Gary Rubinstein learned something new from a Success Academy press release. It was supposed to demonstrate the chain’s “low” attrition rate, to explain why the 73 first grade students in the original class dwindled to only 16 high school graduates. But Gary noticed something unintended: how many students were left back.

Categories Graduation rates, Harlem Success Academy

21 Comments Post your own or leave a trackback: Trackback URL

GregB says:

July 6, 2018 at 12:04 pm

Don’t you mean scholars? 😂

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  July 6, 2018 at 12:11 pm
  
  Ugh! I hate the misuse of that word. A student in elementary school is not a scholar. That is a term of honor, recognizing people for their dedication to study over many years. It is earned, not assumed or given.
  
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  - GregB says:
    
    July 6, 2018 at 1:37 pm
    
    Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
    
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  - dianeravitch says:
    
    July 6, 2018 at 1:50 pm
    
    Understood
    
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Chiara says:

July 6, 2018 at 12:25 pm

“Of course the issue here, and other charter schools as well as some charter cheerleaders have mentioned this, is the fact that Success Academy does not backfill. So if a local school loses 18% of their students but then replaces them with other students (which includes, of course, students who were booted from Success Academy and other charters) then it doesn’t inflate their test scores. But if you don’t backfill and the students you lose are your weaker students then of course your test scores will benefit from this.”

This is the whole thing right here. That all these fancy people, including Arne Duncan, could refuse to admit this simple fact for A DECADE makes me doubt the integrity of the whole “movement”.

Not the same! Not the same as my public school! There’s attrition, sure, but they also add!

This isn’t complex mathematics. It’s addition and subtraction. It’s 6th grade percentages. How can anyone trust analysis by people in ed reform who ignore this?

Moskowitz could have presented this honestly. She could have said “while we don’t have admission requirements we essentially create a selective school thru attrition”

But she can’t. Because central to her argument for system-wide privatization is she’s an open enrollment public school.

Selective public schools are actually FAIRER, because the selection process is transparent. No one has any idea what metric she’s using to get to 16 graduates. They just disappear into the public schools she denigrates and are never heard from again.

She should thank the public schools. They make her schools possible.

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Chiara says:

July 6, 2018 at 12:34 pm

This happens again and again in ed reform. It took a decade for Ohio charter cheerleaders to admit that charter students were taking MORE state funding out of public school than the state was putting in. The state contributes 4k to Columbus Public Schools for each student. When that student leaves the public school for a charter they take 7k with them. That’s 3000 dollars that isn’t coming from the state. Where did it come from? It came from the students who remain in the public schools. Each remaining Columbus public school student contributes toward the charter sector. They’re getting screwed.

This is addition and subtraction, yet they denied it for a decade. We had this huge breakthrough last year where one of the legislative charter leaders in the statehouse admitted it, but good God, why did it take so long? And why haven’t they fixed it?

I’ll tell you why- because if they funded charter schools at the rate they actually cost instead of pulling the difference from public school students they’d have to admit that 2 systems are more expensive than one system.

How can they remain credible promoting flim flams like this?

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Chiara says:

July 6, 2018 at 12:45 pm

Is there any state or issue where the difference between “public education advocates” and “ed reformers” shows up more starkly than Arizona and school funding?

“Arizona Educators United said it turned in more than enough signatures Thursday to get its tax-on-the-wealthy initiative to fund schooling on the November ballot.

Mesa teacher Josh Buckley, who chaired the Invest in Ed campaign, said the group had collected 270,000 signatures to turn over to the Arizona Secretary of State’s office. The campaign had to submit at least 150,642 valid signatures by Thursday’s deadline to get the proposal in front of voters.”

Public school supporters are working on funding public schools. Guess what ed reformers are working on? Expanding vouchers.

The two issues will be competing on the ballot. It’s public school supporters versus ed reformers.

These people do NOTHING for public school students. They simply do not advocate for students in public schools. In fact, they pour money into political initiatives that will directly harm them. If you’re voting for these ed reform politicians and you have a kid in a public school you are voting against your kid’s school. They don’t even pretend to offer anything valuable or beneficial to public school students. Most of the time they never mention them, unless they’re selling them some garbage ed tech product.

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NYC public school parent says:

July 6, 2018 at 12:59 pm

Wow, they are actually ADMITTING that they use “retention” regularly? Years ago I posted on a think tank fawning article about Moskowitz and some PR hack (or maybe Moskowitz herself) addressed my attrition data by basically admitting half the missing kids were just flunked.

Notice that when they talk about their amazing curriculum they NEVER mention the fact that they find that lots of their students need extra years to manage it. And that’s why you know these people are totally corrupt. Can you imagine if they had – from the first – acknowledged that many at-risk kids — even the ones with the most motivated parents who have signed contracts promising to do whatever is asked of them — need extra years to complete the curriculum?

Think about how that would have changed “reform”. Instead of forcing public school teachers to rush thorough a curriculum that is moving too fast — and calling them failures if their students didn’t learn it all — there would have been an understanding that for some kids, moving slower is a good thing. And instead of calling them despicable failures and humiliating those kids, there would be an understanding that children learn at different paces and may suddenly make great leaps forward but not at a prescribed time.

Imagine if a school limiting itself to the most motivated parents and kids still couldn’t teach the curriculum to many of them in a year and people acknowledged that instead of lied about it and pretended that all good teachers could do just that.

I know that Eva Moskowitz’ bank account would not be as full had she told the truth. Lots more money in misleading the public. As her endorsement of Betsy DeVos obviously proved.

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- Chiara says:
  
  July 6, 2018 at 3:18 pm
  
  “Imagine if a school limiting itself to the most motivated parents and kids still couldn’t teach the curriculum to many of them in a year and people acknowledged that instead of lied about it and pretended that all good teachers could do just that.”
  
  Politicians bought it hook line and sinker. Moskowitz gets no actual questions at these marketing events they hold for her- it’s 100% cheerleading.
  
  It’s an echo chamber, and it gets worse every year ed reformers are in power because they only hire their own.
  
  I don’t think you can get a job in education policy unless you hew to the ed reform line. It’s lockstep. They culled all the dissenters and marginalized them as “self interested” or “supporting the status quo”
  
  Now it’s up to unpaid bloggers to debunk the stats they churn out. None of the paid people do any real analysis. If they do they’d get kicked out of the club.
  
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Susan Lee Schwartz says:

July 6, 2018 at 1:15 pm

posted at OEN
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Success-Academy-left-back-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Charter-Schools_Left-Wing-Lies_Left-Wing-Spin_Public-Schools-180706-343.html#comment705645

with my comment which has embedded links back to this blog.

No wonder the public is confused but the media hype about charter schools as ‘choice,”
“Recently,a study was released that made the absurd claim that public schools make academic gains when a charter opens close to them or is co-located in their building. To those of us who have seen co-located charters take away rooms previously used for the arts, dance, science, or resource rooms for students with disabilities, the finding seemed bizarre, as did the contention that draining away the best students from neighborhood public schools was a good thing for the losing school.”

The only thing charter schools are good for, is enriching the operators. “The former leader of Family Foundations Academy was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for embezzlement.” https://exceptionaldelaware.wordpress.com/2017/12/07/ex-family-foundations-academy-leader-sean-moore-gets-18-months-in-federal-prison/

“But the winner of the sweepstakes for charter corruption is Florida.”

Florida: The Corruption and Conflicts of Interest Behind the Charter Industry

There, legislators with direct ties to the charter industry vote to take away money from public schools and give it to their charter chains. In Florida, taxpayers and children are ripped off every day by unscrupulous charter profiteers.

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Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

July 6, 2018 at 1:16 pm

Success Academy? How about “UN-success Deform Academy”…for this name is TRUE.

JUST DO A 180 degree turn and that is the truth.

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NYC public school parent says:

July 6, 2018 at 1:33 pm

If Gary Rubinstein is reading this, I have some questions:

Moskowitz’ chart seems to imply that at no time after the first day of first grade were students added, even though Success Academy did allow backfilling up to 3rd grade in those first years. Is it likely that not one student was added, or is that another way to hide that more students left? Has anyone confirmed that all 16 graduates were from that first grade lottery winner cohort and entered the first day of first grade instead of replacing students drummed out?

Did you notice that once again, Eva Moskowitz uses as her all-knowing source the very questionable single year study done by WNYC’s Beth Fertig and Jenny Ye. That was the study that showed that Success Academy had one of the very highest attrition rates of any NYC charter network – something Moskowitz conveniently forgets to mention in her blog. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional that Moskowitz didn’t notice that other charter networks with far worse test scores didn’t have as many parents supposedly running for the door. Moskowitz has no explanation for such a phenomenon except her usual racist dog whistles implying that ignorant African-American parents prefer mediocre charter schools to high performing ones and their kids are disproportionately violent in their Kindergarten classes.

I wonder if Beth Fertig and Jenny Ye are proud to be helping the person who insists she only suspends violent 5 year olds and it’s just that so many violent 5 year olds won the lottery in a school with no white students that she couldn’t help but suspend them. I wonder if Beth Fertig and Jenny Ye are proud to be helping the woman who insisted that every Senator vote to confirm Betsy DeVos because her policies were so terrific.

Fertig has a long history in helping to justify Moskowitz’ targeted attacks on vulnerable African-American kindergarten children, but I wonder if Jenny Ye likes being complicit. After all, it is their word we take that Moskowitz’ attrition rate should never ever be looked at closely because – Fertig and Ye tell us — it’s just because African-American parents hate top performing charters and like the mediocre charter networks better. Fertig and Ye reassure us there is nothing to see here because if a top performing charter network is losing more students than mediocre charter networks, they are very, very certain it is because the African-American parents who leave Success Academy hate top performing schools. Shame on them.

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- NYC public school parent says:
  
  July 6, 2018 at 7:22 pm
  
  ^^^Actually, I looked at Gary’s numbers again and there is an odd discrepancy between Moskowitz’ chart and Gary’s chart.
  
  It does appear that the state lists more students in that cohort than Moskowitz claims in both 2007-2008 (4 extra students) and in 2009-2010 (3 extra students). That does suggest new students are being brought in. However, those extra students somehow disappear from the count because what is indisputable is that there were only 16 total at graduation.
  
  Were there actually an additional 7 or 8 students added after first grade began? Did those new 7 get counseled out like the other missing ones (but not counted) or did they replace some of the original 72 (which means the attrition of those original 72 is much higher than Moskowitz is claiming.)
  
  The other shocking thing is that if Moskowitz is claiming that the class below that original class is full of students from that original class who were held back, that means the attrition rate of that 2nd class — the ones who started in Kindergarten — could be even larger than expected.
  
  If Moskowitz had a shred of decency she would be absolutely transparent about these numbers because without knowing whether it is true that 75% or 90% of the economically disadvantaged kids who win the original lottery don’t make it through, we can’t really say if her schools are utter failures or just mediocre successes.
  
  But then again, strongly endorsing Betsy DeVos and insisting over and over again in every news organization that will publish it that DeVos MUST be confirmed for the good of children in America doesn’t really go along with having any moral compass, does it?
  
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Laura H. Chapman says:

July 6, 2018 at 1:40 pm

” Has anyone confirmed that all 16 graduates were from that first grade lottery winner cohort and entered the first day of first grade instead of replacing students drummed out?”

An excellent question, and also one with broader implications for research because the data will of necessity be personal Identifiable Information for each student (PII)–problematic with FERPA unless parents sign off on that or the school requires signing off as a condition of enrollment.

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- NYC public school parent says:
  
  July 6, 2018 at 2:20 pm
  
  Actually, any of the reporters brought in to do fawning profiles of the 17 (and then the 16) students graduating could have asked them that question. Did you start at the beginning of first grade? Did all of the other seniors start the first day of first grade? They could have chatted up parents asking about where their kid spent Kindergarten and what made them decide to apply in the middle of Kindergarten. That’s how you learn.
  
  It would not have been scientific but at least it would have shown some attempt to confirm the claims Moskowitz makes.
  
  Instead, education reporters treat her like they did Trump in 2016. They are stenographers for her claims (“we only suspend violent kindergarten children”) and at most will post “some union hacks who have an agenda question Moskowitz claims” because those reporters are too lazy or too co-opted to actually do the work to inform the public when someone’s claims are not true.
  
  What Gary found when he looked closely at the numbers is that by 10th grade, over 30% of the “remaining” students from first grade had been flunked at least once and were no longer with their cohort. We already know that by 11th grade there were only 9 economically disadvantaged students — less than half the 20 who hadn’t been left back. And then another 4 disappear, so if some or most of those were from the small number of economically disadvantaged students who remained, there could have been as few as 5 poor students graduating. In a city where over 70% of the students are economically disadvantaged.
  
  In other words, something Eva Moskowitz doesn’t mention on her blog post:
  
  Her first 2 grades of Success Academy had 65% free lunch, which means it is very likely there were 46 or 47 economically disadvantaged students in that first grade class of 72.
  
  And yet only 9 economically disadvantaged students were left by the beginning of 11th grade. And another 4 students went missing before graduation — who may have been from those 9 who were among the poorest — it is possible as few as 5 or 6 economically disadvantaged students remained.
  
  That would be only 10 – 20% of the economically disadvantaged students who started first grade.
  
  So this charter network that ONLY takes the poor children from the most motivated families and as many as 90% of those students aren’t graduating with their cohort? What does that say?
  
  I believe it says that this charter network is a failure in everything but public relations.
  
  Remember, the NY Times reported exactly what Moskowitz says to parents:
  
  “Greeting parents coming to pick up their children. 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.”
  
  Moskowitz only takes parents who WANT what she offers. And yet she still fails with so many of their students and blames it all on them.
  
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Chiara says:

July 6, 2018 at 3:22 pm

My public school should do this. Drop 80% of the students and then brag about it.

Oh, wait. They can’t. They’re not in NYC and they don’t have a huge public system backup to take up the students they discharge.

People in the community might notice if 3/4’s of the students were just wandering around without a school.

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- ciedie aech says:
  
  July 7, 2018 at 12:55 pm
  
  BINGO: Oh wait, they CAN’T.
  
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Chiara says:

July 6, 2018 at 3:29 pm

I read a lot of ed rerformers and I’d just like to put public school students, teachers and parents on notice:

Realizing they offer absolutely nothing of value to the vast majority of families, ed reformers have come up with a new idea. They’re going to sell us cheap garbage ed tech as “personalized learning”

Do not fall for it. Taking advice ON public schools from people who OPPOSE public schools is suicide.

Do NOT buy the products they’re pushing. You will regret these purchases in the same way you now probably regret adopting their insane testing schemes and teacher ranking systems. You blew BILLIONS on that. Don’t get suckered again.

Eva Moskowitz would never run her schools according to the advice of people who oppose charter schools. You’re under no obligation to adopt advice from people who oppose public schools. It’s nuts to do that, and for God’s sake don’t PAY them for it.

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Laura H. Chapman says:

July 6, 2018 at 3:42 pm

See the parent evaluation form here. Another reason to kick our students?
https://www.successacademies.org/handbooks/elementary-school-handbook/

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- Ponderosa says:
  
  July 6, 2018 at 6:12 pm
  
  OMG–report cards for parents!
  
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- LeftCoastTeacher says:
  
  July 6, 2018 at 8:17 pm
  
  I also gather from the handbook (thank you) that SA students are not allowed to transfer to other SA schools, “In general, once a scholar is admitted to an SA school, there is no ability to transfer to a different SA school.” So much for choice. Students “trapped in failing” SA punishment schools need better options.
  
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