Gary Rubinstein has a peculiar habit of insisting on integrity of reporting. He gets hot and bothered when people claim “miracle achievements” but hide the facts or distort them.
He noticed an article in USA Today that both appeared to criticize charter schools and at the same time to claim that some of them had achieved astonishing college graduation results.
The bottom line, said USA Today, was that many charter school students don’t make it through college. But, it also said, their college graduation rate is far higher than that of comparable low-income students.
Gary did an inquiry, and he learned that the writer of the article–as is typical–did not take the charters’ high attrition rates into account.
So, in the end, the article was another phony claim about the “success” of charter schools, when that “success” depends on shedding large numbers of students.
The star example: Democracy Prep in New York.
In 2006-07, it had a class of 131 students in 6th grade.
New York State has a pretty good public data system, so I investigated the numbers for Democracy Prep’s first cohort, the ones that 87.5% of their graduates are on track to graduate from college. What I found was that in 2006-2007, they had 131 6th graders. According to their testing data from that year where 127 students were tested, there were 63 girls and 64 boys tested. Also, of the 131 students, 80% were Black while 20% were Latino.
But look at their graduation class:
Six years later they had 50 12th graders. This represents just 38% of the original 131 students. Of those 50, 13 were boys and 37 were girls. So they went from 50% boys to 33% boys. Also of their 50 students, they went from 80% Black in 2006 to 66% Black in 2013.
Amazing: 87.5% finished college of those who survived. Not exactly an advertisement for the miracle of charter schools.
As Gary’s article is titled: Charter School With 38% High School Completion Rate Brags About 88% College Completion Rate In USA Today
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t understand why this keeps happening. I mean seriously, are they innumerate?
My public high school could do this and then claim the same thing. Can public schools do this? If we lop off a large group somewhere between 6th and 12th grade and send them somewhere else we wouldn’t be claiming success. We’d be wondering what happened to half the class. The state of Ohio would also be wondering! If we have 200 entering freshman we’re expected to graduate around 200. We can’t claim victory with 70 graduates.
Arne Duncan did this over and over and over- claimed 100% of 50% was the same as 100% of 100%. The only person who ever corrected him was an unpaid blogger? In a “movement” that supposedly lives and dies on data?
Like George W. Bush, Arne Duncan understood what he was doing much better than he let on.
His whole carrot and stick scheme to get states to adopt Common Core and testing was actually quite clever (though Bill Gates was probably the one who first proposed it, Duncan certain knew what he was doing)
These people simply play incompetent of even dumb as a last resort to absolve themselves of responsibility.
SDP,
I doubt that either Gates or Duncan conjured the federal bribe idea. Not smart enough. Some of Duncan’s aides were.
I respectfully disagree.
Gates has both the smarts and the motive.
He wanted to get Common Core into the schools and he undoubtedly was aware that the traditional democratic./legislative method would never work.
I don’t believe there is any way that Gates would ever have agreed to put hundreds of millions of his own foundation’s dollars into development of Common Core if he were not virtually sure that it would be adopted by a large number of states.
That is the only way a truly national standard could ever work and Gates’ plan to standardize schools and students to create markets for software and hardware depended on such standardization.
Finally, Gates is a control freak. Anyone who doubts that should watch the 60 minutes interview of his former business partner, Paul Allen
I’d REALLy like to see the emails between Duncan and the Gates foundation and also the internal GF emails that discussed Common Core.
Maybe someday some journalist will do an investigative report.
Gates was also talking about national standards very early on (2009) before Arne Duncan even appeared on the scene.
Gates had lots of time to think about the best way to accomplish his goal.
Never underestimate a billionaire with time on his hands.
The really interesting study would be “where did the students go?” They went somewhere. Why not look at those schools? See what the systemic effect is. If it’s about “all kids” one would think systemic effects would be hugely important.
I offered this reply to Rubenstein’s article: “Statistics for charter schools as a whole are hard to come by”. Their most impressive characteristic, clearing the way for invented stats which amounts to lies. It does not happen by accident.
I agree. My favorite statistical fiction is “days of learning” gained (in math or ELA) by charter students. Economists responsible for that fiction have been making inferential leaps through thin air since the 1970s.
Just wondering, are the aforementioned Democracy Prep charters overseen by democratically elected officials? If not, change the misleading name. Oligarchy Prep.
Why not just say they’re a new kind of magnet school? If they’re losing that many then there’s some kind of selection going on,even if it isn’t deliberate or planned.
There’s nothing wrong with a new kind of magnet school- maybe they are needed in areas with large populations. I think they run into trouble when they insist on being compared to public schools.
A magnet school is under the umbrella of a public school, and there is no opportunity to squeeze profit from it. In a large system public schools do not feel the student drain, and in some cases like in Bergen County, NJ, the magnet has a quota from each district so that the local schools can limit the number of students in the magnet, which lessens the impact on them.
Details are definitely important. Interpreting stats with an uncritical mind when reporting to the public is just unethical, in my opinion. In the case of this administration carry out the Devos plan, I suspect we will be subjected to many distorted claims.
“President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal includes a huge increase for school choice while making big cuts to the Education Department’s overall budget.
The budget includes increases for the charter school fund, a new program for private school choice, and incentives for states to make sure some Title I dollars for low-income students follows them as they move among schools. The $1.4 billion in new dollars for school choice eventually will ramp up to $20 billion, the budget says, matching the amount Trump pledged to spend on school choice during his campaign.”
Nothing for public schools. That’s what ed reform offers public school parents and students: nothing.
It’s such baloney that they’re “agnostics”. They promote and fund the schools they prefer and the schools they prefer are charter and private schools.
4200 US Dept of Education employees and 500+ members of Congress yet
kids in public can’t find ONE adult advocate in the federal government. They are completely ignored.
They don’t even HIRE people from public schools anymore. Private school graduates only.
Rhetorically- now that Repubs are in control, when Sherrod Brown’s lips are moving, what position on public schools, will fall out of his mouth. I’m guessing the answer is the Walton-funded Center for American Progress’ view ($2.2 mil. grant from Gates).
Linda,
Never trust any think tanks that is Walton funded. Seriously.
I read this article yesterday, and I was happy they reported that charter students like many poor public students struggle in college. I didn’t question the reported statistics, but I am happy that Rubinstein scratched beneath the surface. I figured the numbers were suspect as charters cherry pick data the way they cherry pick students. I now know when charters report on their post attrition “success,” they are reporting on a biased sample. Bias seems to be the operative term for what happens in choice systems. We also will never know how well these students would have fared in a well resourced public school, but their public school success would not have harmed or disrupted other students. The question I have is: Is the success of so few students worth the financial and social cost of setting up a parallel school?
But why wouldn’t researchers look at the system as a whole? They must know they’re losing half the class. Those kids don’t disappear. What’s the effect on the schools that receive them?
I really question whether ed reform researchers are coming at this honestly. Doesn’t that seem like an obvious thing to look at?
We just have a public school but if we had a charter and a public and half the charter class were going back to the public someone would ask what the effect is on the public. They don’t even ask? This is just not of interest to anyone? Doesn’t that show they don’t value the public schools?
Cherry picking is by it’s very nature dishonest.
I really wish members of Congress would stay out of our schools when they’re campaigning. They do absolutely nothing to support public schools.
Go campaign in the private and charter schools you support. Leave us out of it. We’re utterly ignored except when it’s time for these people to get re-elected. I don’t want any part of promoting their political careers.
When they are running, they usually come up with some “choice” scheme. Trump’s budget includes several million to “expand school choice.”
It’s really amazing how blatant the bias is in ed reform.
DeVos speaks to lt governors and completely omits public schools:
https://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/prepared-remarks-secretary-education-betsy-devos-national-lieutenant-governors-association
The vast majority of students in Wisconsin attend public schools. Yet the US Department of Education does not even MENTION that their schools exist!
They exclude public schools. They’re a federal agency that serves 10% of students and deliberately excludes 90%. And you’re paying for this.
Tangential- Silicon Valley’s Arthur Rock gave $16.5 mil. to TFA. On another front, Rock, and the daughter of Michael Bloomberg, contributed to the campaign of an Indianapolis school board member, who won her election. The only public school system in the nation, identified, as a substantial contributor to TFA, was the Indianapolis public school system.
Media report that Bill Gates likes to play competitive games. This is how his game is played in education. (1) No starting pistol is fired- leaving the competition (the public) unaware there’s a race to turn public schools into profit opportunities for, those who manufacture risk, at the expense of kids and communities. (2) A “fix” is put in- e.g grants to groups like the Center for American Progress, which gives advantage to the Gates’ side. (3) The game is rigged with player plants -e.g. “philanthropic “foundation employees, placed in Departments of Ed. (4) The game’s goal (“human capital pipelines” replacing schools) is hidden with the subterfuge of altruism- e.g. the “safe space”, for ed policy creation, in the Gates-funded Senior Congressional Education Staff Network. (5) Referees (politicians) enforce discriminatory calls (rules), crafted by campaign donors- e.g. Ohio charter schools-no student attendance required to get tax money. And, (6) when a final arbiters’ call goes against the Gates’ side, there’s plotting to get rid of the arbiters- e.g. Washington state judges.
The hundreds of Aspen Pahara (Gates-funded) Fellows, a substantial number of whom are in organizations that must wedge their way into America’s most important common good, in order to take the community’s tax money, reflect America’s decline.The ruthless deceit in calling charter schools “public” entities when they are private contractors is bone-chilling.
Gates only likes “competition” that he knows he will win.
Quite the good sport.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Charter School With 38% High School Completion Rate Brags About 88% College Completion Rate In USA Today
The public high school where I taught had a 9th grade with about 800 students in it but four years later that same class would graduate less than 500 seniors and claim a high graduation rate based only on the number of seniors that finished the school year. There was never any mention of the attrition rate and where the missing students went.
Since No Child was passed, our graduation rate has soared. The quality of our instruction, not so much. This is what happens when you are forced to look good. What are we to do?
What are we to do? Rouse the public so they will turn out in numbers necessary to push the pendulum back in the other direction left of far right.
My response to Gary:
I would agree, Gary, that the USA Today article was in important respects misleading, but I fear you’ve added somewhat to the confusion.
You quote that article as stating:
“Statistics for charter schools as a whole are hard to come by, but the best estimate puts charters’ college persistence rates at around 23%. To be fair, the rate overall for low-income students – the kind of students typically served by charters – is even worse: just 9%. For low-income, high-minority urban public schools, most comparable to charters, the rate is 15%.”
I think typically, in academic literature both “college completion rates” and “college persistence rates” are relative to the number of those who had enrolled in a postsecondary school not to relative to all high school graduates. (Though as this article https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/10/10/completion-rates-contex points out it can be misleading to exclude from community college completion those who have transferred to Baccalaureate Institutions).
However, the NSC research center in its data (https://nscresearchcenter.org/hsbenchmarks2015/) reflected in the USA Today article seems to use “college completion rate” as relative to all high school graduates, with “persistence” relating just to those who have enrolled in a postsecondary institution. The USA Today’s references in the quoted paragraph to 23% and 15% seem to derive not from “persistence rates” but instead to the figures found at the very bottom of each of these spreadsheets
https://nscresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/TablesandfiguresPUBLICCHARTERSCHOOLS.xlsx
https://nscresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/TablesandfiguresPUBLICNONCHARTERSCHOOLS.xlsx
If I understand NSC correctly, the charts found there show:
23% of the graduates of the studied charter schools completing 4-year programs and 5% completing 2-year programs within 6 years
with
15% of the graduates of low income, high minority, non-charter urban public schools completing 4-year programs and 7% completing 2-year programs.
And, as you suggest, the reference to 9% in that USA Today paragraph is highly misleading as it is calculated not in reference to all who enroll in postsecondary institutions or to all HS graduates but instead to a greater pool that includes all dropouts.
http://www.pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-Indicators_of_Higher_Education_Equity_in_the_US_45_Year_Trend_Report.pdf#page=33
Two pages later, table 5b provides an alternative perspective that, like most college completion rate analyses, starts with a base of those who have enrolled in a post secondary institution rather than all HS graduates. In neither case, is there an appropriate basis for comparison with the cited NSC data.
But, Gary, your attempt to derive a “High School Completion Rate” by dividing the number of seniors by the number of 6th graders seems faulty to me as you not only merge high school with middle school but don’t consider how many students at each grade may be repeating the year, how many may successfully complete school but take an extra year or two to do so. And Erich Martel is correct to suggest that incoming transfers could further muddy your waters.
I discussed these issues with Jersey Jazzman in this series of postings:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/09/massachusetts-charter-schools-and-their.html
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/10/charter-school-attrition-in-ma-reader.html
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/10/more-about-attrition-rates-in-boston.html
My three-part response to the last of those is in the comments section
Would welcome your thoughts if you have a chance to read that exchange.
Stephen Ronan
Stephen Ronan,
The most absurd part of your laughable defense of high attrition rates:
“you….don’t consider how many students at each grade may be repeating the year, how many may successfully complete school but take an extra year or two to do so.”
So we are supposed to believe it’s not really attrition — it’s just that kids in charters are so much more likely to take an extra year (or two!) to graduate.
Let me tell you why you are lying – because if that was the case, those charters would be spending as much effort to publicize and promote “let’s take 5 or 6 years to complete high school” education reform as they do “let’s allow charters to suspend any 5 year old they want because those children are violent”.
If your claim that the “best” charters need 5 or 6 years to teach students what public schools do in 4 years, then why wouldn’t they be promoting that instead of promoting the lie that if public schools aren’t getting all 9th graders to pass Algebra, they are failures?
Why, you’d almost think that the education reform industry was NOT interested in educational reform at all! Having high school last 5 or 6 years for large cohorts of at-risk kids costs money that their right wing supporters don’t want to spend (on public schools – they are happy to direct public funding to charters).
Can you imagine if the reformers actually WANTED to help public schools instead of undermine them? The reformers would be encouraging public schools to SLOW DOWN the curriculum so that at-risk kids had 5 or 6 years to learn it. Not “raise standards” by pretending they had found a secret sauce when Stephen Ronan just claimed that those charters are finding they need as long as 6 years to teach the at-risk kids without disabilities with the most motivated and committed parents the same curriculum they insist public schools should be teaching far more disadvantaged students in four.
The dishonesty of the privatization movement is shocking. Stephen Ronan, go fight to extend high schools for at-risk kids to 5 or 6 years. That is a far better “reform” than your fight to allow charters to suspend 25% of the Kindergarten through 2nd graders if they choose to do so to get their parents to pull them from their school.
Go fight to extend elementary school to 7 or 8 years as you now acknowledge happens to so many at-risk children in the charters you admire.
Quit pretending that all public schools need is the ability to copy the “best” charters “let’s suspend low-performing at-risk kindergarten children” instead of copying the charters “let’s spend the resources and SLOW DOWN the curriculum so some kids have extra years to learn without labeling their schools as failures.”
It’s a shame that there are no honest people in the education reform business. They are entirely owned by billionaire “reformers” and thus led by people whose interest in telling the truth is far less important than pleasing the people who underwrite their overpaid salary.
I have given up on expecting “integrity” in the education reform business. And it’s sad because these are non-profits — CHARITABLE organizations — but their mission which should be about making education better for all kids has changed to “promote charters as successful and never ask questions about attrition rates, suspension rates, or anything else that might lead people to better understand how flawed the data we promote is.”
The bottom line is that the eduction reform business has been about as honest and truthful as Donald Trump. And they should be treated as such. They may tell the truth at times, but if promoting themselves means working hard to mislead the public or cover up anything that would give a full picture of charters, then that is what they will do. Like Trump, it seems their own careers and personal bank accounts are far more important than making sure ALL children are being served by honestly discussing what is being done in the supposedly “high achieving” charters.
Back in 2014, the SUNY Charter Institute was publicly humiliated when they approved a third charter school for Success Academy in very wealthy District 2, Manhattan, based on an application claiming the charter schools had long wait lists. SUNY had to retract their approval for the third District 2 SA charter school after a group of public school parents had accessed the data and done SUNY’s work for them, and embarrassed them publicly by making them look like fools who believed in the “long wait lists” lies that they couldn’t be bothered to check.
As a result of this fiasco, SUNY Chair Joseph Belluck stated for the record that he would make sure SUNY started to take some interest in attrition rates. (I know, how embarrassing that he’d say that as if it never occurred to him to do so before, but that’s typical for SUNY).
It’s 3 years later and SUNY Charter Institute has yet to look into the outrageously high percentage of disappearing children in the highest performing charters. Where is the attrition data about what % of kids who enter in Kindergarten stay through the terminal year? We don’t know because despite the promise by Joseph Belluck, the staff at the SUNY Charter Institute have done nothing. It’s almost like they are afraid of what they would find — what other reason would SUNY have to keep attrition rates so secretive? In fact, SUNY’s promise at that October 2014 meeting had about as much truth as Trump’s promise to provide a great new replacement for Obamacare or his promise to “drain the swamp”.
In fact, the one somewhat honest reformer — Michael Petrilli of Thomas B. Fordham Institute — wrote an Oct. 2015 NY Daily News op ed explaining that charters SHOULD be for the strivers and the rest of the kids SHOULD be left to rot in public schools that are supposed to figure out how to deal with them. Well, he didn’t exactly say “rot”, but he did say that it’s fine that charters are shedding lots of those unworthy kids and of course, he then blames public schools where all those charter push-outs go for not figuring out how to deal with them. But then again, as I said, Trump has very little on these reformers when it comes to selling Americans a bunch of malarkey.