Gary Rubinstein deconstructed the claim made by the NYC charter industry that 143,000 students are “trapped in failing schools.”
As Rubinstein shows, a billionaire-backed group called “Families for Excellent Schools” decided arbitrarily that any school where less than 10% passed the new Common Core test was a “failing school.” He points out that only 30% “passed” the Common Core tests (including charter schools, which had the same pass rate as public schools). If Families for Excellent Schools had used a 20% pass rate instead of 10%, he notes, then FES could have bemoaned the “Forgotten Three-Quarters.”
Rubinstein discovered that 90% of the parents in the 371 schools arbitrarily labeled “failing” would recommend their school to other parents. Obviously, the parents don’t believe their children are “trapped.”
The claim about “children trapped in failung schools” comes from a “report” by the Walton Family-funded “Families for Excellent Schools.” This is the same group that hastily raised and spent $5-6 million last year to stop Mayor Bill de Blasio’s effort to charge rent to charter schools using public space. With money spent so freely on the airwaves and in Albany, Governor Cuomo adopted charter schools as his cause (only 3% of the state’s students attend charter schools). With his support, the Legislature passed a bill requiring NYC to provide free space in public schools to charters and to pay their rent if they located in private space.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
‘Trapped,’ ‘choice,’ ‘failing,’ ‘adult interests,’ ‘reform,’ and the rest of their lingo. It’s all just slick manipulative advertising.”
You know what else was slick and manipulative? How parents continue to be told that the Common Core tests will not be used against their kids and schools, yet that is exactly how ed reformers are using them. As ammo in a political campaign.
One would think they’d park the ed reform campaign bus long enough to allow the tens of millions of kids engaged in this experiment to complete “the testing season” before going back on their word.
Is there a political campaign planned with the release of the scores in other states?
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Yet Another Brand-Switching Advertizing Blitz (YABSAB) like every other YABSAB that ever went before it …
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The biggest failure at my children’s schools in North Carolina has been the enormous amount of instructional time wasted on grade-level testing and test prep. In North Carolina, the tests are the End of Grade tests. Eliminate them and the test prep and the schools would be better.
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If we continue to use this type of language to describe schools, how is this productive? Can we change the rhetoric used to describe schools to make them more available for change. Yes, we need to address schools that are not performing up to standards, but we need to do this in a productive way. Also, do the parents that recommended the school to other parents know that their school is listed as failing? Are they aware of this label when they tell other parents? Because this could definitely change the way parents interact with the school.
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“. . . know that their school is listed as failing?”
The “F” word is a misnomer. No school is f##%$ng! Pure propaganda or in my terms to say a school is failing is 100% USDA Grade AA Bullshit. When someone tells you a “school is failing”, your immediate response should be “Bullshit”.
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Well, if you can’t find a real crisis to opportunistically take advantage of, then fabricate one!
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Number of children
trapped
in a
FAILED
FEDERAL
TESTING
REGIME:
50,000,000
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I agree with Rubinstein’s point about FES’s “study” having an arbitrary cut-off, although I’m sure that FES could have selected other data—college-going or remediation rates for the districts where these K-8’s are located, e.g.—to prove its point. I don’t think it is being overly harsh to say that most of the schools are a mess.
The problem with Rubinstein’s analysis and his headline is that he doesn’t account for a huge number of parents at these schools who do not complete a survey at all. Sure, 49,000 (out of 54,000) is a big sample size, but it is missing tens of thousands of parents. Citywide, 54% of parents completed a survey last year, and the response rate is generally lower at high-needs schools. To say that 9 out of 10 parents at this subset of high-needs schools would recommend their child’s respective school simply isn’t accurate, nor is it accurate to assume that the same 90% approval rate for responders would hold for non-responders.
It’s also dicey to read too much into this particular question on parent surveys. Even at schools (especially elementary) that are melting down in chaos and dysfunction, like the infamous “school of no” (PS 106 in Queens), you’ll still see parent approval rates of 75 or 80 or even 90+ percent. It is difficult for a parent to give an unbiased response to the question: who wants to admit that they aren’t happy with the school that their child is attending, especially if they are stuck there and can’t move to a different neighborhood or suburb or pay for private school? Many parents are also skeptical about whether the surveys are truly confidential—the materials have the student’s name and ID number printed on them.
If I remember correctly, Rubinstein had some qualms about sending his own child to his zoned school because of the quality of the peer group, but the child scored into a G&T program and relieved his family of having to make a decision. Perhaps a more interesting and relevant blog post would be whether Rubinstein would send his own children to one of FES’s failing schools, and if not, why not.
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If Rubinstein were considering sending his kids to one of these schools, I wonder if he might look for the parent survey responses at these schools for the question “do you feel like your child is safe at school?” and perhaps compare it to the survey responses at other schools.
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Tim and flerp, the problem is that Success Academy Charter school DROPPED lottery priority for students zoned for failing public schools in early 2012, right after they started opening more schools in very wealthy neighborhoods like the upper west side of Manhattan and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Why? Two schools (with empty seats!) in very wealthy District 2 in Manhattan and one school (with long waitlists) in very poor District 7 in the Bronx? Really? When there were far more students on their wait lists in the Bronx than there ever were on their wait lists in District 2 (or wealthy District 15)? That MIGHT be excusable if they still gave priority to low-income students zoned for failing public schools (who they keep pretending to care about), but incomprehensibly, they do not. In fact, Success Academy had to get special permission from the SUNY Charter Institute to change their charter to drop that lottery priority for students zoned for failing public schools, because in their charter application for their school in very wealthy Cobble Hill, those are exactly the students they said they wanted to serve. I guess they changed their mind. Guess what? The Cobble Hill school has far fewer low-income students! Guess what else? Their suspension rate at the Cobble Hill school? 0%! Not a single suspension! Suspension rate for the same age students (Kindergarten and first graders) at Harlem Success Academy 5 was 14%! I guess the best way to lower suspension rates of 5 and 6 year olds is to make sure you aren’t teaching too many poor ones. Shameful.
Look, I get that it’s tough to teach the students “trapped” in failing public schools. I get that charter schools like Success Academy had to resort to high suspension rates and high attrition rates back when they gave such students priority. But since we all know that is the case, how about if your friends there stop this farce that they care about those students. Bashing the teachers in those failing public schools that DO educate the students that they very pointedly dropped lottery priority for is about as low as you can go. Or maybe Eva Moskowitz can reinstate lottery priority for low-income students zoned for failing public schools. And actually teach them without using suspension as a means to punish the ones who aren’t fitting their system. Will she? Until she does, I wish that she and her allies at FES would stop pretending to care about them.
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