Bruce Baker here examines a “graduate school” created by charter schools where their inexperienced teachers train new teachers how to produce high test scores.
The model is a charter in New Jersey called North Star that gets great “growth scores” but has remarkably high attrition rates, especially among black boys.
Baker writes:
“But is a school really successful if 50 enter 5th grade, 1/3 are gone by 8th grade and only a handful ever graduate?
“Is this any indication of the quality of teaching, or pedagogy involved? I won’t go so far as to suggest that what I personally might perceive as offensive, demeaning pedagogy is driving these attrition rates (okay… maybe I just did).
“But, at the very least, I might argue that a school that loses over half its kids from grade 5 to 12 is a failing school, not an outstanding one. Whether that has any implications for labeling their teachers as “failing” and their preparation programs as “failing” is another question entirely.
“It is quite simply completely and utterly ridiculous to suggest that Relay GSE is an outstanding graduate school of education as a function of measured test score gains of the few students who might stick around to take the tests in subsequent years.
“No secret sauce here… just a boatload of bogus policy assumptions creating perverse incentives and taking our education system even further in the wrong direction.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
KIPP also has high attrition among black males,especially in grades 6 through 8: 40%.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/03/31/27kipp_ep.h30.html
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The attrition rate of a charter school can significantly change the perception of that schools performance, for the better, in the areas of standardized test scores, and graduation rates. Yet this data is not factored in when comparing public and private schools. If I could selectively remove 1/3 of the students from my class, the standardized test score average for the class would rise significantly. This is a significant piece of data in the data driven world of ed. reform, yet, the Stanford Credo study comparing charter and public schools does not list attrition rates as a criteria for comparison.
It seem to me that the attrition rate of any school is a factor that should be front and center when evaluating it’s effectiveness.
What are the attrition rates of charter schools in general, and more specifically, the highly effective ones? and how do they compare with their public school counterparts?
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We have many students “bounced back” to us from surrounding charter schools, especially KIPP, near the end of the school year. I wonder how charter school attrition rates correspond with significant dates (i.e. testing) on the school calendar.
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My only question is Why?. Why are attrition rates not factored. Why don’t people ask how many students leave the schools. We have to start and keep asking WHY!!
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This is a horrible way to prepare teachers and it really disturbs me that anyone from traditional Teacher Ed would condone it. Relay and other similar teacher training programs, like Match and ABCTE, were not amongst those that NCTQ evaluated and now you know why. They were compelled to trashed Ed Schools in order to make way for the new, preferred teacher prep programs of corporate “reformers,” which trains people to use ONE pedagogical approach, that of the military style drill sergeant teacher, as implemented at KIPP et al. This is like novice TFA “teachers” being in charge of training future teachers. It sends chills up my spine.
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