Michael Mulgrew is president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, the largest local in the nation and in the American Federation of Teachers.
He published this article in the New York Daily News, which is strongly pro-charter and often writes about the “success” of the city’s charter schools compared to its public schools. Mulgrew explains here the secrets of charter “success.”
The research behind his article is here.
Careful selection, exclusion, and attrition are keys to charter success.
Mulgrew writes:
Cheerleaders for New York City’s charter school sector typically trumpet the academic achievements of charter school students.
But there is an inconvenient truth about these schools that charter supporters rarely discuss, or even admit. The schools’ “success” is due not to any superior instructional strategy but rather to segregation — segregation based on students’ academic and social needs.
Though charters are open to all by lottery, as a group they enroll a significantly smaller percentage than public schools of our neediest children, such as English language learners, special education students or those from the poorest families. Children like these typically have the largest learning challenges.
For the 2018-19 school year, for example, the latest for which data is available, charters as a group enrolled half the citywide average of ELLs (6.9% vs. a citywide average of 14.6%) and a third of the special education students with the highest level of need (1.7% vs. a citywide average of 5.4%).
But the charter sector average turns out to be only half the story. An analysis of individual charter schools clearly shows that the schools most successful at excluding these kinds of students turn out to be — no surprise — the charters with the highest test scores.
As measured by the most recent state English language exam, the most academically successful charters (those with a pass rate of 67% or higher) had even fewer English Language Learners and special ed students.
That’s not a bug in the charter world; it’s a feature. Throughout the charter sector, as the number of children with academic and other needs grows, the average proficiency rate on the state test declines, to the point that the nearly 50 charters with the highest percentages of needy children don’t even reach the citywide average on the state reading exam.
How do many charters — particularly those most successful on standardized tests — find ways to minimize the number of pupils unlikely to contribute to that success?
They start with highly committed families, those with a knowledge of the system and the motivation to enter their children in the charter lottery.
Robert Pondiscio, who has many sympathies for charters, wrote most recently that the idea that essentially the same kinds of students attend both public schools and charters, while “deeply satisfying to charter school advocates…is also misleading and even false” because of the critical nature of this parental motivation.
The next step in the charter success strategy is to find ways to ease out kids less likely to be successful. A key tactic is using suspensions to persuade students who do not fit well to find other schools.
Our analysis shows that less academically successful charters actually gained students over time. However, the most academically successful charters also showed significant attrition — a loss of more than one-quarter of the pupils who started in the cohort that began in 2010.
Were all those pupils who left the top charters academic stars? Or, as is much more likely, are the top charters consciously shedding weaker students and reaping the benefits in terms of higher test scores?
State data shows that charters as a group suspended students far more frequently than public schools did, and that the top charters — with a suspension rate of more than 8% — led the way.
Public school students in more than 100 schools have given up labs, libraries, music rooms and other facilities to charters that have been co-located in their buildings.
The bill for charters continues to grow. Some $2.4 billion in city Department of Education funds will be diverted in the coming fiscal year to charter operations, and current charters, even with no further regulatory or legislative action, are scheduled to expand their grades in future years.
Enormous public investments are going to too many schools that fail to educate the neediest students, and then rely on such exclusion to fuel their claims of success.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So Mulgrew’s wisdom was apparently more valued by the daily news than the New York Times…..and I thank him for his useless krap for this opportunity to urge you to check out New York Times article about the bank in the virgin islands which was established by Jeffrey Epstein for only 12 million dollars…..While it is not hard to imagine why the Post would be thrilled by an opportunity to present Mulgrew…….you have to dig deep to figure out where the nyt is going with the epstein story….money laundering? Trump’s tax returns? women victims making assertions about Derkowitz? Barr appointing a gangster to (the nyt was too reluctant to use the word “suicide”…they opted for saying he died. All of a sudden I wonder…..is Barr evil, or was he acting on behalf of the nation’s women? He and dershowitz might get into an argument, and I doubt dershowitz will be a very good match…..Barr will be too Trumpian.
I don’t get it
I’m sure you are not the only one….I googled for a look at how the nyt covered this…it was almost always 2009-2010 and his belly laughs…my overall perspective is huge unhappiness with how poorly the largely centrist media fails to report about charters, both in quantity and depth. It simply seems not very important to them. I also feel a hostility towards the media for the waning interest in females running for president, with all the emphasis on 3 old white men, and now a young one….I had been following the Epstein story figuring it was fading out…..and wondered why the nyt had interest….and figured it might be aimed at money laundering and matters related to Trump’s monetary adventures. I was the first to post, and hoped it would help engineer a wide ranging discussion of how ridiculous it is for all the free rides given to what charters do…while I admit….it led me to have to go find out about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos….which was followed by an analogy…and I was pleased to see you add the comment about the way charters actually use their dollars…some credit to Peter Greene….I think the nyt story about Epstein gets followed by something worthwhile, but my generous grade for myself in putting it in the opening post is a D-. This so-called explanation probably did not help.
The New York Times has had a few stories critical of charters but those reporters were reassigned. It is now sycophantic and believes whatever Walton-funded press releases say
One of our most highly touted charter schools in Oakland, Envision Academy, has 100% students meeting UC/Cal State A-G course requirements. How did they do it? Easy. In order to graduate, students must pass all A-G course requirements and apply to a 2 or 4-year college. The school also has one of the highest (might be the highest) suspension rates in the district at 14% overall, and 26% suspension rate for African Americans. So first, make sure you only attract motivated families. Next, kick out the kids you don’t want using multiple suspensions, just to be sure you’re retaining the right kind of student. Not impressed.
Yes, what I find most appalling is that these charters begin with a huge advantage by attracting only the most motivated families.
A charter should be thrilled with that advantage. But they are not, which explains why they push out so many students.
Because the goal of the charter is not to teach as many students as possible, but to make the charter look good by attracting and retaining the students that make the charter look good.
So what if some the students aren’t going to graduate? It is the duty of the charter to figure out how to keep them in their school and teach them anyway. If they want public money, they should be obligated to do that.
To me, the fact that charters would do anything — including release private records to publicly destroy a 6 year old child — to keep their attrition rates hidden is a huge red flag. It is like Trump – the reason he is punishing everyone who told the truth and testified is because it is very important that what they say not be told.
And charters act just like Trump and severely punish anyone who tells the truth. The media might mention it one day and the next day go back to its non-stop coverage of the miracles they are performing.
The entire charter industry has become as greedy and self-driven as Trump. When you are REALLY doing good, you don’t have to punish every person who criticizes you. Charters “punish” anyone who criticizes them all the time. Even if it harms a child. The similarity of the charter movement to the Trump White House is shocking to me. The willingness to punish anyone who doesn’t play along is the driving mantra of those people.
Like charters, Republican start with the huge advantage in the Electoral College. And like far too many highly rewarded charters, the goal is winning. So just having that built in advantage that charters and Republicans have isn’t enough. They will do anything to win. And if it means covering up attrition rates, or publicly destroying a child, or covering up a phone call Trump made to help his political campaign, it’s all good because what is important to winning.
And they claim that “winning” helps make so many people’s lives so much better, so how dare anyone question anything they do to win? Don’t the “results” speak for themselves?
who does the touting in Oakland? Thank you for your effort to un-tout.
That would be our billionaire-funded local privatization group, GO Public Schools. Biggest contributor is the Rogers Foundation, of Dreyers ice cream fame, along with Bloomberg and the Waltons. Envision is one of the few charters in Oakland with a significant number of African Americans. That’s what makes the suspension data even more troubling. No authentic public school could ever make the case for “school quality” for African Americans when their suspension rate is so high.
No offense to the researcher, we need good research, but it should be titled “An Obvious Truth.” Self-selection alone leads to an obvious disparity between charters and real Public schools. And obviously, a lack of transparency and accountability, and the diversion of monies away from real Public education is not furthering the common good. Caps and moratoriums are all well and fine, but what we need is a repeal of state laws that allow for charters. And then more funding, especially for the poorest communities.
An ‘”inconvenient” truth is that comparing suspension rates is highly questionable because many real Public schools have all but disallowed suspensions in the failed effort that is Restorative Justice. Teachers/Schools need to be able to use a more balanced approach when it comes to behavior management.
Another “inconvenient” truth is that the choice philosophy that is hurting Public education includes magnet schools. Where I teach in LA, most middle schools, and even many elementary schools, have attached magnet schools. Why? They should not. They do not come with the transparency and accountability issues of charters, but they allow the more involved, more knowledgeable parents to carve out a better education for their kids. And obviously this is a zero-sum game. What’s good for one, is bad for the other. In order to strengthen real Public education, and promote the common good, we need to face the obvious drawbacks of choice, even those that are set up inside our own house.
Charters suspend 5 and 6 year olds. Even before restorative justice, public schools weren’t giving out of school suspensions to huge numbers of Kindergarten children on the grounds that so many of them were too violent to be allowed in the school.
(I also suspect that is the reason that charters in “non-urban” areas that serve mostly white students never perform better than public schools. Because those charters can’t get away with doing what urban charters do and mischaracterize white 5 year old children as violent and reprehensible the way urban charters mischaracterize so many young African-American children. They can’t do what their counterparts at urban charters do knowing that gullible education reporters will never question the ugly racism that underlies charters’ claims about why they “needed” to suspend so many 5 year olds.)
But I do know that closely examining longitudinal attrition rates would easily answer the question of whether the highest performing charters lose lots more of their original lottery winners than charters that have mediocre results. And the fact that not one person in the billion dollar education reform establishment wants to know that answer speaks volumes. Their motivations have never been about seeking what works, it is about promoting what makes helps the adults get rich.
Your “inconvenient truths” are nuanced and important.
The slam on comparative suspension rates pulls a big issue out from under the rock. Many if not most inner-city families seek charter alternatives to escape from the classroom chaos created by disruptive students. The statistical observation that high suspension rates appear to be racist clouds many Q’s [just 1 occurring to me is how do you claim that, in a majority-minority school], yet govt acts on it. That has clearly set many school admins on a nonsensical path of restricting sanctions for behavior harmful to others, yet replacing them w/(a)nada, (b)well-meaning but ineffective substitutes, (c)harm to all via in-school security cops/ involvement of local police/ evacuation of classroom to isolate a dangerous student etc.
The magnet-school Q is a dicy one. How many magnets are OK?
In my area there’s just one [math/tech] for densely-populated Union County NJ. We likewise have one big county vo-tech hisch– could be considered a magnet. The combo does not put a dent in districtsch quality. Then there’s Montclair NJ which for decades was 100% magnet, as a way to integrate two segregated halves of a city; that worked rather well [sadly, Christie’s charter push disrupted it].
But I believe the issue you raise is multiple city magnets whose purpose is to stem white&/ or mid/upperclass flight to suburbs (the NYC model for many decades). NYC has 17.5k students in the 9 spec hischs – roughly 6% of all pubhisch studs. I’m not sure just what that “creaming” impact is on reg NYC hischs… Can only compare to charters, where (generally) enrollment over 10% begins to impact tradlsch finances & balance of high-needs students… Sounds like maybe you are seeing a too-high % of magnets in LA [& what’s with magnets at midsch level?!]
nicely said. For so many paying attention and doing their best to TELL the larger society, this has been an “obvious” truth.
It’s not just the families, but it’s also the infrastructure. Without access to public monies and public schools buildings, these schools would not exist. They are only “successful”, because they are exploiting existing infrastructure.
This cannot be emphasized enough. Charters are a succubus on pubsch infrastructure from a facilities/ $-funding POV, but also in broader sense. They cannot exist as an “alternative” w/o the no-fault condition, tradl pubschs. Where else can newly-arrived in community attend, those w/o time to assess the alternatives, apply, wait for admission? Where else can students attend who are bounced/ pressured out from charter– or left sans school when their charter goes belly-up, which usually happens too late in schyr to select/ apply/ find satisfactory replacement charter [& sometimes midyear]?
ed policy has evolved to exactly that: “success” means “exploit”
“Our analysis shows that less academically successful charters actually gained students over time. However, the most academically successful charters also showed significant attrition — a loss of more than one-quarter of the pupils who started in the cohort that began in 2010.”
If education reporters like Eliza Shapiro were real journalists instead of stenographers to the powerful, that fact alone would be an enormous red flag that would be part of all of their reporting. The “best” charters that start with the most committed parents lose far more students than the charters that aren’t nearly as good. Huge red flag!!! It should be exactly the opposite!
Instead, those complicit reporters justify playing that fact down as something only “partisans” claim. And what is worse is when Eliza Shapiro tweets that what matters is only that some parents like their charter and those parents would be greatly harmed if she posted true facts that made it clear that their charter isn’t working miracles but simply excluding kids that public schools can’t.
Let’s think about how absurd Eliza Shapiro’s claim that she cares only about “the kids” really is. A private “Cancer Treatment Center” chain claims to have 100% cure rates of childhood cancer and is suddenly getting lots of public resources that previously went to Sloan-Kettering and MD Anderson. A close look finds that the private “Cancer Treatment Center” had huge numbers of patients suddenly leaving their treatment programs and the number of patients leaving that private “Cancer Treatment Center” was much HIGHER than patients leaving other cancer treatment centers that did not have anywhere close to 100% cure rates. A close look finds that the children who remain and get cured look very similar to the children who get cured in other hospitals that have lower overall “success” because they keep treating the children who aren’t getting better instead of dumping them.
But a reporter like Eliza Shapiro tweets that she must report unquestionably about the 100% cure rate of a Cancer Treatment Center because the parents of the patients who are allowed to continue their treatment there believe it. Imagine a reporter like Eliza Shapiro tweeting that closely examining the efficacy of those Cancer Treatment Centers is less relevant than whether the patients who are allowed to remain believe them.
It would be very misleading to write endless stories showcasing the parents at that “Cancer Treatment Center” and report uncritically their beliefs that their child would have died at a different hospital (like MD Anderson with much lower cure rates). It would be very misleading to write “balanced” stories that say: “all these many parents know that this private Cancer Treatment Center with 100% cure rates worked a miracle with their child, and a few other parents who had a clear beef with this Cancer Treatment Center and aren’t very trustworthy do not like it, so we just don’t know if it has 100% cure rates or not but clearly the parents who are in it know it is working miracles.” That is absolving a journalist of their ethical responsibility to report the truth.
What harms children would be if resources were taken from MD Anderson because it does’t have 100% cure rates like “Cancer Treatment Center”. I can imagine a reporter like Eliza Shapiro tweeting: “I just interviewed all these parents who said their kid was cured at ‘Cancer Treatment Center’ and taking resources from MD Anderson and giving it to “Cancer Treatment Center” instead is about helping more kids by giving them more Center Treatment Centers that cure 100% of their patients.”
Yes, her education reporting is that appalling. Her tweets explain that as long as some parents are happy, she must not question any public relations that promotes these miracle “cures” for the problems in public education.
Does it ever occur to reporters like Eliza Shapiro that the kids at the private cancer treatment center aren’t helped by her reporting that it has a better cure rate than MD Anderson without mentioning that they simply kick out any and all kids who can’t be cured, unlike MD Anderson. The children who go to the private cancer treatment center are not “helped” by her promotion of that lie even if their parents like their treatment.
The people who benefit when reporters like Eliza Shapiro report uncritically that these private cancer treatment centers work miracles are the adults at the private cancer treatment center. Not the children. The children are helped when reporters are honest.
Same goes for education reporting. I wish Eliza Shapiro would stop claiming that because some parents like a private charter, any truthful and critical reporting about its methods and which children are welcome would be “harmful” to them. No it wouldn’t. But it would be harmful to the CEOs who run those charters and the people who are well compensated for promoting them.
Thanks for this comment, NYCpsp. I read the NYT in the library occasionally & I do not like Shapiro’s (among some others’) “journalism.”
I miss Michael Winerip, & I was glad to see his work cited (esp. about Perelman’s studies RE: computer essay scoring & Barbara Madeloni’s
“act of defiance”) in Slaying Goliath.
Lest we forget.
This article by Peter Greene..27,062 views Aug 13, 2018,
How To Profit From Your Nonprofit Charter School……is worth reading, to get a grasp about how there are different ways that Charters can go about the inherent child abuse they perpetrate towards public schools……I was surprised to read that the Gulen charter chain…is potentially using US taxpayer money to finance a government-in-exile. These schools are mostly nonprofit charters.He talks about the extent to which their nonprofit status can be achieved by buying from themselves…and…they are businesses that do not control how much they charge for the service they provide. This means that every dollar spent on students is one dollar less to go into the bank account of the business; the interests of the students and the interests of the businesses involved in the school are in opposition to each other.
This is a media problem…..we have charters which give phony reports of how great the results are that they are producing, and in the same district some are shedding crocodile tears about failures based on the very profitable management techniques they are using. The media problem……lump them all together, and do not bother to make the comparisons necessary for the public to understand contradictory ways charter schools rip us off, and damage the ability to deliver the best possible educations to the students.
Yes, it is definitely a media problem.
Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. If Holmes didn’t have the fawning (and absolutely untrue) media coverage she got, she would not have thrived for so long. Some random no one making her claims would have been looked at critically instead of fawned over.
&…an analogy: Theranos~real science/medicine as
charter schools~ real PUBLIC schools.
BTW–the WSJ reporter who broke/exposed the Theranos story & wrote the (I highly recommend it) book, Bad Blood–will be made into a movie.
So–more attention, but negative.
“This means that every dollar spent on students is one dollar less to go into the bank account of the business; the interests of the students and the interests of the businesses involved in the school are in opposition to each other.”
This nutshells it for all charters whether they declare themselves for-profit or nonprofit. The nonprofits plough the $ skimmed away from students to advertising, to RE lenders, to admin-heavy biz models, to grossly-overpaid CEO’s & top admins.