Gary Rubinstein began his career in Teach for America but became a career math teacher in New York City. He also writes a blog, where he has achieved fame and notoriety as the nation’s ultimate fact-checker of “miracle schools” whose claims are too good to be true.
As he explains in this post, he first entered the arena of miracle-School mythbusting when he heard Arne Duncan boast about a charter school in Chicago that had once been a low performing public school. That charter, Urban Prep, Duncan said, now had a 100% graduation rate and a 100% college acceptance rate. Rubinstein checked the data and found that the school had high attrition and low pass rates on state tests, lower than Chicago public schools.
“Urban Prep Charter School in Chicago is the original ‘miracle school.’ Seven years ago at the Teach For America 20th anniversary alumni summit, I heard Arne Duncan talk about how they had 100% of their senior class graduate and how 100% of them went on to college after they shut down the public school in that building and replaced it with a charter school.”
He was roundly criticized by charter trolls on Twitter but he was unfazed.
Now he finds this charter, with its miraculous outcomes, has expanded to a chain of three, all boasting the same 100% college acceptance rates. But the city may close one of them for low performance.
Rubinstein checked the data. See what he found.
It is astonishing. All three campuses perform worse than the Chicago public schools. The real miracle is that they still have a 100% college acceptance rate.
Where is the New York Times?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A bit unrelated but regarding public sector unions and individuals not being mandated to pay union dues now because individuals may not agree with the political spending of their unions.
So, the question is why are individuals then mandated to pay taxes to the federal government wheras an individual may disagree with how the federal gov spends the money on political agendas…how the federal gov gives away money to illegals and others. If I disagree I am still mandated to pay taxes.
However, if I disagree with my unions spenditures I do not have to pay union dues….Works for one but not the other?
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Gary is heroic. His work should be unnecessary, but the people who are paid to research all of this have been a captive audience (some paid to be so). Hopefully his findings will continue to spread.
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The lazy education writers at the NYT should do their homework before they publish their “miracle” stories. Publishing false results makes the NYT guilty of being a purveyor of fake news. Kudos to Gary Rubinstein and Diane for finding out the truth and letting the public know the facts rather than the “reform” smoke and mirrors version of these schools.
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A claim of 100% anything is a sure sign of false advertising.
You dont even need to know the details.
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Even the old ads for Ivory soap claimed that it was 99.4% pure.
Pure what, I don’t know.
But not 100%.
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🙂
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And it floated!!!
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Crap also floats.
As does oil.
As do witches, according to Monty Python logic.
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I guess if a charter school FAILS students, then the pundits think that is success. OMG. Everything is upside down.
Today, “DOWN” seems to be “UP.” Guess some people went to schools of bs where they learned how to lie.
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Ed reform has really suffered from the focus on marketing. .
They consistently exaggerate claims of success, and the errors never get corrected because it’s such a closed off echo chamber no one does any real analysis.
They do it over and over. Right now they’re all pushing “porfolio districts” using Indianapolis as the template. The claim is the charters in Indianapolis get A’s and B’s and the publics get Cs, Ds and Fs. But charters get a special school grading system that acts to inflate their grades as compared to the public schools. Want to improve your public school ranking in Indianapolis? Become a charter school. Like magic you can go from a D to an A, just by privatizing. It’s a HUGE incentive to privatize.
They will have sold the “portfolio model” all over the country before it is revealed that they inflated the grades of the charter schools. The facts don’t catch up with the marketing blitzes fast enough- their bad ideas spread before anyone can correct the misleading stats they use.
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It’s kind of amazing how circular and insular it is, when you learn the players.
The big ed reform foundations support every ed reform initiative- they also support all the ed reform “news” outlets, so you get this kind of fawning, deferential coverage of the latest ed reform marketing blitz:
74 Interview: ‘The City Fund’ Founders Talk About Their New Campaign to Identify America’s Most Innovative Public School Systems and the First Metro Areas Where They’ll Be Investing
It’s seamless. Gates = Walton= Broad = = Arnold= US Department of Education.
If it’s privatization, they’re FOR it.
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Yes, and Gates and Walton support the news coverage, including Education Week, Chalkbeat, even NPR.
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In some ways Duncan was worse than DeVos.
DeVos doesn’t claim to care about “results”- she’s making a purely ideological pitch: public = bad, private = good. She’s IDEOLOGICALLY opposed to public schools and labor unions. This is her belief system.
Duncan claimed to rely on “data”, which is just painful, because he’s either lying or he’s innumerate and he doesn’t understand 4th grade math on percentages.
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scary truth: no non-privatizing side to praise
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I told our public school principal she could improve our ranking in Ohio if she’d just agree to lop off the bottom portion of the class, using the charter school ranking system.
Get rid of 50 of our students somewhere between 9th and 12th grade, go from a class of 200 to a class of 150, and we’re golden. 100%!
She declined to adopt my innovative idea 🙂
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Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Outing the foolish consistency (miracle schools) doesn’t negate the
MORE damaging, Foolish INconsistencies, of critiques based on the
falsehoods, of (drum-roll) STATE TESTS, NAEP…
Damn the tests, OPT-OUT…
LOOK at the grad-rates based on the SCORES based on the TESTS…
Critiques based on ‘SCORES are GIFTS, to the testing complex.
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Remember, now, perception is reality-NOT-lol
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Any critic on the internet that does not like publicly funded private sector charter schools is not a troll. They are progressive saints or angels.
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Hhhmmmmm… Maybe 100% of the students who applied to college were accepted. Three students apply and get accepted – 100%. No fake data there;0)
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