Andrea Gabor published an op-Ed article in the New York Times about “the myth” of the Néw Orleans reforms. Critics immediately attacked her research, her facts, her integrity. (See here and here.)
Gabor is the Michael R. Bloomberg Professor of Business Jounalism at Baruch College in the City University of New York. She has written several books and many articles.
She responds to the critics here.
Andrea Gabor writes:
“Here is a preliminary response to some who have attacked the research behind my NYT OpEd. First a little background: I’ve spent months in New Orleans over the past several years researching New Orleans charter schools and published a lengthy piece in Newsweek in 2013. (I’m also working on a book.) However, much of the impetus for this piece came from what I heard and saw at a conference, The Urban Education Future?, held by the Educational Research Alliance at Tulane University this June.
First, the data that ERA just published, and that many education-reformers point to for their positive results, is based on numbers leading up to 2012, i.e. the period during which the worst excesses, including creaming, special-education abuses, high suspension and expulsion rates took place. More than one of the participants an ERA panel in June noted that it’s questionable whether the numbers would look as good as they do if it hadn’t been for those practices.
This was also the period before the Common Core, so the elementary and middle-school test results presented by ERA, as several experts at the conference noted, were based on Louisiana’s very low-level standards.
For years, the ed-reform establishment claimed there were no abuses—no creaming, no special-education abuses—in New Orleans. Now, they are saying: In 2012 we fixed all that, so it’s not fair to reference the problems. Except that we don’t yet have evidence of if/how the new safeguards are working.
What we do know is that there’s a major governance/oversight problem in New Orleans. In 2013, a report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found that the “LDOE no longer conducts on-site audits or reviews that help ensure the electronic data in its systems is accurate.” The audit also found significant discrepancies in the data on attendance, dropout-rates and graduation rates reported by the charters. http://www.lla.state.la.us/PublicReports.nsf/0B6B9CAE61DC9C2786257B6C006DB81E/$FILE/00032CA4.pdf
Also last spring, a Louisiana appeals court ruled that the State of Louisiana, which had given a trove of student data to CREDO, but withheld it from other researchers, had violated public-records laws. So much for transparency.
Click to access student_data_case_c_court_of_appeal_notice_judgment_and_disposition_2014.pdf
I had the opportunity to ask several experts at the ERA conference questions about governance/oversight problems in New Orleans and the kids who “slip between the cracks”. Among others, I asked these questions of Dana Peterson of the RSD as well as members of the panel on the “Role of Communities in Schools.” The exchanges were captured on the webcasts below.
To see the startling discussion about governance/oversight problems during the panel discussion of the “Role of Communities in Schools” go to the 1-hour-and-12-minute mark of the following webcast and listen for three or four minutes: http://educationresearchalliancenola.org/sessions/2015/6/19/role-of-communities-in-schools
Some highlights:
Deirdre Burel, executive director of the Orleans of Public Education Network: “There’s common agreement, we know for a fact that kids have slipped through the cracks because of the closures.”
When an audience member asks: “The RSD doesn’t know who’s in the system?”
And again later: “Who’s responsible for the whole?”
Burel answers: “There is no whole. That’s a governance conversation. There is no single entity responsible for all children.”
I asked a similar question during a panel on “Test-Based Accountability Effects of School Closure” on school closings, their impacts on high school students, and received the response below from Dana Peterson of the RSD and Whitney Ruble, the ERA researcher who was presenting her findings on school closures. Two points of note: First, Ruble’s/ERA results on the effects of school closures said nothing about the impacts on high school kids who are most at risk of dropping out. You had to look and listen very carefully to realize that all the data was about elementary and middle-school effects. However, Ruble acknowledged that “A lot of students disappear from the data.”
This at about the 1-hour-two-minute mark of the following webcast:
Dana Peterson of the RSD, a few minutes later: “We’re more worried at the high school level than the elementary level. Its true some kids do leave and fall out of the system.” That’s why, he said, the RSD started hiring couselors specifically for high school kids two years ago to try to make sure they didn’t disappear from the system.
When I asked whether he knew how many kids fall between the cracks, Peterson acknowledged: “I don’t know the total number. I don’t.”
After the panel, I asked whether there was anyone at the RSD who could get me that data. He said there was and he promised to get me the information. He never responded to subsequent emails and phone calls.
Finally, some, including John White, have taken issue with my assertion that the mostly black teaching force was replaced by young idealistic (mostly white) educators. According to another ERA report, the number of black teachers in New Orleans dropped from 71 percent before the storm to 49 percent in 2013/2014. White teachers, by contrast, made up just a little over 20 percent of the teachers in NOLA before the storm and were close to 50 percent in 2013/14. See p. 3 of the following report: http://educationresearchalliancenola.org/files/publications/ERA-Policy-Brief-Changes-in-the-New-Orleans-Teacher-Workforce.pdf
I should note that I’ve visited over half-a-dozen charter schools in New Orleans. With two exceptions, I barely saw a single African-American face among any of the educators.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The more education is commercialized …
The more commercials will replace the facts.
I don’t know, it’s just one study and maybe there are other studies that say something different, but there DOES seem to be different views of this in New Orleans:
“A similar racial split was found on the recovery of certain government services, including education. More than half of white residents said public schools are better today than they were before Katrina, when local school districts were some of the poorest performing in the country. But African-American residents indicated they did not see the influx of federal aid making much of a difference in their schools, with most responding that schools were either “about the same” or “worse.”
There were a few points of convergence, however. Most people felt their voices were largely ignored as the city rebuilt, with a majority of both African-American and white residents agreeing with the statement “People like me had no say in the rebuilding process.” Most respondents in both groups also agreed that disaster preparedness in their communities is better today.”
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/8/24/study-black-residents-of-new-orleans-more-critical-of-recovery.html
Aren’t we just back to the same “discovery”? That people evaluate local schools on more than test scores? They see value where an ed reformer from outside the local area may not?
It works the other way in Ohio. We have whole cities where the charters do worse. on average, than the public system yet people enroll. Obviously they’re not judging these schools on test scores alone, or they’d go to the public school.
I’m not a researcher but if you’re going to tout charter success stories to expand this all over the country isn’t it cherry-picking to completely ignore those cities and states where there’s a different story?
Here’s one. The City of Toledo.
That’s a real “choice” environment because there is no state that has promoted ed reform more than mine. We have it all- unlimited charter expansion, vouchers, and a state government that could not have promoted those two options more. Couple that with the Obama Administration and their love of all things charter, and Toledo should be all-charter by now.
I congratulate New Orleans on their success but can we get some other evidence introduced here before we privatize everything that isn’t tied down and deeply regret that decision?
https://www.toledoblade.com/news/Education/2015/07/28/No-new-charter-schools-scheduled-to-open-in-Toledo.html
Chiara – There is no “success” for children and parents in New Orleans UNLESE you are one of the selected who are allowed to attend the few selective charters. Even then, would you say school performance scores based on standardized tests are a measure of “success”?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The single thing that stands out to me is OPEN-NOLA director Burel’s statement of the RSD: “There is no whole. That’s a governance conversation. There is no single entity responsible for all children.”
There’s no contradiction from RSD’s Peterson, in fact his statements regarding high school dropouts seems to support the contention: “We’re more worried at the high school level than the elementary level. Its true some kids do leave and fall out of the system.”… ‘When I asked whether he knew how many kids fall between the cracks, Peterson acknowledged: “I don’t know the total number. I don’t.”’
The RSD doesn’t know how many students it serves nor how many graduate. It can’t even claim it is providing an education to all school-age students in its zone. Any statements issued about how it is doing cannot be supported by verifiable numbers.
Am I overstating this? I hope I’m wrong. Otherwise it seems kind of breathtaking. Feature or bug? How can they even keep track of the voucher & charter $ they’re handing out if they don’t know how many dropouts they have?
And the problem is there is little motivation for them to really track that information if their desire is to “prove” how good charter schools are. Far better to just throw up their hands and say “hey, we made mistakes and didn’t track that, but look over here at how well the students who actually stayed in school performed”. And “maybe” we’ll do better in the future but don’t hold your breath.
It’s exactly what I see in the charter school movement in NYC. And the SUNY Charter Institute keeps saying “we must start to do better finding out how many students leave and where they go, let’s convene a committee to look into ways we can begin to see how to do this in the future” while at the same time saying “wow, look how great our schools are performing with the students they DO allow to remain, let’s reward then with more schools!”
I think the fact that there is such a resistance to looking into the high school drop out rate or attrition rate closely is a function of people not WANTING to do so. Which is incomprehensible if your true desire is to provide better schools for the students failed by public education and not to justify privatizing the system using “data” that leaves out any student who drops out.
By design.
feature. feature. feature.
Aaand, now we get the full-court media/government press- full speed ahead on all-charter systems!
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/how-new-orleans-proved-education-reform-can-work.html
Be careful to completely ignore the ed reform track record in the following states: OH, MI and PA. Let’s focus exclusively about New Orleans, Tennessee and DC.
I’m sort of mildly curious why some states and cities are ignored and others cherry-picked. Is it completely ed reform “movement” bias or are they simply unaware these other states exist? Why don’t I hear anything about Eli Broad’s 2012 charter project in Detroit anymore?
Ed reform’ goal is to mislead the public on the effects of NOLA privatization by casting doubt on Gabor’s research. Corporate public relations industry has a long history of propagandizing its customers.
The playbook came from the tobacco & oil industry: “Merchants of Doubt
is the troubling story of how a cadre of influential scientists have clouded public
understanding of scientific facts to advance a political and economic agenda.”
http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
Gabor has no “research”. She pretty much acknowledges she based her article on comments from a couple of people. Off the cuff remarks by a couple of people at a conference have led people here to believe that there are so many “missing kids” as to make the results invalid. She makes no case that this is true.
John – As much of a case as can be made has been made based on the AVAILABLE data. Problem is, the so-called valuable data is suppressed or manipulated. That’s when you resort to primary sources. 100 monkeys layin in the bed, one fell out and the other ones said roll over. . . . That’s the case in N.O. So you count the number left in the bed.
Even New Orleans themselves acknowledged they were doing a poor job of counting missing kids, right? In fact, I thought they promised in 2012 to start getting better at this, and yet the “data” showing that they are getting miraculous results ends before this. So it covers the time that they acknowledged their data collection wasn’t good.
I think you are trying to argue, John, that so what, we don’t know how many missing kids there are but since you can’t prove that many left, we are going to pretend they don’t exist. That sounds like terrible and biased research and I don’t know why you are defending it, John. Why are you?
The point isn’t whether there are some kids they haven’t kept track of, it’s whether there is any reason to consider that when interpreting the data. I haven’t seen any case made that this is more than the usual anecdotal FUD used to cast doubt on data that some people don’t like.
NYC public school parent,
“we are going to pretend they don’t exist”
No, we’re not going to pretend they don’t exist, but we are also not going to throw away the data we have because of some anecdotal “evidence” that it might not be perfect.
Nobody has made the case that NOLA numbers are not valid because of missing students; they have just suggested it. It’s nothing but an attempt to rationalize away the results. Very transparent, and I think the general public will see that.
Okay, John. Even if I contend your point, it is important to know what the number of lost students is. Don’t you think?
One of the contentions that I make about school choice is this: School choice and parental choice are not the same thing. An all-charter system is NOT accountable to ALL K-12 age students. Since charters are not part of a cohesive system, but rather a series of disparate competitors, each school can make the assumption that when a student leaves their school, then they are simply enrolling in another school.
But what if a student is so problematic as a 9th grader that he/she routinely gets kicked from one school to another? At what point, does that student stop going to school? And who is responsible for knowing this and finding a place for that student?
See, here’s where it is NOT in the interest of any school to take that student. That student is disruptive and tests poorly. Kills the culture, kills the test scores. Kills the success narrative. If schools are not retaining the most troublesome, then the stats look better. Squeeze out the average killers and the average looks better. (I have 30 students and the class average is 75%. But the average is destroyed by three students who aver 10%. Those three students leave. My new average with the remaining 27: 82%.)
One thing is for sure, not knowing (or perhaps caring) about those missing students certainly promotes the reform narrative. At the very least, let’s contend that knowing the number of missing students is a potentially significant piece of data. And it’s a shame that they can’t track it.
Steve K,
I think this is simply false. There is still a District here, and it still has responsibility for students. This is nothing but an attempt to rationalize away what the data says based on anecdote.
She’s NOT the only one pointing out the problems. There’s no remarkable progress whatsoever in New Orleans schools(RSDs) under the dictatorship of private Ed Reformsters and corporate PR machine. Critics are desperate in snuffing out any dissenting view because having it in the mainstream media is, to them, a canary in the coal mine.
Ken, I see data that shows that there is remarkable progress. The data appears to indicate NOLA, while being non-replicable in many ways, to very possibly be the single best intervention that we’ve seen in recent history.
I see no data showing that it isn’t. What I see is a bunch of anecdotal FUD being thrown at it by people with a vested interest in its failure in hopes that some mud will stick.
Is there a credible source that supports your contention that there is no remarkable progress with actual data?
Better know who is/are providing the data. Those who are sending the data are not free of political partisanship. They can make whatever manipulation they want to make their raw data attractive–especially those who have close ties with a notorious pro-privatiztion superintendent John White.
Ken,
It’s very easy to dismiss data you disagree with using this rationalization. By all means, take a close look at the data and ask questions, but assuming it’s inaccurate because you don’t like what implies is a guaranteed way to never change your mind about anything, true?
John,
I have an established reputation for changing my mind when the facts are persuasive. I am not convinced by the Nola data that every urban district should fire its teachers and replace its public schools with charter schools.
Diane,
Nor am I. I think there’s a lot of room between dismissing the data and using it to do as you suggest. Did I miss any acknowledgement that there are things to learn from NOLA data or what those might be?
John, successful charters always teach the same lesson: get rid of low-scoring kids and your scores will go up. Same lesson everywhere.
In NYC, no one says that every school should be like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science, because everyone knows they cherry pick their students. Why should anyone be impressed by schools that post high scores because they don’t enroll the most expensive, most difficult students?
John, read Jennifer Berkshire’s recent Salon article on NO myth.
http://www.salon.com/2015/08/03/reform_makes_broken_new_orleans_schools_worse_race_charters_testing_and_the_real_story_of_education_after_katrina/
Or reading Dr. Mercedes Schneider’s report on RSD narrative will be much easier to get down to the fact:
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/a-bad-day-for-the-rsd-improvement-narrative-the-history-of-la-graduation-rates/
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/new-orleans-recovery-school-district-rsd-proponents-now-offer-a-disclaimer/
John, why should we believe you really care about data? You seem quite desperate to only care about the data that supports charter schools and very desperate not to look at any other data, especially missing kids, as if that is not of VITAL importance and can skew “results” tremendously.
John, do you support having a governing body — it obviously is never going to be the SUNY Charter Institute — look at the attrition rates of the NYC charter schools that are the most successful to insure that struggling students aren’t being weeded out? How can we possibly have any useful “data” if we don’t know how many students leave and where they go? The fact that you are not FIGHTING for New Orleans to get its act together to find out that information speaks volumes because no person who really wanted to know whether a school worked because it was good, or because it just got rid of the struggling students, would do that. The only people who would try to stop that data being published are people who are afraid of the results. Why? And you are putting the interest of charter school administrators over the interests of the kids who need good schools that most. There is “no excuse” for that, although apparently those New Orleans schools have lots of excuses as to why that information is completely irrelevant.
John,
LADOE has so many foul plays that seriously undermine their data credibility. They make and change the rules exclusive to New Orleans districts(RSDs) several times to make it look like students out there were making remarkable progress compared to students in other school districts. Despite such special treatment, RSDs have never outperformed any other school districts in academic achievement(i.e., NEAP, ACT) and/or graduation rate after the hurricane Katrina.
Again, better know what is/are holding and releasing the data.
Same logic used by national/local police who rationalize their racial profiling by releasing the data on foreign crime rate to make it look like foreigners are committing more crimes than citizens. Who would buy into such data if the owner is Japan’s national police agency(or the US) who always try to put the tags on any foreign-looking individuals to request IDs on the spot for practicing their broken English?
Thank you, Prof. Gabor, for your integrity and careful research. We are all in your debt. Very hard to to cut through the distortions and deceptions surrounding the privatization war of the past decade.
Andrea…I second Ira in congrats on this carefully researched and documented, cogent article. Your professional and academic views open many areas of concern and help educate not only your many colleagues, but the public at large. The “critics” who lead in the attack on your reasoned insights, starting with Paul Vallas, continue to assess real scholarship while wearing their self serving. economic blinders.
Disaster Capitalism is good for you!
Now be quiet and take your medicine!
If we’re going to evaluate New Orleans wouldn’t “agnostics” also look at this city?
“Sixteen years ago, the first charter schools opened in Kansas City with the promise of ending a student exodus from the city’s public schools.
But state data recently obtained by The Star show that mission has failed, leaving hundreds of students to spiral between district and charter schools in a public education system still losing children.
“We’ve created our own mess,” said Danny Tipton, superintendent of Hogan Preparatory Academy, a charter school. “The mobility rate is so incredibly high. We’ve reached a tipping point.”
Just in the past year, more than a thousand students left the district for charters, but an additional 500-plus left charters for the district, many during the middle of the school year.”
Why have I never heard this ed reform experiment mentioned even once? We just bury the examples that don’t support the theory?
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article31929531.html#storylink=cpy
It’s not easy to discover how many children are actually enrolled in New Orleans Recovery School District. I went to their site, couldn’t find the raw number. They use percentages and ratios only.
To learn how many school age children that live in the city is easy because the U.S. Census offers that data. On Monday, 8-24-15, I left a comment here and the numbers I found for the RSD might have been incorrect because of the sources I found. I think today’s sources are much better.
On Wiki I read that in 2012, the RSD served about 40,000 students statewide. What does that mean—statewide—the RSD runs 57 Charter Schools in New Orleans, but 120 in the state of Louisiana?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_School_District#Demographics
According to this paper out of Tulane University, there are 57 RSD Charter Schools and 20 Orleans parish Schools, but the RSD runs 120 schools in the state.
Later in the report, I found this: “In the 2014-15 school year, 82 public schools in New Orleans enrolled more than 46,000 students. Ninety-three percent of public school students in New Orleans attended charter schools.”
Conclusion: the RSD then claims to enroll 42,780 children.
Click to access SPENO.2015.small.single.pdf
Back to the U.S. Census for New Orleans:
14.9% of the 2014 population of New Orleans were age 5 to under age 18. The population was 384,320 in 2014, and that means there were 57,264 children of school age.
What happened to the missing 11,264 children?
Are these the children that the RSD kicked out—-the most at-risk children, who probably live in poverty and are difficult to teach—-and without democratic, non-profit, and transparent public schools available since most of them were eliminated by the RheeFormers, has the education of these children been turned over to the streets—an environment where street gangs, drug cartels and mafias recruit their troops and find young victims for the sex and drug trade?
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/22/2255000.html
Good post. The stuff that’s hard to measure is often what we really want to know. But we often forget what we were trying know when someone impresses us with some numbers.
What portion of the total New Orleans school-age population is really served by a school in New Orleans?
What portion of the graduation-age population really graduates from high school? Not the same as trying to find a graduation rate for a school.
Aaron,
“What portion of the total New Orleans school-age population is really served by a school in New Orleans?
What portion of the graduation-age population really graduates from high school? Not the same as trying to find a graduation rate for a school.”
Sure, I’d like to know those things about my district too, but they are equally unavailable. They’re important questions, but don’t make the data that we do have less valuable, nor, in the absence of some numbers, imply that the data we have is less valid or not comparable to other places.
How is it valid to compare a group of schools that may have lost a huge % of low performing students but we don’t have the data so we assume they didn’t with a school system that actually tracks that data which means that schools can’t manipulate their rates?
That is as absurd as thinking that when Mayor Bloomberg took a high school with a graduation rate of 50% and moved the 30% highest performing students to a smaller high school that got 100% graduation rate, he has “improved” public schools. Sure, if you ignore everyone who isn’t in that pool anymore. As a parent who believes in rational discourse on the matter of how to improve schools, I find that kind of deceit truly appalling. And I question people like you who don’t and just throw up their hands and pretend missing that data doesn’t mean that the one new high school with a 100% graduation rate isn’t so terrific and has proven how to solve the problem of failing schools. It has not, but you can certainly twist data to pretend it does. That doesn’t mean that the new high school may not be good, but if it simply not educating as many of the kids who would make it “bad”, then what is the point? And only someone who cared more about promoting some agenda instead of caring about education would try so hard NOT to look at ALL data.
Thanks, Lloyd. I think you’re aiming at the right target. Our society is in collapse.
It is a manufactured collapse funded by a small number of oligarchs who think that forcing rigor on the country will turn the United States into a super power that they and their children’s children will rule over for 10,000 years.
That’s why their children get the private schools with small class sizes and no Common Core Crap while the rest of the children end up in overcrowded, crumbling brainwashing factories.
they are in jail, on the streets, or dead.
I taught in NOLA before the storm and was there in 2006. Creaming was wide spread and I have been in contact with teachers since then and most say it has gotten worse. Take a close look at Lusher. It runs like a elite prep school and is not open the most New Orleanians.
Garbor’s critics cite a graph on this page: http://educationnext.org/good-news-new-orleans-evidence-reform-student-achievement/
What is the “matched comparison”?
We’re supposed to think there’s some sort of controlled experiment here? Then Douglas Harris needs to tell us what is being compared. He should not mumble and hope that no cares.
“Scale scores are averaged across grades 3 through 8 and across English Language Arts, math, science, and social studies.”
As far as I can tell, that means a bunch of numbers were scrambled together using arithmetic, until Harris got an answer he liked.
Part of the problem is that even if we look at the same children over time, they are affected by many things, and we may not be looking at the right group, or leave out children we should look at.
If we look at different children at different times, it’s even less clear what to conclude.
Reblogged this on Education Talk New Orleans and commented:
Thank you Andrea Gabor for your courage and for enduring the horrible attacks. You told the truth of what many of our children are dealing with and I appreciate it.
it’s hard to read these comments, in which many of you *want* New Orleans students to fail. You’re not willing to look at what is working there because it might mean something has to change in public education. Rather, you will spend your time trying to cast FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on the numbers using anecdotal stories of missing students, saying that tests don’t measure achievement on what really matters, graduation rates are misleading, etc.
There are small tidbits of legitimate analysis here, but the vast majority of what I’m reading is people who have made up their minds, want this experiment to fail, and are going to extreme means to try to rationalize data that clearly shows improvement. Clearly, “better education for all” does not in any way involve looking at what might be working, but instead involves finding ways to refute anything that looks like it might be.
No wonder public education isn’t improving. People who improve look at what’s working and adapt it. People who don’t want to change do exactly what everyone here is doing.
You think there’s some vast conspiracy out to privatize schools. Take a look in the mirror at the vast conspiracy of mediocrity that is keeping education from changing in the least.
You look here for validation that you’re right that nothing can be done. What a waste of time and what a disservice to students and to public education. It deserves better than a bunch of people looking for rationalizations to keep doing what we’re doing instead of ways to improve.
No one wants New Orleans students to fail.
If someone debunks a false theory of how to cure cancer, does this imply that this debunker wants people to die from cancer?
Aaron,
No, of course not. And when one sticks to objectively questioning, that’s appropriate and responsible. I see no Debunking” here.
Aaron,
Also, while I don’t think people here want NOLA students to fail, there is no doubt in my mind that most here want the NOLA experiment to fail.
And for that to fail, either students have to show no improvement, or doubt has to be cast on the data, true?
John, no one wants students to fail. But everyone wants truth, to the extent it can be determined. Lying about progress is not good for anyone. We know that the game is on to use the New Orleans model to privatize public schools in every city, then move on to the suburbs. If it is not working for the poorest kids, we should know about it, don’t you agree?
Diane,
Of course I agree. I just don’t see this being a search for truth. Congratulating Ms. Gabor on her “research” isn’t a search for truth. She acknowledges using hearsay as her evidence.
I understand that I am looking for successes in NOLA. Will you acknowledge that most here are looking for failures?
Can you describe in more detail (preferably with data to back it up) why you discount the results? My mind is open, but to cohesive, persuasive arguments, not rhetoric.
John,
I don’t see much to celebrate about the model in New Orleans. Some 7,000 school personnel were summarily fired, without any evaluation of their being bad, good, or great. Most public schools were replaced by privately managed schools staffed in large part by inexperienced TFA. The average ACT scores for graduates is under 17, which is appallingly low. Most charter schools in RSD are rated D or F by the state. The top-performing schools select their students. This is being offered as a model for the nation. If it were just an interesting but costly experiment, I would watch and wait another 10 years. But this is being sold to the nation as the model for American education. I don’t think so.
Diane,
I don’t “celebrate” 7000 people being laid off, but I’m more interested in whether student achievement has increased or not. To me, the questions of whether it is working and whether it is replicable are different.
Why do you use absolute scores and say they’re “appallingly low” instead of using relative data points and saying they’ve increased? Would you do an experiment regarding smaller class size or teacher experience and do the same? Of course not. As you’ve pointed out many times, absolute scores have more to do with the students than what is happening in their schools. It’s quite the double standard, which is what leads to my conclusion that this isn’t a search for truth, it’s a search for vindication.
Do you acknowledge that student achievement, as measured by assessments, has increased by a substantial amount? If so, what do you ascribe this to? If the so-called “missing students”, what data supports that? If the changes in demographics, what data supports that?
Thanks.
John, what an ignorant thing to write.
If the charter movement had been honestly trying to evaluate their schools for the last decade, there would be far more trust in them.
Instead, we get charter schools with sky-high attrition rates for at-risk kids getting praised as the model for failing public schools. And absolutely no interest whatsoever by the charter school movement to look closely at why so many at-risk kids left and instead just insist there is some magical sauce that makes this school special. Absolutely NO curiosity whatsoever about why kids left. Nope, can’t look there, but look over here it got good results with the 50% of students who remained. And you wonder why we doubt the pro-charter “researchers” who use data only when it suits their purposes and pretends it doesn’t matter when it doesn’t.
I am tired of the top performing charter schools test results being cherry-picked out from among all the low-performing charter schools, but their attrition rates always being bundled up so it is impossible to look at how many students leave an individual school and how many of those kids are at-risk. If the pro-charter movement believed its own rhetoric (which is does NOT) it would want to see if there is a difference in attrition rates between high performing, medium performing, and low performing charter schools. It would be alarmed if the high-performing schools had high attrition rates.
I believe that there is plenty to learn from New Orleans. I believe that the schools there HAVE improved. But somehow the huge influx of money those schools received is never mentioned. The missing kids are never mentioned. The fact that the supposedly great test results were with tests that set their passing marks lower and where “passing” did not mean “at grade level” is never mentioned.
I used to like charter schools until I saw so much dishonesty by their leaders. I guess I was shocked, because like you, I assumed it was all about helping students and not about promoting their own careers and if that meant misleading the public, well that’s how it has to be.
And the reason I respond to you is because you seem to be just as bad and just as dishonest and just as desperate to mislead the public. If that’s the case, John, then how can I trust you – or the charter school movement — at all? Is it REALLY impossible to make your case for charter schools using honesty? If so, maybe you should look in the mirror and ask yourself what you are really fighting for.
NYC parent,
As I’ve said many times before, nobody should look at achievement data that is “percent passing” without looking at attrition. It’s simple math.
If NOLA results are due to attrition, it’s important to know that. But all I hear is anecdotal evidence saying there are missing kids. Do you have data that shows attrition from the system? The plural of anecdote isn’t data.
What do you make of cohort studies, wait list studies, and the KIPP Mathematica report that includes all students who attended a KIPP school for even a single day as “belonging” to KIPP and *still* shows substantial growth?
John,
Do you think that the solution to schooling in NYC and other urban districts is to eliminate public education?
When Eva runs for mayor, she can make that promise, then let’s see what happens.
Diane,
No, but your definition of “public education” is different from mine. I think by your definition, public education was eliminated when the mayor took control, true?
i’ll tell you what. why don’t you come down and place your first born son in an RSD school, then tell us what you think?
NYC parent,
Please look at these two resources:
http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/01/12/city-reveals-elusive-data-for-13-charter-schools-how-many-students-leave-each-year. “The schools with the highest average mobility rates over the past four years are also the ones that are performing the worst academically.”
and
http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/03/12/district-and-charter-schools-post-similar-attrition-rates-as-enrollment-debate-presses-on “Attrition of low-performing students looks similar at district and charter schools”
I think it’s inaccurate to say that nobody is looking at attrition, nor to ascribe all good charter performance to that.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2164614-school-indicators-for-new-york-city-charter.html
Sorry, John, but you are wrong.
The recent IBO report from this summer looked at 53 charter elementary schools and found that the attrition rate between K and 5th grade was a whopping 49.5%. In other words, those 53 charter schools managed to hold on to barely half their students. Oddly enough, the IBO never disaggregated the data so that one could look at the individual charter schools and see if some were keeping more students and some were losing them.
However, the IBO happily disaggregated the data when it came to charter school PERFORMANCE! Then they made sure not to lump all the charter schools into one big mediocre group and noted the extraordinarily high performance of one particular charter chain.
Now one would THINK that the IBO might also want to disaggregate the attrition rates, too, right? Why not do so? Did the successful charter schools have 49.5% attrition from K-5? Did they have even MORE but it would be embarrassing to see that? According to you, that high performing chain should lose the fewest students, right, since it is the “worst-performing” charter schools that students leave. So if the charter industry pressed the IBO to know what the attrition rates of that high performing charter was, and it turns out that it is NOT significantly better than “average”, despite being high performing and not low-performing, would you maybe wonder a bit?
And yet not a single charter organization is curious. We are supposed to think that all charters lose 49.5% of their starting K class, and that’s just like any public school. And losing so many kids would not affect scores, would it?
I should have added, see page 9 of this July 2015 IBO report on charters.
49.5% attrition rate between K and 5th grade. But remember, no one is curious about attrition rate by school. But performance rate by school is always noted separately. Why?
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2164614-school-indicators-for-new-york-city-charter.html
NYC Parent,
Much like achievement data has to be looked at in the context of attrition, attrition data has to be compared to others schools. What is the attrition rate at the similar neighborhood schools? You may think it’s zero because they have the same number of kids, but that would be completely wrong.
In my area, typical geographic mobility in both district and charter schools is about 10% per year. That means that 53% of the students that start Kindergarten will finish 5th grade at the same school. That’s a 47% attrition rate for both public and charter. The only difference is that attrition is more visible in the charters that don’t backfill.
So, do you have attrition data for the comparable district schools?
Nope. So what? Some schools have high attrition and some have low. There are schools that are failing and terrible and they lose lots of students because parents don’t want their kids there. There are schools that are amazing, like BASIS Charter School, that lose lots of students because they can’t keep up academically. Are you saying that some “average attrition rate” tells you more than just looking at the individual school and seeing if they are retaining their students or if many are leaving? And that a high attrition rate at BASIS still allows them to claim they are doing a fantastic job of educating all students, because hey, this falling school over here also has a high attrition rate? Common sense, John. Students don’t leave a fantastic school for the same reasons they leave a failing school.
John, you linked to a study by the pro-charter right-wing Manhattan Institute. I linked to the IBO Report. Both of them used “averages” to hide individual attrition rates. And you and I both know that there is a huge difference between a family moving away and leaving a school, a family leaving a terrible school for a better one, and a family leaving a high performing school for one that is academically lower-performing. That’s why no one is claiming BASIS is the model for solving all our failing schools and no one with an ounce of ethics thinks that the results aren’t primarily because the low-performers leave. Do you?
I find your effort to excuse a high attrition rate at a high performing charter school to be very suspect, John. If anything, the attrition rates at high performing schools should be LOWER than those at failing schools. What’s more, there are unethical “researchers” for the charter industry who take all schools in a district — including many failing high schools with high numbers of drop outs — and then calculate some “district attrition rate” as if that average relates to elementary schools.
John, are you one of those people looking for any reason you can to NOT examine individual attrition rates at the highest -performing charter schools? You really think BASIS has the magic sauce for teaching at-risk kids and their school’s individual attrition rate isn’t important and can’t be examined without resorting to some “average” that includes failing schools with high numbers of drop outs? You really think a high-performing charter chain that has high attrition rates is just losing the students moving away? Come on, John, I want to think you are better than that. You don’t need to know the attrition rate of every Tucson, Arizona high school averaged together to understand that BASIS Charter School is losing many students who can’t keep up. So why the pretense that it is unimportant to examine how many students leave a specific charter school that touts amazing results and try to find out why so many leave?