One reader writes frequently to boast about the high, high, high test scores at Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain in New York City called Success Academy (previously known as Harlem Success Academy until Eva decided to move beyond the Harlem area).
Another reader offered this response:
| Great that the test scores are so high. But these data alone are not enough to reject the null hypothesis that poverty and poor test results are unrelated…as in, like, everywhere. Here are a few things that would make others get more excited about SA’s test scores.1. Make sure the co-located school and the SA school are truly matched pairs in terms of sample. Others on this blog have suggested ways that the student populations might be different.2. You need to isolate the intervention so that the co-located school can serve as your control group. Skeptics say that student population and test prep account for the scores. Proponents say it is about expecting more and believing the kids can do it. Or maybe it is about more total instructional time.If you want people to be more excited, you’ve got to tell them what is in the secret sauce because high test scores themselves need a context. It may be possible to raise the test scores of ELL students 50% in one year by strapping them into a computer adaptive module for 5 hours a day. But, would we want to do that?
Supposedly, the whole point of charters was to be able to scale up innovations. High test scores themselves tell us very little about the specific intervention(s) that are causing them. And, since we are talking about developing human beings here, we really need to get a sense of potential side effects of these interventions and if a less “costly” (financially or otherwise) change would achieve our goal just as well. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A real test to show why these data on charters and publics are in correct
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Test prep is the educational equivalent of steroids used in professional sports. While they jack up the test scores of Eva’s in the short run, the massive test-prep, like steroids, are ultimately detrimental to a child’s long-term educational outcome.
Have you read anything from the teachers who have defected from Eva’s test-prep factories?
Have you not heard the infamous quote where the salivating Paul Fucaloro, Eva’s Director in Instruction, brags about turning her test-prep factory sweatshop workers… errr… I mean… turning “Eva’s students” into “test-taking machines”—with this idiot not showing the slightest self-awareness or basic understanding about how harmful such a pedagogy is?
http://nymag.com/nymag/features/65614/index3.html
PAUL FUCALORO: “By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.”
Or this from Harlem Success Academy defectors commenting on the above New York Magazine story:
http://nymag.com/nymag/letters/65751/
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“Others took issue with the network and its emphasis on test preparation. ‘Yes, all schools spend some time on test prep, but [Harlem Success Academy] goes too far … Are students here really learning or are they just becoming ‘test-taking machines’ ? ”
“A self-identified former teacher at Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network disputed her assertion that students spent only ten minutes a day on test prep (‘Totally untrue. Try two hours’), and focused on the Network’s policy toward disabled students.”
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Or how about this same defector blowing the whistle on Eva’s dumping of kids with special ed:
Again, at:
http://nymag.com/nymag/letters/65751/
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“ ‘(Success Academy administrators) counsel children with learning disabilities and behavioral difficulties out [of the school] because they do not want their test scores affected. It is beyond shocking, and morally disgusting.’ ”
“Others criticized Paul Fucaloro, Harlem Success’s director of instruction, who was quoted by (the original article writer) Coplon as saying, ‘I’m not a big believer in special ed.’ ”
Paul Fucaloro’s MBA in Statistical Marketing Research has afforded him the freedom to wear many hats at Success Charter Network (SCN) –and beyond according to this: http://newyorkcharters.org/documents/BrooklynSuccessAcademyCS4FullApplicationPART1Redacted.pdf
A “director of instruction” can’t really get much more arrogant and bold than basically flipping the bird at children’s legal rights to special education because he’s not a “believer.”
Wow… Eva and her “little test-taking machines.”
There’s a line in CITIZEN KANE where the reporter talks to Bernstein about Thatcher, telling him, “He sure made a lot of money.”
Bernstein, “There’s no trick to making a lot of money if all you want to do… is make a lot of money.”
The same can be said for students test scores. “There’s no trick to getting your students to have higher test scores if all you want… is students with higher test scores.”
The most obvious way—as seen with the indicted Beverly Hall in Atlanta, and the should-have-been-indicted Michelle Rhee in D.C.—is just out-and-out cheating, with money-motivated administrators and/or scared-of-losing-their-jobs teachers changing the marks on the answer sheets from wrong to right.
The next obvious way is through massive, grueling, mind-numbing test prep, which is to education what taking steroids is to professional (or non-professional athletics). You increase performance in the short term, but it’s a bogus, manipulated outcome that is far more damaging in the long run.
I’m reminded of this when I read in Schneider’s article that Eva Moskowitz’s Director of Instrution, Paul Fucolaro—with no awareness or irony—brags about driving her students into becoming “little test-taking machines.”
(Could you imagine the administrators or teachers at Sidwell talking to President and Mrs. Obama about Sasha and Malia’s progress and proudly boasting,
“Mr. President and Mrs. First Lady, you can be assured that we’re turning your girls into little test-taking machines” ?)
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FROM THE ARTICLE:
“Thus, SA (Success Academy) teachers are afforded no personal life. All of the SA teacher’s time belongs to the school–nothing is too much to require of teachers when coveted test scores are at stake:
. . . [regarding high stakes tests,] Moskowitz says her teachers prepped their third-graders a mere ten minutes per day … plus some added time over winter break, she confides upon reflection, when the children had but two days off: Christmas and New Year’s.
” . . . After some red-flag internal assessments, [Director of Instruction] Paul Fucaloro kept ‘the bottom 25 percent’ an hour past their normal 4:30 p.m. dismissal — four days a week, six weeks before each test.
“ ‘The real slow ones,’ he says, stayed an additional 30 minutes, till six o’clock: a ten-hour-plus day for 8- and 9-year-olds. Meanwhile, much of the class convened on Saturday mornings from September on.
“The day before the scheduled math test, the city got socked with eight inches of snow. Of 1,499 schools in the city, 1,498 were closed. But at Harlem Success Academy 1, 50-odd third-graders trudged through 35-mile-per-hour gusts for a four-hour session over Subway sandwiches.
“As Moskowitz told the Times, ‘I was ready to come in this morning and crank the heating boilers myself if I had to.’
“ ‘We have a gap to close, so I want the kids on edge, constantly,’ Fucaloro adds. ‘By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.’
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Keeping “the kids on edge”… sounds like child abuse.
Teachers and students are at the mercy of a woman whose drive is to create “little test-taking machines.”
“…I want the kids on edge constantly … little test-taking machines.”
These people should be investigated for child abuse.
Also, all these bubble tests often show little critical thought. I also teach French besides English. The other day, one of my students said “Miss, can’t we just have a multiple choice test for this, rather than write answers! I KNOW what a correct sentence looks like, but it is hard to write it by itself.”
Bingo.
I would rather see them struggle and have the satisfaction of coming up with sentences to express themselves in another language, than just give them four optional answers to choose from. When they go abroad, they are not going to be able to have different answer options, to pick, to communicate.
Reblogged this on McBlog.
I’m an inner city teacher and I can tell you that charters cherrypick the most capable students by the nature of their intake process. But first we have to understand why charters were originally granted. The whole reason the state gave permission to use alternative methods and scheduling was because charters promised to deal with the most difficult students in the system and come up with solutions that can be replicated on a large-scale. What happened?
At some point the idea got completely inverted – charter schools instead became success factories which offered the most savvy, most involved and informed families a chance to give their kids a leg up, a way out.
Charters claim the lottery system is fair because it’s random, but this is complete BS – the lotteries only include kids whose parents are savvy enough to apply. This segregates kids by their home circumstance, with data showing the achievement gap widens every year.
After charters skim the kids from savvy families, they leave public schools with more troubled, at-risk and high needs kids than the national average, ensuring continuing decline. I’ve taught in these schools for eight years and I’ve seen them steadily get worse as charters not only attract the most capable kids, but dump their “headache” students on us at all times of the year.
We need to revisit the history of the charter idea and ask why they are worsening our problems instead of finding solutions as they once promised.
Case-in-point: AUDUBON MIDDLE SCHOOL, out here in the inner-city of LAUSD, in Los Angeles, California.
Dr. DeWayne Davis, the principal at LAUSD’s Audubon Middle school, wrote Dr. Diane Ravitch a letter which Diane posted on her site. In this letter, Dr. Davis condemned the “midyear dump” of students from the nearby charter schools. Every year, just after winter break, there are about 168 or so kids that have left those charter schools—either kicked out or “counseled out”. I can’t recall the exact figures, but he said about 162 of those are FBB (Far Below Basic)—kids who score low because of being innately “slower”, non-cooperative, “Special Ed”, newcomers to the country who are brand new to English, those students just plain not willing to work hard, from distressed home lives, foster care, homeless, etc.
Davis tells about the great difficulties that teachers have in their efforts to absorb these charter cast-off’s into their classes. For the next month or two—or for even the remainder of the school year—teachers and the pre-existing students report varying states of chaos as a result of the nearby charter schools engaging in this despicable “midyear dump”.
Of course, think of the effect this has on Audubon’s scores—they go DOWN—and on the nearby charter schools—they go UP.
DR. DEWAYNE DAVIS:
“It is ridiculous that they (charter operators) can pick and choose kids and pretend that they are raising scores when, in fact, they are just purging nonperforming students at an alarming rate. That is how they are raising their scores, not by improving the performance of students.
“Such a large number of FBB students will handicap the growth that the Audubon staff initiated this year, and further, will negatively impact the school’s overall scores as we continue to receive a recurring tide of low-performing students.”
One teacher activist explained this phenomenon with the following analogy:
“It’s like you have two oncology (cancer treatment) practices:
Oncology Practice A
&
Oncology Practice B.
“Oncology Practice A only accepts patients with Stage 1 cancers, carefully screening out those with Stages 2, 3, or 4 cancers. They send the latter down the street to Oncology Practice B. If one of the latter happens to sneak by this screening process, they likewise are immediately referred down the street to Oncology Practice B. If they advance from Stage 1 to Stage 2, they are also kicked out the door and dumped on Oncology Practice B.
“Meanwhile, Oncology Practice B, by law, MUST ACCEPT ALL PATIENTS who show up in their waiting room, and are banned from doing what Oncology Practice A is doing—again, being selective at the outset to only accept the Stage 1 cancer patients, and doing a later screening out to maintain that their patients are exclusively Stage 1.
“Well, low and behold, as things play out, the ‘data’ shows that Oncology Practice A has higher cure rates and higher remissions, while Oncology Practice B has a greater percentage of patients who are relapsing, having to undergo multiple surgeries, enduring extra rounds of chemotherapy, etc., and of course, dying.
“Proponents of Oncology Practice A then claim, ‘Look at all that’s wrong with all Oncology Practice B. Their patients are suffering, not being cured, and even dying. And then look at how wonderfully we’re doing here over at Oncology Practice A.’ ”
Jack: correct me if I’m wrong, but it is my understanding that the “midyear dump” described by Dr. Dewayne Davis occurs AFTER the charters collect the funding attached to the students for the school year.
So students that would and should require greater resources—the kind paid for with dollars like, say, more desperately needed classroom aides or at least more hours for those already stationed at the school—are left behind at the charter.
From the POV of the advocates for charters & privatization, a fair tradeoff: the charters get $tudent $ucce$$ and glowing reports in the MSM, the public schools get punished and pilloried for not accomplishing unrealistically under-resourced miracles.
Please clarify if you can.
Thank you.
😎
Yes, when a charter dumps a child, the money does NOT follow that child. They have to keep the students for a week—or a month—and they get to keep the entire year’s money allocated for that child.
Put another way, there is no pro rata amount of money that goes along with the child. If the charter kicks the kid out after a month, a nine-month allocation does not go along with that child.
Whenever public school advocates try to change this, the charter folks throw up every roadblock and obstacle that they can.
Jack: ok, being a “choice & voice” [thank you, Chiara Duggan!] type of person, and not a part of the charterite/privatizer “my voice determines your choice” crowd—
Just how does this differ from legalized robbery and abuse of public school students, staff and parents?
A charter gets a kid for 1 month out of 9 but gets 9 out of 9 months of funding.
The public school that works with the kid for 8 out of 9 months gets 0 months of funding.
Is this another new math fad? Or am I just behind the curve in this cage busting achievement gap crushing twenty first century?
It seems to make ₵ent¢ to some but it makes no sense to me…
Go figure.
😎
In Utah, anyway, once the “October 1st Count” has occurred, the charter school keeps ALL of the money for those students for the entire year. Thus, any students sent back to public schools after that date come with no money. My colleagues are getting tired of me complaining about this. I have a student this year who left two days before the count to the “better opportunity” of a charter school. He was back within 6 weeks, now credit deficient. His public school now has to pick up the slack of his missing credits, and we have no extra money to do it. Happens every year, although not at the staggering numbers of Audubon Middle.
Gus Wynn – As far as I can tell what you say is generallly true. Of course this also explains the appeal of charter schools to many parents. Charter schools offer real benefits to the children who are able to get into them, protecting them from the social pathology of the poor. Probably most of the children in charter schools are better off there than they would be attending the trsditional schools in their neighborhood.
No one is protecting charter school students from the “social pathology” of the rich, who deign to “teach” middle class values to poor children of color by imposing rigid military style discipline. They counsel out those who don’t comply and have high rates of suspensions for students with special needs: . http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/success-academy-fire-parents-fight-disciplinary-policy-article-1.1438753.
I disagree that there’s a “social pathology of the poor.” SOME poor, perhaps, but certainly not all, or even a majority, of the poor have anything related to social pathologies. I have taught in both high poverty and upper middle class schools in the same district. Both schools had problems, but it was the high poverty schools that were willing to address the problems. The upper middle class school simply ignored that there were problems. There were more problems with underage sexual encounters, gangs, cheating, and drugs at the upper middle class school than there were at the high poverty school. I witnessed two near-riots in my two years at the upper middle class school, while I have never witnessed a riot or near-riot in my 11 years at high or mid-poverty schools. Not to mention that I have seen far more charitable action at the high poverty schools. When my son was working on a project that got a food bank into a high poverty elementary school, we were overwhelmed by the volume of donations from the school community. As one parent told us, “we know what it means to struggle, so we are going to help those struggling all we can.”
I am quoting from the NYC Charter School Center -Data brief-Aug. 2013 in regard to the high test scores by Success Charter Network Schools:
“While Success charter schools’ high test results will doubtlessly draw scrutiny, a great deal of that attention should be directed to the network’s instructional practices and literacy curriculum.”:
Has anyone actually scrutinized these unusually high scores-much higher than the other charter or district schools?? In Washington and Atlanta, unusually high scores were red flagged and investigated and serious cheating was discovered. Who actually oversees the the administration of standardized tests in the charter schools??/
Re:
“It may be possible to raise the test scores of ELL students 50% in one year by strapping them into a computer adaptive module for 5 hours a day. But, would we want to do that?”
You probably just gave someone an idea. I expect to see the above promoted, any day now, as the Next Big Thing.
This anonymous reader writes the crux of the testing issue fabulously clear. And in honor of the olympics… I love the analogy here when talking about charter school “testing performance”:
“The next obvious way is through massive, grueling, mind-numbing test prep, which is to education what taking steroids is to professional (or non-professional athletics). You increase performance in the short term, but it’s a bogus, manipulated outcome that is far more damaging in the long run”…
Each overly test prepped student is like a “Lance Armstrong”. At the end of the day they are empty and have only “test prep” to thank for their short term “pseudo accomplishments”!
STANDARDIZED Lies, Money & Civil Rights: How Testing Is Ruining Public Education
I work in a high needs school. my students pAss the test, but still can.t read . We are teaching reading . We are testing a test . That simple. We must stop now…
The only COMMON SENSE thing to do with standardized tests and the resulting scores is to get rid of them and use the monies to provide all those educational practices that are known to help the teachers provide the best teaching and learning environment that they can. Anything less is absurd, insane and unethical!
Since there are so many epistemological and ontological errors involved in the process of making, using and distributing the supposed results that render the whole process completely invalid, the only COMMON SENSE thing to do is to not waste precious, time, effort and resources so that we can quit causing the inevitable harms to the most innocent, the students. The LACK of COMMON SENSE in these malpractices is mind-boggling.
To understand just how “UNCOMMON SENSICAL” these malpractices are read and understand “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Lets take a look at these results. From last years state Math tests. HSA1 85% passing, Wadleigh Secondary (the co-located zoned school) 0% passing. ZERO!! Not a single child at the Wadleigh zoned school passed the state Math test. Think about that for a moment!
Here are more comps with SA and zoned schools:
http://nypost.com/2013/08/11/schooling-the-critics/
If you think the difference is due to a small minority of the student populations who are IEP-ELL I have a nice bridge to sell you. Whats really happening is Diane and the anti-choice extremist left are trying to find excuses to shift blame away from the system that deserves it. They want to protect the union-political-educational complex that has ruined our schools for generations. Charters like SA are proving it and showing the world and this is why Diane and her side is so scared.
As for the difference in ELL-IEP, it makes sense, and is a great exmaple of school choice at work. SA doesnt have the funding for great IEP-ELL programs, it is pretty amazing how well they do with the students they have in these programs given the limited funding they have from the state. That being said, parents will choose the local zoned school over SA due to this. If I were a parent of an IEP student in Harlem why would I put him in a public charter with little funding for these programs when I could put them in a zoned school with top tier funding and more trained teachers. This is a signal that choice is working.