to convince educated parents that their decent (but perhaps not stellar) zoned public wasn’t as good as their charter, and the “good” charters wouldn’t desperately recruit parents shut out of gifted and talented programs via a campaign telling parents how well they serve gifted students. That was never what charters were supposed to be about, and there are certainly plenty of students still stuck in failing public schools who could benefit from “choice”. But the most ironic thing about all of this is that the one charter chain that has the most money and is in the best position to help those students is not interested in educating most of them. That’s where the notion of cherry-picking comes in.
“There are a number of NYC charter schools who are focused on helping all students and don’t care if their test scores are good.”
What are the schools, though? Now I’m curious.
NYC public school parent: I much appreciate your comments here and above.
If I am not being presumptuous, you and other commenters above (e.g., A Reader) are in great part reminding us of what Gerald Bracey called “Principles of Data Interpretation,” among them:
#2), “Show me the data!”
#3: “Look for and beware of selectivity in the data.”
And especially—
#4: “When comparing groups, make sure the groups are comparable.”
(READING EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED, 2006, p. xix)
Last point: in these times when busybody billionaires are experts on education and five-week wonders are highly qualified teachers, thank you for reminding us that the heavy hitters among the self-styled “education reform” movement don’t represent everybody and everything in, for example, charters.
I would only add that I too wonder how many laudable small fry there are among the full grown sharks of $tudent $ucce$$ and how long the small fish can survive among their bigger meat-eating brethren.
😎
“School Choice”
Charter picking
Like cherry picking
Selects the very best
Those who bore
A higher score
On every single test
SDP, spot on.
From an Ohio newspaper yesterday, “If they have special needs…a history of excessive absences or, discipline problems-things like that, we wouldn’t take them.”
Public schools that are required to and, may perceive it as helping the disadvantaged, enroll the students, resulting in lower scores, for which the schools are punished.
Charter schools are circumventing the law. The New York Charter act mandates that charter schools “focus on students at risk of academic failure”.
Charters are slithering around this requirement by claiming that minority students of low income households qualify as “at risk”.
Real educators know that the most at risk students are defined by the level of parental involvement they receive as well as other home based factors.
Charters avoid these kids by requiring a pro active application to their lotteries and then use suspensions to discourage troublemakers from staying around.
There are several other ways charters are violating the law according to their own written policies, obtained by FOIA requests. One example was calling ACS upon suspension, a policy that harasses low performing students so “they decide” to leave.