Gary Rubinstein has a serious problem about people who use data to fib.
He just saw a newspaper article about a KIPP school in New York City where “96%” of the graduates were going to college. This seemed improbable so he did some digging, and of course it wasn’t true.
He writes:
One of the dirtiest tricks played by charter schools is when they claim to have a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate. The first use of this, to my knowledge, was when YES Prep used it to help secure $1 million from Oprah. Over the years, it is very common to see some charter school tout a similar statistic.
When I hear about one of these 100% schools, the first thing I ask is “Is this 100% of the starting cohort, or just the senior class?” It is always just the senior class. Then I ask “How many students are in the senior class?” When the number of graduating seniors is in the 30s, 20s, or even most recently in the case of Success Academy, 16, I ask “How big was the initial cohort?”
In The New York Post the other day, there was an article titled “Bronx charter school sending 96 percent of grads to college.” The school was the one KIPP high school in New York City. According to the article, there were 225 graduating seniors, which, at least, is much bigger than the graduating class of many of these 100% (or 96% in this case) stories.
But 96% of the graduating seniors is not 96% of the original cohort and The Post addresses this by saying “The network said 86 percent of the original freshman class stayed on through their senior year.”
The problem with this statistic is that KIPP is a 5th to 12th grade program, not a 9th to 12th grade program.
So the question is, what percent of the original fifth grade class remained to graduate? Not 96%. Not 86%. Read on.
Why must every statistic be inflated?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This distortion of the truth is very typical of charters that spin their data to present the illusion of excellence. It is all part of building and protecting their brand. Then, the feckless media often help them sell their false perception. When the feckless politicians repeat false assertion, it becomes the perception of “truth” in the echo chamber of privatization. It is all smoke and mirrors designed tp sell the public on privatization.
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And let’s not forget that the entrance process often screens out those who might transfer out, if only having an application process (and I suspect admission is not random; am I wrong?).
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Another issue is what were the college’s admission standards and what percentage of students were still enrolled in the college in their second year. In New Orleans, charters can funnel students to colleges that only require a high school degree and a “C” average. No minimum entrance scores required. Charters are not required to report the percentage of graduates who actually obtain a four-year degree.
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Gulen schools in Texas send their students to a Gulen college that accepts everyone. Miracle! 100% college acceptance.
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Eva Moskowitch schools have 100 percent graduation rate. Oh they didn’t tell you about the cohorts? Oh well does not really matter. One hundred percent is our graduation rate. So, now let the millions roll in and oh by the way public schools are inferior to us because we graduate every body even though our statistics are flawed but what the heck, hey we have fake news right?
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Why must every statistic be inflated and ALSO how could people who claim to be devoted to “data” continue to make this same dumb claim?
The math isn’t difficult. Why do they continue to pump out these dumb press releases when they know it is an exaggeration?
It’s insulting to the kids who DO graduate and go on to college. They’re diminishing that achievement by claiming everyone achieved it. It isn’t even fair to THEIR students.
But it benefits the adults in the charter chain, so they keep doing it.
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Yes, the data-meisters are anything but…
Unless you include shameless massagers and torturers of numbers & stats.
So you need a translation into standard English every time you hear the rheephorm phrase “It’s all about the kids!”
Should read: “It’s all about the adults!”
And only a tiny groups of adults at that.
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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This was actually the issue that made me lose complete faith in the Obama ed department. Duncan spouted these fake stats weekly. Over and over and over, for 8 years.
They were one of two things- innumerate or deliberately deceiving people.
Arne Duncan went to Harvard, which he bragged about constantly. He can’t do 4th grade percentages? No one at the US Department of Education could?
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Ed reformers know they have a political problem, so they’re frantically repositioning themselves as “agnostics”- supporters of both public and charter schools:
“The Colorado brand of charters/choice is very close to the Obama brand—charters as a complement to traditional schools and part of the public education system, with essentially the same amount of government oversight. And no tax vouchers for private schools.”
It isn’t true though. They simply don’t invest in public schools. They rarely mention public schools, unless it to use them to promote charter schools.
They aren’t going to be able to make up for a decade of anti-public school activism by claiming support for public schools the summer before an election. No one believes them.
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Wait a minute! Who are we comparing them with? Other 5-12 cohorts? I am not really familiar with how many districts serve K-12 and, of course, in a big urban district students can go to several different schools that a miles apart and yet remain in the same district. Knowing the attrition in Kipp at the lower grade levels is informative, but it might it be muddying the waters to try to include them in a comparison of high school graduation rates? We already know plenty of reasons why their 9th grade cohort may not look like other 9th grade cohorts making comparisons less than apples to apples.
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It would benefit society to do away with ranking and judging schools and communities, especially when it is done by the media, and even more so when it is done using statistics. Test scores are invalid and unreliable indicators of the quality of a school. Graduation, suspension, and school climate survey numbers are easily manipulated in a myriad of ways, as Gary Rubinstein demonstrated. Schools should be able to focus on educating individuals without having to focus on statistics for the purpose of marketing. The problem here is not just that KIPP and the NY Post conflated graduation rates to mislead the public; the problem is the existence of the charter chain making education a marketed product instead of the public service it is supposed to be. The problem is “school choice”.
(Sorry I don’t really have a quote of the day. I read a beautiful math book a student’s family gave me instead of the Shelf today. I’m stuck at Milton. The best I have is, “The square root of three plus the square root of twelve equals three times the square root of three.” Bhāskara)
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Leftcoast,
I think you have put you finger on the pulse and heart of the matter, ‘marketing’.
Education is not a ‘business’. The ‘teaching’ that passes from adults to the young of a community transcends even our species. It is a natural activity important to most social vertebrates. It is in the interest of not only the individuals involved but, most importantly, it is necessary for the survival of the species and a ‘natural’ activity.
Education should be free, everywhere and at all levels. Those who provide it should be valued by the rest of society (not necessarily with outlandish wealth, but at least with an ‘average’ income and plenty of letters of appreciation). Those who seek to ‘profit’ from education need to be ostracized until they learn how to be human.
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I’ve finally figured out how charters are getting away with quoting these insane graduation statistics, and the answer is unsettling.
Districts around the country mark any child that leaves a high school after the 9th grade as accounted for as long as the student moves into a program where there is an official transcript request/cummulative-swap. That child then counts positively for the school’s graduation rate…the kid is considered someone else’s problem and the school takes credit for “graduating” him/her. The other agency can be another school, a detention facility, the state’s Dept of Ed (e.g., kids leaving early after having passed a high school-equivalency exam), and so forth. What doesn’t count is if the child becomes home-schooled, drops out, passeses away, disappears, emigrates back to his/her home country, is deported, and so forth. The rationale for this is that prior schools should not be penalized once the child is another institution’s responsibility.
So, we have KIPP NY, with its 404 original 9th graders. After four years of kids coming and going it was able to account for 387 (96%) of them. This is, itself, an achievement [inner-city schools around the country have historically had rates ranging from 50%-70%], but not surprising when you consider that KIPP and other charters are enrolling only those students with parents keen on placing them in what they initially think is a good environment…parents that have jumped through numerous hurdles prior to the student ever enrolling.
Kids pushed out of KIPP, Success Academy, and most of the other charter schools around the country end up enrolling in a nearby public school and, in a sick, ironic twist, count as a positive tally with regards to the school’s graduation rate. Culling is taking place early on, for the most part, and the parent is hypersensitive about placing his/her child in a different locale. Along with dropping kids before testing rolls around, there is another incentive to give problematic students the boot…
It’s a sick, sick phenomena.
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