The New York City United Federation of Teachers used public data to investigate which schools enroll students with low needs or high needs. The analysis compares charter schools and public schools in the same district.
If you scan through the graphs, you will soon see a pattern. There are a few charters that enroll larger-than-average numbers of students with high needs, but most fall to the right of the distribution.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting to see the district-to-district changes in the red line. Invites secondary analyses with some geographic mapping.
Not in NYC where the general locations of these districts may be well-known, but there are some new mapping tools that show how district boundaries are gerrymandered over time.
I’m surprised the UFT published this report, at least in the format they chose. They should have left district schools off of the list entirely, leaving behind only the charters and the line for the district average. And then maybe funk around with the y-axes a bit to make things look worse than they are.
Because this research shows that just about every charter below its district average isn’t an unreasonable distance away; that there are quite a few charters right at or above their district’s averages; that the biggest disparities by far are between district schools and other district schools; and that (as Laura Chapman also noted) there are big differences from district to district. The intradistrict gaps in Districts 2, 3, and 15 are especially stunning given how geographically compact those districts are (District 3 is two square miles, tops).
We know that the UFT wants to adjust charter school lotteries so the schools are serving more high-needs kids: to that I say fair enough, if the state legislature agrees. But where’s the plan for district schools? It’s a much bigger and much longer-running issue.
Who do you think you are, Horace Meister?
My first question is, how did the UFT arrive at the weightings it used for its tweak off the DOE peer index formula? For example, why eliminate the ELL category? Why set the weight for “self-contained” students at 20%, rather than 15% or 25% or some other number? Are these just arbitrary decisions? Also, does the “self-contained” category overlap with the “total special ed category,” and if so, does that double-counting impact the results in any way?
There are no surprises here. I think the areas most likely targeted are those that have a high probability of being gentrified. I believe there is a real estate agenda behind some of the privatization projects in New York City. It would be interesting to track privatization in other metropolitan areas as well.
You are absolutely right: among the many things charter schools are – vehicles for privatization and union busting, social engineering in the interests of the Overclass, and straight-out looting – they are also a real estate play, which is one way the looting takes place.
On a NYC-centric level, no one should think for a moment that Evil Moskowitz doesn’t intend to eventually get a compliant city government to “sell” her the public school buildings she’s invaded for $1.00 at some point in the future, or that it’s an accident that one of the most prominent real estate developers in rapidly-gentrifying Harlem is on the Board of Success Academies.
Michael, if the City of New York ever sells Eva Moskowitz (or Success, or a shell company operating on her behalf), I will buy you a five-year supply of cat food (or donate an equivalent amount to the animal shelter of your choosing).
The board member you refer to could certainly afford to send his child to a $45,000/year private school like Dalton, or to buy a home in the zone of a brutally segregated public-private school like the ones highlighted by the UFT’s report. However, his kids attend a Success Academy school. The simplest, most logical explanation shouldn’t be tossed aside because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
retired teacher and Michael Fiorillo: simple but clear truths—
No surprises if one just “follows the money.”
Among other “no surprises” for me: when black female teachers are disproportionately affected by the self-styled “reform” agenda in places like New Orleans, or when NY experiences 70% [set in advance] failure rates on CCSS-aligned tests, or when a rheephormer like John Deasy literally takes a wrecking ball to LAUSD (second largest public school district in the USA) with his toxic iPad and MISIS projects and the blame for such immoral incompetence is placed on public education.
These and many other things are not bugs but predictable features of self-proclaimed “education reform.” And when the “thought leaders” and enablers and enforcers of the “new civil rights movement of our time” talk about taking their smash-and-grab $tudent $ucce$$ endeavors to scale, what they plan to do on a bigger scale is what they’re already doing on a smaller scale.
Always keeping in mind that the rhetoric they use masks the fact that they are furiously putting in place (oftentimes with casual cruelty and moral indifference) a business plan that masquerades as an education model.
The type was known long ago.
The gap between word and deed:
“Hateful to me as are the gates of hell, Is he who, hiding one thing in his heart, Utters another.” [Homer]
And the motivation:
“For greed all nature is too little.” [Lucius Annaeus Seneca]
A one-two punch, the first by a very dead and very old and very Greek guy, and the second by a very dead and very old and very Roman guy.
😎