G.F. Brandenburg studied the wait lists at charter schools in D.C., and he discovered that poor kids were fleeing from schools with the kids “at-risk.”
Lesson:
He says, “What we see here is not “No Child Left Behind” but instead ” “Let’s Leave All Those At-Risk Kids Behind”.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
If someone were to write the definitive history of the American traditional district school system post-WW II (and ongoing),”Let’s Leave All Those At-Risk Kids Behind” would make an excellent and apt title.
Apparently, you have spent little time in schools for the last two decades. The focus has been increasingly about at-risk kids for quite some time. If any group has been neglected, it’s the A-students.
We are constantly bombarded with focusing on our lowest performing strata. We’ve also created numerous non-academic supports for the at-risk population.
But, hey, whatever fits your narrative. And the graphs in GFB’s blog simply state that your narrative is merely continued by the charter schools! Good to see such innovation.
The more money you have, the more at-risk kids you leave behind. Everyone was and is totally comfortable with that arrangement; it was only when people’s jobs were threatened that the buck had to stop.
Not too long ago, I naively believed the SUNY Charter Institute when I saw on their website that their mission was to establish charter schools that were “especially for students at risk of academic failure.”
Fortunately, some people on here like Tim set me straight. In fact, there is no obligation whatsoever for a charter school — at least in NY State — to serve at-risk students at all. If the % of at-risk kids in a charter school is significantly lower than the % of at-risk kids in the district, that’s perfectly fine and in fact — if having fewer at-risk students means the test scores are better it’s even MORE than fine. It’s celebrated!
At-risk students are great for photo ops and successfully lobbying for scarce taxpayer dollars. But when it comes to educating them, do we really expect charter schools to do that difficult job? Why should they? If you believe in the free market as their supporters do, why would they spend more money on an at-risk student when they can educate a middle class student instead?
I think it’s important to distinguish between parents of kids in schools vs. the schools themselves. Yes, too many affluent parents are trying to get their kids away from “those kids”. But if you look at the last 20 years or so and compared public vs. charter schools, I think the public schools have made good faith effort and a lot of strides to accommodate and effectively educate with various “at risk” populations. Are they perfect? Of course not, at least partially because the problems are bigger than the schools. But they try. Charters, on the other hand, especially in the last several years, are more and more moving away from trying to educate all kids to openly acknowledging that they “save” the worthy ones – the “motivated” kids (realistically, the kids who get high test scores). I think charters are, by and large, just pandering to those families who want to get their kids away from “those kids”.
I agree. The problem is that if that is the case, you might as well create new public “choice” schools to serve only the students who are “not those kids”. That way, all the profit to be made from serving the students who are “not those kids” can be spent in schools that do serve “those kids” — since it is obviously far more expensive to try to address their issues.
Dienne: as so often, you illuminate, not obfuscate.
I know the pro-charter/voucher/privatizer crowd recoils in horror from the phrase “educational triage” but I agree that that is exactly what charters are more and more openly doing now.
They are unashamedly admitting they are giving up, surrendering, taking the easy way out, when it comes to the ‘test score suppressors’ and ‘non-strivers’ and ELLs and SpecEd students and so on.
What happened to their clarion call of “no excuses”? Of being the “rising tide that lifts all boats”?
I guess when you are in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ so that the interests of a few adults are privileged over those of the vast majority of students you adopt the old saw:
“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” [Vince Lombardi]
😎
Tim,
Surely you don’t believe that charters. Take at-risk kids?
Most of the time, Tim is here to misdirect, not to shed any light, Diane.
His comment today is a typical example: he takes things that are indisputably true – a history of de facto school segregation, combined with manipulations by affluent white parents on behalf of their children, but always made darker in his telling, and somehow also implied to be the determining force in our segregated city – and attempts to use it to derail discussion of what charter schools are and what they do.
He’s too intelligent not to see the difference between the disparate desires of individual families that in the aggregate tend toward racial segregation (which can be remedied or at least mitigated by legislation and administratively, something that District 2 actually did with some success in the ’90’s) and an immensely wealthy, interconnected and focused philanthropic/advocacy/academic/legislative/propaganda industrial complex that is relentless in seeking control of how public dollars spent on education, and reconfiguring how labor is managed in the schools.
No light, just smoke, intended to obscure…
Tim has kindly cited NY charter school law to explain to me that charter schools in NY state DON’T have any obligation whatsoever to take at-risk kids and it is perfectly acceptable for them to have an extremely low % of them. Even if the district where they are located has 57% at-risk students, it’s fine for the charter school to end up with only 25% in their school. If the time comes when some charter schools educate no at-risk students, Tim has made it clear that is still perfectly legal. So to answer Diane’s question, Tim certainly does know that charters may take as many or as few at-risk students as they choose to take. He has no problem with the ones who choose NOT to take very many.
Diane, 75% of the children attending charters in New York City qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, a commonly accepted marker (Title I, e.g.) for being at risk of academic failure.
I’ll clear up what Michael got wrong in his latest harangue: segregation does indeed involve the participation of individual actors (and not just wealthy ones–I laughed out loud at that). But it also involves all levels of government, law enforcement, and industry, and it is very much a coordinated, intentional system, fueled by racism and intolerance. Yes, today, in 2015, in even a blue metropolitan area like New York.
Michael’s comment about District 2 is an attempt to make the uninformed reader believe that District 2 was at one point appreciably integrated. It wasn’t. Today its non-integrated schools serve tiny numbers of at-risk children, and any meaningful effort to change that would be met with fierce resistance and/or white flight.
Charters educate 3% of the kids in the state and are almost exclusively located in the hypersegregated communities where New York warehouses its people of color. Nevermind that Michael’s overheated final paragraph doesn’t mention anything about kids (that is typical for him), charters in New York aren’t even the threat to labor that he’s tried to portray here.
More intellectual dishonesty:
– I spoke about efforts made in District 2 in the 1990’s, before the wave of so-called reform took hold of the schools, as an example of (obviously insufficient but good faith) efforts made by public school districts to face the issue of segregation and diversifying classrooms, while he would have you think I’m referring to today’s hyper-gentrified District 2, where mere affluence is no longer enough to allow one to afford living in the District.
– In an effort to cover himself, Tim retroactively brings up institutional racism. Nice of him to have suddenly discovered it and brought it to our attention, since to read most of his comments, you would think racism springs solely from the dark hearts of affluent white urban public school parents.
– In his contortions and obfuscations, he brings up the old charter school chestnut about the percentage of reduced and free lunch students charters enroll, conveniently neglecting to point out that, in urban communities where they are located, the better distinction is BETWEEN students receiving reduced and free lunch. Charters enroll a far higher percentage of the former, while public schools enroll more of the latter, which is a more accurate marker for poverty.
– And, as always, all of this seems to be done in service of getting us to ignore the elephant in the room, which is the education reform industrial complex that is at the heart of all these issues. Tim seems to feel the need to take up the mantle of dear, departed teachingeconomist, and defend those poor charter school operators from the “haters,” who for some zany, kooky reason, object to having their public schools taken over by private interests.
Finally, for those readers who think that he’s on the payroll of charter schools and so-called reformers, I don’t think so. Instead, while he definitely has his trollish qualities, I think we should take him at his word and see that it’s altruism that seems to guide him, and a desire to chivalrously defend the Eva Moskowitz’s of the world.
What some would crassly sell to the Overclass for money, he provides for free. I’ll let readers decide the proper descriptive word for that.
Michael wrote:
“I spoke about efforts made in District 2 in the 1990’s, before the wave of so-called reform took hold of the schools, as an example of (obviously insufficient but good faith) efforts made by public school districts to face the issue of segregation and diversifying classrooms, while he would have you think I’m referring to today’s hyper-gentrified District 2, where mere affluence is no longer enough to allow one to afford living in the District.”
The first time that you referred to District 2, you omitted the “insufficient” part. That the efforts were “insufficient” would not be “obvious” to anyone not familiar with the inside baseball of New York City education. District 2 schools have been intensely segregated and stratified for years, since long before there was such a thing as so-called reform, charter schools, or hedge funds.
“In an effort to cover himself, Tim retroactively brings up institutional racism. Nice of him to have suddenly discovered it and brought it to our attention, since to read most of his comments, you would think racism springs solely from the dark hearts of affluent white urban public school parents.”
Institutional racism would die a quick death were it not for widespread individual racism and people who are keen to preserve the privilege and advantages racism affords them and their families. Racism in New York City and (especially) the metropolitan area transcends economics. As you are fond of saying, watch what people do, not what they say. Look at the middle-class suburbs on Long Island that are experiencing white flight. Look at how ferociously white parents reject even mild proposals to reduce school segregation. Look at the enormous premium attached to housing where there few at-risk kids. Speaking of at-risk kids . . .
“In his contortions and obfuscations, he brings up the old charter school chestnut about the percentage of reduced and free lunch students charters enroll, conveniently neglecting to point out that, in urban communities where they are located, the better distinction is BETWEEN students receiving reduced and free lunch. Charters enroll a far higher percentage of the former, while public schools enroll more of the latter, which is a more accurate marker for poverty.”
Some charter schools do enroll higher proportions of reduced-price eligible kids and not as many at-risk kids as their home districts, and there is indeed a big difference in the outcomes of reduced-price vs. free-lunch kids — about a grade level on NAEP. However, there is a much bigger gap between reduced-price and non-eligible kids; big enough that reduced-price eligible kids are defined as being at risk of academic failure.
Moreover, in 2010-2011, the most recent year someone took the trouble of crunching the data, NYC DOE schools were 75.0% FRPL-eligible, 67.6 free and 7.4% reduced. NYC charter schools were 75.6% FRPL-eligible, 65.2 free and 10.4 reduced. The question at hand was whether charter schools are serving at-risk kids, period, and clearly they are.
“And, as always, all of this seems to be done in service of getting us to ignore the elephant in the room, which is the education reform industrial complex that is at the heart of all these issues. Tim seems to feel the need to take up the mantle of dear, departed teachingeconomist, and defend those poor charter school operators from the “haters,” who for some zany, kooky reason, object to having their public schools taken over by private interests.”
No, the elephant in the room is the fact that the vast majority of children attending New York City charters are zoned for schools that you–or Diane or just about all the other local opponents of choice–would never in a million years allow your own child or a relative’s child to attend. These are primarily people of color without means, whom for decades the residential district system has told to drop dead. Choice for everyone else in the world but them.
“Finally, for those readers who think that he’s on the payroll of charter schools and so-called reformers, I don’t think so. Instead, while he definitely has his trollish qualities, I think we should take him at his word and see that it’s altruism that seems to guide him, and a desire to chivalrously defend the Eva Moskowitz’s of the world.
“What some would crassly sell to the Overclass for money, he provides for free. I’ll let readers decide the proper descriptive word for that.”
The next time I meet a family whose kids attend a charter school, either on the street or at a kids’ performance, match, or game, I’ll be sure to let them know they’re now members of the Overclass! Those families are the reason why I support charter schools, not Eva or any of your other bugbears. If you’ve never talked to such a family, I highly recommend that you do so.
The business community and their pocket politicians decided long ago that educating ALL children was a waste of time and money. They don’t care if the most expensive to educate, ‘children-at-risk’, are disappeared.
Which illustrates in a nutshell why the business community should have minimal influence on education in our country. They are about profit. The very expression “at-risk students” warns the profit-seeking against that population. Yet who with a perspective beyond next quarter’s stats, the fiscal yr etc, would claim it’s in the country’s best interest to abandon the education of poor children (1 in 4), learning disabled, ESL? The free market has no concept of public good; untrammeled, it eliminates its own consumer class & implodes via self-cannibalism.
Right. Charter schools can take who ever they want, and comparing their results to DCPS, for instance, is apples and oranges. In addition, no, we didn’t have the resources to help all children. We needed help with reading, behavior, writing, everything. The stress was too much for me after twenty years. Gone.
whomever!
We have a time-honored way to decide who gets to escape the at-risk kids: People with enough money to pay for private schools, people with enough money to move to another school district, and people with the right bureaucratic connections. That’s how it’s done. Open it up to everyone and you’ll have a bank run on your hands.
I think you may be on to something. Our own kids were tired of dealing with kids from families that 1) didn’t give a darn, 2) raised kids unable to tolerate anybody different and had no idea how to behave in a classroom, 3) seemed far too concerned about what shoes their kid wore or what award they received. Both wealthy and not so wealthy. It got to the point personal safety was an issue.
We were lucky to find a school within a school.
FLERP, that isn’t really the case in NYC, especially with middle school and high school choice.
I know many parents with little income and no connections but whose child was well-behaved who sent their kids to a range of middle and high schools which were perfectly fine — some top notch, some just okay.
In fact, NYC already has a system whereby the students who do want to escape schools that serve primarily at-risk students can escape, especially in high school. There are a myriad of options and you don’t have to be rich, bureaucratically connected, or live in a special school district to attend one of them.
The problem is that the students who are in those failing schools are not all trying to escape because they want a better education or because their parents want one for them. Sometimes they just don’t have much interest in academics at all. That doesn’t mean they might not have one at age 20 or 22, which is why it’s wonderful that CUNY offers opportunities — even if remedial — for students who may not have wanted an education as a teenager but want one now.
I would only suggest that the situation you depict would be less dire if the public schools still had options to train in the trades.
Sp & Fr Freelancer, I agree. When I was a kid we had vocational schools for students with little interest in academics. But I think there will still be teens not interested in being in any school.
But my answer was to address something that flerp said. It simply is not true that you have to be wealthy or politically connected to escape a failing school in NYC, especially with middle school and high school choice. That’s something that upper middle class Manhattan parents who don’t know any low-income families think, because they only know of the few dozen schools that serve lots of affluent Manhattan students. Or the specialized high schools that serve high achieving poor students. But there are plenty of high schools that serve the average student who wants to learn and they aren’t “failing”. It’s true they get very little resources, and rarely attract the affluent families who can donate enough to make up for the constantly decreasing educational budgets. Still, their mostly very dedicated teachers soldier on, often buying their own materials, to give those students a decent education. Many of them won’t become stellar “scholars”, but some will and others will do well enough and go on to college. Those schools will never get the millions from hedge funders and they are often overlooked. But they do a good job with limited resources and don’t try to get rid of students who might bring down their statistics because they can’t ace a Regents exam. It would be great if people would not forget about those schools and pretend that they don’t exist. There are more of those schools than there are failing ones, but there’s no political mileage to be made by reminding people they exist.
So, once again, as always, the ultimate success of a student will depend on who his or her parents are, unless a public education professional– or more than one — intervenes (as happened with me as a HS student, or I would definitely have been left behind). Kids cannot help it if their parents don’t give a darn, and we have no influence on the parent. However, we can refuse to tolerate intolerance, bad behavior and/or a sense of entitlement in students WHILE THEY ARE IN SCHOOL. Frankly, if they have parents who really don’t give a darn, this makes it easier for us to do since the parents won’t interfere via their insistence on teaching intolerance and elitism. Just some thoughts.