José Espinosa is the Superintendent of the Socorro Independent School District In Texas. This article appeared in the El Paso Times.
Superintendent Espinosa thinks the public should know the truth about charter schoools that claim to have a 100% college acceptance rate. They are lying. Rightwingers in Texas and charter promoters are planning on a big expansion of charters in the state, peddling their wares with unverified claims about their “success.”
He writes:
When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Dating back to 1954, the Better Business Bureau used this catchphrase to alert the public of shady business practices.
In the new era of school choice, this catchphrase can be used to alert the public of misleading business practices by charter schools in order to protect our most prized possessions — our children.
Every year, certain charters tout a 100 percent college acceptance rate as their major marketing pitch to lure parents away from traditional public schools.
The reality is the public isn’t told acceptance to a four-year university is actually a graduation requirement at some charter schools.
It specifically states in certain charters’ student/family handbooks that a student may graduate and receive a diploma ONLY if the student is accepted into a four-year university and has completed 125 hours of community service.
Reading lengthy student/family handbooks carefully before considering charters is just as important as reading the fine print before signing contracts.
We must also ask, “Why is Corporate America bashing our traditional public schools, yet it doesn’t demand transparency or accountability from charter schools?”
While 100 percent of charter seniors get accepted to college as required, the public has a right to know the percentage of charter students who didn’t make it to their senior year.
Ed Fuller, Pennsylvania State University professor, found in one of his studies of a particular charter network that when considering the number of students starting in the ninth grade as a cohort, the percentage of charter cohort students who graduated and went on to college was at best 65 percent.
In other words, 35 percent of ninth-graders at a charter network didn’t make it to their graduation….
Just like the BBB, it is our duty to alert the public.
If charters insist on boasting about 100 percent college acceptance rates, then traditional public schools must insist that our communities be fully informed.
Charters’ news release could read: “Since we require students to get accepted to a four-year university in order to graduate, our seniors have a 100 percent college acceptance rate. However, more than 30 percent of our cohort students in the ninth grade didn’t graduate from our charters. Therefore, we had less than 70 percent of our cohort students graduate and get accepted to college…”
Lauding charters who lack transparency and discount students while bashing El Paso’s public schools disparages the hard work, relentless dedication and success of Team SISD.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“It specifically states in certain charters’ student/family handbooks that a student may graduate and receive a diploma ONLY if the student is accepted into a four-year university and has completed 125 hours of community service.”
It’s also nuts. So students can’t graduate if they want to go to a community college or right to work?
Is it just checking a box for marketing purposes? So if you’re not actually planning on attending a “four-year university” you have to apply to one and get accepted because the charter school needs a number to quote to sell the school to parents?
The policy itself is nonsense.
Who verifies that the number is even accurate? The private board that is handpicked by the charter operator?
Has anyone outside even verified any of the claims? Why would I accept anything they report without independent oversight and verification?
The same is true for the many claims made by charters. They are known for shady practices and cherry picking data the same way they cherry pick students. Any reported data should have to come from an independent auditor, but charters eschew any attempts to regulate or oversee them. They are used to getting free money without any strings. That is why there has been so much waste, fraud and embezzling. Charters are taxation without representation for local communities. For tax payers it is like throwing money down a dark hole and hoping for the best.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The term “Buyer Beware” should not even be attached to the word “education”. There is something wrong with a society when it places a sale tag on the value of a basic education.
letting the ‘privileged’ consumer decide the game
This article is spot-on, and illustrates the lengths the charter industry will go to lie about their school “quality”. Oakland’s charter high schools have some of the worst cohort attrition rates compared to the district schools, 40% or higher, including Baytech, our infamous Gulen school and American Indian. A couple of years ago, I was curious as to how bad these rates were, and it turns out that the dropout rates for district high schools and the attrition rates for charter high schools were virtually identical. Charter high schools would boast 1 or 2 dropouts and 100% grad rates. It was so obvious that they used this as a model to sell their schools. And yet our GO-bought school board just ignores it. This model and resulting churn is so disruptive to the kids’ education, and as a result, these pushouts are at risk for dropping out if they return to the district schools. And which school has to report the dropout stat? Why, the district school, of course.
“Oakland’s charter high schools have some of the worst cohort attrition rates compared to the district schools, 40% or higher, including Baytech, our infamous Gulen school and American Indian.”
It’s indefensible to report it as “100%” yet they have been doing it for years. Arne Duncan used to crow about “100%” graduation rates for schools that lost half their students over 4 years. It’s innumerate. They must know how percentages work. 100% OF WHAT is the essential question.
If my local public high school starts with 200 students and ends with 20 who graduate can they report that as “100%”?
In other cases these charter schools have a few colleges lined up to automatically accept any of their graduates. These graduates usually need remedial, non-credit coursework, which benefits the colleges. And if those students don’t end up graduating from college after paying for all that remedial non-credit coursework, well, they were never guaranteed to graduate, were they? Only to get accepted.
In California, charters can report 20 kids out of 100 at the end as 100% grad rate because California looks at stats based on the 12th grade cohort. This cohort is calculated as transfers in, transfers out, and deaths. With district schools, this isn’t an issue because district schools backfill, hence the “transfer in” number. Also, that grad rate calculation includes dropouts in the 12th grade cohort (in the denominator). If a charter school doesn’t report dropouts, they don’t have to include them in the denominator and the denominator gets smaller, thus also skewing the grad rates in their favor.
So, mathematically, a district school that starts with 100 kids, ends up with 100 kids in the 12th grade cohort and graduates 80, has a grad rate of 80%. A charter school that starts with 100 kids, sheds 80 kids and ends up with 20, can graduate all 20, gets to brag about a 100% grad rate (better than district schools!). It’s a complete racket, but it’s both the backfill piece and the dropout piece that make a big difference. Before charter schools existed, no one would anticipate that a school would not want to fill seats. From an ADA/budgeting standpoint it makes no sense to do that. But charters realized that they could use it to their advantage. For them, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
And how many of those charter school HS seniors, the ones that were allowed to graduate, that were accepted into a college, went on to attend a college and eventually graduate with a BA or a higher degree?
I want answers to that question too.
In the studies that Prof Ed Fuller conducted of IDEA charters, the students who entered college didn’t last long because they were poorly educated. Fuller was at U of Texas, now Penn State