A regular reader in New York City is a data hound. He gets annoyed when he sees the media repeating things that are factually wrong. Recently he noticed the repetition of inflated claims of charter success. Here, he goes to the sources to set the record straight.
A recent series of articles in the New York Times’ SchoolBook site examined charter schools in New York City. While the series was more honest than most reporting on charter schools, charter school advocates were still able to get away with untruths and the media reported them as the truth.
Throughout the series charter advocates claimed to be preparing students for college. Does their rhetoric match their results? The data suggests not. The average SAT score for charter high school graduates in New York City was 430 in reading and 438 in math versus the national average of 497 in reading ad 514 in math. Less than a quarter of their graduates earned a passing score on the state exams in Trigonometry or Physics or Chemistry, and only 8.4% of their graduates earned a score of 3 or above on an AP exam. This would not strike anybody as a result that can be truthfully called “students prepared for college.”
In another story in the series Democracy Prep, a charter organization, acknowledged that their policy of holding many students back “drove some families away.” If only they copped to this fact when Mayor of New York City praised them for taking over and turning around a failing charter school. The truth is that they accomplished this by threatening to hold back about 100 of the 247 students in the school according to the Wall Street Journal and, as a result, only 70% of the students returned. The test scores then went up 30%, but they got rid of 30% of their struggling students. Not a great model for improving a school. Brings back memories of the Vietnam-era idea that it made sense to destroy villages in order to save them.
One KIPP school was said to have “a greater share of students with special needs than the citywide average.” The citywide average of students with special needs in middle schools is 18.8%. In the KIPP school, 18.6% of their students have special needs. In what should come as no surprise, the school has only 2.5% of students with the highest level of special needs as opposed to 9.1% in the average New York City middle school. So the truth is that the KIPP school actually has fewer students with special needs and a lot, lot fewer students with the highest special needs than the average city middle school. The KIPP school also accepts many, many fewer students with incoming math scores in the lowest third than the city middle school average (14.3% at KIPP vs. the 38.3% public middle school average). Believe it or not, this KIPP school is accepting more disadvantaged students than the other KIPP schools in New York City, so you can imagine what the average student profile at the other KIPP schools is like. It would appear despite the charter school claim to make “no excuses” they have plenty of excuses for not educating the same students as their public school colleagues.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Inflated claims = Propaganda = Lies
‘Shameful.
If my students submit similar writing, they must correct it.
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Waiting for superman….looks like it is all hollywood hype. The real supermen and women are in the public schools!
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Inflating test scores is truly pandemic, and with a purpose to fool the public about the reality of charter schools, or any other agenda that public school systems want to push. I’ve seen that in Denver, Fort Worth, and from other people across the country. Our past presidential campaigns (Romney) took lying to new levels. Truth any more seems to be passe when “leaders” want to achieve an end that truthfulness would not endorse. It was refreshing to read such an intelligent, accurate account of the miserable “accomplishments” of charters…such fallacious facts are used here to push this corporate attack on public schools. I hope everyone will remember, come ’16 that ALL the Bushes have been the prime movers in the varied assaults on education.
Jeb is just a more acceptable covert agent of such destruction.
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Charter schools do not have to follow most ed code or local regulations, cherry pick parents and students, do not deal with behavioral problems, ESL or special education. Now they do not do so well. I call this the “Correction Factor.” Please go read the Sept. 2012 DOE OIG report on charter schools DOE-OIG/A02L0002. This report on Florida, Arizona and California having no accountability at any level on charter schools. Read the report and see if this fits N.Y. and any other state. I am willing to bet that it totally fits what is happening in N.Y. and all around the country. Please read this report. When the California State Board of Education had a powerpoint from their staff on charter schools and said everything was beautiful and accountable I got up to speak and read from the report which damned all of them for total lack of accountability and asked them “Do you have this report and if not I will give you a copy.” They then stated “We have the report.” What they really said is that they knew that staff was lying to them and they did not care. This is happening in N.Y. also. Make them deal with reality not fantasy.
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I would be more interested in an apples to apples comparison. How do the charter schools compare with the NYC PUBLIC schools? Perhaps the charter schools are out performing their public counterpart. Or not. Not enough information given. A bigger concern is what is working, not throwing stones at other educational efforts. I am all for creativity and trying things new. If we continue to repeat the past, we will continue to get their results.
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Charter performance in NYC varies widely, as it does in all jurisdictions. when looking at performance, one must take demographics into account.
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Dr. Ravitch has often said that some charter schools do a good job of educating their students, some do a poor job, most do about the same job as the public schools, but those statements are usually left out of the headline posts.
You are right that the SAT comparison should be with NYC averages, controlling for various student specific variables.
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This is not a surprise. But, isn’t it pathetic that people like Bloomberg and others are so egotistical that they can’t tell the public the truth. Why? Ego? Greed? It just makes no sense.How will the people ever regain their power?
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