Do you believe in miracles? Do you want to believe that a charter chain—unlike public schools— can graduate every student, no matter what their economic status, and send them on to college? We all want to believe in heroic teachers and miracle schools. The reality is often not as impressive in the cold light of day. Incremental change is a stabler, more reliable base for lasting change but it is not so exciting as miracles.
Along comes Jersey Jazzman to debunk the latest miracle charter story promoted by the New York Daily News.
The story and follow-up editorial cited this statistic about Democracy Prep Charter High Schools:
“According to the network, last year 189 of the 195 seniors in its three high schools that had graduating classes went on to college. And although the sample size is small (the network has graduated fewer than 400 students), the network estimates that 80% of its graduates either are still in college or have graduated.“
Wow! A 97% graduation rate!
The first reason to question the claim is that the article was written by the education policy director of a rightwing think tank, the Manhattan Institute, whose job is to promote privatization.
But Jersey Jazzman had something that the Manhattan Institute didn’t acknowledge and the Daily News didn’t investigate: data on attrition rates from the state education department website. Think of it! Facts! It turns out that 40% of the students enrolled in Democracy Prep in ninth grade left before the end of senior year. Shouldn’t that be included in the story? Why leave it out? In the Democracy Prep School in Camden, “This year’s seniors at Freedom Prep were in a class of 78 freshman. By the fall of their junior year, they were down to 33 students. 58% of the freshmen of the Class of 2018 at Freedom Prep had left by their junior year.” That’s an inconvenient fact for a “miracle” school.
The fault, Jersey Jazzman points out, is not so much with the hired PR flacks nor the thinky tank PR guys as it is with the journalists who swallow these incredible stories without investigating, who forget that miracles should always invite skepticism rather than a dogged will to believe.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Local public schools do this, too, regularly.
No, as a matter of fact, they don’t do this as a matter of policy and practice, as charters do.
Students who leave one public school usually attend another one elsewhere, whereas charter schools “encourage” low-performing or behaviorally-challenging students to leave, and those students also usually wind up in the public schools. As Jersey Jazzman and Gary Rubinstein have repeatedly demonstrated, the students charters “counsel out” are not replaced, unlike in real public schools.
It’s called creaming, and along with lazy, credulous and/or ideologically-driven media coverage, it’s how charter schools conjure their “miracles.”
But public schools pad the numbers in other ways. They can’t pad numbers on attrition because public schools take every child, but they pad the numbers for students filing paperwork to enter college(the kid may never go to college), they boast how many take the SAT (all HSers take the SAT in my area….starting in 9th grade), they boast AP (every child is pushed into AP whether they should be or not). Public schools do their fair share of skewing the numbers especially in wealthy school districts. No one ever questions these numbers either. It’s all a bunch of lies.
Yes, Lisa M, they most certainly do the things you mention, but that’s largely a result of the pressures faced under the numbers game of so-called reform. In the not-so-distant past these kinds of abuses were far less common.
The main point is that for public schools, this kind of abuse is the destructive and dishonest consequence of three decades of so-called reform, whereas for charters, it’s standard operating procedure, essential to their very business model.
Janice: The REAL public schools accept all the kids all year long, they accept whomever walks through the door. No time sensitive lotteries, no special times to register the child, no special agreements/contracts to sign off on (as some charter schools require) and no counseling out of kids.
You are right Joe, thanks for your reply. I see the false equivalence talking points are out in force today.
No, they don’t. Here in the Show Me State the public school is held responsible to get verification as to where a student transfers to, goes to another school due to discipline issues, quits and doesn’t go anywhere. The district has to get verification from the school that the students is going to actually has enrolled there, otherwise the student counts as a “dropout” in the originating school’s performance statistics. Not always an easy thing. Plus the schools have to contact all graduates and determine whether they are in school, working, in the services or not. If not that counts against the school performance data.
Stick around Janice, you may learn quite a bit about public schools from those who live, work and breathe in that sector by reading the comments on this site.
Pretty much the same for Tennessee. We do not have to try to contact graduates however.
Okay, does “attrition rate” mean the SAME students who entered in 9th grade graduate or does it mean at or about the same NUMBER of students graduate?
I ask because of “backfilling” (or the lack of it). If Democracy Prep had backfilled and they had lost 58% of the original 9th graders but backfilled and replaced those students with other transferees and thus had a senior class equal in number to the freshman class is that counted as “attrition”?
As with most educational terms, the definition of “attrition” is quite slippery having different meanings for different people using the term similarly but not the same. One would probably have to go to the state education department to get each state’s working definition and those aren’t all going to be the same, if they even have a definition.
As I explain in the post, these are the size of the grade level enrollments each year. NYSED and NJDOE data do not account for attrition, backfill, and retention.
The data is what it is. But the burden of proof is on those making the affirmative claims for Democracy Prep. I am pointing out something in the data that should get us asking questions. If Democracy Prep has and answer, let’s hear it.
Thank you for your interesting post about Democracy Prep.
One thing — the pro-charter critics on your blog who claim that “retention” accounts for shrinking class size are just making it up.
I looked at the NYSED data for Democracy Prep Harlem Charter School for 9th – 12th grade and retention would only justify shrinking class sizes for the very first cohort of students. In each of the following years, retained students from the year ahead would replace students held back as that cohort progressed to the next grade. There would be no reason for class sizes to shrink from year to year except the first year.
But in fact, what indicates you are right about attrition is that if you look at the class sizes from 9th to 12th grade at that school, large numbers of retained students just aren’t showing up. If you look at the oldest grade and say “oh the missing 22 students have been retained”, they would have to be among the students in the grade behind. But that grade is also much smaller than the class moving up to it so adding in those missing students mean that even MORE students from the grade behind have been retained. And eventually that rationale that the pro-charter folks make catches up to them. Because after a few years the 9th grade class would have to include far more students spending their 2nd year in 9th grade than new ones. And then it gets embarrassing for the charter folks claiming it’s all because of retention because eventually they have to claim that classes made up largely of already retained students are only shrinking because a lot of students were retained! And soon the entire 9th grade would have to be repeaters!
Backfilling seats hides attrition so it would definitely be interesting to hear whether Democracy Prep backfills in 10th or 11th grade. Then they’d have an even higher attrition rate than it appears.
When you scratch the surface of a “miracle,” you generally find a myth.
AMEN, retired teacher. People are so gullible, it’s scary.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The alleged miracle corporate charters schools that are not miracles. It’s all a lie, a sham, a shell game.
If it seems too good to be true, approach it with doubt. That goes for anything.