Mercedes Schneider looks at ACT scores for the class of 2015 in the all-charter Recovery School District and tries to determine how many students disappeared or fell through the cracks.
Citing the work of Andrea Gabor, she quotes officials at the RSD who admit that no one knows how many students got lost. In a system that is proudly not a system, no one checks on the lost students.
“As Gabor notes, according to 2013 US Census Bureau data, New Orleans has approximately 26,000 youth ages 16 to 24 who are neither in school nor employed. These young people are referred to displaced youth, or, euphemistically, “opportunity youth”– though what is lost to them is exactly that: opportunity.”
There are 30,448 students in RSD charters.
“According to Williams’ search engine, 1065 Class of 2015 seniors took the ACT; 21.1 percent scored 20+, and 36.7 percent scored 18+.
“These are low percentages, but one might expect as much given that the RSD Class of 2015 ACT composite was 16.6.
“What is also noteworthy is the number of RSD seniors: 1065 for a district of 30,448 students.”
Schneider compares the rate of test-taking and the scores to other districts of similar size. The RSD scores are much lower.
The Orleans Parish School Board (the remnant of the old school system) has 13,173 students, yet the number of seniors who took the ACT was slightly larger that the much bigger RSD.
“So, when one reads that RSD has 30,448 students and only 1,065 make it to a senior year to constitute “all” senior ACT test takers, one should wonder how many students “fell through the cracks” in order to produce the amazing result ten years post-Katrina of 21.1 percent scoring an ACT composite of 20+ and 36.7 percent scoring an ACT composite of 18+.
“In addition, all too often, those wishing to fashion RSD success use OPSB to carry RSD. OPSB has a 2015 district ACT composite of 20.9. OPSB has 13,173 students; 1,111 Class of 2015 seniors took the ACT. (53.6 percent scored 20+; 71.7 percent scored 18+). Thus, the RSD-OPSB “combined” ACT composite of OPSB’s 20.9 with RSD’s 16.6 allows for a much better marketing composite of 18.8.
“However, one should wonder about the fact that RSD enrolls well over twice the number of students as does OPSB, yet OPSB had more Class of 2015 seniors taking the ACT.
“One should think of those RSD high school students in particular falling through those displaced, “opportunity” cracks.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This also boosts graduation rate statistics. Therefore, the claim of an increase in grad rates from 2005 to 2015 is highly questionable.
So it works like this: student attends a high school through 10th grade. High school slated for closure. Student never enrolls in another high school for 11th grade. No one knows that happened. Student doesn’t count toward new high school’s graduation rate because, technically, he never attended another school.
Is that right?
I would imagine that this game can be played with in OneApp as well. Students attends high school A for his freshman year. Applies to other schools the following year. Gets placed in another school. Never shows up. Therefore, never enrolled. Maybe this one doesn’t happen. I don’t know.
I always come back to the same phrase regarding school choice systems. It isn’t called parent choice. It’s called school choice. That’s accurate because the schools do the choosing. If a school has a student capacity of 800, then it’s capped at 800. If 2,000 parents had that school as their choice, then 1,200 are denied their choice. What decides who the 800 are? Something tells me that can be gamed.
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The attendance data are suspect in my opinion, unless the 30,448 total of students includes pre-k as well. Even if you figure on thirteen grade levels including K, the graduation rate is less than half the number it should be. That would imply that they lost more than half the students. I doubt the attrition rates a due to a population decline as the city has continued make modest growth rates. The decline could be partly due to affluent parents choosing private options for their children after they felt the RSD wasn’t adequate. The real estate market is strong in New Orleans with most of the new developments designed for upscale buyers. It is possible they just have a large number of drop-outs. http://nola.curbed.com/archives/2014/01/10/14-ways-new-orleans-will-be-a-whole-different-city-by-2015.php
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But the people who are raving about the New Orleans miracle have made it clear that all the oversight that is necessary is being done. We need to “trust” the people in charge and if they tell us that the students who are missing don’t matter, then they don’t matter! Look at the results with the kids that are in their schools! If 25% or 30% of 50% of the 16 year olds aren’t in any school, that’s completely irrelevant to the fact that the schools who don’t want to educate those “low-performing” or disabled or handicapped or EXPENSIVE students are better so anyone who dares to question the results just doesn’t understand the “data”. That’s what Jonathan Chait thinks. That’s what Arne Duncan thinks. That’s what everyone celebrating the miracle of New Orleans who believes all cities should be “modeled” on such a “successful” program should be! The kids who aren’t there don’t count. The kids that disappear don’t count. It’s what every pro-charter poster on here who claims that the “authorizing agencies” are beyond reproach believes . If the authorizing agencies say that the many children who disappear don’t matter, then who are we to question it? We trust them completely. If the authorizers say that the results of the ones who remain are all that matters, then who are we to ever question such oversight?
The pro-charter folks on here have made it very clear that attrition rates and young children disappearing from charter schools is best left up to the “authorizers” to examine closely. There is no need to make that data available, because those “authorizers” will provide all the oversight necessary. Disappearing kids? Don’t worry, the “authorizers” will convene a committee to discuss how best to formulate another committee that will then discuss how to come up with standards to best look into the many, many students who disappear. Hey, they may even already be discussing convening that first committee while we speak! According to the pro-charter folks on here, that’s the best way to show that you really really care about the kids left behind! Trust the authorizers!
Ironically, I doubt very much the pro-charter folks actually believe the authorizers are doing anything about making sure “successful” charter schools aren’t just ridding themselves of the toughest and most expensive at-risk kids. But they are just too cowed to do the right thing and ask for accountability. What’s sad is that they rationalize it by saying “well my school isn’t doing that” and “the authorizers will take care of it”. And look the other way so they don’t have to give any thought to all the missing children they have left to rot.
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NYC public school parent:
You have aptly summed up rheephorm logic, reasoning, honesty and accountability—
“The kids who aren’t there don’t count. The kids that disappear don’t count.”
Which gives added meaning to one of the late Gerald Bracey’s Principles of Data Interpretation: When comparing groups, make sure the groups are comparable.
So how to explain the “reasoning” and “thought process” behind rheephorm numbers & stats? Alfie Kohn and others have described it thusly: shoot an arrow into a wall; wherever it lands, draw a circle around it and paint a bullseye under the arrowhead. Voilà! Perfect shot!
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It’s as easy as taking one’s students from the 13th to the 90th percentile. Rheeally!
Thank you for your comments.
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P.S. I can’t help but add: John Deasy, former LAUSD Supt., claimed 12% graduation rate increase but it was only 2% if you count all the ‘graduation rate suppressors.’ See LATIMES: http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-1004-lausd-grad-rates-20141003-story.html
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For many years as a researcher at NYU, I studied student data from the NYC Dept of Ed. There were two phenomena I noticed that took place in low-income neighborhoods.
The first phenomenon was the effect of repeated “hold-overs.” Many children had been held over two or even three times in K-8. By the time they left (graduated from?) eighth grade, they were bored, humiliated and done with school. They were also sixteen or seventeen years old. A lot of them simply never enrolled in high school! They weren’t counted as drop outs, because the K-8 data system didn’t track kids into high school. They just didn’t show up at any high school, and no one went out looking for them. This was one bunch of kids who “fell through the cracks.”
The second phenomenon was the very large # of kids who were “discharged” from their high school and who then disappeared. The receiving schools claimed to never have “received” these students. The “sending schools” didn’t feel responsible for them, as they had been lawfully “discharged” to another school. they weren’t counted as drop-outs. Very often these students were students who started out ninth grade over-age for the grade, and way behind in academics. The schools that were assigned a large number of these students were woefully unprepared to offer the intensive support each of them needed to “catch up” academically and acquire enough credits to graduate.
In NYC there are a large number of “second-chance” high schools that students who are overage and under-credited can attend, and many do. But I suspect that this decades-old pipeline to failure still exists to some extent, many heroic attempts to the contrary notwithstanding.
One tell-tale marker of institutional attrition — whether by using multiple hold-overs or by discharging children to nowhere or by expelling them — is a dramatic drop off in the number of students from year to year, especially in the high school years. As I recall, in NYC there were about 80,000 – 90,000 children in the early childhood grades, and roughly 70,000 or so who were counted as high school seniors 12 years later, who were sorted into “drop outs” or “graduates.” That left maybe 15,000 – 20,000 students who were not counted and “disappeared’ over the years, some of whom went to private/religious schools, but most of whom, I suspect, simply “left.”
Looking at New Orleans, or any other school system, it makes sense to me to look at the number of students from year to year and plot the slope! What percentage of the children who started out in NOLA schools are still there in 12th grade? How does that compare to other districts, rich and poor? How does the district explain the drop-off, the slope? NOLA lost half of the students in last year’s graduating cohort. Did they all go to private school? Or did they get rejected by the school “system” and wind up on the streets, with nowhere to go? Are we looking for these young people and offering them a second-chance? Or are we spinning a tale of success and hiding prying eyes from the truth?
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dorothy in brooklyn: thank you for your insights.
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Thanks for the information. The fact that the neediest can be so easily forgotten is sad. They are probably likely to show up in the prison data. I once read that a common denominator for most inmates is the fact that can’t read very well.
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