Andrea Gabor, the Michael R. Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College, read Gary Rubinstein’s analysis of the so-so performance of charter schools in New York City and wrote this post about it.
About that stellar performance turned in by Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charters, Gabor pointed out that Eva’s schools are known for cherry picking their students:
In this post, I showed how Success Academy schools cherry picks students who are less needy economically and have far fewer special needs students and English Language Learners than nearby public schools.
And she noticed something else: there are public schools that outperform the Success Academy schools, with the same demographics.
But, I also noticed that in Rubinstein’s graph, at least five public schools with comparable economic-need statistics performed as well, if not better, than the Success Academy schools. Several more performed nearly as well, with much higher levels of economic need.
A recent post by charter advocate Richard Whitmire is stunningly in sync with Rubinstein’s analysis. Whitmire concedes that of 6,440 charter schools, only 1,200 hundred are living up to their promise of outperforming public schools–i.e. less than 20 percent. Whitmire’s suggestion is to close 1,000 charter schools immediately. I guess its easy to experiment with other people’s children…
Given the decidedly unmiraculous performance of charter schools overall, and the high performance of many outlier public schools, wouldn’t it be more prudent to focus on learning from the outliers–both publics and a small number of experimental charters–how to improve public schools, rather than jettisoning the public system for a decidedly iffy alternative?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If outliers are cherry picking, what is the lesson: To rid public schools of students deemed undesirable?
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This is an important observation, but if there is money to be made by “servicing” the kids that are making a school look like a failure, surely there are entrepreneurs who can capitalize on that niche market in the “ever-expanding ecological landscape of educational options and choice.”
Of course, test scores and high school graduation rates are highly reductive metrics for labeling any school or student a success or failure. If the only thing that a school is doing is test prep, there is little need for school at all, except as a social space with some opportunity for students to learn the rudiments of getting along (in a best case) and for parents to park their kids while at work.
in the dream factories of tech-education enthusiasts the most cost efficient education is easily achieved by putting as many kids in front of a computer screen for as much test prep as possible, all in the name of “personalized” learning.
That is the McKinsey & Co. vision for educating the masses, endorsed and sponsored by Obama and Arne Duncan.
Teacher salary and job security would be entirely attached to being rated “highly qualified” in every three out of five years, with the leading indicator test scores.
The McKinsey & Co. vision is marketed under the totally misleading banner of RESPECT. RESPECT stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching.
Among the marketers of the RESPECT program is a cadre of “White House” fellows. Candidates for these White House slots, with some others in various regions, are drawn from the “state teacher of the year” award winners.
These White House Fellows are enlisted to “discuss” and propagate this McKinsey & Co. model of professional excellence. However, they are treated as dummies. They are given specific directions and scripts for talking up this “vision” (which includes ridiculous plans for how teachers should be paid). The Fellows are supposed to organize discussion groups, instructed exactly how to run a meeting, with instructions that include a pacing guide and a script for getting feedback. The feedback is supposed to go back to the promoters of this agenda (buried somewhere in the White House).
So that is a little-known “grassrootsy” effort to raise the ante on pay-for performance, with the bonus (and bogus) claim that the vision and the plan is “teacher-led. More, at http://www2.ed.gov/documents/respect/discussion-document
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I just heard that the Supreme Court is taking up a case that will take teacher’s union back to when I was teaching. Teachers can opt out of union, not pay dues, but must be represented by union.
These seem to be very troubled times in education.
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This post assumed that the primary purpose of those 6440 charters is to provide better education; some do. But what proportion are primarily designed to make money for stockholders–or, as we know, for very well-paid managers? Or to marginalize or break teachers’ unions? Or to support right-wing politicians, as in a couple of states ending in “a” and “o”? These are not cynical questions, I don’t hink.
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When I post here, I often go to data dot nysed dot gov to look at what happens at the Success Academy schools over the years. There are huge anomalies that they never have to address because either reporters are too lazy to look, or their overseers don’t care.
So, you get a case where the number of students on the Success Academy register in 2nd grade is 25% larger than the number of kids taking the 3rd grade exam and no one asks why 1/4 of the kids disappeared in one year. You get a case where 20% or more of the students are suspended when that particular Success Academy school served only K – 3rd graders and no one asks what could so many 5, 6 and 7 year olds could be doing to warrant an out of school suspension. You get a case where at one of Success Academy’s “affluent” schools (less than 25% low income) a suspicious number of low-income kids go missing and suspicious number of high-income kids seem to come in for 2nd or 3rd grade. And you get reporters happily using charter school “aggregate” data to hide exactly how high Success Academy’s attrition rates are in each of their individual schools. You get an IBO Report, that came out this summer, which shows extremely high attrition rates for 53 charter schools “in aggregate” (5 of them being Success Academy schools) without reporting on the specific attrition rate for those 5 Success Academy schools. And in the SAME IBO report, you get a breakdown by school of test score results, making sure to separate out Success Academy’s results because they don’t want to be lumped in with all those “failing” charter schools (except they INSIST on being lumped in with those failing charter schools when it comes to attrition, so that you can’t see how many students actually leave and are replaced by higher performing kids.)
I had hopes that Scott Stringer’s audit would be an honest attempt to look at these many, many anomalies, but given the length of time it is taking, and Ms. Moskowitz withdrawal from the Mayoral race, I wonder if politics has trumped Mr. Stringer’s desire to really take a close examination of Success Academy’s “results”. All we have left is the information at data dot nysed dot gov and that certainly raises far more questions of why so many low-income students disappear. I guess no one cares enough to find out.
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Thanks to everyone for their comments.
Food for thought.
😎
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The point is that Eva and her Success Academies are seen by most people and politicians as coming in way above public schools. John Q. Public and certainly John Q. Bought-And-Paid-For Politician certainly do not truly investigate as we do here to reveal the actual story. No. They buy the dominant narrative and don’t read a select few anti-reform blogs like this one. All of our points reveal the truth, but that isn’t enough. Being right isn’t enough.
I don’t see a strong counter-argument to old Eva emerging outside of us. The reformers have huge numbers of people who aren’t truly informed on these issues. We just have the folks who really care, mostly because its our livelihood.
Charters and computer based education are rolling full steam ahead. We assume, incorrectly, that at some point a moment of truth will happen for them when the kids emerging from this new world of corporate education won’t have any skills, intellect, etc. We think that at bottom it will be shown to be bad for the kids. I’d argue that that moment will not come. Nobody cares about the kids on their side. The kids the charter supporters care about are their own, and they will be educated via the elite Institutions. These corporate reformers know better than anyone else what the real score is: there are no good jobs left in the United States for most of these kids. There are no factories where competent workers will be needed. No anything. The reformers know that it’s the perfect game….privatize education because really, the outcomes don’t matter at all. Their idiotic focus on STEM is part of this too….kids kept far away from a real introduction to the humanities will never know what’s been taken from them, what to demand, or who to blame.
The privatizers see this as the ultimate moneymaker. Consequence-free public money right into their coffers. What we are facing here has been allowed to grow into something I don’t think we fully grasp the scale and scope of. We are now facing, quite clearly, the pure, unreformed, hyper-capitalist animal that is historically damn near impossible to stop in the U.S. It should have been killed at its inception. The blame for not doing that….well, that’s another discussion.
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