Tonight the Austin school board will deliberate the future of the IDEA charter school chain.
The chain claims to offer a “rigorous” college preparatory program. It claims that 100% of its graduates enter four-year colleges and universities and that 92% are either still in college or have graduated.
As researcher Ed Fuller shows, none of these claims is true.
71.4% of the IDEA graduates–not 100%–enrolled in a four-year institution of higher education.
Nearly half of them–43%–are failing in college. They were not well prepared.
Each year, the failure rate has gotten larger.
Despite these unimpressive statistics, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the IDEA charter chain a stunning $29 million.
Fuller concludes:
“One would think that given claims of the CEO, the marketing focus on being a college preparatory school, and the recent $29 million Race to the Top award from the US Department of Education, IDEA graduates would be showing improving performance in this area. Yet, this is not the case.
“In addition, this data calls into serious question the 92% persistence rate of IDEA graduates in universities as claimed in the IDEA annual report. While students earning less than a 2.0 GPA during the first year of college do not necessarily get removed from the university or drop out of school, the fact that nearly one out of every two IDEA graduates failed to earn a passing GPA suggests that more than 8% of IDEA graduates might fail to enroll after their first year of post-secondary work. Unfortunately, IDEA provides no data source or even data table to substantiate their claim about the persistence rate and, given that many of IDEA’s claims have proved to be untrue, one has to question the veracity of claims that are not substantiated by some independent data source.
“I have written about this issue before in more detail (see http://fullerlook.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/college-readiness-of-idea-and-other-high-schools-in-the-rio-grande-valley/) and shown that given the initial scores of IDEA students entering high school, IDEA students tend to under-perform on the SAT and college performance. Indeed, even when compared to high schools in the same labor market, IDEA students substantially underperform in college. This entry simply updates the previous post with a new cohort of students.
“Sadly, despite the rhetoric from IDEA, Tom Torkelson, and the US Department of Education, the college preparedness of IDEA schools has been moving in the wrong direction.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Madison Avenue Rule Of Thumb —
You can estimate how false an ad line is by how much money it takes to convince people of it.
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Let’s say you are in favor of charter schools. Even so, lavishly funding IDEA is clearly a waste of money. Or is it? If, as appears to be the case, the US Department of Education’s actual goal is not to educate but rather to privatize education under the guise of “reform,” the funding makes perfect sense.
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I agree. The purpose is to lower costs. An uneducated population is easier to rule.
I’ve noticed that with a lot of things. Government never identifies the real problem and works on solutions that are doomed to failure. For example, it is the lazy teachers’ fault student’s don’t learn. Then government pushes for social promotion, unfunded mandates, increasing graduation rates, etc.
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If you want to know about the total lack of accountability of charter schools go read this DOE OIG report. This report is DOE-OIG/A02l0002. And remember this comes from the Federal Dept. of Education Office of Inspector General. Looks like they are talking with forked tongue to me.
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Also, Arne Duncan, when superintendent of Chicago along with senator Feinstein wrote letters to the California Legislature during L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa’s, “King Tony”, bid for the California unconstitutional mayoral control (AB 1381) in which they both lied. They both stated that those who ran the Chicago Public Schools before Daley took over in 1995 had put the Chicago School District into $1.8 billion in debt which Daley, Vallas and Duncan had to clean up. Now to the facts. I just happen to have the pertinent financial pages from the Chicago Public Schools 1994 Budget and there was a surplus. Duncan should lose his job just like Rod Paige when he lied to get his job. Paige stated that the Houston dropout rate under him went to 0% when in fact it was discovered that it was really 50%. In Duncan’s case he lied to another state for political and ideological reasons. It seems that liars are the ones who go ahead now. Duncan and Obama are also pursuing corporatization and privatization. They are destroying public education. Recently in the Chicago Sun-Times was a story on charter schools. This article stated that of the over 100 charter schools only one charter school did better than the regular Chicago Public Schools. And Obama and Duncan want us to follow this failed methodology?
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Obama and Duncan want people to follow this methodology because they are simply incompetent in the area of education. I really don’t think they have a clue about what is happening out here. Charters always use propaganda. They use false graduation rates and inflated grades. If your school has an average ACT of 15 or 16, how prepared for college is a student from this school. It’ s all a scam and our tax dollars are being used to enrich charter CEOs. Taxpayers deserve to get their money back.
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Duncan knows what’s going on. The man worked for Eli Broad for years.
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I taught at an IDEA secondary school during the school year 2011-2012. When I began, one of the phrases scarred in teachers’ and students’ minds is “No Excuses”. I understood this to mean that students should not give any excuses because the teachers equip them with the necessary abilities to complete the work and pass the exams. Within a short time I realized it meant that teachers must go above and beyond to do as much for students that there was no possible way they could give an excuse (this came just short of basically doing the work for the students). Examples were fill-in-the-blank notes, doing homework together (question by question), giving students the notes, teaching them the questions that were to appear on the exam, accepting homework or make-up work months late, and many more. Because students still did not perform, grades had to be changed. No student could have a grade lower than a 60 appear on their report card and no assignment can receive a grade lower than a 50 (even if never turned in).
I can definitely back-up this article by reiterating that “the numbers” for TAKS look good because “they teach to the test.” The standards for students are ridiculously low, and the expectations for teachers are impossibly high. When you’re asking the teacher to do the work for the student, how can you expect them to be college-ready? I had this argument with my assistant principal WEEKLY. I could not change my teaching philosophy to think like them, and I went to work everyday miserably, knowing full-well that my efforts were useless. These kids were doomed, and there was no way they would make it in college.
At the beginning I went in actually teaching. However, because these students were not used to it, I got so much push-back from the students and absolutely no support from administrators. I quickly realized these students were like that because of past teachers and administrators at IDEA.
One thing you might not know is that most administrators are white and almost all students are Hispanic. A good amount of teachers are also white (and TFA members). Teachers and administrators have the mentality that these are poor, Mexican kids, and we can’t expect them to do anything for themselves. They are their saviors sent from up North, come to finish their high school education for them. I know this sounds extreme, even racist, but you have to teach here in order to believe the things that occur in this school.
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