Chalkbeat uses state data to report on high suspension rates at many charters, where strict discipline is prized.
“New York City charter schools suspended students at almost three times the rate of traditional public schools during the 2011-12 school year, according to a Chalkbeat analysis, though some charter schools have since begun to reduce the use of suspensions for minor infractions.
Overall, charter schools suspended at least 11 percent of their students that year, while district schools suspended 4.2 percent of their students. The charter-school suspension rate is likely an underestimate because charter schools don’t have to report suspensions that students serve in school.
“Not all schools had high suspension rates. One-third of charter schools reported suspending fewer than 5 percent of their students, and many schools said they did not give out any out-of-school suspensions. But 11 charter schools suspended more than 30 percent of their students — a figure likely to draw added scrutiny amid a nationwide push to reduce suspensions and a debate over allowing more charter schools to open statewide.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, and as Michael Petrelli is the first to candidly tell us, that’s a feature, not a bug.
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Actions rather than words say a lot. Charters have proven that it’s about $$$$$, not students and their teachers.
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Actions speak louder than marketing sales pitches.
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Interesting how we don’t know how accurate this is. I would like to know what other forms of discipline would work for teens other than suspension, both ISS and OSS. I feel that suspension is a big fat “I DONE BAD” on somebody’s record, but do all those people who are suspended care about this? If they don’t plan on going to college, I’m not sure how effective having a suspension on one’s record is. Most importantly, how does the suspension correct the specific behavior?
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More interesting is how many students they expel.
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Sorry, Diane, but your headline is very misleading. In fact, the Chalkbeat story reports that only one third of charters suspend more than the city (traditional) school average! Worse, it doesn’t say what the charter suspension average is. That would be the appropriate apples to apples comparison, no? The Chalkbeat report also says that “nearly 200 others [traditional public schools] doled out more than 100 suspensions in the 2011-12 school year, according to city data,” but conveniently leaves out the suspension rates in those schools. –pbm
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Charters also counsel out the students who are too expensive or difficult to educate. To get an accurate perception, suspensions, expulsions, and those who were counseled out should all be included.
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Brooke Lincoln: you have put your finger on the crux of the matter.
Thank you.
😎
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An apology is in order. I read too fast. In fact, Chalkbeat is comparing apples to apples: average suspension rates. And charters do suspend 3x more often. I’ve got a query in to Chalkbeat about the 200 traditional schools kicking out more than 100 kids and their suspension rates. A fairer comparison might be between the charters’ demographics (race and poverty) with traditional schools with similar demographics. We’ll see. But sorry for the first misreading. –pbm
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I appreciate the occasional but recurring very sharp disagreements on this blog that push the boundaries of civil discourse almost over the edge. Sometimes I even learn something new when things really heat up. But there have to be limits or the purpose of this blog—to encourage dialogue on the topic of “a better education for all”—will be defeated.
One of the things, IMHO, that keep this blog relevant to the national conversation is to remember that real human beings run this blog and comment on it and read the postings and threads.
Speaking only for myself, I appreciate the tone and detail of your apology.
As I used to say to the SpecEd students I worked with, “give respect to get respect.”
Because that’s how you get people to listen to what you have to say.
😎
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TAGO
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pbmeyer2014, I too appreciate your honesty. I have seen far too many posts that try to fudge the facts.
But you missed an important point — the most celebrated charter school with high suspension rates has primarily ELEMENTARY school students! You may be able to justify high suspension rates for high schoolers, and perhaps even middle schoolers. But if you are giving out of school suspensions to 15% of your Kindergarten – 3rd graders, then something is terribly wrong. And that is what Success Academy has done (but only in their schools with primarily low-income kids — the suspension rates are much lower in their new “affluent” schools. And that, in my opinion, is even more troubling about how this particular charter chain is shamefully managed. Unless you think that low-income 5 and 6 year olds are so much worse than middle class ones, so their frequent suspensions are justified. I wonder if that is Success Academy’s argument.
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Pbm, re “a fairer comparison” please see “Why poverty measures matter” 11-4-14 Jersey Jazzman post. He looks at free/reduced lunch %age of students for Newark charter cf NPS schools. Post has a link to detailed report.
School Finance 101 by Dr Bruce Baker Rutgers GSEd also considers issues you raised.
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The fact that charter schools have higher suspension rates truly surprise me. I wish the data could have been broken down enough to highlight whether the suspensions were primarily for petty behavior concerns or for more severe behavioral issues. However, more than anything I wonder why would a school invoke in school suspensions (or out of school)? What’s the point of removing a student from a classroom setting? In school suspensions essentially give students an easy out to not challenge themselves academically, engage properly with students, and to have respectful/successful relationships in the school. My main question after reading your post was whether or not these Charter schools have a mechanism in place to emotionally support students? Are administrators being proactive when it comes to avoiding suspensions or finding alternative forms of “punishment”? It will be interesting to observe how these rates change through the next few years.
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Well, first there’s the charter chains that are renowned for their “no excuses” approach, where students get “disciplined for such offenses as untucked shirts or untied shoes. It’s not hard at all to see how those schools would be suspending/expelling way more kids than public schools.
Second, there’s the Petrelli view that says that charters are for the “strivers”, so those who aren’t willing to shut up, sit down and get to work should be suspended/expelled. Public schools are, of course, for the rest of the losers who can’t or won’t run with the big dogs. Again, it’s not hard to see how that sort of view would lead to more suspensions/expulsions.
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I think if we looked closer at the reasons some charters didn’t have many or any suspensions, we might discover that the students who would have ended up being suspended were either filtered out or left after being harassed so the Charter school could avoid marking them as suspensions or expulsions. If a student, who might face multiple suspensions, leaves sort-of voluntarily, then that’s one way to make the numbers look good.
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Lloyd:
Do you have any data on the “progress” made by students who have been dropped from, or “counseled out” of the charter schools?
As a 24-year veteran public high school teacher, I don’t think that I’ve encountered tons of these kids. That said, there’s nothing like sending a demoralized (and probably way behind) student to the local public school, where the teacher has to juggle that student’s emotional and educational needs with the needs of 170 other students.
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Paul,
I haven’t read anything about the students who are filtered out of the corporate Charters. I think if they are 16 or older, they might drop out of school and if this is the fact, then they would probably fall through the cracks and not end up as a statistic for dropouts, because the Charter industry probably doesn’t care and seeing as how that industry is opaque, it will probably be hard to get their names and track them anyway. Once a 16 year, or older, child drops out of school, who finds out where they go and what they do?
I did read somewhere that in New Orleans where there are few if any choices outside of the corporate Charters, that the children who are filtered out often end up on the streets and out of school—-does anyone care? Where is the choice when there is no public school as an option? And the public school system that was organized to deal with kids who should be in school but were on the streets doesn’t exist anymore to bring them back often using the juvenile justice system.
Does the juvenile justice system even work with the corporate Charters—I don’t think so?
In addition, it was my experience as a 30 year teacher (I retired in 2005) that when the school transferred in a new student in to one of my classes, it wasn’t important for me to ask them where they came from. Where was the time to do this? I was teaching, planning, dealing with disruptions, correcting work, etc.
When a new student was added to one of my five daily classes, I only had about an hour to work with the entire class so I had a introductory packet ready to help these students get ready to join the class and become productive learners—-hopefully.
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This issue was actually just recently discussed in a Room for Debate discussion on the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/12/10/are-charter-schools-cherry-picking-students) which I believe is incredibly worth a read. I believe the narrative in this piece and both the ones in the NYTimes article is that we must take a critical look at the way we discipline our students and the effect this has on our students. No matter the type of school, we must grab the reigns of our restrictive disciplinary practices and make sure we are using positive reinforcements and not disciplinary mechanisms that inhibit the education of students.
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There are a lot of feel good about charter schools written…..supposedly unbiased news. I wonder if the schools which do have the very high rates of suspensions are those they brag about, or are they more likely to be among the schools which are shown to be about the same as, or less effective than the regular schools. I also wonder if there are any significant secondary numbers related to special needs children. Finally….did any particular month stand out as more likely to have high numbers……speaking, of course, of the month before high stakes testing.
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Diane, I hope you note that some of those charter schools with high suspension rates are high schools and it is possible to make an argument that a 15 or 17 year old might be deserving of an out of school suspension. But notice that Success Academy had high suspension rates in their ELEMENTARY schools (which later added middle school grades). If you want to understand why Eva Moskowitz dropped lottery priority for low-income students zoned for failing public schools, this is why. She had to suspend far too many of them in order to get the results that would keep the donations coming in. So she simply started opening schools that Success Academy Union Square, where the majority of students are affluent. As a solution to her “suspension” problem, it’s brilliant! Just stop educating as many of the kids you don’t want to educate, and you can keep suspensions down. But never forget that Success Academy achieved those appallingly high suspension rates in ELEMENTARY schools.
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They’re “schools of choice”, Diane. Rules that govern ordinary schools don’t apply.
We have a local columnist who calls them “the darlings” of politicians 🙂
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Under NY education law:
“provisions for detention, suspension and removal from the classroom of students, consistent with Education Law section 3214 and other applicable Federal, State and local laws including provisions for the school authorities to establish policies and procedures to ensure the provision of continued educational programming and activities for students removed from the classroom, placed in detention, or suspended from school, which shall include alternative educational programs appropriate to individual student needs”
Do charters provide mandatory alternative educational programs for their suspended students? If not, what is their out of school suspension policy?
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Aside from pressuring out the “undesirables”, I think the high rate of suspensions is due to the lack of educational background of many – perhaps most- teachers at charter schools. When the focus of “discipline” is on untucked shirts, dropping pencils, chewing gum and so forth, that means that the teaching and learning is getting short shrift. We’ve seen the SLANTing, hand clapping and head swiveling that goes on in these classrooms – it sure isn’t meaningful, messy, engaging, loving, thoughtful instruction.
It’s just show – something all effective, experienced teachers recognize and despise.
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To have a suspension rate of 51% at a school which “serves a large number of students who are homeless or in foster care” simply boggles the mind. What did these kids do while suspended – wander in the streets? Many shelters are closed during the day, so it’s doubtful they went home and studied under the watchful eyes of a parent.
Broome St. Academy was authorized by SUNY; it’s instructive to read the first year evaluation and see the shortcomings which were found. It’s amateur hour – and kids never get a do-over when they lose school time.
Click to access Broome-Street-Academy-First-Year-School-Visit-2012.pdf
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Christine, what’s more mind-boggling however is that SUNY (and the NYSED) evaluations are more like CYA memos. They hardly ever yank charters when gross deficiencies are found.
The Advocates for Children of New York’s recent report on the faulty discipline policies at NYC charter schools was discussed on this blog just a week or so ago. Here is the link to the AFC page were the full report can be found. SUNY and NYSED are not even insisting charter schools’ policies be in compliance with city, state and federal regs concerning student discipline.
http://www.advocatesforchildren.org/node/852
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Sharon – I completely agree. I’m left slack-jawed at SUNY’s abdication of responsibility for the kids attending this “school”.
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Christine, in fairness, I learned just today while reading documents presented to the SUNY Board of Trustees’s Charter Schools Committee that last year the SUNY Charter Schools Institute did not recommend renewal for a charter school in Troy, NY, and just this week recommended against renewal of a one in Brooklyn.
Documents here: http://www.suny.edu/about/leadership/board-of-trustees/meetings/meetingNotices.cfm?archivedPage=Y#b
(Yes, you might say my charter school oppo research takes me deep into weird, wonkish places!)
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