Seth Andrews, founder of the charter chain Democracy Prep, created an organization called Democracy Bulders. The latter group of charter advocates issued a report critical of charters that refuse to “backfill,” that is, to accept students who apply after the entry year or other designated points.
Its report showed that this policy means that many charter seats are left empty as the charter sees high attrition.
The target of Democracy Builders’ critique is Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy. Eva defends her policy of not backfilling, saying it is not fair to her high-performing students to add low-performing students to their classes.
Mike Petrilli supports Eva, saying the point of charters is to free them from regulations.
I thought charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovations that would be shared with public schools? Is it innovative to take in small proportions of English language learners and students with disabilities and to lose those who are problematic? If public schools did that, their scores would soar. But who would educate the kids that no one wants? And what about the idea of equal educational opportunity?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
To answer the questions:
Yes, that’s what the charters were originally proposed for.
NO!
No one.
For non public school district controlled charters that has never been a consideration as their main concern is making money for someone who is usually in the background.
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I would like to know how public money can be spent on schools that deny parents democratic participation in the schools, and foster segregation and discrimination. How can public money can be spent without much accountability or oversight? The federal government is hypocritical by trying to enforce unrealistic “accountability” on public schools while there is so little accountability in many charter schools’ practice.
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I’ll tell you why public money is being given to private investors who deny parents & students their rights and are permitted to segregate & discriminate: because government officials are corrupt. The bankers & private corporations own them and the think tanks that spew privatization propaganda.
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If you are using tax dollars to fund a private entity while giving the public no voice in the process, it is taxation without representation! We seem to have had a problem like this once before.
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Think of it as a variation on the same theme.
Do you remember the song, “People” (“People who need people”
Try it this way:
Hedge funds, people who need hedge funds,
Are the luckiest people in the world.
Like charters, needing other charters;
And yet letting our grown-up pride,
Hide money deep inside,
We need more for children,
For…children.
Losers, aren’t very special people.
They’re the unluckiest people
In the world.
Give losers, one very special hedge fund;
The feeling deep in your soul,
‘Give me half,
Now you’re whole’,
No more hunger and thirst,
But first, be a person
Who need hedge funds.
People who need hedge funds,
They’re the luckiest people…and,
Too big…to fail.
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I am not a very nice person. Sometimes it is necessary…sometimes….I have to ask myself….are you having fun? http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1106336&p=14852158#p14852158
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My child’s Public School 5th grade class last year of 29 children, had students that ranged from high performing to low performing, and in addition, had seven new children, three from other schools out of the district and four who do not speak the English Language as they had only very recently arrived from Israel, Sweden, Korea and Guatemala. They may have understood some of the English language, but they were far from fluid in their ability to speak it. It was the best year my child ever had in elementary school. The teacher and the school went to extraordinary efforts to accommodate every student in that classroom, especially those who struggled in one way or another. The high performing students excelled just as they always had, there was not a deficit in their education, but an enhancement in having so many unique and different types of children in the classroom. Please also note that some of the lowest performing students were also the best artists in the school. I have often found this to be the case where a child who struggles academically shines in other ways. Why are our country’s leaders attempting to model alternative schools on the cut throat European/Asian Educational Systems? Isn’t it time that American children stop being told how lazy and lousy they are by the very adults who raised them and who are now in positions of leadership. The United States still produces some of the most, if not, the most innovative, creative, accomplished individuals in the world and that includes people from all races and backgrounds. There is no evidence that charter schools or Eva Mosowitz Educational Mausoleum’s up in Harlem have had one iota of impact on the future lives of these children in the long run. Why has not one of these children made it into a specialized high school, for instance? Children who excel in life are those who as adults can communicate with all people, the low performing ones and the high performing ones.
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From my experience diversity usually enriches the school environment and makes all students in the school community expand their view of the world. Their contributions have nothing to do with test scores. As an ESL teacher, I learned a great deal from my students, and I am a better person for the experience.
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We used to have (literally) an A Team and a B Team at the public middle school. The B Team were the kids who didn’t score as well on tests. It was an “innovation” of a superintendent who didn’t last very long- she came out of the private school system.
It was a disaster. It set one group against the other and the parents of the B Team students were convinced it was based on something other than merit- they may have been right, I have no idea.
I think it’s a better school without it.
They still track for gifted in english and math in 7th and 8th grade, but they use three factors- scores, grades and teacher recommend and people seem to think it’s fair.
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BEAUTIFUL!!! THAT is what “education” is all about. There is a vast difference between education and training. We used to believe that one trains animals but one educates peoples. If that be so, what should that tell us about charters and political influence on public schools now.
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I don’t really understand a public school system where all of this is voluntary, particularly considering all of the over the top threats to public schools that can’t provide 95% participation rates on test scores.
Can my public school do this? Just make up their own rules, depending on the manager’s or owners current edu-philosophy? How is this an even playing field? I’m pretty sure my public school could increase their graduation rate if they somehow misplaced the bottom quarter of the class over 4 years and never replaced them.
I think they have to choose. No one compares magnet schools to ordinary public schools because there’s a recognition of reality. Either play by the same rules or stop the apples and oranges comparisons. Pick one.
There’s just no recognition of this at all in Ohio reform-land. My public school receives the kids who churn in and out of cybercharters. That changes the public school. Schools are systems, and decisions made without public schools ripple INTO public schools.
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Not ‘back flling’, supporting attritioning kids who the charters want to expel. Any test results are suspect as the charters don’t not have a student population comparable to that found in public schools. Moreover, charters do not support and educate ELL students or students with more than moderate specil needs (at best). How many ELL and special need students remain in charter schools post grade level expulsions? How many were enrolled at the official studnt entry point? In summary, grade level test comparisons with public schools is invalid and charter schools, as publicly funded entities are in a l liklihood excluding catagories of students who are protected by civil rights laws. Petrelli’s arguements are plain wrong headed and support discriminatory policies in charter schools. How come there has not been a civil rights complaint filed against either the charter schools or the state dpartments of education that funnel public funds to charter school tht support discimintory practices? I would most appreciate a response from an attorney who specializes in civial rights/education law.
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“Any test results are suspect . . . ”
NO! ALL test results are suspect due to the myriad epistemological and ontological falsehoods and errors inherent in the educational standards and standardized testing process that render any results COMPLETELY INVALID. To understand why read Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted treatise “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 description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional 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 the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
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. And 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 attempts to measure “’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.
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Eva is loathed by other charter operators, for many, valid reasons that have appeared on this blog and elsewhere. While sometimes couched in valid criticism, it’s fundamentally sour grapes, since she sucks up all the oxygen they’d hoped to siphon off, and kids they’d hoped to cherry-pick.
While a positive development for those trying to save public education, this is basically a falling out among thieves.
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Michael Fiorillo: never underestimate the power of a Rheeality Distortion Field on those susceptible to the lure of $tudent $ucce$$.
It has become a hallmark of almost every shill and troll that has appeared on this blog to not do their homework. Hence, I wouldn’t be surprised to see (if not today, sometime in the future) a comment or two or three that references this posting, adding that this is 100% platinum proof that the owner of this blog hates charters to much that all she can do is post reports and comments by the anti-charter crowd just to make these “laboratories of creativity and and innovation” look bad.
You know, charter haters like Democracy Bulders.
¿?
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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I wish you were correct.
But this is from Politico today.
A NEW CHARTER PAC: A new political action committee called the Charter Schools Action PAC was registered recently and is linked to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Does the group have plans for big spending going into the 2016 elections? Bill Phillips, listed as the group’s treasurer on the registration, didn’t reveal many details. “Advocates for charter schools intend to be fully engaged in the political and electoral conversation about the future of education,” Phillips said. And there other new hires as lobbiests who want to yake a whack at getting more goddies for charters before the final reauthorization of ESEA and to rev up big support to charter-friendly candidates for offices and that includes presidential candidates.
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Moskowitz’s comment to Brian Lehrer on this topic is profound: “It’s not really fair for the seventh grader or high school student to have to be educated with a child who’s reading at a second or third grade level.” The most obvious implication is that these children who are that far behind should be sent to a district school, where their presence will unfairly impact their classmates. Another implication is that the entire traditional public school model is unfair and harmful because it doesn’t segregate students by ability and performance.
In addition to ability/performance gaps, I suspect (obviously this is conjecture) that there’s another factor that’s least as important in the no-backfill policy. The Success model seems to involve forming deeply ingrained habits and instilling high expectations in children from a young age. Success may believe (perhaps correctly) that it can’t do this effectively when the student is 11, rather than 5 or 6.
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Correctly filling in bubble items on some tests (but not others, as SA’s no-students-accepted-to-the-specialized-high-schools debacle attests), while obediently doing what you’re told in one of Eva’s Skinner Boxes is a very strange definition of “high expectations.”
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The problem is that Eva Moskowitz also constantly compares her students’ stellar test scores to other public schools and insists her students are just like the ones in failing schools. What this Democracy Builders’ report shows is that when you look closely, what she is bragging about is educating 31 out of the 88 students who began school there. And a closer look might even show that some of the original students were replaced by “better” ones, too.
The Success model has nothing to do with “forming deeply ingrained habits and instilling high expectations in children from a young age”. It is simply weeding out the ones who can’t perform, period. We all know that if you weed out 20% of the students from the worst public school each year, beginning with Kindergarten, and shower those schools with millions of dollars in donations, the test scores will improve. Is anyone really claiming that most (perhaps not all) of Success Academy’s “secret sauce” is that? Even Eva Moskowitz knows that — if she didn’t, she would be opening more schools in the Bronx where she could educate more of those students trapped in failing public schools she always pretends to care about, instead of dropping priority for them in her lottery!
Let me state that again for the record — Eva Moskowitz dropped lottery priority for students zoned for failing public schools as soon as she was given real estate in neighborhoods where few of them lived. She dropped it. She purposely said “I am NOT going to educate those students if they don’t live in wealthy District 2 in Manhattan, and by the way, I need a THIRD school in wealthy District 2 in Manhattan even though my longest wait lists are in the Bronx where far MORE of those failing schools and at-risk students live.” In truth, the first schools she did open were mysteriously losing large cohorts of the low-income students they served each year. And do you know what I find most reprehensible? Instead of figuring out why they were losing so many at-risk students and trying to figure out how to teach them, she simply decided to change her focus to affluent students instead so she can now pretend her suspension and attrition rates have “improved” by averaging the low suspension and attrition rates for middle class and upper middle class students!
What is wrong with Eva Moskowitz that she is not shouting from the rooftops that it takes lots of money to educate at-risk students? What is wrong with Eva Moskowitz that she is not shouting from the rooftops that failing schools aren’t going to be helped if we don’t lower class size and provide all kinds of other resources beyond teaching that those students need to succeed? What is wrong with Eva Moskowitz that she isn’t saying “I TRIED to educate at-risk students and I found that my schools couldn’t help half of them even when they did have involved parents. I realize they need schools that are given even MORE resources than my well-funded schools have and I have the utmost respect for the teachers with the patience to do what my young and inexperienced teachers are not trained to do — educate them.”
What is wrong with Eva Moskowitz that she has the chutzpah to claim she is educating the same students for the same money as public schools and any school that doesn’t match her results is just not trying hard enough?
What is wrong with the people who give her money and write admiring posts here that they think all of that is okay, as long as a very small cohort of low-income students whose families commit to doing all that Eva Moskowitz asks them to do are helped? Have you all become so cynical that you truly believe that if you don’t lie about how Eva Moskowitz gets her results (“we get our stellar scores with the same kids with LESS funding”) you will be doing harm? Tell me who is going to be harmed if Success Academy was honest?
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By the way FLERP, you seem to be saying that Eva Moskowitz claims that every public middle school that takes students who aren’t already “scholars” and scoring at least a 3 on state exams gets a pass on teaching them because it is impossible to do it effectively. I doubt you truly believe that 11 year olds should be in holding pens because they are no longer able to be taught, or perhaps not “worth” teaching, and I doubt Eva Moskowitz is saying that. More likely she is just saying that are too expensive and won’t get good test scores she can brag about. Not that no one should be teaching them because they are beyond help.
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“The Success model seems to involve forming deeply ingrained habits and instilling high expectations in children from a young age.”
FLERP!,
Have you drunk too much of the $ucce$$ ACKademy’s koolaide? That sentence is straight out of the behavioralist edudeformers talking points.
Using operant conditioning (supposedly “forming deeply ingrained”) on unsuspecting children serves to deny their inherent rights as humans, conditions them to blindly obey authorities and is unethical. Operant Conditioning may be ethical for willing adults who KNOWINGLY sign up for the military or other organizations-religions, cults, etc. . ., that utilize those tactics but not for UNKNOWING children.
High expectations??? Whose??? And for what purposes???
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I was going for what I thought was neutral descriptive language that could be imbued with meaning by both friends and foes of the Success model. Looks like I failed. My basic point was in fact what you suggest, i.e., that the SA model may require a level of conditioning that works best when started at ages 5-6.
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A “level of conditioning”? Yikes! And if you don’t get the kids by 5 or 6, that’s it? It sounds like something out of a teen dystopian novel. I love that, like The Hunger Games, the richest kids in Success Academy get joy and kindness (as the Upper West Success Academy parents keep insisting and I believe them) and the “poors” who live in different areas get “only the fittest survive” and the rest are weeded out. After all, high test scores are far more important than trying to educate the “poors” who can’t learn — send them back to their holding pens and let’s be done with it. Eva Moskowitz says they aren’t worth her time anymore and she knows education.
The fact that Eva Moskowitz raised over $9 million dollars this week from supposedly nice, normal people is scary. The fact that people think that is the model for all education in some futuristic society where only the wealthiest can opt out by paying $50,000/year in private schools (or perhaps given a slot at the special Success Academy schools for affluent students) is so terribly sad. How is anyone in their right mind not appalled by this? FLERP – maybe you can explain the mysteries of thinking that this is all okay.
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A “level of conditioning”
This is what Mao did in China in the early 1960s right after what’s known as the Great Famine. He wrote a book called the “Little Red Book” that became the Common Core of Chinese public education to condition China’s grade school children. When those children were teens, Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution and turned that revolution over to those conditioned teens who turned on their teachers and the teens own parents. The schools were closed effectively denying an education to an entire generation.
When Mao died in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping stepped up to take over the CCP, the long road to rebuilding China’s dismantled public education system began. The destruction to China’s public schools was so deep, that even today, China is still working to finish the job. During the decade long Cultural Revolution millions of teachers committed suicide as the conditioned teens relentlessly turned on them.
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The biggest problem is that as higher proportions of high needs kids get dumped into public schools, then the schools get labeled as “failing.” As long as the public schools “fail” politicians have motive to continue the expansion of charters (who do not serve the same population).
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The whole scenario is rigged to ensure high needs public schools will fail. When the charters siphon off the per student funds and then send many high needs, expensive students back to public schools, the public schools are operating at a deficit. These students don’t perform well on standardized tests. When the school gets the failure label, it is vulnerable to takeover.
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Like WT points out, the rich have ways to select into exclusionary schools, move to a leafy suburb or go to a private school. I look at it like the possibility of a Waldorf charter school, if the students and teachers are there of their free will, so be it.
The problem is that public schools are underfunded, ELL and struggling students are underfunded, which is on the legislature, not SA.
Like Chiara says, comparing public schools, magnet schools and charter schools is apples to oranges.
Charter schools aren’t a systemwide solution.
A systemwide solution requires adequate funding, there is no getting around that anywhere.
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So to Petrilli, the “point of charters is to free them from regulations” that ensure they are educating the number of students they received funds from the government to educate? He is opposed to regulations against such blatant fraud??
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If it is not fair to Eva to add low performing students to Her “Success Academies” why are the scores of transfer students immediately counted in the accountability reports for public schools. We just took in two returning migrant children. They had spent the winter in Mexico after being enrolled in another NY State district last fall. NY State advised us to give the Math Exam to the kids (it makes them feel so welcomed on their first day–it models inclusion) and count their results in your district report. Now that really makes sense–and is really fair–isn’t it Eva!
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As an ESL teacher, I got all comers at any level at any time. It was my job to be welcoming and make it work. I often got students around Memorial Day. The parents brought them at this time so they didn’t have to start off with a winter wardrobe.
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“But who would educate the kids that no one wants? And what about the idea of equal educational opportunity?”
The reformers would, of course, outsource those children to India or China. But beware, in India, several thousand children, who live in poverty, die of malnutrition or starvation every day, and these numbers have been constant for decades—hmm, maybe that is the plan, to let India get rid of these children for us.
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Interesting blog post dated February 18, 2015 on philly.com by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter: “A Promising type of charter” – Kahlenberg has long been a proponent of economically diverse schools.
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