Gary Rubinstein assesses the claim that graduates of charter schools have a dramatically high college graduation rate than public school graduates.
He writes:
“On the heels of the latest call by the NAACP for a charter school moratorium, there has been a media blitz started by The 74 about a report called ‘The Alumni’ in which they claim that charter school graduates go on to graduate college at three to five times the rate of low income students who do not attend charter schools.
“Besides being reported in The 74, it has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Daily News.
“The 74 article is written by Richard Whitmire (as is The Daily News Op-Ed) who is known for his biography about Michelle Rhee (haven’t heard much about her lately) and also one about Rocketship Charters (haven’t heard much about them lately).
“The summary of the report says that they have tracked the students at nine charter networks and found that graduates of those charters have between 25% and 50% of those students also graduate college. Since a commonly quoted statistic is that only 9% of low income students graduate college, these networks seem to be getting between three and five times the rate of college completion.
“The major flaw in this report — and they admit this in The 74, but not in The Daily News (The WSJ is behind a paywall, if someone can read it let me know if they address it there) — is that while the 9% statistic is for ALL students who enter schools, these 25% to 50% numbers are only for the students who complete 12th grade at the schools (KIPP is an exception, they use data from students who complete 8th grade — I’ll get to that later.)”
The claim, he says, is a lie because there is no way to verify the data.
A great post, vintage Rubinstein. Read it. This is what happens when a vert thoughtful person has a passionate commitment to evidence and accuracy, not ideology or self-interest.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My response to Gary:
I think that you and The 74 are correct to be cautiously skeptical of college completion rates of a high school’s graduates in the absence of the H.S.’s attrition data.
However, kindly correct me if I am wrong, but it appears to me that you are claiming that those who transfer out of a charter school after 5th grade should typically be included in the denominator but not the numerator when calculating the graduation rates and college completion rates for the charter school from which the student departs.
Is there any state in the USA that follows that procedure for calculating graduation rates?
What would the 9% figure for students from low-income families look like if, for the purposes of calculating graduation rates, one removed only from the numerator, but not the denominator, any student who transfers out of one school and into another after 5th grade?
Here is the Massachusetts system for calculating schools’ graduation rates; my sense is that it is not atypical:
http://www.doe.mass.edu/infoservices/reports/gradrates/calculating_overview.html
It can create somewhat misleading results if they’re only examined superficially and in isolation from other data; as is the case for every other readily implemented technique for calculating graduation rates that I’ve seen or can imagine.
In respect to this from The 74 article, “The Data Behind The Alumni,” which you cite:
“The Academy of the Pacific Rim, for example, was able to track every alumnus, discovering students who earned four-year degrees who were missed by the Clearinghouse. As a result, its success rate rose from 60 percent to 70 percent.”
I had the privilege of attended their high school graduation ceremony this year… and was awestruck.
(Nevertheless, with cautious skepticism I investigated, and the summer attrition rate there seems lower, and school-year stability rate higher, than the local traditional district schools).
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/attrition/default.aspx?orgcode=04120530&fycode=2016&orgtypecode=6&
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/mobility/default.aspx?orgcode=04120530&fycode=2016&orgtypecode=6&
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“The Academy of the Pacific Rim, for example, was able to track every alumnus….”
Did they also track every non-alumnus? Transfer students, drop outs, etc.? I’d be curious about the comparison.
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YES. There is perhaps a more important truth in looking at who DIDN’T do well in these lauded programs than in who did.
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Billionaires will happily fund studies that do everything BUT a close examination of the huge number of students who fail and leave charter schools.
They have the chutzpah to claim that it’s just a “coincidence” that there are higher attrition rates in high suspending, high performing charters than there are in mediocre charters serving the same population of students. They have the chutzpah to claim that there just happens to be far more violent 5 year olds in the high performing charters than in mediocre ones serving the same population. They have the chutzpah to claim it’s unnecessarily to look closely at whether such a ridiculous claim is true because why wouldn’t they believe white people who tell them how violent non-white children are?
The billionaires don’t care about “reform” – they are looking to undermine public schools and the charters are happy to help them by lying about the violent nature of very young non-white kids and knowing they can get away with it because the children are not white and affluent.
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If a charter school forces out a kid in 6th grade after starting in 5th grade and he subsequently attends a public school and then graduates college why should the charter school be credited with this kids graduation in their statistics? The charter school failed him and the public school rescued him.
Kids that went to public schools and then to charter school and then graduate college don’t get included in the public schools graduation rates.
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dienne77: “Did they also track every non-alumnus? Transfer students, drop outs, etc.?”
I see no evidence that they did. Though it should be somewhat easier for them to do that than for most local district schools, due to the lower current transfer/dropout rates at APR.
Tangentially, did you have a chance yet to read the article that I recommended to NYC Public School Parent?
https://www.the74million.org/article/whitmire-americas-best-charter-school-doesnt-look-anything-like-top-charters-is-that-bad
I think you might enjoy it.
But you might, at the same time, wonder if they were screening the test scores of applicant kindergarteners to see if they were up to snuff, and if they were losing their least academically successful students.
Actually, they admit students via an open lottery (plus preference for their current students’ siblings) and have gathered and presented some data regarding that latter possibility… looking at not just attrition numbers but some characteristics of those who leave. They report:
“student attrition rates at Brooke are among the lowest in the city among district and charter schools alike, and are essentially no different for high-needs students than for others. Furthermore, even the small numbers of students who do leave Brooke each year are just as likely to be performing well academically as their peers who persist.”
Also, while their schools have just been K-8 till now (they’ve just this school year opened a H.S.), they have carefully tracked students who graduate from their schools, no matter what kind of school they attend next, and provided them continuing support and assistance.
See: http://www.ebrooke.org/achievement/beyond-brooke/
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And this tells you more about Brooke Charter:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2015/10/15/praised-charter-school-safe-harbor-for-disabilities/dathSBLIXZvLh5hKk0gh2O/story.html
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The letter you cite states:
“Brooke does have a low attrition rate. But that rate captures only students enrolled in the school in June and unenrolled the following September. It does not capture students who leave during the school year because, for example, they are regularly suspended.”
Nonsense. The state provides both summer attrition figures and also specifies the stability of the student population during the school year. Brooke not only loses fewer during the summer but retains considerably more during the school year.
The school year stability rate
Brooke Mattapan: 96.5%
Brooke East Boston: 95%
Brooke Roslindale: 97.3
These are all far higher than the sending district rates. According to Brooke:
“As the CHART data highlights, the suspension rate at Brooke Roslindale has been higher over the last several years than the sending district. However, as highlighted in the previous section, those suspension rates have not resulted in high rates of attrition at Brooke – just the opposite.”
And the letter you cite states:
“Brooke draws from a district where 19.5 percent of the students have disabilities, but only 9.6 percent of Brooke students have disabilities.”
A missing element there is that in Massachusetts one is apparently not permitted to classify as disabled for special education purposes a child who is making good progress in a regular classroom. And kids who come into Brooke schools struggling, with special education plans, are quite frequently able to make good progress in a regular classroom and are declassified. Additionally Brooke is relatively sparing in its classification of incoming kindergarteners as being disabled.
More below from a Brooke document that I have cited here on multiple occasions previously. Perhaps you downloaded a copy? I hope so. It used to be located here:
Click to access item3-tabA1-1.pdf
But the site is being reorganized and I’m not sure where it is now. The text is currently available via Google’s cache and provides much more detail than I quote here below:
“Special Education Access and Enrollment
“Brooke has a school-wide support and intervention model that supports all students and deliberately minimizes and reduces the proportion of students on IEP’s. This approach results in dramatically strong academic performance among students with disabilities, as outlined in the CHART data, and outlined in the graph below. In short, students with disabilities at Brooke consistently outperform the general population from the sending district and often outperform the general population across the state.
“In addition to resulting in high achievement among special education students, this approach also demonstrably results in a lower proportion of students on IEP’s than occurs in most other schools, district and charter alike….
“The low special education identification rates at Brooke are due primarily to our school-wide support and intervention model designed to create the capacity for all teachers to support all of their students. It is also due to Brooke’s strict adherence to department guidelines on special education placement and persistence. In short, students who are making effective progress at Brooke are not eligible for special education.”
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Stephen B Ronan,
You STILL can’t explain how City on a Hill Charter this year had 50 graduating seniors. And 111 freshmen. The data you cite is so bad that no one actually knows how many new freshmen come in every year! Talk about a determination to see no evil.
Now you want to change the subject because you think a school that has an extraordinarily high suspension rate when it serves K-8 students and is the subject of questions by public interest lawyers who represent kids with special needs isn’t disappearing as many of them as City on a Hill.
50 graduating seniors. 111 9th graders. There is something wrong at that charter and if people like you actually cared instead of spending your energy coming up with racist and and nonsensical reasons why those huge attrition numbers are there, people like me might be more inclined not to think the charter movement was filled with dishonest actors who represent the pro-charter billionaires who pay for PR campaigns.
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I’ve just been given the new address for the Brooke document that I alluded to that had been moved to a different location on the state education department’s web site. The correct current address is:
Click to access item3-tabA1-1.pdf
I would particularly recommend pages 32-33 of the document starting at the heading: “attrition and suspension”.
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Stephen B Ronan,
You have never explained how City on a Hill Charter can begin with 100 or 111 of the most motivated students whose parents enrolled them in a top performing charter precisely because they wanted the best education for them ends up with 50 students graduating. You keep claiming you addressed it but you never have. Fifty students left with the rest mysteriously disappearing. And how many of those 50 needed an extra year or two or get there? If charters really wanted to be models for reform instead of “competing” for the cheapest kids to enrich their operators, we’d already have dozens of studies telling us that instead of it being “irrelevant”.
These numbers don’t even include all the students that charters discourage from enrolling in the first place by discouraging kids who they don’t believe would fit. “If you cannot commit to all that we require this is not the school for you” says the leader of one of the top performing charter chain in the country. One of the truest things ever said.
Take a look at the data colleges publish. Every student who enrolls is tracked to see their 4 and 5 year graduation rate.
Despite the many millions of dollars reformers will throw around to commission greedy researchers to do limited studies, we don’t know how many of the most motivated families leave high performing charters like City on a Hill and why they leave. I guess some things are not of interest to “reformers” because you blame the children for leaving. No wonder you attack the NAACP for not agreeing with you that the children who get suspended and counseled out are as violent and unworthy as the charter operators claim they are.
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“You have never explained”…
Regrettably, there is a less than 1:1 correlation between what I have explained and what you have grasped.
As I have repeatedly indicated in conversations that you have been aware of, the summer attrition rates, school-year stability rates, grade-level retention rates and dropout rates (not to mention 4-year and 5-year graduation rates) are all readily available from the MA department of education’s web site.
If for some reason you don’t think I reported such figures correctly, go look ’em up. You may find it handy to open a spreadsheet and put some concentrated focus on understanding those numbers… It’ll help you intuitively grasp the implications when you encounter an analogous set of numbers in the future.
But first, I’d encourage you to settle back, relax, and enjoy this article about a different, top-notch Boston charter school:
https://www.the74million.org/article/whitmire-americas-best-charter-school-doesnt-look-anything-like-top-charters-is-that-bad
Best wishes.
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111 children in 9th grade.
50 students in 12th grade.
I’m waiting for your explanation of how that could work in a school that YOU claim is offering one of the best educations in all of Boston.
If the links you keep posting explained nothing. If they did, you would do more than say “here’s a link”.
If I post a link, I also explain what the data shows. I say: here is data that shows that a charter school that claims 100% passing rates on 3rd grade exams has xx number of students in 2nd grade and that number declines by 19% by the time those 2nd graders sit for the 3rd grade test AND the suspension rate in that charter school serving 5, 6 and 7 year olds is over 20%. Readers are free to believe that lots of African-American children are violent as the charter CEO says (and that you seem to accept without question) or readers may believe that the charter is winnowing out the less able students.
You just provide links that you seem to have no faith in since you can’t even explain in words how this data explains why 111 students are in 9th grade and only 50 in 12th grade.
At least Michael Petrilli is honest when he says well-funded charters should be for strivers and the non-strivers can rot for all he cares. Why aren’t you just as honest as him? You promote charters that “disappear” so many students and when called out on it you pretend you’ve explained it so many times (you never have) as your reason for once again not explaining it.
Just admit that you embrace Petrilli’s notion that charters should be able to weed out non-strivers and you are pleased they do. Why is that so hard? Then you wouldn’t have to keep avoiding the question of where those kids went because you can just say “they don’t matter”.
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Stephen ne thing that you don’t actually confront with this issue is the intangible and damaging negative effect that this dumping of students — treating vulnerable children with frail, forming egos — as commodities to be rejected or embraced based on their ability to promote the expansions of school privatization.
As a classroom teacher in a public school who often services the kids which the nearby charters dump,, I can attest to the severe emotional damage inflicted upon these children as a result. Teachers such as myself have to act as emotional MASH Unit doctors and repair the damage done as best we can.
In the NAACP report, read the following:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
NAACP Report: (p. 17)
During the Los Angeles hearing, a student described the psychological toll that youth experience when they are pushed out of charter schools:
“My friend was kicked out of the charter school and she came back to Coliseum (Elementary School in L.A.) and she had to readjust to everything going on. And it was very humiliating for her to explain to other people that she got out because,
” ‘Oh, I wasn’t good enough for a charter school, I wasn’t good enough or I didn’t perform enough fora charter school.’ ”
This is where the emotional aspect of leaving a charter school comes in regarding the expulsion of kids from charter schools for grades, which I feel is unfair and strenuous for the parents and students.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Stephen, It seems to be that there is an appalling disregard for the psychological carnage going on here, as all of this is being swept under the rug, or, if it is addressed at all, it’s explained away as acceptable “collateral damage.”
Here’s more:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
NAACP Report: (pp. 13-16)
The claim that charter schools provide greater options for families was often countered by accounts of exclusionary enrollment and push-out practices that are viewed as common to many charter schools. Many participants testified about students with special needs, those perceived as poor test takers, or those who pose as a behavioral challenge are either not accepted, or once enrolled, disciplined or counseled out of many charter schools.
In New Orleans, the Southern Poverty Law Center had to bring a lawsuit against the Recovery School District because so many special education students were rejected from all the charter schools they applied to.
Hilary Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau noted that:
“It is our unfortunate experience that in some cases charter schools are being used to perpetuate discrimination. While public schools are required to take every student, it is the option of charter schools to admit Johnny, but not Jamal or Jose. Witnesses explained that while a charter school may claim to be open to all students, between reserving seats prior to any lottery process, selective enrollment, the use of exclusionary discipline processes, and counseling out of students, it may actually be exclusive.”
According to testimony by civil rights lawyer Dr. Bill Quigley, Professor at Loyola Law School:
“What we have is a very small group of selective schools that are not approachable by most of the people in New Orleans. They are charter schools that are reserved for the wealthy. They are reserved overwhelmingly for White children of the city of New Orleans.
“They have their own special, non-transparent process. They do not participate in the application process that the rest of the city of New Orleans talks about and uses.
“For example, one of the high scoring schools is 53% White, 21% economically disadvantaged and 4% Special Ed, compared to the overall system which has 7% White, so it is 7 times as White as the system as a whole. It is only one-fourth as economically integrated as the system as a whole and has less than half the special education students the system as a whole has.”
Most studies have found that charters are more racially and economically segregated than public schools generally, including underserving English learners and special-education students relative to the public schools in their districts.
In some states, such as Louisiana, charters are allowed to set admissions policies similar to private schools. In others, like California, this practice is illegal. However, a recent ACLU study found that one-in-five California charters violate state law by publicly posting policies that would restrict access for high-need students.
Student pushout was a widely described problem.
Bob Wilson, a member of Journey for Justice from Chicago, Illinois, testified about a local study found that Chicago charter school expulsion rates were more than 1,000% higher than those of Chicago Public Schools on a per-pupil basis.
Wilson noted that one charter school in Chicago claims a 100% graduation rate, “yet only 40% of their incoming freshmen graduate. So between freshman year and senior year, 60% are pushed out due to suspensions, expulsions…[and] counseling-out students.”
Other studies mentioned by witnesses described similar patterns. For example, a review of three years of expulsion data found that Washington, D.C. charter schools expelled 676 students, while the neighborhood public schools expelled only 24.
During the Los Angeles hearing, a panelist mentioned a recent study that found “charter schools suspended higher percentages of Black students and students with disabilities than traditional public schools.”
The study the panelist referenced, conducted by the UCLA Civil Rights Project in 2016, found that Black males are over three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from charter schools than their White peers and that nearly 50% of black secondary students attending a charter school were enrolled in schools where the suspension rate for Black students was about 25%annually.
Parents described in detail what this practice is in action.
Clarence Sprowler, a former charter school parent in New York City, shared the following:
“My son, with great fanfare, got accepted into Harlem Success Academy. Within his first day of school, I was told that he was unfocused and he needed to be disciplined. I was like,
” ‘Okay. They have high standards. This is good.’
“I didn’t see anything wrong with it…within days, people were coming into the classroom.
“They didn’t identify themselves. They were sitting in the back and they had papers and pads and they immediately, systematically, with these systems in place, identified children that they knew were going to be problematic and my son was among them, along with four other kids.
“Within three days, they had placed him in the back of the class in a table together and one by one, as every day went by, one of those kids were missing and they were gone. I was the hold out and I only lasted twelve days… I could not understand how a school that claimed to be public could come to me and say,*
” ‘Listen. Something is wrong with your son. You got to go.‘ ”
Sprowler ’s experience is reflected in research that found some New York City charter schools have routinely adopted suspension and expulsion policies that the authors claim violates students’ civil rights.
Exclusionary practices in charter schools are not limited to those viewed as having “behavioral” challenges; they can extend to students who struggle academically.
Alesia Joseph, a New York City public school special educator escribes how in her school “we receive children from charter schools two weeks before an exam. Children that they know won’t make it on the test so they send them back to the public school. After October 31st, we received an abundance of kids because the money didn’t follow those kids.”
A similar point was made by Ruby Newbold, Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers:
“At charter schools, not every child who applies gets accepted or can stay. And the only choice parents have is choosing what application to fill out. The application process also requires parental involvement, and there are far too many obstacles for some parents to be involved in the day-to-day lives of our children.
“And truth be told, most high-performing charters only accept the students likely to succeed. Oftentimes, we see evidence of charter schools counseling students out or utilizing harsh discipline policies to suspend and later expel some of our most vulnerable students. And these students end up back in traditional public schools; yet the money stays at the charter school.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
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Jack: “Stephen one thing that you don’t actually confront with this issue is the intangible and damaging negative effect that this dumping of students — treating vulnerable children with frail, forming egos — as commodities to be rejected or embraced based on their ability to promote the expansions of school privatization.
“As a classroom teacher in a public school who often services the kids which the nearby charters dump,, I can attest to the severe emotional damage inflicted upon these children as a result. Teachers such as myself have to act as emotional MASH Unit doctors and repair the damage done as best we can.”
Thanks for sharing that, Jack. And I salute your efforts.
Not so long ago, I attended a meeting where our state’s Commissioner of Education met with families of a Boston charter school that he intended soon to shutter. It served grades 4-8 and the great majority of students had, I believe, previously attended public district schools. The eloquent parent testimony consisted mainly of passionate statements about how their kids had not fared well in public district schools, with a lot of emphasis on the damaging effects of ridicule and bullying. And passionate declarations of how the culture had been so much different and better in the charter school… Teachers and administrators at the charter school had, it seemed acted as emotional MASH Unit doctors to repair the damage the best they could, which was very well indeed.
You offer, Jack, quoting from the NAACP report, some anecdotes and some allusions to data/research that seems to me quite likely defective, and to lots of sweeping statements where there’s no attempt to provide support with either solid data or research.
For example: “Wilson noted that one charter school in Chicago claims a 100% graduation rate, “yet only 40% of their incoming freshmen graduate. So between freshman year and senior year, 60% are pushed out due to suspensions, expulsions…[and] counseling-out students.”
What are the odds that that’s typical charter school antagonist innumeracy? Pretty high I’d guess.
And this: “During the Los Angeles hearing, a panelist mentioned a recent study that found “charter schools suspended higher percentages of Black students and students with disabilities than traditional public schools…. The study the panelist referenced, conducted by the UCLA Civil Rights Project in 2016…”
OMG, with both UCLA and “Civil Rights” in their name, how could they be wrong? Malkus answered that question quite thoroughly and persuasively I thought.
And this: “Alesia Joseph, a New York City public school special educator escribes how in her school “we receive children from charter schools two weeks before an exam. Children that they know won’t make it on the test so they send them back to the public school. After October 31st, we received an abundance of kids because the money didn’t follow those kids.”
I can’t help being a little skeptical, because I know that similar statements were made by the teachers unions and their campaign staff throughout last year in Massachusetts, claims that were demonstrably false.
“A similar point was made by Ruby Newbold, Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers:
“And truth be told, most high-performing charters only accept the students likely to succeed. Oftentimes, we see evidence of charter schools counseling students out or utilizing harsh discipline policies to suspend and later expel some of our most vulnerable students. And these students end up back in traditional public schools; yet the money stays at the charter school.”
Again, we’ve heard such statements proffered here in Massachusetts frequently by teachers union folks and they were demonstrably false. I’m not saying that no aspects of that occur anywhere ever… Nor that it shouldn’t be taken seriously and corrected where it does…. Just that the incidence seems frequently wildly exaggerated.
I remain hopeful that the NAACP can join with various education groups to continue to research these issues, increasingly arriving at accurate conclusions, and devising effective collaborations in support of this goal that the report appeared to endorse:
“Can charter schools be part of the solution? Absolutely. But that solution must be intentional, well-planned growth that takes into account the health and sustainability of the entire public education system, including the so-called traditional public schools that educate 90% of our country’s students.”
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College graduation rates are as silly as high school graduation rates. If a person graduates from enormous state university with a degree in proverbial technology, and the demand for proverbial technology means that this person has to take a job waxing the new 2018 Eloquent for rich people, the fact of a college education is as meaningless as the rain that falls in the summer desert. Graduation from high school or college might be a predictor of economic success, but there are many roads to success that go through other doors.
The problem with focusing on college as an ultimate goal related to economics belies the truth that many jobs require no college experience whatsoever. What should be the goal of high school and college is the production of good citizens who are involved in the rational discussion of societal issues and the development of a better place to live for all. Unfortunately, this lifetime behavior is impossible to measure. Education is worthless unless it provides for a lifetime of learning behavior. Quantifying this with a series of tests and statistics produces chimera at best.
Last night we had an open house at my high school. A lady brought by her daughter who was to be in my class. She was a graduate of our school who had left me with a poem that still sits near my desk. Now I will teach her kid. Will I do a good job? I can never know. Just get all your statistics off my back and let me try.
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“What should be the goal of high school and college is the production of good citizens who are involved in the rational discussion of societal issues and the development of a better place to live for all. ”
I like that. This program at the Academy of the Pacific Rim, the school I alluded to above, may be of related interest:
http://www.bulletinnewspapers.com/23469/270622/a/apr-gets-wild-card-invite-for-national-civics-competition
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Heart warming story. But can we justify our spending 40 grand to send a chosen few to Washington for a feel good session and leaving thousands of kids in schools that leak, underfunded because of money that goes to the few? Community schools are the linchpins of democratic values. Let us fund them. Then we can raise money so the band can play at Disney and the debate club can go to congress.
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I guess another way to think about it, Roy, is does it make more sense to send to Washington DC dozens of kids from the Massachusetts public school that performed best in the state civics competition, or to pay instead for kids to be bused around within the state each week all autumn for the purpose of bashing each others’ brains in football, as is apparently a widespread practice, particularly in traditional district schools, leaky or not?
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I thought charters sued so that those public schools have to allow charter students to play on their sports teams whose costs are borne entirely by the public school students. Just another freebie for charter students that the public schools pay for so that charter proponents can claim they “waste” so much money.
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Stephen B Ronan,
Isn’t this the MODEL law your favorite charter organization wants?
http://www.publiccharters.org/law-database/extra-curricular-interscholastic-activities-eligibility-access/
“Laws or regulations explicitly allow charter school students in schools not providing extracurricular and interscholastic activities to have access to those activities at noncharter public schools.”
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I don’t know too much about keeping statistics on poor students, but I understand what happens to poor students in the real world over time because I have kept in touch with many of my former ELLs. Poor students often do not have the typical four year trajectory into college. Some attend community college, graduate, work for a time, and go back to a state school when they have saved enough money. Poor students are also more likely to have schooling interrupted due to a family crisis where they have to care for a family member or work to pay for a family crisis. Many of the girls attend nursing school. Is this calculated as attending college when collecting statistics? Even with nursing, the girls may opt for an LVN (a one year course), work for a time, and they may eventually go back to get an RN when they have enough money to pay for tuition. The road to higher education is often a rocky one due to their limited resources.
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There are other issues not addressed by attrition that can and do influence student academic success.
First, a major filter revolves around admission requirements. We know from the ACLU report, “Unequal Access”, that large numbers of charters surveyed in California were clearly breaking the law when it comes to discriminatory practices. Worse yet, ACLU admitted that they were only able to review admission requirements that were easily accessed on the school websites. They also reported that many charters require the parent to sign up for an online account prior to completing the process which further conceals their enrollment procedures.
Second, many charter networks receive huge donations from the likes of Gates, Broad and the Waltons. These dollars can be used to provide extra assistance to students preparing to apply to college, money that is not available to all public school students.
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Correct. Charter school population is different from public school population both because the front door is more heavily guarded and the fact that the back door is more heavily used.
I have very little education experience, but I too could create a “miracle” school with high graduation and college attendance rates if I could select the most affluent kids from the most savvy families and then usher the failures out to find a “better fit”. And if I have a few extra million Gates bucks to play with in between, all the better.
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Exactly. They wouldn’t dare to try this with charters serving mostly white and middle class students, which is why those same reformers will never claim that BASIS Charter Schools are performing the miraculous feats that charter chains with similar numbers of disappearing children (who aren’t white and middle class) claim.
Many of the students who left BASIS were white and middle class and if the reformers tried to characterize all of them as violent and unworthy and entirely to blame for their own failings at the miraculous BASIS, they’d never get away with it. They’ve been getting away with it with regards to those kinds of slurs against very young African-American children and the pro-charter reformers are throwing a temper tantrum right now because the NAACP is finally calling them out on it.
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This post reflects the crude reality that a minority of powerful financial interest groups will pursue by what so ever means necessary to undermine and obliterate public education. Remaining silence, hiding or conservatively showing concern for this dilemma is the exact reaction they hope educators will display.
Proof of this is the San Diego experience as quoted in Dr. Ravitch’s book “The Death and Life …….American School System…..” . Sadly, the same types of attacks have been fine tuned and implemented in many American school systems. I am currently experiencing the same situation, where as an advocate teacher with over 20 years, my school district have slapped me with 40 disciplinary charges, totalling 109 surcharges.
The reality is that we are in a very bad situation. We are looking as our local teacher Union has been cleverly taken over and they manage how far we can object to horrible decisions, some teachers have been used to divide other teachers (the “divide and conquer game”). As an advice to readers: and not trust anyone b) keep your opinion to yourself c) document (electronically record per State laws) D) search for a good private lawyer.
This is Doom Day.
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One “reformer” in Denver posted the 74 report on his website. I glanced at the article and noticed THE PREMIER CHARTER CHAIN IN DENVER, DSST, was not evaluated. One question I have posed repeatedly to DSST over the years is exactly the one supposedly addressed in the article: with the claim of 100% (!) accepted at a four year college every year (!), how many actually graduate? That seems like a reasonable question and with ALL the data collected one that is not too difficult to collect. Right? Wrong! I have repeatedly been told something like “oh, that would be helpful data but we don’t track that.” Hmmmm.
So, once again, I will put out there the real story: number of freshmen entering DSST Stapleton, the first school, opened in 2005, through 2013 resulting in graduates of classes 2009 through 2016 (DPS claims it doesn’t have 2017 yet, waiting for summer school grads. DSST doesn’t post numbers of graduates, only 100% accepted to four year colleges, another clever charter trick). 1139 freshmen started, 650 graduates.
57% graduation rate !!!!
The second school to have graduating seniors: Green Valley Ranch: 314 freshmen, 177 graduates:
56.4% graduation rate
Totals for two schools: 1453 freshmen, 827 graduates, 56.9% graduation rate as calculated by national norms, freshmen in, graduates out.
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If billionaires were actually interested in the “reform” they claim they are, they would have done studies of this years ago. After all, if you are holding out these charters as great schools, you would want to know WHY students leave instead of offering all kinds of ridiculous excuses for why it’s not important to look at it because the reformers know they all left because their parents hated top performing schools even if they intentionally chose that school for their kids. The reformers happily grasp that nonsensical explanation rather than actually do a real study that interviewed those parents. In fact, they’d rather criminalize any student whose parents complain instead of investigating how those schools work because when the bottom line is to promote charters and denigrate public schools, the truth does not matter.
Trump is the perfect President for the charter movement. It’s not surprising that their most “successful” leaders have embraced Betsy DeVos with all their might.
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We discussed your understanding of such matters, Jeannie, at some length on Merrow’s blog.
As I wrote then:
“If it happens that you double-count those who repeat freshman year in constructing the denominator in your calculation, and then don’t include them at all in the numerator if they graduate in five years, that would help explain why the graduation rates by your method are lower than the official state statistics.”
Has your methodology changed at all since then?
Thanks.
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I’m not sure to what you are referring. Double counting does not seem relevant. Even if there are students held back, they would appear in some graduating class, and those numbers are still what I have collected. My statistics are based on number of freshmen taking state tests as reported by the Colorado Department of Education and the number of graduates as reported by the CDE and DSST. I calculate grad rates the way CDE calculates grad. Freshmen in, grads out four years later. Another DPS trick is to talk about five year grads which is fine. It you need to compare apples to apples. Four year to four year; five year to five year. It’s all about truth and transparency.
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Kaplan: “I’m not sure to what you are referring. Double counting does not seem relevant. Even if there are students held back, they would appear in some graduating class,”
“I think it is relevant… if the same student takes the 9th grade test twice because he or she repeats 9th grade, you seem to count the student twice. At most that student would graduate once. If you think there is one graduation for two students you would imagine a 50% graduation rate, when it’s really one student taking the test twice and graduating once.”
But actually, your analysis seemed to have an additional problem; according to the methodology you shared with me in our discussion on the Merrow blog, it appeared that you’d actually not give the student any credit for graduating if being held back meant graduation occurred in 5 years. You were just looking at 4-year graduation rates. As you wrote back then:
“Graduation rates are calculated based on four years. All studies that cite graduation rates are talking about four years in high school. Five years and more are usually called “completers” meaning they have completed high school in five or more years. ”
And for that reason, for a student who took the 9th grade test twice and graduated in five years, you’d add 2 to the denominator and 0 to the numerator in calculating graduation rates…. While the state department of education would have 1/1. Which would go a long way towards explaining why your graduation rate figures were so different from the schools’ or state’s figures.
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Jeannie Kaplan, thank you for stating the obvious.
Stephen B Ronan keeps claiming you are wrong because the not very good teachers at DSST Stapleton have a lot of trouble teaching the children who enroll in their charter school and flunk huge cohorts of students to cover up for their ineptitude in teaching them.
He claims that the inept teachers at DSST Stapleton couldn’t figure out how to teach the most motivated students whose parents were very supportive of their education and even with that very large advantage they had to flunk lots of them — apparently some were flunked over and over again.
Ronan thinks the teachers at DSST Stapleton are so inept that even after years and years they still have flunk huge cohorts of students to cover up their own failings as educators. And that’s the only reason that the number of graduation seniors is so tiny compared to the number of 9th graders in the school.
It’s just inept charter teachers who can’t teach huge cohorts of charter school students enough to let them pass to the next grade. That explains it all, says Ronan.
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Stephen B Ronan,
I read your second response to Kaplan and it is ironic that you assume just as much as you claim she does in her statistics.
You claim that huge cohorts were flunked in 9th grade to repeat a year and that is why the 9th grade class is so large. And you assume that no high performing new child ever came into the school after the first day of 9th grade. You have no idea whether that is true because charters go to great lengths to hide those numbers and that speaks volumes.
Do charter flunk 50% of their 9th graders so that every 9th grade class (except the very first one ever) is half repeaters and half new kids? 75% of the kids? 10% of the students? We don’t know because charters keep that hidden. Why? How many NEW 9th graders start in DSST each year? If you can’t answer that basic question you have no business criticizing Kaplan’s numbers. And you can’t.
Where are all the longitudinal studies to show exactly what happens to each child who enrolls in a charter school in the entry grade and how many of those ACTUAL children who started in the school make it to graduation 4 years later? They don’t exist and that’s appalling.
The NYC Independent Budget Office did ONE study that wasn’t really about attrition at all but accidentally revealed that 49.5% of the students who enrolled in Kindergarten charter schools were gone by 5th grade! Half the class gone. And I mean gone. Not “retained” — every single starting kindergarten child who was in any grade in the school was considered to be still in the school. Even if he were spending his 3rd year in 2nd grade. Half the starting cohort out of the school. And of the 50% who remained in charters, an unknown number of them had been failed and weren’t in their proper grade.
Click to access school-indicators-for-new-york-city-charter-schools-2013-2014-school-year-july-2015.pdf
Page 9 has the shocking information that 49.5% of the entering Kindergarten class at charter schools were GONE by 5th grade. Not retained. Gone. 3,375 students started in Kindergarten and a whopping 1,670 of those students disappeared. Not retained in a different grade. Absolutely gone from the charter schools.
The fact that there aren’t real longitudinal attrition studies done on every charter is beyond appalling — especially when this one revealed that HALF of the entering Kindergarten children in charters were gone by 5th grade and not “retained”. Charters ONLY talk about high retention rates when they try to hide attrition and it’s true that charters fail many students. The sad part is that they so very often just rid themselves of even more students than they “retain”. As the only real study of charter attrition rates that I linked to above demonstrates. 49.5% of the Kindergarten children missing — not remained but missing — by 5th grade. Not good. Just like Denver.
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NYC Public School Parent: “Do charter flunk 50% of their 9th graders so that every 9th grade class (except the very first one ever) is half repeaters and half new kids? 75% of the kids? 10% of the students? We don’t know because charters keep that hidden. Why?”
Eh? I have frequently referred you to the dialog I had with Jersey Jazzman about charter school attrition in Boston. But you continue to not provide indication that you have carefully read and understood it. It included this:
“Massachusetts grade-level retention reports can be found here:
http://www.doe.mass.edu/infoservices/reports/retention/
The advice provided in the building trades would seem useful in respect to your postings here: “Measure twice, cut once.” (I myself regret not carefully reviewing my most recent message to Jeannie and removing the quotation marks from the second paragraph).
Should you ever open a blank spreadsheet, as I have suggested, an exercise I would encourage you to try would be to start with a hypothetical public district Kindergarten class of 100. Then subtract from that a number based on the typical attrition rate in urban traditional non-selective urban district schools. Do it 12 times, each time reducing the remaining total based on a number reflecting a typical attrition rate. Look at the number that would remain at the end of each year.
If more detailed advice might be helpful, put 100 in cell A1, put whatever trasfer/attrition rate you consider most appropriate for urban traditional non-selective urban district schools in B1 through B13. In cell A2 put
=A1-(A1*B1)
Then copy that formula in cell A2 into cells A3 to A13 so that the spreadsheet adapts the formula to keep subtracting from the previous remainder.
Let us know what your results are.
We can add dropout rates later.
Best wishes.
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Stephen B Ronan,
What is your point with your link?
One City on a Hill Charter Dudley Square retained 42.2% of the students with most of them (28%) being flunked their first year.
Maybe some of those 42% are double flunkees but it looks like over 40% of the students needed 5 years to graduate.
At City on a Hill Charter School Circuit Street a whopping 58% of the students are students who have been retained! At that one it is more evenly divided with retained students in all grades.
But since this is still missing how many new students came in, all it tells us is that City on the Hill flunks lots and lots of kids and that it graduates less than 60% of them even when they have extra years.
What is it about this that impresses you so much?
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^^By the way, you fail to address why the top charters are losing more students than the mediocre ones. Why are you insisting that I compare to “urban public schools” when we have an apples to apples comparison of charters who serve the same kids but don’t have outsize results. You want to claim that every mediocre charter has the same high attrition rates as the high performing ones? Mediocre charters start with 90 kids and are left with 50 a few years later?
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NYC (may I call you by your first name?): “The data you cite is so bad that no one actually knows how many new freshmen come in every year!”
You’re asking a good question. Excellent start.
I think you can adequately determine the information you’re seeking there by looking at a few years’ 9th-grade enrollment data together with 9th grade retention data, I would suggest, at least initially, not trying to be absolutely precise. Just attempt for starters to figure out what you’d expect to be a reasonably close estimate.
In reference to a subsequent message of yours:
NYC: “it graduates less than 60% of them even when they have extra years.”
As you have by now, I hope, discovered on your own, the official state calculations for COAH graduation rates are:
4-Year 69%
5-year 92%
And in a further subsequent message of yours:
NYC: “By the way, you fail to address why the top charters are losing more students than the mediocre ones.”
As I responded to you for the umpteenth time very, very recently:
Quote begin —
And note that once in a while when you offer that opinion, I respond with the material below… to which you never respond….
In Massachusetts, DESE constructs a numeric percentile score that aims to rank schools against others statewide that serve the same or very similar grade levels. My understanding is that it derives from a complex blend of test scores, growth, graduation rates, etc. that’s tough to decipher, and that I might quarrel with if I fully understood it. But it’s the best single score I can find for purposes of ranking schools as to how much better kids read, write and calculate as they progress through school.
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/accountability/report/aboutdata.aspx
So here’s that score for Boston’s 2015 Commonwealth charter schools in the first column, and in the second column, DESE’s attrition score for the same score. Would be pleased if you’d throw those in a scatter chart here, JJ.
for Boston’s 2015 Commonwealth charter schools:
97 — 5.3
93 — 1.6
91 — 5.3
78 — 9.1
71 — 6.9
62 — 12
58 — 8.6
57 — 8
54 — 11
51 — 8
42 — 7.7
36 — 11.3
32 — 10
23 — 18.9
OK, no positive correlation between attrition and performance there. We could imagine that the impact is via school-year rather than summer loss, but with only 82 students total in all grades leaving all Commonwealth charter schools in the city during the school year, that’s not a compelling putative explanation.
End quote–
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Stephen B Ronan,
I’m not trying to “trick” you here. I’m asking you how large the incoming class of 9th graders to COHC is each year. Each year’s 9th grade class is made up of some retained kids and some new students and no one knows how many of each? Sounds like a great way to hide the number who disappear.
But the bottom line is that if 100 new students enter each year, eventually every graduating class should be near 100. And the population of the school in 4 grades after 4 years should be 4 x 100 or 400. If there were only 50 graduating with the 50 who were on the 5 or 6 year plan, those other 50 would still be somewhere in the school. And those larger classes in lower grade would – after a few years – become the graduating class. If you are still graduating 50 after many years there is something going on.
Perhaps that’s why you can’t answer what should be an easy question – how many new 9th grade students come into City on a Hill each year?
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NYC”: “Each year’s 9th grade class is made up of some retained kids and some new students and no one knows how many of each?”
You’re right that I don’t off-hand know the number precisely, and it may change a bit from year to year… but I think we can together arrive at a reasonably close estimate.
Do you think we can figure out from the previous year’s enrollment and the 9th grade retention figures about how many of the total number in a 9th grade are retained? (We may want to take into account some 9th grade attrition also at some point, but let’s hold off on that part for now, for the moment imagine that no freshmen exited during the school year)
NYC: “But the bottom line is that if 100 new students enter each year, eventually every graduating class should be near 100. ”
I’d encourage you to reread this, since I think it may alter your opinion on that subject:
Particularly the part starting: “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… “
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^^Also, why do you keep posting irrelevant numbers from accountability links that you acknowledge are based on data that is not clear to you? There IS data that should be very easily attainable:
How many incoming 9th graders start and why — after so many years — would retention change the fact that there should be 4 x 9th grade class size in the school?
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ARGH…we know charter schools mostly LIE. Charter schools must lie or people will find out how horrid they truly are.
Give me a public school graduate any day.
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Here is one popular way to manipulate graduation rates — control the entering class:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/11/03/nyregion/03eva2.slide-11.html
“Ms. Moskowitz asks a lot of participation from parents, AS A CONDITION of admitting their children. She told one group, “If you know you cannot commit to all that we ask of you this year, this is not the place for you.”
THIS IS NOT THE PLACE FOR YOU. Something that no public school system gets to say in order to claim extraordinarily high results. Because even if a system has specialized schools that take gifted children, it must also have schools for ALL students and the pro-charter folks specialize in attacking the public schools that take all students.
We have charter school chains whose population of students is larger than many small cities and yet they don’t have to spend one penny on any child who they can convince to leave the school. Which creates an astonishingly horrendous motivation for them to get rid of children. That is really how “the market” works and it’s ironic that the promoters of “market forces” plead ignorance of “market forces” when market forces shows up their successes for the frauds they are.
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CROSS POSTED AT https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Charters-and-the-Big-Lie-A-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Corporate-Fraud_Diane-Ravitch-170729-493.htmL
WITH 2 COMMENTS (links at the above address.
1- Carol Burris: The Broken Promises and Scams of the Charter Industry
Carol Burris notes in this article that the NAACP passed a resolution last year demanding a moratorium on new charters until charters cleaned up their actions and policies.
Instead of doing some self-examination and trying to right what was wrong, the charter apologists attacked the NAACP.
Burris reviews some of the notable charter scams and corruption in the past year or so.
Back in the 1990s, when I was a Charter fan, I believed that charters would cost less money (no bureaucracy), but now they demand the same funding as public schools. The slogan of the day was that charters would get autonomy in exchange for accountability.
Now we know, 25 years later, that charters want autonomy with no accountability.
That’s a bad deal for students, teachers, and taxpayers. It does not produce better education. It robs public schools of resources. We are re-creating a dual school system. This is not Reform. It is a massive scam.
2- There is so much shenanigans going on with charters.As you all know, I follow the bog of former UnderSecrearty of Education, Diane Ravitch.
Here is some of what is afoot as the EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXmakes PUBLIC EDUCATION into a marketplace.
Oklahoma: Some Charters Use Application Process to Winnow Students Oklahoma has 29 charter schools. The charter law says that charters are not allowed to base enrollment “on a student’s past academic performance, income level or the abilities of their parents.”However, on their applications, several charter schools in the state require parents to explain their child’s academic abilities in detail, pledge a commitment to volunteer at the school or have the student submit an essay.
Florida: The Corruption and Conflicts of Interest Behind the Charter Industry The Akron Beacon-Joirnal reports on a multi-state charter scandal. In some states, like Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania, charter operators get what they want by making campaign contributions to state legislators and the governor.
Florida is different. The charter operators and members of their families are members of the legislature. They shamelessly engage in self-dealing. You may well wonder: How can this be legal? I don’t know.This article in the Miami Herald by Fabiola Santiagodescribes the flagrant abuse of power that typifies charter legislation.
AND IN FLORIDA A convicted felon who had served four years in prison for grand theft and arson was chosen as president of the board of a small Florida charter school, where she was convicted of stealing from the school. She is heading back to prison.You can’t make this stuff up.
National Education Policy Center: New Research on Virtual Charter SchoolsThe National Education Policy Center has released new research on virtual charter schools that shows variation among those in different states, though all have poor academic results:
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