Horace Meister (a pseudonym) worked as a data analyst for many years in the New York City Department of Education. He is currently conducting research at a major university. In this post, he addresses some of the common misperceptions about charter schools. I cannot explain why everyone who writes about SA feels the need to be anonymous.
The Charter School Myth
Hilary Clinton recently remarked “there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools…most charter schools, I don’t want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest to teach kids, or if they do they don’t keep them.” This upended a comfortable consensus that had emerged in the past decade. Politicians, both Democrat and Republican, blindly support charter schools. Facts are ignored or denied.
Simultaneously, a number of unflattering stories came out in the press about the Success Academy charter chain in New York City. It turns out that the charter chain suspends large numbers of kindergarten and first grade students.[i] It also turns out that the charter chain tries to force out challenging students.[ii]
Success Academy should serve as a lesson, debunking the mythologizing of charter schools that has become so widespread in education reform and political circles. But before examining the myth of Success we must address a deliberate obfuscation often introduced into such analyses by some defenders of charter schools.
We assume that the purpose of charter schools is to educate the same students as the public school system. In other words a successful charter school should have great outcomes with students living and growing up in challenging circumstances and environments. A charter school that creams students, that selectively gets rid of large numbers of challenging students, or that otherwise manipulates its outcomes is not fulfilling the purpose of charter schools. Talk of magnet public schools or the all too many zoned public schools that, due to the unfortunate segregation in American neighborhoods and communities, are not diverse, is irrelevant to the policy issue under discussion. The bottom line is that thousands of public schools and tens of thousands of teachers are dedicated to students that American society has put at significant disadvantage. The relevant policy question is—do charter schools show up the public schools doing this critical work?
So, what do we know about Success Academy?[iii]
Success Academy schools have a student body very different than public schools. The New York City Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) School Quality Report data show that. Success Academy has a very different student population than the NYC public school system.[iv] On average, a Success Academy school has sixty six percent fewer English Language Learners (4.7% vs 13.8%), forty three percent fewer special education students (12.3% vs 21.4%), eighty six percent fewer of the highest need special education students (.9% vs 6.5%), and forty percent fewer students living in temporary housing (8.1% vs. 13.4%) than a public school. These disparities will only grow as Success Academy’s push into gentrifying and middle class neighborhoods continues.[v]
Success Academy has very high and selective attrition rates. SA has high attrition rates particularly among special education students and English Language Learners.[vi] The attrition rate increases as students advance to the grades when they will be taking the state tests.[vii] “This pattern repeats cohort after cohort with growth in early grades, followed by sharp winnowing accumulating over time.”[viii] The selective nature of the attrition is crucial, since that is the distinguishing characteristic between attrition at Success Academy and that at public schools. Such selective attrition is characteristic of the charter sector.[ix]
Success Academy suspends students at extremely high rates as a deliberate strategy to get challenging students to leave. “The charter school network suspended its students at more than double the rate of the New York City public schools, eleven percent to five percent” with a much less challenging student population.[x] “In its first two years, Success Academy 1 suspended 8% and 2% of its students respectively. Over the next five years, however, those numbers jumped to 12%, 15%, 22%, 27%, and 23%…By the way, the out of school suspension rate for 2011-2012 at Upper West Success, a school where 29% of students qualify for free lunch and 10% for reduced price lunch? 5%. Apparently suspension rates in the high 20s are a necessity for schools where 78% of the students are in or near poverty.”[xi] Insiders report that “school leaders and network staff members explicitly talked about suspending students or calling parents into frequent meetings as ways to force parents to fall in line or prompt them to withdraw their children.”[xii]
Success Academy forces high need special education students to leave. “But The News found a disturbing number of suspension cases where the network’s administrators removed special-education pupils from normal classrooms for weeks and even months, while at the same time pressuring their parents to transfer them to regular public schools.”[xiii]
Success Academy employs additional strategies to winnow out challenging students. For example, they mail the annual reenrollment forms to only preferred families.[xiv] By the way, public schools as a general rule don’t even have reenrollment forms. A student on the roster of a public school remains on the roster.
Teaching at Success Academy is focused on test prep and practice. It appears that teachers are mandated to focus overwhelmingly on test prep.[xv] To such an extent that students wet their pants out of the induced anxiety.[xvi] This leads to high teacher attrition rates, with over 30% of teachers annually leaving the charter chain entirely.[xvii] Often because the teachers could not abide by the way SA wanted them to treat students.[xviii]
Despite these shenanigans the academic outcomes of Success Academy schools are questionable.
A Success Academy education does not seem to prepare students for success in high school. Only 21% of SA middle school graduates passed their classes and earned at least 10 credits (44 credits are required to graduate high school in NYC) in their 9th grade courses. Note that since SA is a relatively new charter chain these data only exist for their first school, Harlem Success Academy 1.[xix] And not a single SA student scored well on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT).[xx]
Success Academy seems to do a mediocre job of growing their students academically. For the sake of argument we will use test scores on the New York State exams as a measure of success, since Success Academy likes to boast about those scores. The NYCDOE calculates growth targets for every school.[xxi] On the English exams three Success Academy schools exceeded, two schools met, one school approached and one school did not meet expected growth targets.[xxii] On the Math exams only two schools exceeded, four met, and one approached the expected growth targets.
Success Academy seems to do a very poor job with their high need students. The data provide a measure for how students in each school’s bottom third do. Only two Success Academy schools exceeded and two schools met English growth targets for these students, while two approached and one did not meet the target. In Math, four schools did not meet the expected growth target while two exceeded and one met the targets.
Other analyses have found similarly poor outcomes from Success. An examination of 2012 and 2013 fourth grade scores found that “Success schools dropped by about 40 points while other schools that had such high 2012 scores dropped by about 20 points. But in math, two of the four Success schools had a smaller drop than the other schools and the other two Success schools had about the same drop.”[xxiii] A different analysis of the 2013 data found that “Success Academy scored in the 39th percentile on English exam growth for their overall student population and in the 21st percentile on English exam growth for the students who began with scores in the lowest 1/3 of students.”[xxiv]
Overall these are rather sorry outcomes that nonetheless overestimate Success Academy’s performance since even growth measures don’t account for selective attrition and other SA tactics. Still the growth metrics do a better job than pure performance metrics in measuring the true contribution of a school to student learning.
What can be learned from Success Academy? There are of course positive take-aways from Success. Additional learning time, such as that mandated by SA, is likely a positive intervention strategy for some students requiring additional academic support. SA offers the equivalent of about fifty additional schools days, thanks to their extended school day.[xxv] That is of course expensive and we know that SA spends thousands of dollars more per student than public schools with similar populations.[xxvi] There is no question that additional funding for schools helps improve outcomes for students growing up in poverty.[xxvii] New York City is now directing additional funds, along with other initiatives such as extended learning time, to their Renewal schools, schools that serve a disproportionately disadvantaged student body. Providing schools with such supports can benefit students at both charter and public schools.
Teachers must be given the time and support to grow into the tremendous responsibility that every educator has for student success. As Success Academy first year teachers are assistants in the classroom ideally working with and learning from excellent and experienced teachers. Such an initiative, at a national scale supported by local districts and the federal government in collaboration with schools of education, is definitely worth a look.
[i]http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/kindergarten-young-suspend-student/
[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html
[iii] An earlier review of claims made by and about Success Academy can be found here https://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/12/researcher-charter-chain-built-on-hyperbole/.
[iv] The data can be found in the file here http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/06F7DE89-AA46-4509-9A0C-600038728D14/0/2014_2015_EMS_SQR_Results_2015_12_09.xlsx. For explanation of the various metrics see http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/5347DA79-B985-4CBF-B56E-B05C8380C53B/0/201415EducatorGuideEMS11122015.pdf. The Success Academy schools with data include five schools in Harlem, two in the Bronx. Two schools, one in Bedford Stuyvesant and one on the Upper West Side have demographic but no academic performance data as they are too new. All the other twenty three SA schools are so new that they have no Quality Report data at all.
[vi] http://commonal.tumblr.com/post/58209601458/harlem-success-academy-charter-and-attrition
[vii] http://insideschools.org/blog/item/1000359-vanishing-students-at-harlem-success#
[viii] See the data here http://danielskatz.net/2015/11/25/eva-moskowitz-cannot-help-herself/.
[ix] See https://dianeravitch.net/2015/02/09/the-unholy-alliance-charters-the-media-and-research/.
[x] http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-discipline-race-and-eva-moskowitz%E2%80%99s-success-academy-charter-schools
[xi] http://danielskatz.net/2015/11/25/eva-moskowitz-cannot-help-herself/
[xii] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html?_r=0
[xiii] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/success-academy-fire-parents-fight-disciplinary-policy-article-1.1438753
[xiv] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html?_r=0
[xv] https://dianeravitch.net/2013/10/04/mole-in-success-academy-speaks/ and https://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/07/my-conversation-with-a-success-academy-charter-teacher/ and http://nymag.com/news/features/65614/index3.html. Interestingly enough there has been a recent attempt by some apologists to claim that Success Academy is a progressive pedagogy paradise. First-hand reports by teachers (i.e. those not describing carefully arranged guided and pre-scheduled tours) provide an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.
[xvi] http://www.businessinsider.com/students-wetting-pants-success-academy-charter-schools-2015-4
[xvii] http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teacher-turnover-success-academy-charter-schools with data suggesting even higher attrition rates found here http://citylimits.org/2014/08/20/why-charter-schools-have-high-teacher-turnover/.
[xviii] http://www.wnyc.org/story/302768-high-teacher-turnover-at-a-success-network-school/. It has been suggested that “The pedagogy in the Success Academy schools is rote, highly disciplined and punishment, suspensions, are commonplace, perhaps the pedagogical/discipline practices chase away teachers of color.” https://mets2006.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/success-academy-charter-school-staff-diversity-why-is-the-staff-overwhelming-white-tone-deaf-by-choice-a-diverse-workforce-is-essential-in-the-21st-century/. Some telling reviews of Success Academy’s culture can be read on Indeed.com http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Success-Academy-Charter-Schools/reviews and on glassdoor.com https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Success-Academy-Charter-Schools-Reviews-E381408.htm. Other first-hand accounts can be read here https://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/27/a-former-success-academy-teacher-steps-forward-to-tell-her-story/ and here https://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/01/former-success-academy-teacher-why-i-resigned/.
[xix] See column CW on the following file http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/06F7DE89-AA46-4509-9A0C-600038728D14/0/2014_2015_EMS_SQR_Results_2015_12_09.xlsx under the “student achievement” tab.
[xx] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/gonzalez-success-charter-students-fail-top-city-schools-article-1.1833960. It would not be surprising if SA has already begun intense SHSAT prep for this exam for their students in response to this, now widespread, statistic. While unfortunate that tests are driving so much of what happens in schools that may be the best way to open high school opportunities for their students.
[xxi]The data can be found in the following file http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/estimated-versus-actual-days-learning-charter-school-studies. See columns P, V, AT, and AZ under the “student achievement” tab. Broadly speaking one third of all schools each exceed, meet or approached their growth targets. The remaining ten percent of schools did not meet their target. See pages 24-25 in the document here for an explanation of these growth targets http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/5347DA79-B985-4CBF-B56E-B05C8380C53B/0/201415EducatorGuideEMS11122015.pdf.
[xxiii] http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/08/13/how-to-define-success/
[xxiv] https://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/12/researcher-charter-chain-built-on-hyperbole/
[xxv] Somewhat disappointingly it appears that the better test results claimed by many charter schools often reported as an “estimated days of learning” metric are less than the actual extra days of learning at those charter schools. See http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/estimated-versus-actual-days-learning-charter-school-studies.
[xxvi] See Table 2 here http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/ttr-charter-rent_0.pdf
[xxvii] See http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/Jackson_Johnson_Persico_SFR_LRImpacts.pdf. Of course the additional funds must be spent sensibly.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Oh, I don’t think they have to worry. Clinton’s mild criticism was met with such outrage from the charter cheerleading squad I doubt any politician will dare to question or criticize any “market based” ed reform initiative again.
Charters are off the table. There will be no further discussion permitted.
All our political debate can now center on criticism of public schools, because for some reason public schools are a perfectly acceptable punching bag for politicians. You know the drill- “failing public schools”, “government schools”, “monopoly”- all the ed reform smears of public schools that we hear daily.
Here’s noted ed reformer Jeb Bush smearing every public school in the country:
“It’s time to challenge the 13,000-plus government-run, politicized monopolies we call school districts that focus too much on the economic interest of the adults and not enough on student learning. Education politics should not be about protecting an antiquated system. This should be about empowering parents and students to be able to achieve earned success. Empowering parents with choice, particularly low-income parents, improves the quality of all education options.”
Weird, huh? How there’s a double standard in ed reform? Bush can make outrageous statements lumping every public school in the country in the “failing” category and accusing every public school of acting on behalf of adults and there’s not a peep out of ed reformers. In fact, he’s a hero of ed reform!
Clinton makes a mild objection to one aspect of one charter chain and they rush to the defense of charters.
They’re not “agnostics” and that’s obvious to anyone listening. They should drop the pretense and just advocate for charters. Then at least we’d know what we’re voting for, instead of misleading voters like Obama did.
“It’s time to challenge the 13,000-plus government-run, politicized monopolies we call school districts. . . ”
Anyone else see the logical inconsistency in that statement by the Jebster?
Duane “Anyone else see the logical inconsistency in that statement by the Jebster?”
From a Bush boy “13K monopolies” sounds almost wise.
There is no real mystery regarding the rationale for parents choosing a charter school over a public, neighborhood school in NYC. It’s not the rigor. It’s not better test scores. It’s not the uniforms.
It’s all about getting their kids OUT OF disrupted, disorderly, chaotic, and unsafe schools.
I wish this point were addressed directly, often & regularly, in the public debate. That the charter system steadily wrecks the public system most attend, and further segregates students, and wastes public dollars: these are arguments that must be made, but fall on deaf ears.
Parents faced with underfunded, crowded, dilapidated, unsafe public schools are focused on this year and next, for their own kids, and will experiment with alternatives for a short-term gain regardless of public good or the long game. State and federal governments, corrupted by the deregulation of financial & corporate sectors take EXACTLY THE SAME approach, & encourage parents [“consumers”] to grab what looks good now for their own families, discouraging community solidarity and the long view.
Still more promotion of charter schools out of DC:
“The federal charter school program will receive $333 million, an increase of $80 million, or 32 percent, from last year. The program gives grants to help with planning, program design and implementation of new charter schools, and to share research on how to best expand high-quality charters.”
Did Clinton say anything about public schools in that interview or have the disfavored “public sector” schools now completely and utterly disappeared from view or discussion in fashionable DC circles?
“Still the growth metrics do a better job than pure performance metrics in measuring the true contribution of a school to student learning.”
NO, no they don’t as neither “metric” (sic) is “measuring” anything. Assessing and/or evaluating does not necessarily mean measuring no matter how hard one tries to parse the concept of measuring. Using false, idiological* concepts, that the teaching and learning process can be measured, invariably renders all conclusions mute/invalid. Why do folks insist on “doing the wrong thing-attempting to measure the inmeasurable teaching and learning process-righter. One can only gets results that will be “wronger”:
“The proliferation of educational assessments and evaluations belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Venomous snake handling is inherently dangerous with many a bad outcome. So it is with attempting to “measure” the teaching and learning process-many bad outcomes for the most innocent of society, the children, who find themselves thrown into the snake pit of educational standards and standardized testing.
*Idiology (n.) A. Belief system based on error and falsehoods. B. The belief system of idiots.
Kudos to you Duane for trying to make people think about the words they use because words are very important.
Most people throw around the words “metric” and “measurement’ without defining or even thinking about what they mean.
But use of those words has the effect of implying a scientific basis for whatever it is they refer to, regardless of whether that is true.
In fact, to give something an aura of scientific credibility is precisely why people use the words.
Thanks, SDP. If all of us would work on getting folks to understand the misuse of words and terminology, which I also believe is purposely done, is of utmost and primary importance. And it is an urgent task!
I have been working through in my head how to get Comte-Sponville’s “fidelity to truth” concept worked out in the framework of current educational discourse so that these deformities of language can be counteracted.
And thanks to you for your insightful poetry that brightens our days while fighting those who have no qualms about
to finish my thought:
being “Infidels to Truth”.
Duane “NO, no they don’t as neither “metric” (sic) is “measuring” anything. ”
You are wrong; see below.
And Poet “Most people throw around the words “metric” and “measurement’ without defining or even thinking about what they mean.”
Well, I did think over the meaning of these two words in connection with education, and I came up with a correspondingly scientific and and deeply satisfying solution.
http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/Html/universal_measure.html
No, doubt “deeply satisfying”, Máté! A perfect tool (or is that toy?) for doing mental mathturbation (credit to SGP).
When I read about “measuring learning outcomes” or “intelligent design”, my thoughts are not exactly sexy.
They are “not even wrong”, as Wolfgang Pauli would say.
What a waste that we had to stop dismissing them with a simple “stupid” and we are now compelled to write endless blogs about them.
Another statistic would be the number of certified, licensed teachers at SA, versus new graduates. When I was there, I was quite shocked at the number of recent college grads, most from out of state, who were suddenly “teachers.” The principal of HS3 was inexperienced, without backbone, and was the architect of the punishment of the kindergartner who was made to walk up and down the halls until 5 pm on the first day of school (noted in the famous Michael Winerip NY Times article).
Didn’t she immediately back off this mild criticism of this one clout-heavy chain, anyway?
She’s off script. The Democrats plan on ignoring K-12 schools and re-directing to prek and college until after the election, at which point they’ll aggressively pursue privatization again, no matter who wins, because that decision has been made.
Ms. Ravitch, Good morning. An issue that most people do NOT want to talk about is that of the impact single parents raising children on the education of these children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has a report that you have probably read that lists the number of single parents raising children. The report is at: http://www.aecf.org/blog/single-parents-raising-more-than-a-third-of-us-kids/ Just a brief glance at the report one can quickly see which states have the highest number of single parents raising children and from what we know these are the very same states with the lowest results when it comes to reporting educational results in our public schools. The statistics in these reports clearly point to one major problem in this country when it comes to educating our children. I live in New Mexico. High poverty. Low income levels. High number of single parents raising their children. The negative list goes on and on. Unlit there are changes in this negative areas there will NOT be changes in the education success for majority of children listed in the Casey report. It just cannot happen. An additional impact is the number of Grandparents raising their Grandchildren. This is a very sad state of affairs. Eugene (Gene) Gant “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” Margaret Mead “Testing students until they are numb does not teach them to think. Turns them into robots.” Gene Gant
Are you implying that single parents are a cause of all the other problems? Because studies show that single parenting is a symptom not a cause. If you raise people’s economic situation, they are more likely to get and stay married. It’s the effects of poverty that make marriage – along with education, getting and maintaining a job, caring for a child, etc. – difficult. It’s not single parenting that causes poverty (although there is a cycle and single parenting can exacerbate poverty).
The cyclical aspect is probably hard to overstate. Like many other things, single-parenting seems a lot more hazardous when you’re broke than when you’re flush.
“The Hilloracle”
Hilloracle is she
Omniscient, that is true
Most wise is Hillary
And unassuming too
Now that Success Academy has received all this attention I wish BASIS schools would start being looked at with closer scrutiny. These schools also have ridiculously high student attrition rates and coach out any student which they feel will damage their bottom line numbers. Also, there are little to no accommodations made for special education students. The BASIS schools do not teach all students as public schools must do. I do not understand how they can receive public funds when they cater to a select few.
BASIS are located in states that don’t really care whether charter schools educate at-risk kids. If a charter school wants to be the “Stuy” of Tucson and were willing to experience 75% attrition rates and graduate only a handful of kids until families got the message, they could do and everyone said “go ahead”. Notice that when they had to open a school in NYC, it was a NON-charter school. Instead, they opened as a for-profit private school.
I suspect Eva Moskowitz wishes she could get away with being as honest as the Basis administrators are about their unwillingness to educate any struggling kids. The problem is that is illegal in NY State. So therefore she jumps through all the hoops to deny what even her own parents know to be true — they LIKE that they get rid of so many kids who struggle. And SUNY Charter Institute is not just looking the other way at the high attrition rates, but actually encouraging them by judging their schools ONLY on performance alone (even if that performance is achieved by getting rid of most of the starting cohort.)
They absolutely don’t care how many kids leave nor how miserable a school works to make them WANT to leave. The new “education reform” in which charter schools get to pick their kids (but pretend they do not.)
Public magnet schools love the cream too, but maybe they keep more of their admission “mistakes” ? I don’t know the answer to this but will find out.
While there are legitimate arguments to be made for and against magnet schools, it’s a false analogy to compare them to charters.
Magnet schools make no efforts to hide their selective enrollment, whereas charters falsely claim that they are public schools serving the same populations as the District schools they drain resources from. While pretending to be public schools open to everyone, charters skim/sort students on the front end and counsel out/banish them on the back end. Thus, those “miraculous” charter graduation and college-acceptance rates, with cohorts that are often less than half of those students who started the program.
Also, magnet school teachers are fully certified and receive union wages, benefits and working conditions. The overwhelming majority of charter school teachers are at-will employees earning reduced wages and benefits, have no say whatsoever about their hours and working conditions (which resemble those of a sweat shop more than a school) and mostly come through bogus “certification” processes engineered by wealthy charter interests.
Charters and magnets can be compared on the creaming variable.
Public magnets do publish acceptance criteria but the rate of acceptance is very low in most of them, lower than the charters I know about. Of course, the magnets for gifted accept only the top 2%. Then there are the rich public schools and I.B. etc.etc. Also, how do parents in poverty areas learn about the complex public school application process and in some cases provide private transportation? They don’t.
I agree that “miraculous” outcomes are based on creaming, but your assessment of charters is not based on average charter schools across the country.
Certification has little to do with teaching excellence but many of the teachers in charters I’m familiar with are certified or have advanced degrees. They are former public school teachers who want to teach kids and not battle discipline problems and paperwork.
But none of the above is the real problem, in my opinion. Only about 30% of students have the ability, self-control, attention span and motivation to attend an accredited university. Most would love the option of career training (not shop) along with the basic academics needed for career work. Read my report “The Elephant in the Classroom.” Instead, they are hammered with heavy duty academic tests that actually prevent them from entering career programs.
Both my son and I attended what could be considered as magnet schools. Unlike charters which siphon high achievers with a direct often severe impact felt by relatively few schools, magnet schools usually accept students from much larger geographic areas such as cities or entire counties. As a result, there are plenty of capable students left in neighborhood schools. Magnet schools operate like any other public school with transparency, accountability and democratic parent input. Not all magnet type schools are for high achievers. Some like BOCES in New York, are formed so districts may pool resources to more efficiently serve a special needs population or career education. It may be cost prohibitive for a local school to offer auto body repair for twelve students. When neighboring districts pool resources, they can offer academics half of the day, and by sending students to a common location, students can receive the career education program for the remaining part of the day.
Mack Hicks,
” Instead, they are hammered with heavy duty academic tests that actually prevent them from entering career programs.”
I’m not following what you are intending to say with that statement. Would you please elaborate?
TIA
Duane
Low ability kids are spending so much time re-taking tests, etc. that there is no time for career ed.
What is “career ed”?
Even not knowing what you mean by that term Mack I believe it may be more of cutting “career ed” and other supposed peripheral courses to be replaced with English and Math coordinators and other administrative personnel to attempt to ensure raising test scores.
I saw that happen in my last district, where I was told when I hired on that the next hire at the school would be another foreign language teacher. Well, in ten years that never happened but the district added the above mentioned personnel and the computer techs needed to install and maintain the technological infrastructure for all the testing mandates.
Yes, but career courses leading to nationally recognized certifications should be central, not peripheral, for at least 40% of our students.
Information of possible use. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has a wish list for state laws. The 2015 “National Alliance Model Law” for charter schools has “twenty essential components” with these rated in priority to show what matters most to the charter industry.
The Alliance monitors state-by-state progress in having laws that align with these priorities in order to “encourage state laws that require ‘best practices’ and guarantee public charter school rights and freedoms from a supportive legal and policy environment.”
In the following I have rearranged and edited information from the Alliance’s 2015 report (pp. 8-13) in order to show the number of states (from many states to few) where there are laws matching the priorities in the Alliance model law. For example, 32 states have laws that comport with Priority 2 (law allows a variety of charter schools) but only 21 states have laws for Priority 1 (law says there can be no cap on the number of charter schools). The full report names the states with laws for each priority, along detailed profiles for each state. Reports of this kind are tools for national and state-by-state legislative advocacy.
Priority 2. Allows a Variety of Public Charter Schools—including new start-ups, public school conversions, and virtual schools, (32 states).
Priority 11. Fiscally and Legally Autonomous Schools with Independent Public Charter School Boards—charter schools are created as autonomous entities with their boards having most of the powers granted to other traditional public school district boards, (27 states).
Priority 14. Automatic Collective Bargaining Exemption—charter schools are exempt from any outside collective bargaining agreements, while not interfering with laws and other applicable rules protecting the rights of employees to organize and be free from discrimination, (24 states).
Priority 1. No Caps—allows unlimited growth of charter schools in the state, (21 states).
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Priority 3. Multiple Authorizers Available—including non-local school board authorizers to which charter applicants may directly apply, (13 states).
Priority 8. Comprehensive Charter School Monitoring and Data Collection Processes—so that all authorizers can verify charter school compliance with applicable law and their performance-based contracts, (13 states).
Priority 20. Access to Relevant Employee Retirement Systems—with the option to participate in a similar manner to all public schools, (13 states).
Priority 15. Multischool Charter Contract and/or Multicharter Contract BoardsAllowed— allows an independent charter school board to oversee multiple schools linked under a single charter contract or to hold multiple charter contracts, (12 states).
Priority 17. Clear Identification of Special Education Responsibilities—clarity on which local education agency is responsible for such services and how such services are to be funded (especially for low-incident, high-cost cases), (12 states).
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Priority 9. Clear Processes for Decisions on Renewal, Nonrenewal, and Revocation—including school closure and dissolution procedures to be used by all authorizers, (6 states).
Priority 10. Educational Service Providers Allowed—provided there are no conflicts of interest between the charter school board and the service provider and there is a clear performance contract between the two entities, (6 states).
Priority 13. Automatic Exemptions from Many State and District Laws and Regulations—except for those covering health, safety, civil rights, student accountability, employee criminal history checks, open meetings, freedom of information requirements, and generally accepted accounting principles. (4 states)
Priority 5. Adequate Authorizer Funding—guaranteed funding from state for authorizer fees, and public accountability for such expenditures, (4 states).
Priority 19. Multiple Possibilities for Equitable Access to Capital Funding and Facilities—such as: a per-pupil facility allowance equal to statewide average per-pupil capital costs; facility grant and revolving loan programs; a charter school bonding authority (or access to state tax-exempt bonding authorities available to public schools); the right of first refusal to purchase or lease at or below fair market value a closed or unused public school facility or property; clarity that no state or local entity may impose any facility-related requirements that are stricter than those applied to traditional public schools, (4 states).
Priority 4. Required Authorizer and Overall Program Accountability System—except for a legislatively created state charter school commission, all authorizers must participate in an authorizer reporting program based on objective data, as overseen by some state-level entity with the power to remedy, (3 states).
Priority 12. Clear Procedures for Student Recruitment and Enrollment including Lotteries—which must be followed by all charter schools, (2 states).
Priority 6. Transparent Procedures for Charter Application, Review, and Decisions—including application requirements treating comprehensive academic, operational, governance, and performance, with such applications reviewed and acted upon following professional authorizer standards, (1 state).
Priority 7. Require Performance-Based Charter Contracts—with such contracts created as separate post-application documents between authorizers and charter schools detailing at least academic performance expectations, operational performance expectations, and school and authorizer rights and duties, (1 state).
Priority 16. Eligibility and Access to Extracurricular and Interscholastic Activities—so that (a) students at charters that do not provide extracurricular and interscholastic activities have access to those activities at traditional public schools via a mutual agreement, and (b) charter school students and employees are eligible for state- and district- sponsored interscholastic leagues, competitions, awards, scholarships, and recognition programs to the same extent as traditional public school students and employees, (1 state).
Priority 18. Equitable Operational Funding and Equal Access to All State and
Federal Categorical Funding—flowing to the school in a timely fashion and in the same amount as district schools following eligibility criteria similar to public schools, (1 state).
I have deleted my initial commentary on these “essentials.” Many prevent in-state competition among charters by imposing standardized procedures and some of those procedures shore up some loopholes that are common and threaten the industry.
Source: Measuring Up to the Model: A Ranking of State Charter School Laws, 6th Edition. (2015, January) http://www.publiccharters.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/model_law_2015.pdf
The PURPOSE of charters is to close public schools so taxpaying dollars can be pilfered by privatizers. Why is the government complicit with the hedge funders? Ultimately, even when the charters close, investors got paid. Then the do it all over again. It is a revolving gravy train, and none of them care about the kids. Eventually, will it all be online so the privatizers don’t even have to use brick and mortar buildings (which the will gentrify into luxury apartments)?
“And not a single SA student scored well on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT).”
If I were one of those kids, I’d feel like I’d been robbed. Imagine spending all your elementary and middle school years being drilled like a little soldier, spending nearly every waking hour in school when other kids get to play or watch TV. You witnessed other kids getting suspended over and over again until they didn’t come back. Maybe you were suspended a few times yourself, but you managed to straighten up, remain in the SA system, and graduate from the eighth grade. You were probably told all this rigor and “tough love” would be worth it in the end, because you’d get into a selective high school instead of being stuck in that dangerous, rundown, overcrowded dump your older siblings and neighborhood friends attended. You have dreams of going to college and doing something special with your life. But then you find out after all those years of sacrificing your childhood and jumping through the SA hoops, your test scores are still too low and you still have to go to a “ghetto” high school.
That would feel like a major kick in the behind.
It would be ironic if all the affluent white families whose kids are treated so well at Success Academy Upper West (“it’s a free private school” they always brag) were shocked at their children’s poor performance on the SHSAT in a few years. But those families have so much money that they will easily hire tutors to help their own children unlearn all the bad habits the constant test prep created and then teach them how to think.
I can see the affluent kids getting steamed also. Like their not-so-well-to-do counterparts, they’re growing up in the SA test prep factory. Meanwhile their little friends at Dalton and the Ethical Culture School are spending their schooldays in a pleasant, progressive environment doing fun, kid-friendly activities. Then after all that, the SA rich kids will still need extra tutoring? Oh yeah, they’ll be angry, perhaps more so than the poor kids because they’ll be more aware of what they’re missing.
I hate to interrupt the jollies you’re getting over the perceived failures of 13- and 14-year-old kids and their families, and I’m not sure what a “ghetto” school is, but it looks like most of the Success middle school graduates have chosen to go to the Success high school.
The kids at Dalton and other independent schools are the ones leaning heavily on tutors (often for hundreds of dollars per hour–no, not day or week, per hour) to get through their courses, college applications, and SATs, so I’m not sure what you are getting at with that comment.
Tim writes “often for hundreds of dollars per hour”
Like $200/hr? Can you make this claim more convincing?
It is an open secret at NYC independent schools. Here is one link, you can easily Google for others: http://gawker.com/5844635/private-school-tutors-amazed-at-own-ridiculous-fees
http://giphy.com/gifs/LzMOD5jviTGve
Tim, what makes you think I’m getting my “jollies” from hearing about what these kids are going through? Quite the opposite. I am putting myself in those kids’ places, imagining what it feels like to spend one’s entire childhood at an SA school, only to find out that all those years of hard work and sacrifice amounted to nothing.
If there are any “failures” here, I blame the schools and the larger system, not the kids. As for the parents, they enrolled their kids in what they believed to be a good school, a school that would be better than the local public school. If the kids managed to stay at SA from K-8, then it means the parents did whatever the SA system required of them. I do not perceive that as a failure on their part. Like the kids, these parents made sacrifices, believing there would be benefits in the end.
In regards to the kids “choosing” to go on to an SA high school, what other choice would they make? SA did not provide them with the education they needed to gain admittance to a selective high school. You may not know what a “ghetto” high school is like, but the kids do. They don’t want to go to a place where there are fifty kids in each classroom, where the roof leaks and the toilets don’t flush, where only a handful of freshmen manage to graduate and fewer still go to college, where fighting and bullying is rampant and nobody ever really feels safe. Given these limited options, the SA eighth-graders stick with the “devil they know” and sign up for SA high school. For their sake, I hope it works out for them and they get into college.
I am (obviously) not a fan of Success Academy due to their massive dishonesty about who they will and will not teach and the great harm they have done to public schools with their insistence that large class sizes are fine and cutting funds are fine, because if they can teach “any at-risk child” using less money (a terrible lie) then public schools should be able to do it for less money too. The reason they are the darlings of the right-wing is Eva Moskowitz’ willingness to say that failing public schools don’t need anything more than the cheap SA teachers so no need for more funding or small class sizes.
But I have no doubt that their high school will be well-funded and the kids who have made it to high school (some unknown fraction of the at-risk students who entered in K) will get a decent education. It’s not a bad booby prize from a charter school that spent far too much time teaching them to think like the not very smart people who think the state exam questions are “rigorous” instead of just ambiguous. And presumably by 8th grade Success Academy has rid itself of most of the students it doesn’t want. If they end up graduating only a fraction of the 9th graders who begin there, then they would feel like a major kick in the behind for all the ones who “got to go”.
Great article, btw. With all these references to back up every claim, I wonder what SA supporters will say.
I am surprised this hasn’t been talked about already (maybe I missed it), but Success Academy seems to be changing to a shorter day for elementary and middle school — significantly shorter — so that students don’t miss out on all the important after school activities.
It’s an incredible acknowledgement of their desperation to get more middle class and upper middle class students because — despite the thousands on their wait lists — I wager that nearly all the students on wait lists are the students that Success Academy prefers that public school educate. As it is, people are looking more closely at their attrition rates and suspension rates, so that’s not going to cut it in the future as they fill their spots.
In the article, the parents who love that change to a shorter day are middle class or upper middle class. The ones who question it are parents at the schools that serve much poorer students. I suppose if your aim is to serve the affluent families, you are happy to be a hypocrite.
“None of them care about the kids.” Wow! I can see why Horace keeps his name hidden.