Our blog poet, who goes by the sobriquet Some DAMPoet (Devalue Added) responded to the story about the rankings of the best high schools in the country, which were notable for their high attrition rates and their selectivity. The very best high school, in one ranking, had only 24 graduates of the 43 that entered ninth grade; the number two high school had only 11 graduates of an entering ninth grade class of 17.
“100% Graduation”
It really can’t be beat
Our graduation rate
Our senior, you should meet
His scores are really great
Diane Ravitch's blog 
LOL! There must be some home schools that are off the charts!
Wow, if I could have handpicked the students (when I was still teaching) that I wanted to teach and was free to get rid of any student I didn’t want to work with, after the first grading period, I’d keep all the students earning A’s and B’s and get rid of the rest. I’d seriously consider keeping the students earning C’s.
I’d also recommend that all the students earning Fs and Ds be sent to autocratic, corporate charter schools. I didn’t base grades earned in my class on tests. The grades were based on school work and homework turned in on time and after it was corrected by me. Work that demonstrated that learning took place from the lesson I taught usually earned full credit and work that didn’t demonstrate learning was sent back to be done over. The only way to earn an F or D was to not do the work or not do the work over when offered the chance.
Actually, I did have a class where most of my students earned A’s with a few B’s sprinkled in. That was the journalism class I taught for seven years of the thirty I was a classroom teacher. That class was an elective, and the students produced the high school newspaper. Those high school journalists usually stayed three of four years in the class and all of them graduated from high school and went to college. Those high school students were willing to show up at 6 a.m. in the morning and stay until 11 p.m. at night, also give up lunch, to get the newspaper out on time. I taught five classes. The other four were 9th or 10th grade English and I always attempted to recruit the few students that did all the work it took to earn an A grade into journalism.
It’s somewhat excusable that a magazine that is famous for ranking colleges, grad schools and high schools would use silly statistics. But the accrediting organizations for colleges would never ignore attrition and doesn’t let them get away with cooking the books that way. Colleges are required to publish graduation rates of their entering freshman class and they don’t get to cook the books by bringing in students after freshman year to replace them. The very students who enter as frosh are tracked to see if they graduate or not.
So a college trying to market to gullible parents that claims 100% graduation rates would be charged with false advertisement if it turned out 75% of the frosh went missing over the next 4 years.
Fortunately for charter schools, the only oversight are rabidly pro-charter boards in thrall to the pro-privatization billionaires whose mission is really to promote charters instead of honestly assessing them by including such things that the corrupt charter boards say are irrelevant, like attrition rates.
It’s as if the Republican Party got to appoint all oversight of Trump U. and Trump U. was allowed to offer whatever misleading numbers it wanted to make it look like a roaring success. The “oversight” would cheer them on.
That’s what we have in the charter industry. Unlike colleges, it makes no attempt to police itself. And like the used car business, eventually the bad ones will drive out the “unprofitable” good ones. When that happens, the people who have been complicit in promoting the big lie about charters will be driven out as well in favor of people even more corrupt than they are.
As noted in prior blog posts, when it comes to tracking students for HS from entry to graduation, along how successful/unsuccessful they are in the areas they are heading to afterwards, there’s no rules to follow; so it’s like comparing apples to oranges, and no standardized tracking system to use to account for how successful/unsuccessful they were in completing vocational school, college, the militairy or what job and how long they worked there once they hit the real world post-secondary school.
At the “Failure to Fixes” conference put on by the University of Arkansas (think Jay P Greene, one of the moderators) and the Show Me Institute (a hard core far right libertarian think tank of Rex Sinquefeld, the Koch Bros of Missouri) I met the “owner” for lack of better term of University Academies, a charter school “district” in Kansas City. I say owner because he gave me his business card and it reads “Expedition Capital”, Bush Helzberg (the gentleman with whom I spoke) Managing Partner. This company’s address is 200 E. Main St. . . . in Aspen, Colorado. Intersting, eh! He’s the chairman of the University Academies (I wonder if he is of the family that has had a diamond business in KC since 1915, now a 234 national stores chain. It just dawned on me that more likely than not he is going to attempt to scale up his model-see the diamond companies. Talk about sucking off the government teat.)
During one panel Matthew Ladner, a senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, repeated the standard charter school lie, that they are public schools. By chance Helzberg was sitting right in front of me when Ladner repeated the lie and I said out loud that’s a lie and Helzberg turned around and said no it wasn’t. We both went up to Ladner after the discussion to discuss various points
So we were bantering back and forth after the presentation with Helzberg claiming that charters had to follow all the same rules as any other district in Missouri. I said I didn’t know about that (and will be trying to find out if that is true). He claimed the books were open to the public. I asked him and Ladner about attrition rates and Ladner hymmed and hawd but Helzberg said that his schools’ (called a district in Missouri) had a lower attrition/drop out rate than KCs and that his served a supposedly highly mobile population.
Well, being awake now so early in the morning I looked up on MO DESE site. What I found was that Helzberg’s elementary cohort had shrunk by 42% by high school. The KC district cohort shrinkage was 23%. In looking at other districts the total per grade level number of students was about the same for the elementary and the high school level, in other words basically 0% shrinkage, and in some cases the high school grade level size increased (people moving into a district?).
Hmmmm, another lie? Or just repeating the charter school supporters altfacts? Or am I looking at the information wrongly
It is not easy to tease out the information on the MODESE website. It’s as if the site is designed to be as ornery as it can in being less than user friendly.
More to come on the conference. That was just about 15 minutes of the day.
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Diane, can you check to see what the problem with wordpress is in my comments going into purgatory. Gracias.