A credulous reporter, Rebeka Lowin, wrote a glowing article about the miraculous charter school in Chicago that sends 100% of its graduates to four-year colleges.
Urban Prep, she writes, “boasts a whopping college acceptance rate of 100%. That’s right: Each graduate has been accepted to a four-year university.”
“Boasts” is the right verb, to be sure.
According to Mike Klonsky, referring (https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/school_detail.asp?Search=1&InstName=urban+prep&SchoolType=1&SchoolType=2&SchoolType=3&SchoolType=4&SpecificSchlTypes=all&IncGrade=-1&LoGrade=-1&HiGrade=-1&ID=170993005884) to US Department of Education data, “This class started with 154 freshman. 67 made it to 12th grade.”
The point of stories like this is to imply that every neighborhood could achieve the same success if they did what this school does. But Urban Prep does not have a 100% graduation rate. It is not a neighborhood school. It is not a model.
Urban Prep is noted for its amazing attrition rate. This year, less than half its first-year students made it to graduation. The graduation rate is not 100%.
Klonsky, who lives in Chicago, congratulates those who did make it to graduation, but he adds some caveats.
Once you cut through all the hype, Urban Prep is anything but a miracle. For one thing, only about half of its students even make it to their senior year. This high attrition rate is typical of charter schools and neighborhood schools alike. For another, despite its strong emphasis on test scores, UP’s reading and math scores are among the lowest in the district and usually fall below the CPS average for African-American male students.
Last year the school had its charter renewed even though it failed to meet most of its own accountability targets. Only 17 percent of Urban Prep juniors passed their state exams a year ago, far lower than the district average of 29 percent. On the positive side, that beats the 8.4 percent passing rate in many neighboring high schools. But nevertheless, nothing to write home about.
As I pointed out last year, the school’s entire graduating class has been accepted to four-year universities even though only 12% of them met the college readiness benchmark in reading and only 36% met the benchmark in English on the ACT exam. And while UP’s composite ACT score is a few (3) points higher than nearby high schools, it’s important to remember that Urban Prep ISN’T a neighborhood school. It draws its students from 31 different zip-codes in the city.
As it happened, I first debunked the claim of “miracle schools” in the New York Times five years ago. When NPR lauded this very same miracle school, I wrote another commentary, this time noting the work of Gary Rubinstein and Noel Hammatt.
Note to reporters: Before you believe the press release, please google the name of the school. Be sure to check the attrition rate. If anyone knows Rebeka Lowin, please send her this post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
But, but … real reporting is hard …
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you could email it to her at rebekah.lowin@nbcuni.com
http://www.rebekahlowin.com/2626010-contact
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I urge readers to send my commentary to Rebeka so she doesn’t get hoaxed again.
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News outlets like NPR basically just read press releases. The NYTimes is often just as guilty of bad journalism, especially its editorial staff. Investigative reporting has gone away; when I was a student it was still exciting to open up a newspaper and find out what a reporter had gone to great lengths to discover.
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I would like to ask your readers for a new word to use in connection to the word ATTRITION. We need to describe the thinning out of students prior to enrollment. We know that charters can make enrolling very difficult and can require all kinds of parental involvement in the overseeing of their child’s school work. Also, charters can and do create very punitive behavioral standards which can also work to discourage some from enrolling in the first place. And, of course, there’s the limited numbers of special ed and English language learners. When you factor all these into the type of student showing up on the first day of school, and add the attrition factor in, it becomes even more concerning that less than half make it to graduation.
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Disapparate?
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Los desaparecidos.
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The highly touted BASIS schools here in Arizona are similar ‘pushbutton factories.” Their high AP course completion rates get all the press, while no one pays attention to the fact that half the freshmen cohort never makes it through the program.
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“Pushout” not “pushbutton”
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I agree but at least people do know that BASIS gets those results with only the top students. No one — and I mean no one — is claiming that BASIS is taking any at-risk student who wins the lottery and turning him into a scholar who passes 5 AP exams. No one even thinks they are taking any middle class student and doing so.
That is because there are many middle class white parents who pulled their kids from the school and reporters don’t assume it is because they prefer their kids be in a terrible school over the best one in the country. Everyone understands that BASIS serves top students, period. The states where it operates have privatized their gifted and talented program and handed it over to private operators. Why not let them get rich by teaching the smartest kids? That happens to be illegal in many states, however, so the charters that wish they could be BASIS and be up front about the fact that they only want the strivers have to lie and pretend the kids who leave are violent criminals because otherwise people would ask questions.
They get away with it because so many racists don’t question why so many at-risk minority kids disappear from those schools.
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The shortest explanation is that every school that reports 100% college acceptance (or the like) for a graduating has college acceptance (etc) AS A GRADUATION REQUIREMENT.
At least, in every case I’ve looked it up in the school’s handbook, that has been true.
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Perhaps this is a cynical rule, but it is my rule: If it seems to good to be true, it probably is false. School falls into this category more than any other government program. I often think schools that have a high drop-out rate have at least one thing right: they know what they want. I talked to a graduate of the liberal arts magnet in a nearby city. She recalled how they were all afraid of being asked to leave at any minute. She was a very impressive individual and knew she had been given the opportunity to learn without having to wait for the teacher to correct other students.
Maybe all our schools should hold removal over the heads of students. We could create enough different types of schools so that students moved around until they felt comfortable at one or another. But who is going to fund that? It would be dreadfully expensive.
I once had a workshop with a teacher who was all about grouping children. This was in the early 90s and those of us who were more traditional in our style were being proselytized about a different approach. Most were skeptical that student would actually spend unmonitored time on task. This teacher declared that those who did not could just go to another class.
Perhaps these approaches that remove those who are not willing to work have merit, but I do not see it. Sooner or later we have to provide for those without support. If all we have is this approach, we will bankrupt the tax base. We wash out of enough things in life. Maybe school should be a safe place for kids. Save the washing out for the jobs people get and lose.
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And what do you propose we do with the kids that are removed? This would create a permanent underclass that would never receive a decent education, just be sent to prison.
Considering that we spend much more per prisoner than we do per student in this country, I don’t know that this is fiscally responsible. And it’s certainly NOT socially responsible.
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Your point was exactly the one I was trying, obviously not well, in my post. As I pointed out in the last paragraph, if there is merit in having programs that serve only to wash people out of them, sooner or later we have to stop and help someone. Prison, as you point out, is not a good investment along those lines.
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Why does this keep happening? I mean, seriously, are they innumerate? How hard is it to ask if 100% applies to all or if half the entering class is gone?
Arne Duncan used to do this same thing. He went to Harvard. Does he really not understand that 100% of 50 remaining is different than 100% of 100 entering?
Public schools should start doing this. There’s no downside. No one will ever look past the top number anyway.
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Public schools probably need to hire marketing people. With politicians stumping for charters and media only covering charters, no one ever hears anything positive about public schools. I loved the parent campaign to show their schools- “not a prison”. I had no idea there were so many good things going on in public schools and I NEVER would have heard about it from the ed reform echo chamber.
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
Sadly, real investigative reporting seems to have largely gone the way of the dodo. Reading a press release without examining all the background and the underlying facts isn’t “reporting.” It’s propaganda.
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The irony is those reporters who report on this would fail a basic 6th grade common core exam.
It astonishes me how educated reporters ignore attrition. Every time they say “charter school with high pass rates” or “charter school with high graduation rates” it is ALWAYS a charter school with high attrition rates. Always. If anyone can cite a single urban charter serving at-risk kids with stellar results that doesn’t have an extraordinarily high attrition rate, please name one.
Some reporters — Beth Fertig is the worst of the bunch — are either ignorant or devious enough to pretend they are really looking at attrition rates. Instead of comparing a charter school that gets top results with a group of public schools that get top results, or a group of charter schools with similar students, she insists that the only valid comparison is to compare a top performing charter school’s attrition rate to a group of underperforming public schools.
It demonstrates the underlying racism of those white reporters like Beth Fertig. They have such a negative opinion of low-income African-American parents that they don’t question why so many of them would “voluntarily” pull their child from a top-performing, extremely well-funded charter school offering all the bells and whistles and instead enroll their kid in an underfunded failing school. Every one of those parents made the effort to seek out a better school for their child and jump through an any hoops to get their child in a charter that was top performing. And yet kids leave at an extraordinarily high rate.
Reporters like Beth Fertig don’t ask why because she seems to assume that those parents — because most are minority and poor — just decide to blow off this once in a lifetime opportunity of the best school in the state for their kids. You can bet if it was a top-performing charter serving middle class white kids and huge numbers were dropping out to attend terrible public schools instead, reporters would wonder why that would be. They wouldn’t just assume “hey, those white educated parents just don’t like fantastic schools and prefer failing ones so no need to question it.”
Even BASIS Charter can’t get away with that — most of the kids who leave are white and middle class, so at least reporters acknowledge that the school is obviously not welcoming to all kids and purposely weeds them out.
But Success Academy’s high attrition rate comes at the expense of at-risk minority kids, so reporters like Beth Fertig just say “I’m sure they are just ignorant minority parents and it doesn’t have anything to do with got to go lists and high suspension rates.”
And leaders of those charters know that they can get away with the most outrageous claims by using the racism that is prevalent in America.
Witness Eva Moskowitz claiming that she found that 24% of the students in a school serving African-American and Hispanic students were so violent at age 5 and 6 that she had no choice but to suspend them over and over again. No reporter challenges her on that because the white reporters assume it could be true. Can you imagine a suburban public school serving mostly white and affluent students suspending so many Kindergarteners and expecting the public to assume those 5 year olds are violent?
When reporters really start looking at attrition rates — and that will probably be when hell freezes over since many work for organizations are funded by reformer dollars — it will be obvious how many at-risk students the top charters do not serve.
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I’m actually more concerned about the colleges that are admitted these woefully prepared students. They are perpetuating a fraud
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