The media loves the story of miracle schools. Imagine that! A school where 90% or more pass the state tests! Where 100% graduate. Where 100% are accepted into four-year colleges. Michael Klonsky once said to me, miracles happen only in the Bible. When the subject is schools, miracle claims should be carefully investigated.
With that caution and skepticism in mind, we turn again to a post by a researcher who works for the New York City Department of Education and must remain anonymous. This is the same researcher who chastised the media for ignoring attrition rates at Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools. In posting that article, I failed to capture the links to documentation (a terrible oversight, I admit). I include his/her links at the bottom of this article.
Ed Reformers Are Most Like (a) Pinocchio (b) Beavis:
Getting to the Bottom of the Reformer Distaste for Honest Analysis
My short essay examining some of the dishonest claims about Success Academy’s data led to interesting debate on this blog.[1] Some of that discussion illuminated the dishonesty with which education reformers approach data and facts. I’ll limit this essay to the dishonesty reformers display in the charter school debate.
Reformers tend to make two very different arguments about charter schools. Argument #1 is that charter schools serve the same students as public schools and manage to put public schools to shame by producing amazingly better results on standardized exams. Therefore, reformers claim, if only public schools did what charter schools do (or better yet, if all public schools were closed and charter schools took over), student learning would dramatically increase and America might even beat South Korea or Finland on international standardized tests. When it is pointed out that, as a whole, charters do no better than public schools on standardized tests [2], reformers will quickly turn their attention to specific charter chains that, they claim, do indeed produce much better standardized test results. So what’s the deal with these chains? Well, in every case that has been subjected to scrutiny their results are extremely suspicious. Here is a short list of examples:
1. Achievement First in New Haven had a freshman class of 64 students (2 students enrolled later), and only 25 graduated- a 38% graduation rate- yet the school claimed a 100% graduation rate by ignoring the 62% attrition rate. [3]
2. Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) had a freshman class of 144 students and only 89 12th graders- a 62% graduation rate- yet the school (and Arne Duncan) claimed a 100% graduation rate by ignoring the 38% attrition rate. [4] As a 6-12 charter chain, DSST also manages to attrite vast numbers of their middle school students before they even enter the high school.
3. Uncommon Schools in Newark disappears 38% of its general test takers from 6th to 8th grade.[5] Another analysis found that through high school the attrition rate was, alarmingly, much higher “Uncommon loses 62 to 69% of all males and up to 74% of Black males.”[6]
4. BASIS in Arizona- “At…BASIS charter school in Tucson, the class of 2012 had 97 students when they were 6th graders. By the time those students were seniors, their numbers had dwindled to 33, a drop of 66%. At BASIS Scottsdale…its class of 2012 fell from 53 in the 6th grade to 19 in its senior year, a drop of 64%.” [7]
5. The Noble Network in Chicago- “Every year, the graduating class of Noble Charter schools matriculates with around 30 percent fewer students than they started with in their freshman year.” [8]
6. Harmony Charters in Texas- “Strikingly, Harmony lost more than 40% of 6th grade students over a two-year time.” [9]
7. KIPP in San Francisco- “A 2008 study of the (then-existing) Bay Area KIPP schools by SRI International showed a 60% attrition rate…the students who left were overwhelmingly the lower achievers.” [10]
8. KIPP in Tennessee had 18% attrition in a single year! “In fact, the only schools that have net losses of 10 to 33 percent are charter schools.” [11]
In every case these charter chains accepted students that were significantly more advantaged than the typical student in the district, and then the charters attrited a significant chunk of those students.
Success Academy in New York City plays the same game. It accepts many fewer high needs special education students, English Language Learners, and poor students. [12] It attrites up to 1/3 of its students before they even get to testing grades and then loses students at an even faster pace. It selectively attrites those students most likely to get low scores on standardized tests. [13] It is legally permitted to mark its own exams (as are all New York City charter schools) while public schools cannot. It loses 74% of its teachers in a single year at some of its schools. [14] The author of the Daily News editorial that sparked the initial blog commented “even in the aggregate that wouldn’t seem to account for” the results. It is entirely unclear what he means by “in the aggregate.” But it is clear that he has his arithmetic wrong. A charter chain that starts with an entering class that is likely to score well on standardized tests, then selectively prunes 50% or more of the students who don’t score well on standardized tests and refuses to replace the disappeared students with others, can easily show good standardized test results with the remaining students. Any school could do this. It’s really not rocket science.
Charter advocates usually first give argument #1 a try. When called on the data that clearly show high-flying charters engage in creaming and in pruning, which can account for most of their “success,” they quickly switch to argument #2. Argument #2 claims that charter schools play a different role than public schools. What exactly their role is can vary from “serving high-potential low-income students [14]” to serving as laboratories of innovation. The problem with argument #2 is that we don’t need charters to cream students (public schools could do that too…if it were legal), and charters as a sector are not doing anything innovative. Kicking out half of your class is no innovation, nor is it hard to create an environment that will encourage the half least likely to succeed to quit. The Navy SEALs have been doing that for years.
At the policy level these two different arguments have led to much confusion. It is often unclear what charter advocates are defending as they switch back and forth between the two arguments. This makes it difficult to have sensible public discussion about charters and leads many to accuse charter advocates of hiding their true motivations (from privatizing education for profit to breaking unions).
It is time that education policy makers demanded an honest accounting of charter practices. Metrics must be produced by every district clearly showing the demographics of charter school students, the attrition rate, and general data on which students are attrited. It is critical that the demographic data be as detailed as possible (e.g. specifying level of special education need, distinguishing between free and reduced price lunch, specifying level of English Language Learner status) since the charter sector and its advocates have in the past used broad categories to cover up important differences (e.g. claiming to serve the same numbers of English Language Learners as public schools while only serving advanced ELLs, claiming to serve the same number of poor students as public schools while serving much higher proportions of reduced as opposed to free lunch students, claiming to serve the same number of special needs students as public schools while serving only students with minimal needs).[15] With honest data in hand, the more important conversation about good teaching practices, engaging curricula, and effective students support services can begin. It is this conversation that will truly improve education for students. It is also the conversation that professional educators want to have.[16]
[1] https://dianeravitch.net/2014/08/22/is-eva-moskowitz-the-lance-armstrong-of-education/
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/09/24/the-bottom-line-on-charter-school-studies/
[3] http://jonathanpelto.com/2013/05/30/another-big-lie-from-achievement-first-100-percent-college-acceptance-rate/
[4] http://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/arne-debunkin/
[5] http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/truly-uncommon-in-newark /
[6] http://danley.rutgers.edu/2014/08/11/guest-post-where-will-all-the-boys-go/
[7] http://blogforarizona.net/basis-charters-education-model-success-by-attrition/
[8] http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/04/no-bull-in-chicago.html
[9] http://fullerlook.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/tx_ms_charter_study/
[10] http://parentsacrossamerica.org/high-kipp-attrition-must-be-part-of-san-francisco-discussion/
[11] http://www.wsmv.com/story/22277105/charter-schools-losing-struggling-students-to-zoned-schools
[12] https://dianeravitch.net/2014/03/12/fact-checking-evas-claims-on-national-television/
[13] https://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/28/a-note-about-success-academys-data/. The high attrition rate before testing in 3rd grade may explain the data pattern noted in this http://shankerblog.org/?p=10346#more-10346 analysis.
[14] http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/5156/why-charter-schools-have-high-teacher-turnover#.U_gqR__wtMv
[15] http://edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-daily/flypaper/2013/the-charter-expulsion-flap-who-speaks-for-the-strivers.html
[16] http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/when-dummy-variables-arent-smart-enough-more-comments-on-the-nj-credo-study/ I leave it as an open challenge to Ms. Moskowitz to voluntarily share this date (scrubbed of identifying student information of course) so that independent researchers can examine the Success Academy results. If she declines to do so we can only wonder what she is hiding.
[17] I wanted to end on a positive note so I add this comment as a footnote. We can expect that reformers will resist allowing the national conversation to go in this direction since they have so little to contribute to it. So many have so little classroom experience and so little time in schools that they will do all they can to make sure the conversation does not turn in this direction. If it did, they’d be out of a job. So we can expect that, as long as reformers maintain their power base, the national conversation about education will be limited to accountability, choice, standards, VAMs… anything but discussion of actual classroom and school-level practices.
Liars figure and figures lie! They will make the numbers conform to whatever point of view they want.
Anyone remember the various reasons why we supposedly had to invade Iraq? September 11! WMD! Saddam is a vicious dictator! Humanitarian reasons! Any time one was debunked, they just switched seemlessly to another as if that were the justification all along.
Same thing with charters. It’s an ideology bordering on religion – facts don’t matter.
“He tried to kill my Daddy!” What a poor excuse for thousands actually being killed and maimed.
The NYS charter law says that charters should not be reauthorized or allowed to expand without proving that they have enrolled and retained comparable numbers of high -need students as are enrolled in the public schools in their communities . We have plenty of evidence of that most of them, including Success Academy schools, are not doing this. And yet the State Education Dept and the SUNY Charter Institute have never turned down a re-authorization or an expansion on that basis.
Bracey regularly exposed the myth of “high flyers”, but there are no penalties for the liars and a press that seems to demand such fiction. We also have had educators like Doug Reeves who perpetuated the myth of 90/90/90 schools. His creative counting was a little more interesting but still a misrepresentation of reality.
” A charter chain that starts with an entering class that is likely to score well on standardized tests, then selectively prunes 50% or more of the students who don’t score well on standardized tests and refuses to replace the disappeared students with others, can easily show good standardized test results with the remaining students. Any school could do this. It’s really not rocket science.”
No, it’s not rocket science, just good ol fashioned gaming the system with obfuscation of the results.
But probably “in aggregate” the most egregious thing is that the staff gets to “grade” the test, leaving open not only the possibility of cheating without being able to be caught/held to account but then they also gain the advantage of “knowing” the test in a way that the public schools cannot and thus gains an even greater advantage on top of the selection and attrition factors. Really, and no, not in a Johnsonally fashion, I can’t believe they don’t all score at the highest level as the charters involved Rheeally-in a Johnsonally fashion are the ideal schools.
A terrifying part of all this is that charters are diverting funding from public schools (I know, charters are public schools – but not really), which is all we have to serve the students that charters exclude. After charters have functioned to break apart local systems of public education, how will we be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
Diane, did you say that charters are marking their own exams?
Meaning: grading standardized tests item by item?
Similar to a teacher-made class test?
If so, I can’t believe it?
Pls advise…Thx
Yep. I knew I had read that somewhere: “It is legally permitted to mark its own exams (as are all New York City charter schools) while public schools cannot.”
But it’s not Diane who said it. That was written by “a researcher who works for the New York City Department of Education and must remain anonymous.”
Who do EdReformers think we are?
Dodo birds?
Bone heads?
Charters get the answer keys to all State tests? Grade their own tests? Trust them? Sure!
In this punitive, unethical & unprofessional climate of having all schools, children and their teachers on the chopping block, we are to ‘believe’ the Charter School Honor System? Are you kidding us?
Those of us who were not born yesterday, we should go viral with this nonsense!
Even with the a Fort Knox Test Security System in Atlanta Public Schools, better rats were trained and the APS Cheating Scandal is still in court and Atlanta is spending $M-$B for lawyers.
Success Academies are liars, in my book!
If I worked in a charter, I would not have testing unless top security was part of the process.
Call me crazy! They participate in privileged unethical options…they are liars!
Don’t even need proof because they are wallowing in PRIVILEDGE while others are walking to the gallows.
But…it is working for the Filthy Rich Reformer$. American Greed!
See my comment above H. A.
In Massachusetts these data are on the state department of education website.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/state_report/
In Massachusetts that charters have extremely high rates of out-of-school suspensions compared to public schools. You can look year by year at the attrition rates and teacher’s ages, how many teachers are certified in their subject compared to public schools.
When you really look, starting with Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public (District) (since it’s first on the list)
They show that the graduation rate for 2012-2013 is 92%
However, if you look at the enrollment data – then they started with 134 8th graders in school year 08-09 and are down to 88 by grade 12 in 2013-2014- which means that about 35% are gone between 8th and 12th grade.
When you look at their enrollment policy – they only accept new students K-5 and it seems that many students leave. hmm…
Click to access Enrollmentpolicy9_6_12.pdf
This came up during the Mass. Senate discussion on increasing the charter cap and is one of the reasons that the measure failed.
Thanks for the info, I don’t see parent educational levels for each school, do you?
Good article. It really puts the onus on charters to explain their attrition rates. The public schools have always known that charters cream the students. At the beginning of the school year, when our numbers in public school are down, charters wait until after norm day and get rid of the low scoring, trouble makers at the school and they all come back to us in public schools. This would not be a problem if the ADA came with them but it doesn’t. I like the concept of public school as a place that doesn’t cream. Where any student can attend because its their right. I hope that NEVER changes.
paula: the “midyear dump” [although technically it’s near the beginning of the school year, not in the middle] has been discussed on this blog before.
From a thread on this blog of 2/15/2014, from two comments by Jack:
[start quotes]
#1: 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.
#2: 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.
[end quotes]
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/15/reader-offers-a-dose-of-common-sense-about-high-test-scores/
Then look at the follow-up discussion on this blog of 2/18/2014, following a posting entitled “New York Comptroller Releases Charter Audits: Not a Pretty Picture.”
There are other such discussions on this blog. Google.
I am far from a perfect person but I feel compelled to state: the unfairness and immorality of this typical charter practice is staggeringly unfair and immoral.
And yet the heavy hitters among the charterites/privatizers claim that they are the leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time”!?!?! All the while strutting around proclaiming public schools to be “factories of failures” and “dropout factories” infected with the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” [François de la Rochefoucauld]
Nailed—to—the—wall. And it didn’t even take an old dead Greek guy.
😎
In addition to the breakdowns of free and reduced lunch, ELL levels and severity of disability for special ed students, researchers really need to also compare parents’ educational levels at charters with those of parents at neighborhood schools.
Recently, I looked at KIPP schools in CA, which provides that parent data along with school test scores, and KIPP schools consistently had more parents who were high school graduates and college graduates than neighborhood schools.
You can compare the high parent educational levels at this Kipp school in LA, where they also have high test scores and a top school ranking (10 –the highest), with the educational levels of parents at the neighborhood schools listed at the bottom which have lower scores and rankings (1 –the lowest):
http://school-ratings.com/school_details/19647330121699.html
I don’t know if charters specifically cream for this, but it is suspicious since there’s a well known research base indicating that parents’ educational level predicts student achievement as much as family income –so that, too, can contribute to higher test scores.
Even better, CA compares schools for you and they include the parent educational level in comparisons* (*”Parent Education is the average of all responses where “1” represents “Not a high school graduate” and “5” represents “Graduate school.”)
On the school page, you just click on the link up top that says “compare with nearby schools” and on the next page, click towards the bottom to show 64 rows (schools).
One the following page comparison for KIPP Academy of Opportunity in LA, you will see that only 4 schools have a parent education level of 3 or above and all four of those schools are charters:
http://school-ratings.com/schoolRatings.php?zipOrCity=90047&schName=&lastOB=distance&lon=-118.3177616&lat=33.9756255&schoolName=KIPP+Academy+of+Opportunity&searchRadius=2&orderBy=distance&dir=standard&qty=64
It sure does seem like they are creaming for parents with higher educational levels. I would love to see data on this for other districts and states, including NY, because I’ve never seen this before.
Does anyone know if their state collects and posts data on parent education with school test scores, as California does?
Makes sense for the charter schools to do that. All the while claim they don’t discriminate against any students.
Duane, Yes, it does make a lot of sense. I don’t think researchers have examined this variable when comparing charter schools with neighborhood public schools though.
BTW, I was only reporting schools within a 2 mile radius because I thought that would generally be the same community. However, when you click on 5 miles, there are 8 schools among the nearest 64 with parent education scores of 3 or above and all 8 are charters. So there is a definite pattern, at least in LA. The pages after that, with subsequent listings of 64 schools per page, are farther away and include several suburbs, so I didn’t count them.
Also, not every school has “charter” in its name, so it can be difficult to distinguish all of them without digging deeper into each school, so I only counted schools that specifically say “charter” or which I know are charters even though it doesn’t say it, like the KIPP schools.
Just to clarify, it was only after I got past about a 3 mile radius that I encountered a problem with identifying the number of charters.
And don’t forget, all of that pruning and counseling out is an ongoing threat to those who stay, families and students: shape up and keep the scores up or you’re out!
Additional incentive and stress, in case there wasn’t enough already.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
How the fake education reformers, private-sector Charter schools fools the public repeatedly with help from the media. Are you one of those who are easy to fool?
Great post. This is something that is hardly ever in the news. A few years ago, when I was an 8th grade teacher, I took students to visit various magnet schools and we visited a charter school. There were about six seniors left.
Charter schools claim to be public school and they are requesting more and more tax money. In Colorado, part of a recent tax passed on recreational marijuana is earmarked for building schools– including Charter schools, although they rarely use the C word around here and call themselves public schools. They should play by the same rules as public schools, accepting students on a first come, first serve basis and opening their books to show how they are allocating taxpayer funds.
This is something that I have commented on in past discussions of private and/or charter schools.
You cannot scientifically compare academic performance between charter and standard public schools and conclude that there is a causal relationship between student achievement and the presence of union vs. non-union teachers.
Charter schools — which divert taxpayer funds away from traditional public schools to sites that are run by private-sector entities — have a self-selecting component in that only highly motivated students/families will take the time and effort to apply for acceptance. The outcome of student performance may be significantly affected by this motivational factor. Furthermore, low-performing and students with learning disabilities, along with those that have behavioral problems are often “encouraged” by school counselors and administrators to transfer to “less demanding” school sites.
It’s great that these students do well (at least those who are not receiving falsified grades or are scoring well on standardized tests simply as a result of an administrator-driven cheating scandal) but it would be invalid to draw conclusions regarding the performance of the faculty based on the performance of these more self-motivated students.
You forgot argument #3: when charter schools compete like businesses do the failing charters will close. The argument goes like tho: “If a charter fails it will be closed but a failing government run public school remains open.” I’m sure you and/or your readers can blow holes in this one.
The biggest consequence of this line of thinking is that like a business, charter schools should spend lots of money on advertising and lots of money pushing back if they sense their product is flawed.
The information pertaining to Achievement First’s New Haven high school is not representative of the current class. The data referenced is from May 2013. At that time, the school had a four-year cohort graduation rate of 75 percent. We take attrition very seriously, and we do everything we can to retain every Achievement First student. We also understand that there are many reasons why a student might not continue with a school. We differentiate between “unacceptable” or “loss” attrition and “acceptable” attrition because it helps us identify and remedy the causes of attrition within our control. Loss attrition—students who leave our schools for “unacceptable” reasons such as concerns with instruction or culture— is something we are deeply committed to improving, and we are tackling it through multiple points.The most common cause of “acceptable” attrition is moving out of the district. The Educational Projects in Education Research center found that schools with high rates of student mobility generally have large populations of children of migrant workers, large populations of homeless children and/or a large population of low-income families. At our New Haven high school, 75% of students receive free and reduced-price lunch.
The above comment from “Achievement First” demonstrates how low charter chains will stoop to falsify their numbers and lie about what is truly happening in their schools. Their 4 year cohort graduation rate was 38%. It is only by discounting through various accounting tricks the vast number of students who leave that they get to a 75% figure. And then they tell the media that they have a 100% graduation rate. It is only when called on their lies as they were is the article that they admit to a 75% graduation rate (and even that is a lie).
Also see how they lie about their free and reduced lunch rate. They are using the exact same trick the article notes that charters use to lie about their numbers. How much of the 75% is reduced as opposed to free lunch? How many of the neediest category of special education students do they serve? How many students who are beginner English Language Learners and/or who are Students with Interrupted Formal Education do they serve? And how does this compare to the average of nearby district public schools? “Achievement First” does not give any of those numbers because they prefer to continue to tell lies as the article called them out on. Even when attempting damage control they still cant manage to tell the truth. Sickening!