Gary Rubinstein has been bothered by the lies spread about the college completion rates of charter students. He has pointed out that it is unfair to say that X% of your students in twelfth grade finished college without admitting that twelfth grade is not the right place to begin, since it excludes the attrition that may have occurred earlier.
Among charters, KIPP has been honest in stating that it counts the students who completed eighth grade and persisted to high school graduation. Others say they just can’t find the data to learn when their senior started in their school. Can you believe that?
Gary posts a twitter exchange he had with Richard Whitmire, who clearly did not want to engage with Gary. Whitmire wrote a fawning bio of Michelle Rhee, then a book praising Rocketship Charters. Not a high success rate.
What Gary is looking for is candor, not boasting.
It seems the public is beginning to understand that charter school boasting is built on cherrypicking students and pushing out the ones that get low scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The lie is actually bigger than that. They’re promoting it as “charter students”. It’s as if you said “public school students” had this or that achievement. Which public school students?
I feel as if it’s presented in a misleading way, deliberately. That they knew the headline would dominate and the specificity would be lost.
They do the same thing when bashing public school students. It’s “public school students aren’t prepared” or “our failing public schools” or the US Department of Education with their “dead end” schools by which they mean “public schools”. It’s the opposite of “agnostic”- it’s blatantly promoting one sector and bashing another.
It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t have consequences, but it does. It makes it easy for politicians to pull funding from public schools- they’re all “failing” and full of “dead end” students anyway. Why not use them as a piggybank to fund tax cuts?
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You remind me of how Trump (and apparently DeVos) imagine ALL people of particular racial backgrounds to be the same; if feels as if they are functioning out of a sort of 1950s racial stereotyping.
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When news outlets like the NYTime and & TV pundits promote charters’ slippery PR releases as facts, they undermine any future investigative reporting on the dark side of charters. It’s bad enough that they frame the union’s opposition to privatization as anti innovation, but they ignore what innovation really looks like. I have yet to see charter curriculum & teaching practices put under the microscope by any news outlet.
The reluctance of the NYTimes to report on child abuse & discrimination at Success Academy; the fact that all 3 TV networks are promoting Laurene Jobs’s school building contest is revealing on many levels. Their rich friends antediluvian ideas matter more than those of teachers (aka, union thugs), as long as its poor kids who suffer the consequences of their unproven, craven experiments.
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It seems to me that the Times has done some strong exposes on Success Academy’s child abuse and discrimination. In days of yore, the TImes fawned over charters — I’m talking about the Edison Schools era, 2001 or so — but I would defend its coverage now.
TV coverage is traditionally vapid, so it would be naive to expect anything but gushing about Laurene Powell Jobs’ project.
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carolinesf,
That is exactly right about the NY Times. Six years ago Michael Winerip wrote some very mildly critical but absolutely truthful articles about Success Academy and suddenly someone else took over the beat. For years there were non-stop fawning articles in which the main opposition was always the union opposing a woman who was dedicating her life to serving the most vulnerable and poorest students from a life of failing schools.
Just like Betsy DeVos is doing. She and Eva Moskowitz are two of a kind.
It isn’t until recently — when the NY Times was given incontrovertible proof of the wrong-doings and nasty things going on at Success Academy that they are reporting in a less-fawning way.
And it is interesting that the ONLY reason the NY Times is reporting on this is obviously leaks from the few ethical people who work at Success Academy and finally got sick and tired of watching Eva Moskowitz’ lies treated as if they were the gospel truth because she said them and the SUNY Charter Institute certified them as absolutely the truth.
No reporting happened until a few Success Academy insiders gave a reporter incontrovertible proof.
It’s why SUNY Charter is so corrupt as they had access to all this but looked the other way which is exactly what they should NOT be doing as an oversight agency. They are still looking the other way and should be removed from their position. The fact that they are not is exactly why the NAACP is taking such action.
And hearing the pro-charter folks making their nasty racist attacks on the NAACP because the NAACP understands that it is Daniel Loeb who gives marching orders to the SUNY Charter Institute is shocking, but entirely expected.
Nothing will be reported by the media until the next time some Success Academy insiders find their moral core instead of looking the other way because they like their overpaid jobs.
And I suspect most of those people are long-gone as the ones who will happily “see no evil” are promoted and when they get caught, kept on because they did exactly what they were supposed to be doing.
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In earlier times, KIPP used to lie outrageously about this. Maybe the lying got so obvious that it started to backfire and they have since decided to change that tactic.
Candidly, there is a question to be asked here. If a school has a student population that weeds out lower-functioning/challenged students, does that mean some at-risk students have a better chance of success, surrounded only by other motivated, compliant students? It seems like a valid question, though it’s hard to know what the ideal route for creating that climate would be.
But the question isn’t asked because the charter sector lies and lies and lies about it, and the lies are overall not challenged in the mainstream world.
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FLASHBACK to late 2015 – early 2016
1) JOHN MERROW report:
Merrow: “People say Eva and Success Academy kicks out kids to raise their scores.”
Eva: “That’s crazy talk. You have no proof of that. I defy anyone to find and present such proof.”
–
2) KATE TAYLOR New York Times article:
TAYLOR: “We were given a copy of a Success Academy ‘Got to Go’ list of low-scoring students targeted to be pushed out.”
3) EVA MOSKOWITZ Press Conference:
Black Success Academy principal who wrote ‘Got to Go’ list blubbers away like Jimmy Swaggart, admits he wrote the list, but claims he did this on his own.
EVA MOSKOWITZ: “This list is an anomaly. We’re sick of this Gotcha journalism!” (quickly descends into a paranoid rant about her and Success Academy being persecuted by the media)
FLASHFORWARD to 2017 NAACP report (released late July 2017):
Black parent whose kid was pushed out testifies that a Tiger Team of well-dressed Success Academy officials enters classrooms during the first daus of school, takes notes on which students got to go, then … SHAZAM! … those kids are soon gone.
Here’s the exact quote from NAACP report: (p. 17)
Click to access Task_ForceReport_final2.pdf
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
NAACP REPORT: (p. 17)
“Parents described in detail what this (push out) practice is in action.
“Clarence Sprowler, a former charter school parent in New York City, shared the following:
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
CLARENCE SPROWLER:
“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’s 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 describes how in her school:
” ‘We receive children from charter schools two weeks before an exam — children whom they know won’t make it (i.e. do well, JACK) on the test, so they send them back to the public school.
” ‘After October 31st, we received an abundance of kids because (at this point) the money didn’t follow those kids (back to the public school, and stayed with the charter school).’
“A similar point was made by Ruby Newbold, Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers:
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
RUBY NEWBOLD:
” ‘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 x x x x x x
The thing about the Success Academy Tiger Team. If this is a systematic process that is regularly implemented by Eva —as the parent Clarence Sprowler claims — then this is going to come out with proof There are now hundreds of former and embittered Success Academy teachers and officials who can drop a dime on Eva.
Any non-disclosure agreement that Eva forced on these ex-employees as condition of employment is not going to hold forever This includes the actual Tiger Team members.
Sooner or later, the truth comes out.
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carolinesf wrote:
” the charter sector lies and lies and lies about it, and the lies are overall not challenged in the mainstream world.”
Agreed! Your post just explained exactly why I morphed from someone who thought charters were a great idea to someone who despises the movement.
They are NOT reformers. They are shills, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen who are basically like Donald Trump with perhaps a smidgeon of more self-control. They have left their honesty somewhere else because it is less important than promoting charters.
The charter movement is no better than any commercial enterprise except it doesn’t have to adhere to the “truth in advertising” that used car salesmen must follow.
It’s a shame that they decided that truth was expendable. And given that they deal with CHILDREN – the fact that truth is so expendable to them gives me the creeps.
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And doing the undemocratic signature thing that marks all scoundrels: Never opening themselves up to scrutiny that goes by the name of transparency and independent audit.
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I went door to door a couple of years ago to try to get a public school levy passed. The state had cut our funding so this was just replacement funding- we were asking them to raise their own taxes because the state decided public schools weren’t worth the investment so kept all the state revenue in Columbus, where it went into some black hole of ed reform gimmicks.
Anyway, we had lots of school conversations with people and people here thought charter schools were “magnet” schools- selective. They thought that because ed reform had marketed the schools as “better” than public schools for 20 years in Ohio and people just assumed they were “better”, and therefore selective. None of that is true. Charter schools aren’t (generally) better than public schools in Ohio and charter schools aren’t over-enrolled.
The propaganda effort,while successful, is wildly misleading.
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Well, that’s complicated, because all charter schools are free to be selective in one way or another, which means that they all ARE selective. Within charter school communities, that’s totally accepted as a feature of the school. Then the charter sector turns around and lies to the rest of the world, which accepts the lies. It’s bizarre in the information age that those two stories are told simultaneously.
The fact that charter schools overall don’t do better than public schools despite the selectivity is notable. But parents are attracted to the selectivity, which does weed out the troubled and high-need kids who might be more challenging classmates. Plus of course it’s a point of pride to have your kid pass the screening.
Here in San Francisco, one of our district’s longest-running charter schools, Gateway High School, has used a variety of hurdles in its application process, for example. At various times it has required multiple essay-length answers from the parent and the student on the application form; transcripts and recommendations; you get the idea. I attended a presentation by its founding principal, who also said they screen the applications for such issues as (wink-wink) a student who says he wants to play football when Gateway has no football team.
This is all normal practice in the charter sector. So those parents are actually correct that charter schools are selective — just not that they’re “better.”
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Exactly! It is bizarre that charters get away with a lie that nearly every one of their parents know is a lie. I guess that speaks to the new Trump American values — any lie in pursuit of your own happiness is perfectly fine.
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From talking to some people, I’m not sure the parents know that’s a lie. Some of them may. I especially got it from friends whose daughter is a teacher in a high-profile L.A. charter chain — they totally believed that a feature of the charter is the fact that all parents must commit to a large amount of “volunteering” for the school, weeding out parents who can’t/won’t, not to mention kids with no parents.
I’ve also seen in online discussions charter parents earnestly explaining that this kind of screening is a benefit of the charter, and then abruptly dropping out of the conversation, indicating that they’ve probably been told by someone better informed to keep it hush-hush.
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Charters often cherry pick data the same way they cherry pick students. When profit is a motive, charters will continue to manipulate data to always be seen in a positive light. Hype and spin are all part of the market.
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@RT: I used to work for the Department of Commerce in statistical analysis. Data can be “massaged”, and pushed around to prove or disprove almost any proposition. I used to say “Give me enough data, and I can prove to you, that Rhode Island is bigger than Alaska”.
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The US Department of Education finally met with people from a public school. You know what they discussed?
How it put in “personalized learning”.
Ed reform only pays attention to kids in public schools when they’re 1. selling us ed tech or 2. selling us tests. We’re just big buyers of whatever product they’re selling. That’s our only role. We ARE the biggest buyers, too. Public schools should use that. If you have to buy this stuff (and I’m not sure you do) at least demand the sellers in ed reform offer a good deal. Please don’t buy what Betsy DeVos tells you to buy. She’s not a supporter of your schools. You’ll get bad advice from people who don’t support public schools. Find someone who actually values your school.
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Get ready for an ed reform marketing blitz on this book:
“A new book by the Progressive Policy Institute’s David Osborne – author of the New York Times bestseller Reinventing Government – and an accompanying website that takes you inside the work of creating 21st century schools for America’s students. This is the story of the future of public education – and the people helping to shape it.”
Osborne is the privatization guru. His basic premise is everything that isn’t tied down should be privatized.
Expect uniform, lock-step glowing reviews. The reviews were probably written before the book came out.
We’ll hear harrowing tales of dead end public schools with their mediocre students and icky teachers who belong to labor unions, contrasted with hagiographies about Ivy League graduate charter visionaries.
They’ll have to exclude vast areas of the country – expect MI, OH, IN, and IL to be missing. Those states tend to introduce some inconvenient truths to the ed reform narrative and who cares about them anyway?
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There’s some potentially useful elaboration in the comments section of Gary’s post.
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Yeah, the last post that corrected Gary’s number lowering the graduation rate significantly.
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“Yeah, the last post that corrected Gary’s number lowering the graduation rate significantly.”
It is my understanding that Gary had been constructing a hypothetical scenario when the arithmetic error occurred… not providing actual figures. Please let me know if you think different.
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No, not a hypothetical scenario. Just a different scenario using the data available, in other words calculating the graduation rate from the 5th grade (I believe without going back over it). instead of 8th or 12th grade cohort attrition.
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Gary wrote: “So if a school only has 14 graduates and 7 of them graduate after six years, it is accurate that 50% of their graduates went on to complete college, but if that cohort of 14 students was 40 students three years earlier, then their rate is really 25%. ”
I think he was providing the arithmetic (with multiple errors) for a hypothetical scenario. He wasn’t saying that that was an actual circumstance. So correcting that particular one of his errors did not reflect worse on any actual school, right?
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I thought it was apparent that he was using the “if” statement as part of his analysis, more as a bit of sarcasm, using the numbers from the school itself. I may be wrong. But it, as it was meant, serves to illustrate a the problem with figuring cohort retention rates, again another statistic that is easily manipulated to say whatever one whats those statistics to say.
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“cohort retention rates, again another statistic that is easily manipulated to say whatever one whats those statistics to say.”
When, for example, examining a grade 9-12 high school, analysts need to:
1) Make sure they’re not double counting freshmen, adding them to two successive cohorts if they’re held back a year
2) Have a clearly stated, reasonable policy and procedure for retaining (and presumably tracking), or removing from the cohort, those who transfer out
3) Have a clearly stated, reasonable policy and procedure for totally ignoring, or adding to the cohort, those who transfer in
Gary’s analyses, and most others I see from amateurs around here, typically fail on all three counts. In the hypothetical (I think) example, you alluded to… Imagine the possibility that all 40 of the original cohort transferred or dropped out… Others transferred in during 10th or 11th grade and just some fraction of those constitute the 14 who graduated HS, and 7 who completed college. His calculation of a supposed completion rate ignores any such possibilities.
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Stephen,
You refer to Gary Rubinstein, who teaches math to gifted students, as an “amateur.” What are your credentials?
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“You refer to Gary Rubinstein, who teaches math to gifted students, as an “amateur.” What are your credentials?”
Me? I’m a “gifted” amateur.
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Just what I thought. You have no credentials or credibility.
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Stephen: “oh, dear, Diane, watch out, it looks as if a brick from the building behind you has dislodged and is headed for your human caput.”
Diane, fiercely immobile: “What are you, a structural engineer? You have an architectural degree? How many years have you practiced?”
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Funny, Stephen, but not relevant. If you demean others as “amateur,” you should have the credentials to do so. You don’t.
The brick that’s falling is the whole Charter money grab, about to land on the cherished tradition of public schools that belong to the public. You, sir, are a willing troll for billionaires. They should pay you. You are being cheated.
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My previous answer when you asked “What are your credentials?” was “An ability to read and write.” But since you seemingly found that inadequate I’ll continue casting around with limited success for alternatives.
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Be all this discussion as it may, I would like to offer you an electronic draft copy of my book (will finally have the hard copies next week-what an interesting project it has been) “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education”
In it I discuss the purpose of American public education and of government in general, issues of truth in discourse, justice and ethics in teaching practices, the abuse and misuse of the terms standards and measurement which serve to provide an unwarranted pseudo-scientific validity/sheen to the standards and testing regime and how the inherent discrimination in that regime should be adjudicated to be unconstitutional state discrimination no different than discrimination via race, gender, disability, etc. . . .
The book will be available on Amazon after the eclipse-LOL! Really. But feel free to email me at duaneswacker@gmail.com and I’ll get it, no charge, to you ASAP!
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So, I finish Duane’s book early this evening.
About an hour later, with graceful insouciance, I’m bicycling through town when a young lad has a question:
“Can you ride no hands, Mr. Steve?”
Me: “Sure”
“I hope you don’t fall like you did last time!”
I’ve never been so thoroughly well-armed with arguments about temporal errors, contextual errors, construction errors, labeling errors and the like to argue that the test that had been administered on the prior occasion, perhaps a year or two ago, should not be taken as a credible measure of my current capacities, let alone my almost unlimited potential….
But still I was unable to completely throw the baby out with the bathwater….
He had learned, and now reminded me of, something that I could neither deny nor entirely dispell. And the extra care we took as a result may have been helpful…
I do love the Russell Ackoff quote that starts Duane’s book’s intro… and encountered plenty of other excellent, truly helpful, material new to me further along in his pithy tome… worth checking out….
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Thanks for the kind words, Stephen. I truly appreciate them. And thanks for the feedback!
I will check later today, but I told the printer that I really needed at least some of the books for this Friday as on Saturday I’m going to a friend’s 70th birthday party and he and I have been “intellectual sparing partners” for quite a while. I’ve known his younger brothers (my age) since kindergarten, so it is a family get together of which I am considered part. but I digress. Once I get the books, they will be available through Amazon and/or through me.
I’m glad you enjoyed the book and learned a little! Again, thanks for the kind words.
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Stephen B Ronan,
Nothing convinces me of how fraudulent the entire “research” paid for by pro-charter billionaires is then their absolutely refusal to examine longitudinal attrition rates.
I think even as an ‘amateur’ you understand that you need to track the SAME students in order to find out how many are leaving. You are critical of Gary’s numbers and yet you are NOT critical of the entire charter movement for not having those numbers out there.
Every single college reports on a 4 and 5 year graduation rate of the incoming freshman class. And they don’t report “numbers” so they can hide whether some transfers came in to replace the freshmen who enrolled and then left.
This would be incredibly easy for charters to do — especially the highest performing ones. The fact that they refuse and pretend that a WNYC reporter comparing the number of students in October with the number of students the next October over a single year “proves” that their attrition rate is perfectly fine should give you pause.
I have never heard you criticize THAT — in fact, you often cite it!
So it’s amusing to hear your hypocrisy in pretending that Gary is not using the right numbers while you endorse misleading useless numbers that support the “honesty” of the charter schools that say lots of 5 year old African American children who win the lottery are violent.
I mean, how could you?
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“a WNYC reporter comparing the number of students in October with the number of students the next October over a single year”
I think you’ll find their methodology here:
https://github.com/datanews/charter-attrition-2013-14
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Yes, their methodology compared total numbers, as they acknowledged. So if a charter school lost 50% of their Kindergarten class but the remaining, carefully culled children in the older grades lost almost no students just as you’d expect when you have a chance at going to a “free private school”, it would be hidden as a much lower “overall attrition rate”.
Which is why the charters embraced this very limited study.
It told us nothing, which was the intent.
Although it did tell us one thing — that the highest performing charter with double and triple the suspension rates of any other charter also lost a higher % of students than almost any other charter.
Coincidence? According toiStephen B Ronan, of course it is! Because all the research is done that he believe should be done ever. And like the racist charter operators he admires and tells us to believe when they say so many non-white charter children are violent, Ronan also believes that parents of those non-white children would intentionally remove their children from a high performing charter more frequently than a mediocre one.
And if you believe that, there’s a billionaire hedge funder who runs Success Academy’s board who will enrich you quite a bit.
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“Yes, their methodology compared total numbers, as they acknowledged.”
I’m not sure what you are alluding to in respect to: “total numbers”.
I wonder if you think they compared the total number of students at the beginning and the end of a year.
To arrive at the attrition rate, it looks like they instead divided the number of students discharged (transferred out) during the course of a year by the number in their adjusted enrollment figure (which seems to be the actual enrollment as of Oct 31, plus the number who already transferred out by Oct 31). As they stated it:
[grades]attritionRate: [grades]discharge / [grades]adjustedEnrollment
Based on what I know thus far, I would certainly be inclined to concur with you in a call for more thorough, and readily understood, data collection and presentation systems among state education departments throughout the United States.
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^^^And why did you avoid my question about LONGITUDINAL attrition rates which would tell you how many Kindergarten children are made to disappear from the charter before they reach 3rd, 4th or 5th grade?
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Stephen B Ronan:
There can be no “attrition” by public school students unless their parents are moving away or are transferring to a private or parochial school at great expense.
A student remains the responsibility of the public school SYSTEM unless his parents provide proof that he is being properly educated elsewhere. It isn’t like charters where every child who leaves is no longer their responsibility at all.
That’s why charters should be compared to other charters. And here is the problem:
It seems that in the very few studies that compare charters to charters, the very highest performing charters lose significantly more at-risk children than mediocre charters. And unless you are a racist who believes that non-white parents would pull their children from the very best charters more frequently than from mediocre ones on a whim, that tells you that high-performing charters are not welcoming to far too many at-risk children.
What is your theory for why the WNYC study showed the highest performing charter losing a far higher % of students than other charters?
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NYC PSP: “There can be no ‘attrition’ by public school students unless their parents are moving away or are transferring to a private or parochial school at great expense.”
I think I may know what you are trying to allude to there….
Here is an example of attrition rates at a traditional district high school in Boston:
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/attrition/default.aspx?orgcode=00350525&fycode=2017&orgtypecode=6&
That includes the students who transferred from the Burke to another public district high school in the same Boston district… for example, perhaps the family moved over to East Boston… and wanted the child to attend school close to the new home…
So, never fear, we can indeed readily compare a charter school’s attrition to one or more nearby traditional district schools’ attrition, when you can no longer restrain your eagerness to do so.
What can be trickier, as you may have been trying to get at, is trying to compare an individual charter school to what’s typical across the entire TDS district. The latter may only publish an overall attrition figure for how many leave the district entirely, and not count those who move between schools within the district. That can be overcome by combining all the individual schools’ attrition rates, while weighting them according to the size of the student population. Not the kind of fun task you’d want to make a priority on a weekend summer afternoon… but thankfully others have periodically accomplished that effort. And we can check what they’ve found if you’d like.
NYC PSP: “It seems that in the very few studies that compare charters to charters, the very highest performing charters lose significantly more at-risk children than mediocre charters.”
In case you didn’t have a chance to read this any of the first half dozen times I shared it with you…
Here, 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 —12.0
58 — 8.6
57 — 8.0
54 —11.0
51 — 8.0
42 — 7.7
36 —11.3
32 —10.0
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.
And please see, via the link below, the graphs on pp 32-33 that illustrate this: “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, as demonstrated in the graphs below.”
Click to access item3-tabA1-1.pdf
So it may be time to consider abandoning the bedrock of your belief and enter a yawning chasm of unknowing, then dive into an unfathomably deep sea of statistics, hoping to come up with another theory with broader application. We’ll be waiting with a towel.
NYC PSP: “What is your theory for why the WNYC study showed the highest performing charter losing a far higher % of students than other charters?”
You mean lower than average for NYC district schools and also lower than average for all NYC charter schools, but still more than some other, top-notch, charter schools here in Boston?
I think I know where you’re going with that one. Please, none of that effusive praise again. No, I’m not totally responsible… Aw shucks, I may do my little part, but others contribute also. Don’t forget the teachers… Give them some of the credit… Ahh, now I’m blushing. You’re too kind.
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Here’s Osborne’s twitter. Get ready. It’s 100% charter cheerleading and he will be everywhere when his newest privatization effort comes out.
https://twitter.com/osbornedavid?lang=en
All the “thought leaders” will be on board. Expect an absolute full frontal assault on the public schools 90% of kids attend.
We’ll spend yet another year ignoring or denigrating the schools that exist while our (alleged) public servants pursue their vision, which sadly does NOT include your kid’s school.
Can we get ONE advocate in government for 90% of US kids? That’s too much to ask? ONE. Can we pass a hat and hire a private person? The tens of thousands of people we’re paying seem to be pursuing some alternate school system that exists inside think tanks.
Ridiculous. They spend 90% of their time on 10% of schools and we’re paying them for this! Gates doesn’t pay them. We do.
They offer not one positive to kids or parents in public schools and the most amazing part is they don’t think they have to! We’re SO taken for granted it doesn’t even occur to them.
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You obviously didn’t read the WNYC study or you would see that the highest performing charter chain (by far!) had one of the highest attrition rates of all the charters.
It also had the highest suspension rate but I’m sure that’s just a happy coincidence.
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“the highest performing charter chain (by far!) had one of the highest attrition rates of all the charters.”
Not true.
From WNYC’s report: “Citywide, across all grades, 10.6 percent of charter school students transferred out in 2013-14, compared to 13 percent of traditional public school students.”
My understanding is that Success Academy’s rate was below not only the 13% traditional public school rate but also below the average 10.6% rate for all charters. And it was only 57% as high when compared to local public schools in the same districts as the SA schools.
There were lots of charter schools with higher attrition rates than Success Academy. Look at the data.
You are remembering the fact that their rate was higher than seven of the largest networks of charter schools and extrapolating that to an incorrect statement about “all the charters”.
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Stephen,
The comparison is nonsense. When students leave charters, they return to public schools. When they leave public schools, they move to another city. They certainly don’t go to charter schools. You are comparing apples to lipstick.
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Diane: “When students leave charters, they return to public schools. When they leave public schools, they move to another city. They certainly don’t go to charter schools. ”
Mmmmm. The many kids who arrive for the first time at a charter school after Kindergarten?
Tell us all about storks and charter school students, Diane.
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Stephen,
Your lame humor does not change the fact that the corporate charters are parasites, many of them corrupt.
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Students leave public schools for more than just charter schools and vice versa. Plus they can leave and be homeschooled or choose to go to another private school or to a public magnet school or if there is a school choice option they can choose another public school or a cyber/online school.
But choosing an online/cyber/private/parochia/denominational school may mean expending additional financial resources above and beyond the local school tax levy families are charged annually.
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Children also leave public schools when they are in foster care and move into new homes in other districts.
Many children with behavior related school problems also have learning needs that have gone unremediated.
How can those children, especially those in homes that result in their children being in foster care, be successful at advocating for their school needs when they cannot even fulfill the basic needs of keeping their family intact, safe and cared for?
Is anyone tracking how many students leave public schools because their educational needs are not being addresses sufficiently? And where they go once they leave the school? I know this level of tracking is not happening in our district.
Barely more than deminimus is the standard for FAPE for SpecEd students in many district circuits my state included and we spend the most educational dollars per student with lackluster results….
I do hope this Spring’s recent SCOTUS ruling changes that embarrasing low bar!
Maybe it will be the wake up call that has been lacking for generations now….
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Here is a listing of right wing deformers, which came out before the past election for potus.
AWFUL! We know it’s about $$$$$$$ and power…and segregation between the haves and have nots.
https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2016/04/27/here-are-corporations-and-right-wing-funders-backing-education-reform-movement/210054
Hope the DEMs know they are a huge part of this problem. Education became a for profit enterprise and public schools were/are targeted … KA-Ching.
When will the DEMs fight for public schools? I write to the DNC and the DEMs and keep waiting…but NO RESPONSE…NOTHING. AND THEN THERE’s Rahm’s and others’ actions, which show me they don’t really care about our public schools and our public school teachers, both I consider to be National Treasures, like our National Parks.
As an aside, if you are retired, get your SENIOR NATIONAL PARKS LIFETIME PASS. It is now $10. If you apply online it costs $20, the additional $10 is for processing. At the end of the month, cost for retirees lifetime pass will be raised to $80. I got mine.
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I’m pretty sure that most of the public schools do not routinely bother to collect such data either.
It typically ends with the exit survey regarding what the Seniors are planning on doing after graduation (ie: exit to vocational or post-secondary schools/programs, enter the work force, enter the militairy or some other option.)
So focusing on charters who at least are trying to do so, seems sort of hypocritical when the public schools aren’t even bothering to collect the same data which could be very useful to follow, if they truly want to know how the students did in life after HS graduation.
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Wrong. Public schools collect data on every student who graduates & can track their progress from Pre-K through graduation. High school guidance counselors & administrators keep copious files on kids so that when they transfer, move across the city or the country, the receiving school can provide them with appropriate services.
Public schools not only keep track every student in their system but they are required by federal law to find kids who are homeless, have disabilities, whose families are transient & provide them transportation to school. Public schools are part of a connected, cooperative system- not a competitive business enterprise determined to eliminate their competitiors.
Charters have no system in place like the public schools. Once they expel a kid that child is erased. One of the charter’s favorite claims is they’ve cut out the burdensome bureaucracy. Yet, bureaucracy has a purpose & one is to assure that every kid & family receive the services they deserve.
The consequences of breaking up school bureaucratic system is apparent in NOLA. After the Republicans used Katrina to privatize NOLA school system thousands of kids disappeared. There was no coherent process in place to find kids who dropped out, transferred, were in another charter, or had died.
Just knowing charters are allowed to throw away kids makes me sick to my stomach.
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“Public schools collect data on every student who graduates & can track their progress from Pre-K through graduation. ”
Graduation from where? M was talking about college completion, I think. But perhaps you’re just alluding to HS graduation?
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Oh please- public schools throw away students all the time when they allow barely more than deminimis to be an appropriate standard for FAPE – which up until this year’s recent SCOTUS. ruling was the standard in many district circuits across this nation! It will be extremely interesting how that ruling plays out in public schools across the country this year and into the future though!
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jcgrim- please go back and re-read my post! I noted the following: It typically ends with the exit survey regarding what the Seniors are planning on doing after graduation (ie: exit to vocational or post-secondary schools/programs, enter the work force, enter the militairy or some other option.) <there is no other data collection being done, as far as I’ve been informed, regarding requirements for post-secondary completion rates or how students are making out in life after they graduate or drop out of a public school.>
Also, public schools allow for exactly what makes you sick regarding charters, especially when they allow the barely more than deminimus standard to be used in their district for students….
PS- If you know of such data collection for post-secondary graduation data collection being done by public schools, please enlighten me to where I can find such data.TY!
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I hope someone is writing a book about the charter marketing, the charter money and the charter fraud.
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Stephen you are correct. Maybe I need to go back and re-read but I thought they were talking about tracking how well students did in college completion and that’s what was referring to as to the best of my knowledge most school districts are not collecting any statistics after the student leaves the district upon graduating (or dropping out) and if the charters are doing so and people are complaining about how they are using the data I just think it’s sort of hypocritical for them to be doing so when their public schools don’t even bother to collect such data points at all.
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Certainly, as you suggest far too rare, but there are some real laudable efforts involving public district schools like this here in Boston:
http://www.tbf.org/tbf/55/success-boston
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Stephen,
Maybe this is part of the reason why MA is more successful than most states in regards to educational outcomes. Thank you Stephen for sharing this!
Also though … this still is not the public schools initiating this on their own behalf.
It’s a PRIVATELY initiated endeavor that requires collaboration from various players in the area, including public schools.
It’s NOT being initiated by any great interest in this information originating from the local public school systems themeselves (nor the state or federal education departments apparently either.)
But again, maybe this is part of the reason that MA is in the forefront of educational success in comparison to other states. It’s very interesting to see that this data is considered important to those in Boston!
I believe that NYS is also ‘talking up’ the importance of college and career readiness, as well as ‘timely completion’ in higher education, but it seems like there’s lots of loop holes in what is being said in PR releases and official posts online vs what is actually happening on individual campuses.
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Do public schools don’t track where each student transfers to. (At least I know our public school doesn’t officially have such a model in place.) The only way they find out is if they get a request for transfer of educational records (or through the grapevine.) There is no official placement tracking to follow a student who enters initially and moves around. It’s been an issue surrounding transient students for ages.
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**** correction (there really needs to be an edit option):
Public schools don’t track where each student transfers to. (At least I know our public school doesn’t officially have such a model in place.) The only way they find out is if they get a request for transfer of educational records (or through the grapevine.) There is no official placement tracking to follow a student who enters initially and moves around. (It’s been an issue surrounding transient/highly mobile students for ages.)
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