In response to the earlier post about Geofrey Canada boasting about the “100% graduation rate” of his charter, which was not true, while knocking the public schools, Bruce Baker reminded me that he had looked at NYC charters and compared them to NYC public schools in relation to a number of variables.
Geoffrey Canada’s charter is part of his analysis, along with other highly touted charters, like KIPP and Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy.
Charters typically enroll fewer students who are ELL, special education, and free lunch (the very poor). Their teachers are younger and less experienced. They have smaller class sizes. They spend more (in the case of KIPP, a lot more). With some exceptions, they do not get better results. The public schools outperform Canada’s HCZ charter school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Doesn’t look like the charters have much to brag about. What if their benefactors shut off their money? What will happen then? That is unstable revenue. Dangerous is what it is. Typical of their un thought out risk taking.
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“Typical of their un thought out risk taking.” Kinda of like what the banksters did with the various derivatives, swaps, bundled pieces of junk paper in the recent crash???
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This summary of Bruce Baker’s analysis should be posted on every site that links to Canada’s TED talk.
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The weird thing to me is this; Wall Street contributes heavily to charters in order to make which them viable even when they are not doing better than public schools.
Then Wall Street floats the bonds that charters need to stay alive. They sell them to their clients. The rating agencies haven’t rated them highly. I wonder what the rate of return is on them? The charters have to spend tax payer dollars on debt service.
The rating agencies know charters’ debt service payments depend upon high enrollment — and that conflicts with charters’ need for higher test scores, as that depend upon regular culling of ELL children, children with special needs and those who receive a free lunch.
So tax payer funds go to debt service and marketing for the right students.
That is why UNO charter pays $20,000 less a year to its teachers. Wall Street knows the numbers won’t work for their clients otherwise, and that is why when UNO teachers voted in a union, Wall Street became concerned.
And union teachers can speak up.
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It’s as confusing as those high-risk home loans. I guess the people making the money now won’t be paying the price once this bubble bursts. What is so sad about this they are gambling with a generation’s education. Is nothing sacred?
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Our students are commodities traded on Wall Street…the same yahoos who caused the recession (I call it a depression) in this country of the not so brave and the not so free.
Also, elections in this country is insane. Lobbyists give campaign contributions to pass laws that benefit the top 1%. The top 1% can buy laws for their own pocketbooks. It’s The Hunger Games at work in this country. There’s the Capitol and the rest of us…the people in the districts who support the lavish lifestyles of those in the Capitol.
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Do you have a link to backup the info that Canada’s 100% graduation rate is false?
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Yes, read Gary Rubinstein’s post for the full data on Canada’s school. It was linked in my post
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Baker’s data undermines the spectacular claims of charter-advocates like Canada and Rhee. That’s the singular message which Baker does not provide b/c he maintains some distance from the toxic policits of the private rampage coursing its way through pub schls. The grand claims of charter operators distorts the reality of their mediocre outcomes, but as long as the major media project Canada, Rhee, Gates, and others as tough-talking truthtellers, their distortions become the common sense of the day. The success of the charter rampage thus is heavily-dependent on monopoly control of the mass media whose mass circulation gives them their false heroic image.
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That audience seemed to be more than happy to applaud anything the Canada or Legend said. Facts were beside the point. It seemed more like an infomercial.
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When I last looked, state laws allowed charters to enroll students, accept state money to educate them for a year, and then expel the student at the beginning of the year and keep the money designated for that child’s education. Meantime, the student is sent back to the public school to be educated at public expense, while the remaining charter school students benefit in the form of smaller class size, because of the missing students.
That was my understanding, perhaps I am wrong.
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That’s how I understand it, as well.
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But if everybody knows the deal with test scores (that they doth not a good education make), then why would anyone presume people would send their kids somewhere based on test scores? At some point some new selling point for any school wanting to attract students will need to be realized. For example, the public school where I work is getting a dual language kindergarten (2 of them). And I have a friend whose children attend a French Immersion Charter in Kansas City. The selling point for both of these schools (public and charter) is the language component. So if we all know the testing craze is just that. . .a response to purposefully driven hype to sell contracts, why would people still look at test scores for choosing a school? When will the metric change? Or will it?
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