This is second in Mark Weber’s two-part series about an amazing charter school in Philadelphia.
He reveals its secrets: it gets more funding than public schools. It chooses its students with care. It loses students who can’t make the grade. A sure-fire formula for student success!
He writes:
“A follow-up to yesterday’s post:
“As I noted, NBC’s Sunday Night with Megan Kelly broadcast a story earlier this month about Boys Latin Charter School, a “successful” charter school in Philadelphia which claims to have ten times the college completion rate of its neighboring high schools.
“To his credit, reporter Craig Melvin didn’t swallow the claims of the school whole, and pushed back on the idea that Boys Latin serves an equivalent student population to those surrounding high schools. But he did miss two important points:
“First, and as I documented in the last post, Boys Latin raises funds outside of the monies it collects from public sources. The amounts add up to thousands of dollars per pupil per year.
“As Bruce Baker notes in this (somewhat snarky) post, you really can’t make a comparison between two schools and call one “successful” without taking into account the differences in resources available to both. Philadelphia’s public school district has been chronically underfunded for years. It’s hardly fair for Boys Latin to collect millions in extra revenue, then brag about their college persistence rate compared to schools that don’t have enough funding to provide an adequate education.
“But there’s another issue Melvin missed — an issue that Boys Latin’s founder, David Hardy, has been refreshingly candid about in the past:
Hypothetically speaking, say a charter school is authorized to serve up to 500 students, but, for whatever reason, 50 students leave through the course of a school year. A charter that “backfills” will enroll the next 50 kids on its wait list as space becomes available.
Other schools will replace those empty spots at the beginning of the next school year, including filling seats in the upper grades.
Charters that don’t do this will watch their total enrollment in a grade dwindle year by year — retaining only the students tenacious enough to persist.
In contrast, district-run neighborhood schools and renaissance charters must enroll all students living within a prescribed catchment zone, no matter what time of year or grade, when they show up asking for a seat.
At first glance this difference may seem a subtle nuance, but Philadelphia educators say the policy difference tremendously affects school culture and performance.
[…]
David Hardy, CEO of Boys’ Latin, subscribes to the same theory. He oversees a rigorous admissions process that begins well before the school year.
Boys’ Latin asks prospective ninth-graders to submit letters of intent in November, nearly a year before they would enroll. Staff then interview students and parents to ensure that they understand the school’s rigor — classes run until 5 p.m., students must learn Latin, wear a uniform, and adhere to a strict code of conduct.
Those who commit attend a month-long freshman academy in July before the school-year-proper begins.
By September, he said, the kids are all on the same page.“You introduce new people into that, and it can kind of mess up the environment,” said Hardy.
“This is an issue that comes up over and over again in charter school research: student cohort attrition. As a cohort of students (Class of “x”) moves from freshman to sophomore to junior to senior year, it may lose students. Sometimes students drop out; sometimes they move. If a charter school “backfills,” they then replace the students who left with new students who come into the school in later years.
“Many charters have high student cohort attrition rates, meaning students leave the school before graduation — often returning to the public, district schools, which must take them no matter when they arrive at the schoolhouse door. These same charters don’t backfill, so their cohort sizes shrink as they move toward their senior years.”
You too can create a miracle school. Pick your students carefully; create a few hurdles to winnow out the slackers; bid farewell to those who can’t keep up; get some deep-pocketed funders.
Simple. A miracle!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s truly outrageous that people who call themselves journalists in major media do not realize this very obvious fact.
If something is a “miracle” and is still losing high numbers of students, the miracles are phony. A school that is offering a great education keeps every student except the ones whose families move out of town. You don’t compare it with a failing school that parents rightly leave in droves and demand that the only comparison be to that school.
As I often say, it is good that science journalists aren’t as idiotic as education journalists when it comes to statistics and how to manipulate them.
A drug study touting the effects of a new miracle drug that ignored the fact that huge cohorts of patients dropped out of the study would be excoriated and the scientists running such a study who tried to cover up attrition rates would be rightly noted as corrupt. And journalists who tried to “prove” the study was valid by saying “look how many patients dropped out of this other drug trial with a drug that had terrible side effects” as a reason NOT to look closely at why so many patients stopped using a “miracle” drug would be rightly called PR shill of the drug company.
There is something terribly wrong with education “researchers” who ignore attrition rates. And that means attrition rates of the kids who started in the cohort and looking at them over the course of 3 or 4 years to see how many of them left and why.
The best schools should have the lowest attrition rates. That is how it works with PUBLIC schools. The worst schools have high attrition and the best schools have low attrition.
With CHARTER schools it works just the opposite! The “best” schools have high attrition and something terribly corrupt is going on that this is ignored by people who don’t want to see any evil. Especially if their funders would be upset if they spoke out. The silence of the co-opted charter movement is an evil thing. They are complicit in something that hurts many students and they justify it — just like evil folks do — by pretending that helping a few kids is justification for hurting so many.
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To be fair to Craig Melvin: he did, in fact, question whether Boys Latin was a model that could be replicated for a large number of students. I wish he had dug in further, but at least he understood the larger issue. That’s better than most media reports on schools like this, even if it’s still not quite good enough.
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I’m only going to correct you on one detail. Don’t think that everything’s hunky-dory in Pharmaland cuz after all FDA wouldn’t approve drugs whose studies had attrition due to bad side-affects. What you see happening in ed-stats has been going on for decades in the pharma industry. They are way ahead of ed-reform in terms of big$ manipulating study-stats to dump on the public good in order to keep the qtrly profits rising & score big on WallSt. BigPharma gets new drugs past FDA on the basis of 6-wk studies w/30 participants & no follow-up. Take it from one whose kid suffered & died as a result. How else do you think the opoid epidemic happened?
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That quick approval process by the FDA began with the Reagan administration and his “big gubmint bad” mantra. That’s when the campaign contributions of “big pharma” really came into play with having the politicians overrule what the FDA was doing. I worked in the pharmacy sector during the early to mid 80s and the pharmacists were appalled with what was happening with that quick drug approval process with Aspartame being the poster child for not being properly scrutinized/vetted. All the pharmacists that I knew at the time would not touch that stuff with a ten foot straw.
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“The best schools should have the lowest attrition rates. That is how it works with PUBLIC schools. The worst schools have high attrition and the best schools have low attrition.”
No, that isn’t “how it works with the public schools”. Attrition rates in public schools are a factor of socio-economic status wherein the most stable neighborhoods/school districts, i.e., low attrition rates are those at the upper end of the socio-economic ladder. The ones with the higher attrition rates are those where economic instability reigns, i.e., the lower socio-economic ones. It is not a matter of the “best” schools vs the “worst” schools, it is one of socio-economic status wherein stability is maintained in higher SES districts. It has nothing to do with “best”/”worst” schools however that monstrosity of definitions is defined.
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Duane,
You make a fair point – I’m sorry for using the terms “best” and “worst”.
But my point is that high attrition rates are not the norm for public schools where the students’ performance on standardized tests is among the very highest of all public schools. High performing public schools have some of the lowest attrition rates when compared to other public schools.
Only with charters do the highest performing ones lose far more students than mediocre ones. And I am talking about comparing attrition rates of two charters serving the same students socio-economically.
The charter with the highest passing rates on state tests will lose far more students than the charters with much lower passing rates.
And that tells you that something is off.
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It’s hardly fair for Boys Latin to collect millions in extra revenue, then brag about their college persistence rate compared to schools that don’t have enough funding to provide an adequate education.
We could say this about all of the charter industry so well-funded by so many billionaires who wish to destroy public education.
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So why doesn’t the NEA take some of our dues money and provide materials education seminars that spell this out clearly to national journalists?
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Ha ha ha ha he he he ha ha ha ha ah ha!
That’s a good one! Good thing I didn’t have a mouthful of iced tea when I read that.
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Getting more funding than public schools, choosing students with care, losing students who can’t make the grade. SAME carefully hidden formula for success in our district’s charter school game where, after the fact, our news outlets crow about this or that school “getting it right!”
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All of it’s so damn obvious that you have to question why we even make the obvious arguments, given the obvious motivations of the ed-reform crowd. Seems to me quite clear. The goal of all ed-reformers is to delete public ed/ lower state taxes correspondingly, wherever possible, i.e., in poor red & rust-belt states. In blue states w/red govrs (e.g., NJ, MA) or neolib ‘Dem’ govrs (like Conn, NY)– states in long economic decline due to losing mfg, but which have nascent industries to sustain them– the goal is to apply a tourniquet to bleeding state resources in the poor areas leftover from gone industries: impose cheap ed on those areas by hook or by crook.
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cheap ed or even soon: no ed?
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Educational “researchers” routinely ignore cohort attrition rates because to reveal these numbers would never fit with the miracle model of what makes a charter school so awesome (and look at those high test scores!) In Oakland, when charters go before the board to renew their charter, they boast of their graduation rates, and routinely compare them to the district, which is a completely bogus comparison. American Indian Public High recently revealed a 50% attrition rate, 60% if you count the dropouts. No miracles, just shedding students right and left. Overall, in Oakland, charters lose twice as many students between 9th and 12th grade as the traditional public schools. And here’s the interesting part: if you look at graduates as a percentage of 9th grade enrollment, charters and district schools are virtually the same.
The worst part of all this? Charters create student churn, which contributes to more dropouts. And dropping out is a really bad outcome. Everyone can agree on that. And yet, charters are allowed to continue with school models that contributed to dropouts. But, why should they care? As long as the students aren’t dropping out of the charter school, then everything is just fine. Go back to the publics, and drop out there….
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I wonder if anyone has studied long term impact of charter rejection and dropping out. We know that retained students are more likely to drop out. Common sense tells me there is a personal toll on students to all the charter churn, but it would be interesting to see it documented.
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All you say makes sense. Do you also see charters as contributing to the break-up of neighborhood communities in Oakland? I often ponder that the combo of detaching schools from nbhds via school choice, plus the teacher churn caused by school choice, cannot help but create a social nomansland for kids, leaving them with neither stability nor role models…
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Charters absolutely disrupt communities by their market-driven nature, which is the rationale behind the entire charter movement. Closure, colocation, teacher/student churn, relocation of the school, etc. all feed into their disruptive nature, which creates havoc for vulnerable student populations. Oakland’s communities push back hard against outside interests who are constantly using the excuse that the schools (students/parents/teachers) are bad and therefore must be closed/charterized. This narrative, along with the usual factors (Broadies, disruption of feeder patterns, test scores, underfunding, politics, real estate development) puts a huge strain on the neighborhood schools. These kids, who may come from chaotic home lives with all the usual stressors that these outside interests never acknowledge, need a stable place to attend school. That school may be the only stability they have, a place to get a meal, to see friends, to play on a team, to know that they can come back to the same location and see the same teachers/principal each year. If you want to look at the disaster that is the forced closure of neighborhood schools, look no further than Chicago.
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Unfortunately, Jazzman has an extensive history of mingling members of multiple incoming classes of students into a single supposed “cohort”, and comparing number of seniors to freshmen in a way that entirely omits the effects of grade-level retention.
Here, he says: “Every year, Boys Latin loses at least one-third of its students, and never replaces them.” And there’s an accompanying graph that appears to belie that statement. If one had 150 students starting 9th grade, and lost one third each year, seems to me that one would have, for example:
9th grade 150 students -50
10th grade 100 students -33
11th grade 67 students -22
12 grade 45 students
not to mention students lost during 12 grade.
His graphs in fact show nothing like that level of attrition. What am I, or is he, missing?
Why doesn’t Jazzman rely on official attrition/school year stability rates rather than manufacturing his own? Are such official, reliable statistics not available in Pennsylvania and New Jersey?
Here in MA such figures are readily available and demonstrate that charter schools lose fewer, not more, students than the sending districts. See for example:
“Attrition, Dropout, and Student Mobility in District and Charter Schools: A Demographic Report by Cara Stillings Candal and Ken Ardon” (January 2017)
http://pioneerinstitute.org/download/attrition-dropout-student-mobility-district-charter-schools-demographic-report/
Its conclusions include:
“Though the vitriolic debate about whether to raise the charter school cap in Massachusetts is likely to continue despite a ‘No’ vote on a November 2016 statewide ballot initiative, the data presented in this paper make it clear that at least one of the arguments that charter school detractors claim as a reason to keep the cap—student ‘push out’ and attrition—is a nonstarter.
“Since DESE has tracked student attrition and mobility in all schools, charter schools have been more accountable than their counterparts for attracting and retaining all students, including those with diverse needs. The Department’s own data show that in the districts with the greatest concentrations of charter schools (Boston and the Gateway cities), charter attrition rates are lower than the sending districts. Perhaps more importantly, charter schools are recruiting and retaining increasingly diverse student bodies and helping them achieve very strong outcomes. Similarly, charter schools also have lower dropout rates than their district counterparts, as well as higher stability rate and higher graduation rates.”
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But Stephen, the people of Massachusetts voted overwhelmingly not to expand the number of charter schools. The only districts that voted for it are affluent ones that expect never to have a charter school.
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Stephen, I did indeed phrase that incorrectly: a third of the cohort attrits from freshman to senior year, but not every year. I think in my mind I was equating “year” with “cohort,” which is incorrect. I have corrected the text and apologize for the error.
As we have been over before in the case of MA (and I’ll add here I did give over an entire post on my blog to allow you to make your argument): the definition of “attrition” and “mobility” can change depending on what you want to measure.
I have been very clear in what I am measuring: the size of a student cohort as it moves from year-to-year. In the case of Boys Latin, and with many Boston charters, the cohort unquestionably shrinks. There is little “backfilling,” meaning students do not come in to replace those who leave.
As I point out, David Hardy is completely upfront about this. Would that his colleagues in Boston were the same.
The Pioneer report does not address my central point, which is easy to understand and does not get bogged down in semantic arguments: Boston charter schools have student cohorts that shrink from year-to-year.
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/10/more-about-attrition-rates-in-boston.html
You’ve made the case this may be due to student retention. OK, maybe — but that puts Boston taxpayers on the hook for a whole extra year of schooling, and only for students who are willing to subject themselves to it. Hardly a “miracle” in my book. And, even if true, we would expect to see little cohort attrition in the upper grades; that’s not the case.
We can debate whether charters should backfill. What we shouldn’t ever do is try to argue that charter high schools are doing the same job as their neighboring high schools when the cohorts shrink like this.
Again: David Hardy is willing to admit this is what’s going on at his school. Why won’t you?
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Jazzman, you seem to try deliberately to give your susceptible readers the impression that attrition, as you use the word, involves students leaving the school. But periodically you now acknowledge that you are, in ways that are invisible to the reader, combining the effects of students leaving the school and others being kept for an extra year.
We saw that particularly dramatically evidenced in our exchange regarding Boston charter attrition in the series of postings you alluded to:
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. Feel welcome to respond to those last comments, which concluded:
[Extract]
Jazzman: “If COAH was retaining students in their freshman year, we would certainly expect a drop in students from freshman to sophomore years. But then we’d expect to see the number of students level off between Grade 10 and Grade 12. Except that’s not the case; COAH’s cohorts continue to shrink in their upperclass years.”
I previously shared with you the most recently available COAH retention data:
9th: 27.8%
10th: 3.3%
11th: 3.2%
12th: 7.4%
http://www.doe.mass.edu/infoservices/reports/retention/
So, clearly, a large portion of the decline in enrollment between 9th and 12th grade is indeed caused by front-loaded retention. And, also clearly, that doesn’t explain all of it. After some years with 100 newly enrolled 9th graders each year, if retention rates like those cited above were the only factor, I think we might at some point see enrollment along these lines:
9th: 138 students;
10th: 103
11th: 103
12th: 107
So, to achieve a fuller understanding of the enrollment decline, we would best move on to other DESE data, and learn:
COAH had a zero percent dropout rate:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/dropout/default.aspx?orgcode=04370505&orgtypecode=6&leftNavId=15627&
8.4% summer attrition rate:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/attrition/default.aspx?orgcode=04370505&fycode=2015&orgtypecode=6&
and
91.8% school year stability rate:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/mobility/default.aspx?orgcode=04370505&fycode=2015&orgtypecode=6&
So, it appears that throughout the entire summer and school year, COAH does better on every one of those measures than is typically the case for traditional public schools in the same community. COAH was the school you originally cited as a prime example of Commonwealth charter schools losing students. Rather than a poster child for attrition loss aimed at ridding schools of poor performers, COAH is perhaps instead a poster child for the practice of callously dumping high perfomers into college after four years, while keeping the academically less accomplished students close at hand, for at least one additional year.
[/Extract]
Jazzman: “I have been very clear in what I am measuring: the size of a student cohort as it moves from year-to-year.”
I don’t credit you for much clarity on the subject. In this particular posting you write: “As a cohort of students (Class of “x”) ” But your analysis typically starts with all students in a particular grade, silently and unpredictably mingling those who are Class of “x” and any who may be Class of “x-1”, those who have been retained a year.
Jazzman: “You’ve made the case this may be due to student retention. OK, maybe…”
What’s “maybe” about the figures cited above regarding COAH? The degree to which it is or is not the case for any particular school is readily demonstrable in Massachusetts.
Jazzman: “David Hardy is willing to admit this is what’s going on at his school. Why won’t you?”
Well for starters, I’ve just looked for the relevant figures regarding his school via: http://www.schoolfundingfairness.org/data-download
And haven’t yet found them. I would like to get an accurate understanding before pronouncing much about that particular school.
I can say that your analysis is often not much applicable to what I see here in Massachusetts.
And as for the public paying for an extra year of free education for kids who may take an extra year to graduate, are you really questioning that investment?
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I really don’t understand your defense, Stephen. So you’re saying that charters don’t kick kids out, they hold them back a grade? And that’s supposed to be better? What research can you cite showing the efficacy of retention? Especially at the high school level? Everything I’ve seen shows that retention is almost a guarantee of negative results. It has an unavoidable connotation of “flunked”. What does that do to a student’s sense of self as learner?
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I question spending extra on retaining students for a year just in charters. If it’s a good investment, it should be made across the board. It certainly is a relevant factor in deciding whether charters should expand: if retention is the strategy, taxpayers should be made aware of it, especially when assessing claims of superior results.
I’ve noticed over the years that charter supporters often point to “the latest data” as if they just figured out how to get things to work. My original post used ten years worth of COAH cohorts. If COAH is now better at retaining their students, good for them; doesn’t erase the previous patterns. Also doesn’t answer the question of whether the rest of the Boston charter sector retains large numbers of students.
If you think I’ve been deliberately deceptive there’s not much I can do for you. I always cite my data sources and describe my methods so they can be replicated. I make mistakes but I own up to them and correct them when someone points them out. I have acknowledged your point about retention and answered it. Not good enough? Sorry.
You seem to value having the last word, so go ahead and have it (with Diane’s permission, of course).
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Jazzman: “I question spending extra on retaining students for a year just in charters. If it’s a good investment, it should be made across the board. ”
Does that assume that it’s inevitably an equally good investment across the board?
In evaluating the cost/benefit ratio it would seem worthwhile to examine factors such as how much those who are retained make progress during that time and/or how much they are dispirited and more inclined to drop out.
As you likely know there’s considerable retention in district as well as charter schools. Two key differences in respect to Boston: 1) higher likelihood of the traditional district school students dropping out and 2) According to CREDO, the results for the typical student in a Boston charter equated “to more than twelve months of additional learning per year in reading and thirteen months greater progress in math. At the school level, 83 percent of Boston charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their district school peers in reading and math, and no Boston charter schools were found to have significantly lower learning gains.”
[…]
“Second, and more important, the Boston charter schools offer students from historically underserved backgrounds a real and sustained chance to close the achievement gap,” said Margaret Raymond, Director of CREDO at Stanford University.”
Click to access Mass2013PressReleaseFINAL2.pdf
Jazzman: “I’ve noticed over the years that charter supporters often point to “the latest data” as if they just figured out how to get things to work. My original post used ten years worth of COAH cohorts. If COAH is now better at retaining their students, good for them; doesn’t erase the previous patterns.”
A defective methodology used 10 times shouldn’t be expected to give much better results than using it once, should it?
Jazzman: “If you think I’ve been deliberately deceptive there’s not much I can do for you. I always cite my data sources and describe my methods so they can be replicated. I make mistakes but I own up to them and correct them when someone points them out. I have acknowledged your point about retention and answered it. Not good enough? Sorry.”
I’m not of the opinion that you have deliberately intended to deceive. I remain puzzled and curious to understand better where your thoughts are at on the subject at the present time. You’ve answered, but rather too obliquely for many of us to grasp your current and likely future stance on the subject we’re discussing. Explain yourself, lad!
As I commented on this blog earlier this month:
“For example, even smart folks whom I respect like Gary [Rubinstein] and Jazzman for years have supposedly debunked charter successes based in substantial part on silly superficial glances at the number of students in schools’ starting class one year and graduating class several years later, claiming that the differential is a proper measure of students who have been squeezed out of the charter school or abandoned it. And then such sloppiness has been roundly applauded in environments like this.”
Hey, I’m an ex-chef, with numerous unintentionally singed concoctions hidden in my history, so I can commiserate with occasionally slipshod work. In the kitchen we’d normally acknowledge with clarity our mistakes. Hard to hide from them when the smoke arose. (Perhaps a different matter in respect to the dining room, of course… might have to raise the price a couple of bucks after adding brûlé, incendié, or carbonisé to the name of the dish).
Jazzman: “Also doesn’t answer the question of whether the rest of the Boston charter sector retains large numbers of students.”
Recall that you had cited COAH has having egregiously great attrition. And by looking at readily available state statistics it was I hope apparent to you that actually it didn’t (using the common understanding of the term as representing students departed from the school). I don’t have any reason to suppose that the Boston charter sector overall has a lot greater retention rates than local traditional district schools… Indeed my recollection is that Angrist didn’t find that to be the case. It does appear though that they have less attrition and fewer dropouts than local traditional district schools. See the study I cited, or go directly to state dep’t of education numbers.
Jazzman: “You seem to value having the last word, so go ahead and have it (with Diane’s permission, of course).”
On the contrary, I would have liked you to respond to my final comment on your blog posting. And I invited you here to respond to that. It seemed in that brief discussion that you had progressed from thinking that grade-level retention was irrelevant to your methodology to thinking that it was perhaps a factor sometimes somewhat undermining your conclusion, but you insisted, against no disagreement whatsoever, that it wasn’t the only factor that produced different ratios of 12th to 9th graders in district vs. charter schools (we agree that differential backfilling is a major factor).
I still have no confidence as to whether or not you will continue the specific practice I have been criticizing. Whether you continue to defend it as legitimate even in the presence of readily available relevant state data that describes where and when attrition is occurring. And how exactly you would defend it, if you do.
Thanks for all your good work. (And obviously not all of anyone’s work is good.)
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Dienne: “So you’re saying that charters don’t kick kids out, they hold them back a grade?”
I tend not to be impressed by the wisdom of anyone making blanket statements about charter schools. And try to assiduously avoid doing so myself. They are enormously diverse; in various aspects some are superb, others dismal, most in between, and they commonly have a mix of more and less laudable aspects. Kinda like district schools.
What I am saying is that looking at a high school’s enrollment in 9th grade and then in 12th grade three years later is a defective methodology for ascertaining attrition. And it is startling to me how broadly it is used, and celebrated seemingly unquestioningly, by charter school antagonists.
Here in Massachusetts, there is very easily available data for what percentage of kids leave school to enroll in another school during the summer, and what percentage stay in a school throughout the school year, what percentage are considered dropouts, and what percentage are subject to grade-level retention.
Those statistics do not put district schools in a good light, relative to charter schools. So, for years and years, the state teachers’ union has gotten enormous mileage promoting alternative facts, formulating ludicrously inept, or deceptive, analyses that instead focus attention on the ratio of seniors relative to freshmen three years earlier, alleging falsely that that provides an accurate measure of the number of students who have abandoned the school or been “pushed out”.
Dienne: “What research can you cite showing the efficacy of retention? Especially at the high school level? Everything I’ve seen shows that retention is almost a guarantee of negative results.”
I like to quote from: “Locating the Dropout Crisis” by Balfanz and Legters at Johns Hopkins http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED484525.pdf
“Absent a strong and sustained intervention, there is little evidence that students who failed to be promoted to the tenth grade will right themselves by simply being given a second try (Roderick et al., 1998).”
If one accepts that judgment, then the question in respect to any particular school is whether a high grade-level retention rate is or is not accompanied by “a strong and sustained intervention” with positive results. Where one finds a high school like COAH demonstrating a high, front-loaded, retention rate, a zero dropout rate, a relatively low summer attrition and high school-year stability rate, it seems most plausible to imagine that the answer is yes, absent other countervailing evidence.
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Charters “retain” students who don’t get the message to leave. They “retain” them and we can only guess how many of the “retained” students graduate because the charters hide that.
Taking Stephen Ronan at his word: He claims that 137 students start in 9th grade, and it is 100 “new” 9th graders and a whopping 37 who have been “retained”. He is saying that 37% of the students take 5 years to complete 4 year high schools in “top-performing” charters!
Can you imagine that Ronan is arguing that 37% of the students of the most motivated parents — not the most disadvantaged but the low-income students with parents willing to sign contracts promising to do all the charters require — of THOSE children, 37% of them need 5 years for high school!
If that was REALLY the case, and charters were honest actors rather than greedy operators in it for themselves, the ONE thing that you would hear constantly from reformers is SLOW DOWN the system and give students extra years to do the work.
Instead they pretend to have better teachers or a secret sauce. Because actually telling the truth — that their “secret sauce” fails with the most motivated students — does not serve their prime goal which is to promote the charter operators at the expense of what is best for children everywhere.
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NYC public school parent : “He claims that 137 students start in 9th grade, and it is 100 “new” 9th graders and a whopping 37 who have been “retained”. ”
If I understand you correctly, you misread what I wrote.
I had stated “if retention rates like those cited above were the only factor, I think we might at some point see enrollment along these lines”. But obviously retention rates were not the only factor and those were in fact not the real enrollment figures…
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Thank you, NYC Public School parent, good analysis of this argument.
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I went to Stephen Ronan’s link and here is what I found for City on a Hill Charter:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=04370505&orgtypecode=6&leftNavId=300&
Enrollment 2016-2017:
9th grade – 111 students
10th grade – 67 students
11th grade – 51 students
12th grade – 50 students
50 students graduated?? 50? From a starting 9th grade of 100 or 111? And Ronan thinks that is a “success”??
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“I have been very clear in what I am measuring:”
You have stepped into the minefield of the misuse and abuse of the “measurement” meaning. You are not measuring anything when you are ASSESSING, EVALUATING, COUNTING or JUDGING attrition rates. What you are doing is not measuring but any one of the AECorJ methods of describing what happens with students in either continuing a program of study or not.
And no, I am not a nitpicking word Nazi, but one who would love to see the true meaning of words. Yes, measure has a connotation of evaluation, assessing, etc. . . but actual measurement is something far more specific than those activities in that measuring requires a standard unit of measure, a measuring device calibrated against said unit exemplar and then the parameters of the error of measurement laid out and explained.
None of that is happening when you say “I have been very clear in what I am measuring:” and that serves to obfuscate the meaning and to lend a pseudo-scientific sheen, what I call scientificity, a false sense of scientific/mathematical accuracy that is not there.
Yes, you are counting cohorts and figuring the attrition rate which is a mathematical function but it is not “measuring”.
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Striking is the Boys Latin admission process which involves letters of intent, interviews, and pre-enrollment training programs, all of which weed out the ‘others’. That there is any attrition after all that creaming is surprising. (Attrition in public schools is more attributable to the instability of poverty than to the schools.) The fact is that the charter’s graduation rates are inflated because Boys Latin is not a public school and therefore, through a combination of its admissions process and operating policies, does not accept or support any and every student at any and every time. It should not be supported with public dollars.
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Of course. High attrition correlates with low-performing public schools. The BEST public schools don’t lose huge cohorts of students.
But with charters it is the opposite. High attrition correlates with high-performing charters while mediocre charters somehow manage to keep far more of their students than the high performing ones. The immoral charter cheerleaders want us to believe that low-income parents just hate good charters and that’s why they leave more frequently than they leave the mediocre ones. They pretend that it has nothing to do with the fact that the high performing charters treat low-performing children in a way that makes it clear they should find another school because their children are NOT welcome.
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Right on, LCT
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Yep, “it gets more funding than public schools.” Kudos for today’s Chicago Sun-Times article, “CPS’ School Budgets Prompt Questions on Enrollment, Funding” :
“But what’s confusing is ow schools where enrollment is predicted to remain the same will see big losses, such as Christopher Elementary School, which is slated to lose about $700,000, or about 10% since last year, or increases, such as UNO-Tamayo* Elementary School, which will see a 7% budget increase since last year, or $159,000 more. CPS couldn’t explain that on Monday.”
*UNO-Tamayo Elementary is, of course, a charter school–part of the UNO Charter School chain, whose CEO, Juan Rangel (since resigned, although re-surfacing in some other endeavor, as was recently reported) was investigated for misappropriation of funds (the then Gov. Quinn at that time held up some $98 million which had been appropriated for the building of a new UNO school; the money was later released & the school built & operating to this day).
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