I recently wrote an article that referred to charter schools that succeed by excluding students with disabilities, English learners, and others unlikely to get high scores. The editor questioned if this claim was accurate. I turned to several expert researchers to ask their view, and they all agreed with my assertion. David Berliner of Arizona State University—one of the nation’s pre-eminent researchers and statisticians—had data to back it up, and I invited him to write an essay addressing this issue.
He wrote:
Culling, Creaming, Skimming, Thinning: Things We Do to Herds and School Children
To cull is to select things you intend to reject, often in reference to a group of animals. An outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease can cause authorities to order a cull of farm pigs. An outbreak of low-test scores or a meeting with undesirable parents can promote the culling of charter students. To cream is to remove something choice from an aggregate, such as selecting the best and the brightest appearing students and families for acceptance to a charter or private school.
Diane Ravitch was recently criticized for writing that charter schools, supported by public tax money, engage in skimming and creaming students and families. Ravitch, however is right! Public charter schools, and private schools that accept public monies through vouchers, admit only certain students, often those predicted most likely to succeed and whose parents are “acceptable.” And, if these schools choose “wrong,” they cull the herd later. Between selective admissions and culling the student body, the data ordinarily used to describe a school’s accomplishments will make charter and voucher schools look quite good.
Let me illustrate with data collected by my wife, Dr. Ursula Casanova, by a former student (Assistant Professor Amanda Potterton, of the University of Kentucky), and from the ACLU of Arizona.
Dr. Casanova wrote in the Washington Post about the Basis (charter) school in Scottsdale, Arizona, enrolling students in grades 5-12. Based on its test scores that year, it was named the top high school in Arizona. But the year it was so honored, Casanova found enrollments from 5th to 8th grade to be 152, 138, 110, and 94. Then, the high school enrollments, in grades 9-11, were 42, 30, and 23. Finally, the 12th grade graduating class had 8 students! With no shame whatsoever the Basis school was able to claim they graduated 100% of their seniors and that all were accepted at college!
The Basis school of Tucson, part of the same chain of about a dozen charter schools, mostly in Arizona, presented data with a similar pattern. In the year for which Casanova reported, the school started out with 127 students in the fifth grade. But they had only 100 students in eighth grade, 69 in the 9th grade, 45 in 10th grade, and 27 in 11th grade. At the end of 12th grade they had only 24 seniors left at graduation. The graduating class was only 35% of the ninth-grade cohort, and they were less than 20% of that fifth -grade cohort. Culling the herd seems to describe school policy.
Potterton wrote in Teachers College Record about four highly rated charter schools in Arizona, the two Basis schools reported on above, and two other schools from the Great Hearts Academy chain, which run more than 20 schools in the Phoenix area.
In the year of her study she found that the average rate for free and reduced lunch in Arizona schools was 35%. The average for free and reduced lunch in these the four charter schools? 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. Highly selective admissions and culling work quite well. That same year the state average for English language learners in our schools was 7.5%. The English language learners in these four schools? 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. The percent of students with IEPs in the state was about 12%. But the percent of such students in these four schools was between, .6% and 3.5%.
Arizona is not unique. In a recent year the federal government reported in the Common Core of data that in 2014 the Boston public schools graduated 85% of its grade 9 students. But the “City on A Hill” Charter school graduated 46% of its grade 9 class; while the “Boston Preparatory Academy,” “Boston Collegiate Charter,” and “Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter” each graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class. Culling in charters seems to be widespread.
Another example comes from Philadelphia’s Boys Latin Charter, as analyzed by Jersey Jazzman in his column of July 28th, 2017. Boys Latin proudly boasted that 98% of its students were accepted into college. But in the years 2011-2015 the school graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class, culling approximately 40% of its student body, and thus allowing the school to make a claim that 98% of its students are accepted to college.
Charter schools cull families with special needs too. Arizona’s ACLU in 2017 noted that state law forbade charter schools from limiting the number of special education students they accept. But “The Rising School” in Tucson advertised blatantly that the school’s special education and resources department “is currently full.… Thus, any student with an IEP will be put on our waiting list.” Also in apparent defiance of the law, “AmeriSchools Academy” (in Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma) blatantly noted that “Special Education placements are limited to a capacity of ten (10) students for each school site. Students in excess of this number are to be wait listed with provisional registration.”
Further, by state law, Arizona’s charter schools may not require students or their parents to complete pre-enrollment activities, such as essays, interviews or school tours. Nor can charter schools use students’ performance on interviews or essays, or the student’s decision not to complete requested pre-enrollment activities, to determine which students to accept. But the ACLU found that at the “Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy” students must write a one-page essay as part of their enrollment application. As part of the enrollment process at the “Satori Charter School” in Tucson, parents and students must meet with a school administrator. These are all excellent, though illegal ways to cull potentially undesirable families.
State law also directs charter schools not to require parental involvement as a condition of admission. And furthermore, charter schools must not pressure parents into donating money. As in many states, the Arizona Constitution guarantees students the right to a free public education, and charter schools are supposed to be public schools. Yet the same Great Hearts Academy charter schools reported on above asked each family to contribute $1,500 per student per year. Parents were also encouraged to donate anywhere from $200 to $2,000 to the school. The “Mission Montessori Academy” of Scottsdale asked parents to volunteer 15 hours every year per child enrolled, or make a contribution of $150 to the school in lieu of volunteer hours. The “Montessori Day Public School” chain noted that “All parents are expected to contribute 40 hours of volunteer time per family, per year.” The “Freedom Academy” in Phoenix and Scottsdale required a non-refundable $300 “Extracurricular Arts Fee,” due at enrollment. The “San Tan Charter School (in Gilbert, AZ)” required parents to provide a credit card the school can keep on file to pay several fees, including a $250 technology rental fee for grades 9-12. These are all great ways to cull families, illegality be damned!!
In many states, private schools receive public monies through vouchers, and still discriminate against certain children and families, culling them as needed! One of the most blatant examples I know of is the Fayetteville Christian School in North Carolina, a recipient, in a recent school year, of $495,966 of public money. But it is not open to the public! It says, up front, that it doesn’t want Jews, Muslims, Hindu’s and many others. At this school a student, and at least one parent, have to have taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior, or they cannot be admitted. They also cannot engage in sexual promiscuity, illicit drug use and homosexuality—or anything else that scripture defines as deviate or perverted. Any report of such activities by parents or the students is grounds for expulsion. This is culling of the student body by religion and life style, in a school receiving about a half million dollars of public funds per year!
Many of the schools I mentioned above, are considered great public and/or great private schools. Creaming and culling really do pay off in terms of a school’s reputation, as long as the schools’ policies are not examined too closely. But Dr. Casanova asked an excellent question of our citizenry when she reported on the graduation rates of various charters and private schools, and compared them to the reports from San Luis High School, in San Luis, AZ, on the Mexican border, part of the Yuma, Arizona school system. Data from different sources informs us that in recent years this public high school serves almost 3,000 students a year, almost 100% of whom are Hispanic, half of whom are limited English proficient, and most are classified as economically disadvantaged. But this public high school manages to graduate over 80 percent of their freshman class, and almost 90 percent of its senior class. They also do this with a teacher/pupil ratio well in excess of the U.S. average, and working with Arizona’s per pupil school funding formula, which is among the lowest in the nation. Why isn’t San Luis High School, and others like it, compared to the culling and creaming charters and voucher schools, considered among our great American high schools?
So many of our public schools deserve our gratitude for doing such a good job educating all our citizenry, many under difficult conditions. The Darwinian approach, to push the weakest students out of school, to cull the herd, should not be tolerated in a democracy, and therefore is absolutely inappropriate behavior for a school receiving public money. But Darwinism really is the philosophy guiding some of the highest rated charters. A respondent to a blog by my colleague Gene Glass, where he too criticized the culling and creaming practices of charters, stated the following: “Basis schools does not engage in any form of thinning across any grade. Students do drop out because they are not fit to thrive in the difficult curriculum ….”
Let’s think about what “not fit to thrive” might look like as a guiding philosophy for our public schools. We could do away with special education, bilingual education, counseling and guidance, transportation, free and reduced breakfasts and lunches, school nurses, etc. The Darwinian approach to schooling is not merely undemocratic,….. it is evil! If it were me, I wouldn’t give another public dollar to any charter or voucher school that culls, skims, or creams. They are all patently undemocratic.
David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor Emeritus
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College
Arizona State University
Yup. That’s the Success Academy model. If they want to cull and choose, then why not advertise themselves as elite schools or gifted and talented, and stop pretending that they really nurture all children.
scariest thing is that over the past almost 20 years of school reform, the word “success” has come to be more and more secretly synonymous with the word “selective”
Here is a big secret:
Selective schools have higher scores than non selective schools.
“With no shame whatsoever the Basis school was able to claim they graduated 100% of their seniors and that all were accepted at college!”
It wasn’t just BASIS – the entire echo chamber uses this “100%” nonsense along with the US Department of Education.
Based on that alone their numbers should always be questioned. How can they be credible when they all use this number? It’s crazy.
Any school could do this. Take your entering freshman, drop the bottom 2/3’s, and then announce you have “100% graduation and college acceptance”.
The selection will increase with the entire echo chamber’s embrace of private school vouchers too.
Where I live, everyone knows the Catholic school expels students with behavior problems, sending them back to public schools. It is part of the reason parents choose the school- because they know kids with behavior problems will be sent to the public school.
How do ed reformers plan on addressing this? It’s okay with them if we have a subset of publicly funded schools that expel students they’d prefer not to serve?
How will this affect public school students? Our schools become the “safety net” that allows the “choice” schools to select students? Ed reform obviously doesn’t CARE how it affects public school students since none of their marketing and promotion around vouchers addresses it at all.
Once again, public school students are the dead -last priority in “the movement”. No one works on their behalf or cares at all how these ed reform privatization agendas impact them.
Not that it matters, but now that ed reformers have all lock-step embraced private school vouchers none of the “selectively” criticisms of charters matters- even if charters didn’t cherry pick, ed reformers are all working to publicly fund yet another group of schools- private schools, which have no duty to accept ANY student.
As usual, “the movement” is completely incoherent – their talking points on charters are completely contradicted by their talking points on vouchers, and the contradiction is never resolved or even discussed.
You know who gets NO attention or effort from the ed reform echo chamber? The 90% of US students in public schools. They’re barely mentioned in all these schemes. An afterthought, at best.
I have a question for ed reformers- why is it okay to have hundreds of ed reform groups lobbying on behalf of charter schools and private school vouchers and those students but NOT okay to have people who advocate on behalf of public schools and public school students?
Why don’t public school students deserve advocates who work on their behalf? Charters have thousands of paid promoters and so do vouchers. Why shouldn’t public school students get advocates?
Are public school families supposed to sit back and wait for ed reformers to start working on behalf of their schools and students? If ed reform doesn’t do a lick of productive work on behalf of our students and schools, and they don’t, shouldn’t public schools develop their own advocacy orgs?
Berliner’s analysis is defective. For example, he writes:
Quote
But the “City on A Hill” Charter school graduated 46% of its grade 9 class; while the “Boston Preparatory Academy,” “Boston Collegiate Charter,” and “Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter” each graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class. Culling in charters seems to be widespread.
Another example comes from Philadelphia’s Boys Latin Charter, as analyzed by Jersey Jazzman in his column of July 28th, 2017. Boys Latin proudly boasted that 98% of its students were accepted into college. But in the years 2011-2015 the school graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class, culling approximately 40% of its student body, and thus allowing the school to make a claim that 98% of its students are accepted to college.
End quote
In respect to the latter, he was presumably alluding to this July 20 piece:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2017/07/when-miracle-charter-schools-shed.html
See my exchanges with Jazzman here:
https://dianeravitch.net/2017/07/24/jersey-jazzman-the-secrets-of-successful-charter-schools-extra-money-and-shedding-students/#comment-2708897
starting with:
“Unfortunately, Jazzman has an extensive history of mingling members of multiple incoming classes of students into a single supposed “cohort”, and comparing number of seniors to freshmen in a way that entirely omits the effects of grade-level retention.”
Stephen,
Can you explain the dramatic attrition at BASIS charter schools, allegedly the “best in the nation,” which requires all its students to pass multiple AP tests before they can graduate and is overwhelmingly white and Asian in a state with large numbers of Hispanic students?
Berliner writes:
“To cream is to remove something choice from an aggregate, such as selecting the best and the brightest appearing students and families for acceptance to a charter or private school.”
Which, of course, ignores the massive creaming in cities like yours and mine by public district schools, such as, but by no means exclusively, the exam schools.
A sprinkling of anecdotes, a bunch of them clearly relying on faulty understanding of how to calculate attrition, do not effectively support any sweeping assertions about charter school successes necessarily relying on creaming and culling. For example, as we have discussed repeatedly, the charter management organization rated highest by CREDO has extraordinarily low attrition or evidence of culling any less academically successful students.
It’s not clear whether this statement of yours:
“I recently wrote an article that referred to charter schools that succeed by excluding students with disabilities, English learners, and others unlikely to get high scores.”
alludes to an article where you provided credible evidence that that occurs sometimes, or instead one that made sweeping generalizations of which the editor should be properly cautious.
I have no great familiarity with BASIS, but a critique that erroneously compares first year and last year enrollment to determine attrition, and that looks at ELL levels among total student body without examining FLNE status needs further work.
Stephen,
Exam schools do not claim to have a model for all.
They openly acknowledge selection.
Charter schools pretend they accept all students.
They don’t.
Stephen is absolutely wrong.
There has been no study of attrition by any charter organization.
That would be a very simple matter. How many students started in the incoming class? How many of those very same students are in the culminating class having progressed each year with their class?
Stephen is basically claiming that it is very wrong not to give charters huge applause for the fact that charter schools have such inept and untrained teachers whose teaching is so terrible that huge numbers of students are not learning what they should and are flunked by the charter to be held back (forever?) — the euphemism that Stephen uses is “grade-level retention” because that’s so much nicer than “the students who actually need more than what our inexperienced charter teachers can provide and who are then punished for their charter teacher’s ineptitude by being failed (“retained”) until they get the message to leave.
Stephen — without a single bit of data — insists that all those kids are still at the charter, just being “retained” in a lower grade because their inept charter teachers failed to teach them what they need to know and the charter punished the students by flunking them.
Show us the data of how many students are failed by their inept and inexperienced charter teachers every year, Stephen.
The fact that Stephen is so proud of what he claims is an extraordinarily high rate of inexperienced and inept charter teachers failing to teach so many of their students what they need to know is truly shocking. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.
What is that “retention” rate you are so proud of Stephen, anyway?
Let me guess: you blame the kids, not their teachers. after all, we all witnessed the “model” teacher at Success Academy getting caught on video demonstrating how the top charter network in the country handpicks the “model” young teachers who demonstrate exactly how to teach a struggling student. Humiliate and punish him publicly. Don’t explain, just harangue.
And when public humiliation doesn’t work, charters flunk the kid (oh sorry, “retain” them) because that will really teach them.
And you are angry that Jersey Jazzman didn’t include this hidden number of students whose inept charter teachers couldn’t punish the learning into their students and so just flunked them?
You have to be kidding me!
PS — the proof of how easy it would be to get real data from charters about attrition is that every single college provides exactly that. If you look at a college’s common data set, you know exactly how many of the original entering freshmen graduated with their cohort 4 years later.
And no college yet has the chutzpah of Stephen Ronan to say that those students are just flunked by our inept professors and that’s why they didn’t graduate.
Several years back, I had a dinner conversation with the president of one of the nation’s elite private colleges. The college is noted for the quality of its liberal arts curriculum, especially in literature, philosophy and history. He told me they had accepted students from KIPP, but these students were unable to cope with the reading, which required critical thinking and analysis. They were not prepared to do more than take standardized tests.
I understand your point of view… If a child leaves the school district and enters 9th grade at a charter high school with reading, writing and math skills corresponding to what we would normally hope to see in a sixth grader, within one year at a Boston charter school you think he or she should be up to a tenth grade level. Your enthusiastic high regard for the capacity of our charter schools is appreciated. But perhaps a little over the top. From 6th grade to 10th grade academic abilities in one year… perhaps sometimes…
But according to CREDO, the results for the typical student in a Boston charter equated “to more than twelve months of additional learning per year in reading and thirteen months greater progress in math. At the school level, 83 percent of Boston charter schools have significantly more positive learning gains than their district school peers in reading and math, and no Boston charter schools were found to have significantly lower learning gains.”
[…]
“Second, and more important, the Boston charter schools offer students from historically underserved backgrounds a real and sustained chance to close the achievement gap,” said Margaret Raymond, Director of CREDO at Stanford University.”
Click to access Mass2013PressReleaseFINAL2.pdf
That’s impressive. Sure. But falls a little short of your imaginings.
None of that matters when you review Berliner’s data on Boston charter school attrition.
Boston charters have a LOWER graduation rate than Boston public schools!
Berliner:
Arizona is not unique. In a recent year the federal government reported in the Common Core of data that in 2014 the Boston public schools graduated 85% of its grade 9 students. But the “City on A Hill” Charter school graduated 46% of its grade 9 class; while the “Boston Preparatory Academy,” “Boston Collegiate Charter,” and “Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter” each graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class. Culling in charters seems to be widespread.
Berliner:
“Arizona is not unique. In a recent year the federal government reported in the Common Core of data that in 2014 the Boston public schools graduated 85% of its grade 9 students. But the ‘City on A Hill’ Charter school graduated 46% of its grade 9 class; while the ‘Boston Preparatory Academy,’ ‘Boston Collegiate Charter,’ and ‘Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter’ each graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class. Culling in charters seems to be widespread.”
I know that some exotic cactus grows in Arizona, but…
Here, for example, are the sober statistics that the Mass Department of Elementary and Secondary Education serves up for the 4-year and 5-year graduation rates of Academy of the Pacific Rim and the Boston Public Schools district as a whole, as of 2014
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/grad/grad_report.aspx?orgcode=04120530&orgtypecode=6&&fycode=2014
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/grad/grad_report.aspx?orgcode=00350000&orgtypecode=5&&fycode=2014
One might argue with their methodology. Or, as an alternative, perhaps just revel in the experience of nonordinary reality.
I hope that everyone who reads this notes that Stephen Ronan failed to tell us how many students are flunked each year because of inept charter school teachers that Ronan insists is the sole reason that the charters only graduate a fraction of the student who begin there.
Stephen tries to distract by pointing to public schools instead of simply admitting that he does not have a clue how many students at charters are constantly flunked or ever graduate in the 5 or 6 years he is dishonestly insinuating happens.
I hope Stephen can explain how it is that charters would not be graduating the same number of students who begin unless it is the very first graduating class.
Stephen seems to believes that we are all as stupid as charter teachers who believe that haranguing and punishing and flunking students who don’t understand the math the charter teacher is ineptly teaching will make the student suddenly understand it!
Let’s see Stephen’s bad logic:
Charter has 100 students in 9th grade and only 50 who graduate 4 years later. And that is because the other students flunked and flunked and are still in a lower grade.
But here is where Stephen’s logic fails:
There should be ADDITIONAL students who started 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 years ago — as Stephen claims they were “retained” — who would be added to the incredible shrinking number of 9th graders who started 4 years ago. And that would make the senior class of 50 comprised of some charter students who needed 4 years to graduate and all the others who needed – as Stephen claims – 5 and 6 years to complete high school.
You see, Stephen’s claim that charters simply flunk huge numbers of students who their inexperienced charter teachers can’t teach only works the very first year that there is a senior class. By the time a charter has existed for over 4 years, the senior class would not be half the size because the 9th graders who were “retained” and didn’t graduate 4 years later would be missing, but the 9th graders who started 5 years ago and 6 years ago and 7 years ago and were “retained” would have replaced them.
Stephen has also just insulted Eva Moskowitz as one of the most inept educators ever. Because Success Academy High School ONLY takes students from Success Academy Middle Schools which ONLY take students from Success Academy Elementary Schools!
Uh oh!!! Stephen you have just publicly implied that the reason that Success Academy High School graduating class is so much smaller than the incoming 9th grade class 4 years previously is because of the students being so terribly prepared by their lousy Success Academy middle and elementary school teachers.
I don’t expect Stephen to reply now that he realized he just insulted the most powerful and beloved charter CEO in the country. Uh oh!
I quote Stephen:
“If a child leaves the school district and enters 9th grade at a charter high school with reading, writing and math skills corresponding to what we would normally hope to see in a sixth grader…’
Too bad the children didn’t leave the “school district” but left the charter’s own elementary and middle school.
Wanna retract your excuse that charters have so many missing kids because the students came in from such lousy middle schools which got kids from such lousy elementary schools?
Because otherwise, I assume that’s your excuse for why Success Academy high school has such small graduating classes.
Seems like you’re making the same mistake Jersey Jazzman made that was addressed here (you’re in honorable company there):
https://dianeravitch.net/2016/07/14/jersey-jazzman-takes-charter-cheerleaders-to-the-woodshed-for-destroying-public-schools/#comment-2582419
Stephen Ronan,
If you think I’m wrong, then address the points I made in my comment. Your implication that Success Academy High School loses so many kids due to the terrible education so many of the incoming 9th graders get at Success Academy Middle schools is pretty insulting to Eva Moskowitz. Why not just admit that the inexperienced teachers have trouble teaching any student who need more than a rote curriculum and “you didn’t get it so I will punish and humiliate you into understanding it” that “model” charter teachers seem to believe is the ideal teaching method?
You must be really desperate because the “proof” you offered linked to Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter school with a graduating class of 34 students! Which you compared to an entire city of Boston school system of over 4300 graduates! Interestingly, the public school system does better with white students, while the charter does not do well with white students. My theory is that those charters depend on racism that allows them to get away with culling and creaming African-American students that they can’t get away with with white students.
After all, only a charter CEO would have the chutzpah to claim that as many as 20% of the Kindergarten and first graders in a charter act out so violently in their classrooms and it is all the fault of their own violent natures and not because there is something very wrong in the charter.
We all know that the public would never believe that a Kindergarten classroom with all middle class white kids would have extraordinarily high numbers of violent children. But charters get away with it because they have no shame making those statements about African-American Kindergarten children.
And you STILL haven’t come up with any charter study that is anything like that information that college provide about 4 year graduation rates (and 5 year graduation rate) in the Common Data Set. We all know how easy it is for charters to offer that information, but clearly they all want to hide it so that dishonest shills can claim that the only reason that a charter’s graduating class is so tiny compared to the entering class is that the charter flunks lots of kids — and oddly they never ever seem to graduate!
Again, if you claim that the 40 out of 100 charter kids are still in the charter but were “retained”, then where are they? Why aren’t the ones from older years added to the number of graduates so that the number of graduates would be the same as the number of students who begin?
Colleges know that the Common Data Set means that they can’t bring in 100 new transfer students to hide the fact that many of the entering freshmen have disappeared.
But Stephen Ronan shows a lot of chutzpah trying to claim that the kids are still there but apparently just never make it to graduation!! Because if those charter students DID make it to graduation in 5 or 6 years as you claim, the number of graduates would not shrink.
But I do love your claim that Jersey Jazzman should have believed you because you personally promise him that the charter graduating class of 60 includes a good number of students who actually started 5 years ago and not 4.
If you really lack the numerical understanding to see that the number of charter students who graduate would remain similar to the incoming 9th graders 4 years ago because “retained” students who started 5 or 6 years ago would be included in the number of graduates (and replace the “missing” students in that original cohort who are supposedly still juniors or sophomores), then you should not be shilling for charters anymore.
I always find it amazing when charter folks say “Boston Latin selects students so if charters want to cull and skim students and lie about it then they should be allowed to lie about it”. How shocking to hear a charter shill justifying the LYING about culling and skimming because of Boston Latin (which has NEVER lied).
At least BASIS doesn’t lie. Of course, they don’t have to since they operate as a for-profit charter in states that don’t care if they cull and skim.
Unfortunately, Massachusetts and NY don’t legally allow charters to cull and skim. So justifying it by pointing to a selective PUBLIC school which is upfront about who it is educating is not just wrong, but implies that you know charters are doing something improper.
NYC PSP,
I’m sorry you are in moderation. Try as I might, I can’t find a way to get you out. Will keep trying.
Stephen,
I also looked at your reply to Jersey Jazzman and according to your claim, after 4 years the graduating class would be BIGGER than the size of the 9th grade class!
You offered up a nonsensical example where a charter has 100 students in 9th grade and 110 graduating and somehow claim that explains a charter that has 100 students in 9th grade and 60 graduating.
I think you likely are a student at Deerfield Academy, lol!
“I also looked at your reply to Jersey Jazzman and according to your claim, after 4 years the graduating class would be BIGGER than the size of the 9th grade class!
“You offered up a nonsensical example where a charter has 100 students in 9th grade and 110 graduating and somehow claim that explains a charter that has 100 students in 9th grade and 60 graduating.”
Good for you for looking at it! Sorry if it wasn’t clear to you that the first column represents freshmen, the second column sophomores and so on…
Give it up, Stephen!
The “high-performing” charters are selective schools, like NYC’s exam schools. They recruit and retain the best test-takers.
They have nothing to teach regular public schools, whose doors are open to all every day of the year in every grade.
Charters can refuse to accept new students after third or fourth grades, like EvaMoskowitz’s Success Academy.
That’s called “back-filling.”
Public schools do backfill.
Stop writing. You deny what everyone knows.
Stephen Ronan says: “Good for you for looking at it! Sorry if it wasn’t clear to you that the first column represents freshmen, the second column sophomores and so on…”
LOL! That was totally clear, which is why one would expect charters not to have a senior class of 60 and a 9th grade class of 100 except perhaps in the very first years when the seniors – as the first class of 9th graders – aren’t joined by all the “retained” students from the 3 years before that class entered, the ones who are older that the charter has flunked, who should be joining the class in the place of the students who were “retained” and are still juniors or sophomores.
Your chart has a senior class of 110, and a 9th grade class of 100! Oops! No wonder you are so desperate to change the subject or make a flip remark since you have no way to explain what that has to do with a charter with a senior class of 60 and a 9th grade class of 100.
Is Stephen Ronan really trying to claim “charters retain kids and they never graduate, see there’s no attrition at all!” He is making charters look really bad which might lead Stephen Ronan to lose his job pushing them.
After all, what Stephen Ronan implied about charter CEO Eva Moskowitz is probably a firing offense. He claimed that graduating classes at charters were small because so many of the incoming 9th graders were so ill-prepared by their middle and elementary schools that the 9th grade students are at 6th grade level and that explains the small number of graduating seniors.
I’m still waiting for you to correct that comment in which you imply that Success Academy’s elementary and middle schools aren’t teaching their kids what they need to learn to complete high school in 4 years!
What IS Eva Moskowitz doing with all those donations since Stephen Ronan claims that charters have small graduating classes due to their ill-prepared 9th graders? Clearly Stephen Ronan believes incoming 9th graders at Success Academy are being “retained” frequently because their middle schools and elementary schools were sub-par.
Stephen, I don’t expect you to reply and I think that might be better for you since you have already gotten yourself into trouble for implying something about Success Academy that the billionaire reformers won’t like.
Oops!
Diane, thanks for trying to get me out of moderation. I am fine with being in moderation — probably it is a good thing! — and you have so many more important things to do!
Thank you so much for all that you do for public education!
It is about time researchers started studying the claims that the charter industry makes. The lazy media rarely does any fact checking on the information released by charter schools. They merely repeat the false claim. Then, a lazy politician repeats the lie. When lies are repeated long enough, they become the fabric of charter school lore. We need to countermand the false narrative of the charter industry. Kudos to those that investigate the assertions. Their skills are needed when those that attack public schools repeatedly present falsehoods as truth.
Charter organizations skim and cream, then they thin and cull. And with all that, they still don’t get the higher test scores they promised as their reason for existing, suggesting that, overall, public schools provide better education for all students than do charters. Not only are charters, therefore, engaging in Darwinism in their treatment of students and families; it’s survival of the unfittest for their schools.
“One of the most blatant examples I know of is the Fayetteville Christian School in North Carolina, a recipient, in a recent school year, of $495,966 of public money.”
Note that this is a private school. How does it receive public money?
Simple. North Carolina has a voucher program. This explains how the private Christians-only school received $495,966 in public money. Moreover, North Carolina is pushing for legislation that will expand eligibility for vouchers. In addition, special education students are “culled” from schools by a separate scheme of savings accounts. https://www.nccivitas.org/civitas-review/bill-filed-expand-eligibility-school-choice-programs/
This is the same sort of raid on public dollars for public schools being foisted on Ohio’s EdChoice scheme. The beneficiaries are religious schools and the majority of these are ” state-approved” Catholic Schools, not elite religious schools where tuition is $16,000 a year or more.
Behind the statistics that represent this unjust situation, especially in connection with Success Academy, you will find abused, traumatized, and troubled kids whose ejection from these charter chains has left them confused, demoralized and angry. I saw this again and again, especially in final five or so years I taught at a Manhattan high school.
I guess I’d like to qualify this (even if my evidence is subjective and anecdotal) as long as we are spilling so much ink on quantifying it. These are real lives interrupted and disregarded. For heaven’s sake, that ought to count for something….
I worked at 2 charter schools and they definitely do this. I am an ESE teacher who saw some ESE kids or potential ones told “it just wasn’t a good fit”. It is the school’s choice not the parents. Alison Kiser Sent from my iPad
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Say it ain’t so, Joe!
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Diane Ravitch was recently criticized for writing that charter schools, supported by public tax money, engage in skimming and creaming students and families. Ravitch, however is right!