Gary Rubinstein has followed the progress of the much-lauded Success Academy charter chain, supposedly the most successful in the nation. He has noted that SA graduates only a small fraction of those it admits. He estimates that about 75% are gone before graduation.
Success Academy has argued that a 75% attrition rate isn’t so bad because it is about a 11% attrition per year, compounded, which, they say, is what happens in public schools too. But I don’t think this is a valid argument. Getting into Success Academy is supposed to be like winning the lottery. The attrition rate should be miniscule if Success Academy is as good as they claim. You don’t just give away a winning lottery ticket.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Education Reform Motto: If you don’t succeed, do more of that.
Isn’t that similar to the definition of insanity? Do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
Exactly. Years ago, I rented office space in a building that bordered on a marsh in Massachusetts. The reception area had expansive picture windows looking out onto a porch and, beyond that, the marsh. One day I heard this loud thumping and went to investigate. An enormous seagull was standing at the window. He would lean back and then deliver a devastating blow to his own reflection in the window. Then, he would stagger back, regain his composure, and do it again. Over and over and over. I finally had to go chase him away to keep him from killing himself.
DECADES into standardized-testing-based
“education reform” that has resulted in a profound devolution and debasement of our curricula and pedagogy, we’ve seen NO improvements in outcomes based on the “Reformers'” own measures–test scores–and no reduction of achievement gaps. Utterly failed. But the response from the Gates-funded chorus of think thanks where the thinking has tanked: stay the course. We’re going to triumph over that other seagull any moment now. LOL.
Attrition in NYC’s public schools is mostly about moving from one school to another, due to changes in residence. For the the moves that are discipline-related, the kid goes from one public school to another public school. They must be taught and accommodates somewhere, somehow. By contrast, Eva dumps her kids with an appalling disregard for what happens to them after she dumps them. She treats children like trash.
If the public schools did what Eva does, and dumped 75% of its students with no place for them to land, there would be tens of millions of children with no school to attend.
I moved my son from one NYC public middle school to another because the school was chaotic and there was daily violence.
Flerp says: “I moved my son from one NYC public middle school to another because the school was chaotic and there was daily violence.”
That is absolutely a reasonable choice for any parent to make. You cared about your son’s well-being, because you are a good parent.
Now if you had written that you moved your son from a middle school with the best academics in the state that was known for well-behaved students, a middle school that was never chaotic nor violent, because you decided a more chaotic and violent middle school school with far inferior academics was where you really wanted your son to be, I’d have some doubts about what kind of parent you were.
If the CEO of the top performing school you pulled your son out of implied that you did so because you preferred a more violent school with worse academics for your kid, I wouldn’t take her word for it.
Although if you were an African American or Latinx parent and you pulled your kid from the quiet and non-chaotic school with top academics, the white folks who sit on the board of the SUNY Charter Institute would definitely believe any explanation offered by a white charter CEO that implied you had a preference for a more violent school with far inferior academics for your son.
Elizabeth Green at Chalkbeat wrote an entire book where she didn’t think it was important to call out the implicitly racist assumption of anyone who believed that large numbers of parents wanted a more violent environment and worse academics for their own kids.
Education reporters in NYC don’t think there is anything wrong with the white folks on the SUNY Charter Institute board believing something that is implicitly racist.
Moving your son because the school was chaotic or violent or because the academics were lousy is perfectly reasonable. It isn’t reasonable when lots of parents move their kids because the school’s academics were too excellent and students were too well-behaved.
And that should have been a red flag for many people — from the trustees of the SUNY Charter Institute to Elizabeth Green who wrote a book about Success Academy.
Instead, they accepted some of the most absurd justifications of where all the missing students had gone instead of the only explanation that made sense. That those parents pulled their kids because there is something wrong with this charter school, and neither the SUNY Charter Institute trustees nor Elizabeth Green nor any education reporter is curious about what it is.
I suspect they would be if those parents were middle class and white.
NYC public school parent
You do have to shorten it a bit . All valid if not a little repetitive. As that there are 47 Success schools vs1876 public schools that lottery is Geographically very much like getting into a specialty school. One would imagine that average travel distances are far greater right from the start. Moving a few blocks can put you into a different public school or at least make the change convenient. Moving the same distance while enrolled in a charter is as likely to put you closer to the Charter as it is further away. Which then begs the question why Success is not compelled by the State to accept these students who moved to a closer success school. The answer to that is, the attrition is not geographical and everyone knows it.
We often hear about “long waiting lists” at Success Academy. Why then does Success Academy pay for recruiting billboards on city buses, even in supermarkets?
Geographical?
There hasn’t been any evidence that parents withdrew their kids from Success Academy charters in such large numbers because they moved. Sure, Success Academy should be obligated to find a closer charter, but that is assuming that moving had anything to do with why these parents withdrew their kid. Although I suppose invoking “moving” without having to provide any evidence is less implicitly racist than their usual innuendo that those missing students’ parents wanted a more violent and chaotic school with inferior academics!
Again, if the SUNY Charter Institute wasn’t absolutely certain that so many Success Academy parents are the opposite of flerp and prefer their kids being in more violent and chaotic and academically inferior schools, this wouldn’t be a mystery. It’s very easy to clear up, so it looks like a cover up since no one with oversight has even bothered to try.
Just look through the records of the kids who won the lottery whose kids went to the first day of school. If they left after that first day, what school did they attend instead? It would not surprise me if those extraordinarily high attrition rates don’t even include a lot of students who are pushed out the first few days of Kindergarten. Oops! I mean the students whose parents wanted them to be in more chaotic, violent and academic inferior schools instead, as the SUNY Charter Institute folks seem to believe.
Over the years, students may leave any school. It is the why those students leave which is important. And the why depends very much on which schools they left for.
When parents of any background pull their kids from a sub-par or mediocre school for one that is known for outstanding academics, it’s obvious why they would do so.
But when they do the opposite, it raises a red flag. Except with white education reporters in NYC and the trustees of the SUNY Charter Institute who apparently find it perfectly reasonable.
I find the lack of any curiosity about where the missing students went to be incriminating in and of itself. Maybe they all moved. Maybe they didn’t. The SUNY Charter Institute doesn’t seem to want to know. Which is strange given that there have been a myriad of complaints against the school.
If high percentages of middle class college educated white parents were pulling their kids from the top performing charter in the state and putting their kids in an underfunded, more violent and chaotic school with worse academics instead, the obvious question is what is wrong with that top performing school. Why hasn’t that question been asked? Implicit racism.
^^I should add that instead of asking “what is wrong with that school”, the assumption is that there is something wrong with the parents!!! Or the kids themselves!
And that is what is so implicitly racist about how white education reporters and the white trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute cover this.
The only reason not to find these high attrition rates a shocking sign that something is very wrong at that charter is to assume that the fault lies entirely with the parents and their kids.
And the implicit racism that accepts that there is something wrong with the parents and kids and not the school is why after all these years, no one in any authority believes there is any reason to look closely at the students who left, to see how different they are from the students who remained.
NYC public school parent
Here is how you keep it short . I did not disagree with you. There is only one reason for the very high attrition rates. They were effectively thrown out.
Joel,
I allow for the possibility that Success Academy’s high school fails to educate a significant number of students in 4 years, but does in 5 or even 6.
I allow for the possibility that Success Academy starts demanding that struggling students repeat years in their schools, beginning as early as Kindergarten. I allow for the possibility that there are parents so motivated to get their kid a good education that they are fine with their kid being 1 or even 2 years older than other elementary school students.
I also allow for the reality that some parents whose kid is being forced into repeating 2nd grade after repeating 1st grade are likely to “voluntarily” leave and Success Academy administrators can deny those kids were “thrown out” — those parents just realized that if they kept their kid at Success Academy, their kid might not make it out of elementary school until he was a teenager.
I don’t blame Success Academy entirely for their cover up of this and lack of transparency.
The SUNY Charter Institute and the billionaires who lavishly donate to subsidize Eva Moskowitz and likely other administrators’ very generous compensation INCENTIVIZE this cover up. The charter network is rewarded because of their false narratives.
And the complicit media does not realize how much they reinforce the implicitly racist view that high attrition is entirely the fault of the parents. The complicit media accepts the lie that so many Success Academy parents are the opposite of flerp and they would leave a non-chaotic school with excellent academics to find one more chaotic and violent.
If flerp had posted that he pulled his son from a school that was neither chaotic nor violent because he wanted his son in a more chaotic middle school with more violent incidents, I would definitely assume there was something wrong with the school that he was leaving that was neither chaotic nor violent. I would not assume there was something wrong with flerp and he was a bad parent who only wanted the worst for his kid. (Note to flerp – this is a compliment. I presume you are an excellent parent and therefore I would assume there was something seriously wrong with the school you left, even though it was neither violent nor chaotic and had the best academics in the state.)
So why don’t the SUNY Charter Institute and so many education reporters question what is the most implicitly racist narrative of all? That there must be something wrong with the parents, because the school is absolutely not to blame.
FLERP
You have just described the driving force behind the charter school movement. Inability of public schools to deal forcefully with disruptive and dangerous students has been an epic failure of public education.
Every school has a Code of Conduct, but they all allow limitless and chronic misbehaviors on the part of a small handful of students who seem to have little desire to learn.
Rage, it’s not a problem at all public schools, for sure, but it’s a huge problem at a lot of public schools. And parents don’t need to be told how they feel about it. I certainly didn’t. In fact, if I didn’t have better options, I probably would have moved my son to a Success Academy school.
This isn’t to praise Success Academy (about which I know almost nothing even secondhand). It’s to underscore your point, and what was my original point: disciplinary problems in local public school options are a huge driver of parent interest in charter schools. You can yell all day about why charter schools are bad, but if you can’t address that problem, it doesn’t matter.
Flerp
I will never begrudge a parent’s decision to find a safe and orderly learning environment for their child(ren). Charters, although imperfect, are in many cases simply a better choice than an out-of-control public school. Not sure when we decided that the right of a student to be chronically disruptive exceeds the right of the vast majority of students to learn in a peaceful, disciplined, and decorous environment.
However, as they currently operate, charters are nothing more than publicly funded private schools that lack transparency and accountability. Taxpayers should be outraged that they are allowed to proliferate. Parents whose public schools are disorderly and unsafe, not so much.
Rage and flerp,
This post is about Success Academy’s very high attrition rate. I assume there is no underlying racism intended when you suddenly start talking about discipline problems when the subject of this post is why an extraordinarily high percentage of parents LEAVE a charter school that does not have those discipline problems.
Rage and flerp explained why parents choose Success Academy.
But this is about why parents LEAVE.
As flerp states, “disciplinary problems in local public school options are a huge driver of parent interest in charter schools.”
Which – if either of you cared about the point that Gary Rubinstein was making – would make you both very suspicious of the high attrition rates at Success Academy.
It would be quite ugly if you were invoking “dangerous and disruptive” students to imply something quite negative about the students who LEAVE Success Academy and their parents.
If you aren’t suspicious of the high attrition rates at Success Academy, I can only think of one reason, and I suspect it is the same reason that white education reporters and the white trustees at the SUNY Charter Institute aren’t suspicious.
Why don’t you both start with the assumption that the highly motivated parents who are willing to jump through hoops to enroll their kids at Success Academy have the same values as flerp does. Why don’t you start with the assumption that their children are no more likely to be “dangerous and disruptive” than flerp’s children. Is that too difficult for you to imagine?
So why are there high attrition rates? You have both explained why something smells rotten here. Thank you.
The middle school at which I currently teach used to be ensconced with violence. It no longer is. The reason for the change is simple. Strict discipline used to be the way of the school. It no longer is, thank you. Students used to be treated like prisoners, told where to walk, where to eat, how to dress… Tuck in that shirt! Suck in that gut! Stand up straight, sit down straight, speak straight, shut up… No longer.
No one should feel compelled to put their children through the difficulties of changing schools midstream because of violence — or the perception thereof. There must be a local, elected school board to which one can note the presence of oppressive discipline policies that result in a prison mentality, and cause change. If the problem with the oppressive leadership of a school cannot be overcome, it is the problem of the city, not the problem of individual parents. And it must be solved, or the world into which individual students will grow to adulthood will be one of violence and hate.
NYCPP, I don’t know why families leave Success Academy — like I said, I don’t know much about the schools — so I’ll leave it to you and others to opine on that.
LCT, I don’t doubt your experience, but I can only tell you that the school we left was the opposite of what you’re describing. There were no oppressive discipline policies. The school was run by a very progressive principal who believed strongly in restorative justice. Bullying was rampant, there was daily physical violence, and my son was put in the stressful situation of having to be the defender of one student in particular, with a severe speech impediment (and who tragically appeared never to have received speech therapy), whom the bullies targeted. It makes me want to cry just thinking about this poor kid again. In restorative justice circles, the bullied had to face their tormenters again. It was absolutely awful. My son dreaded going to school.
Yes, Flerp. This seems to be some sort of third rail among educators: I find few discussing it, even here, and almost nothing in MSM coverage. Yet public will often chime in on comment threads to ed articles. Some speak of it as the elephant in the room, implying experience as parents. Some of those routinely refer to mainstreaming SpEd students with behavior issues, others blame lack of detention, suspension, etc. Some blame DofEd measures targeting schools with way too many OOS suspensions for SpEd & minorities, reducing it to a bean-counting exercise that results in no suspensions at all. Then there are others who make broad statements about “inner-city” public schools, and I sense they have no idea what they’re talking about. It makes it hard to figure out what the scope of the problem is, where it’s occurring, what measures schools are taking, what methods have proved successful or not.
Your son was put in the stressful situation of having to be the defender of one student in particular? I do not understand how that happened. That was wrong. Justice means people are treated respectfully, not caused to defend one another. What a mess! Again, NYC is messed up because of mayoral control.
He was his friend.
Also, I am not advocating for restorative justice. I am advocating for lightening up.
Gary Rubinstein wrote about the high attrition rates in a charter school with no discipline problems.
flerp successfully changed the subject the same way Eva Moskowitz changes the subject whenever the inconvenient subject of the many disappearing students come up. Instead of discussing the inexplicably high attrition rates at a charter school that has no discipline problems, the subject is changed to talking about how parents want to go to those charters because of the discipline problems in public schools.
We have all stipulated that Success Academy provides that safe and orderly environment that the parents who jumped through hoops to enroll their kids wanted.
So if anything, Success Academy should have extremely LOW attrition rates, not extraordinarily high ones.
bethree5, you say “It makes it hard to figure out what the scope of the problem is, where it’s occurring, what measures schools are taking, what methods have proved successful or not.”
Isn’t that exactly why it is so important to have a conversation about the high attrition rates at orderly charters that enroll the families who specifically want orderly schools? Why would so many parents who jump through hoops to enroll their kid in an orderly charter school then leave that orderly charter school?
Success Academy is a school with a very safe and orderly environment that is sought out by the most highly motivated parents willing to jump through hoops to enroll their kids.
Without discussing why parents who want an orderly school would leave such an orderly school, how can you we even begin to consider what methods are successful?
I hope I am wrong, but I am getting a very negative vibe from this discussion – not stated but implied – that this isn’t worth discussing because it is the students who leave Success Academy who are the discipline problems. Why do I get the vibe of “good riddance”? I hope I am wrong about that.
But why else is there a lack of curiosity as to why parents who jumped through hoops so their kid could attend an orderly school would withdraw their kids from that orderly school in astonishingly high percentages?
ALL of the parents who enroll their kid at Success Academy are just like flerp and wanted their kid in an orderly school. In fact, they were willing to jump through hoops to get their kid into an orderly school. We should be assuming there are a disproportionately small number of discipline problems, not a disproportionately high number of discipline problems.
So what’s going on in this “orderly” school to make parents leave? Are words like “chronically disruptive” or “discipline problem” or “violent outburst” being used to hide that an orderly school just doesn’t want to teach many of the students whose parents specifically want an orderly school?
And what do we do about that inconvenient fact? Are parents who want an orderly school at the mercy of people who get to decide if their 5 year old is orderly enough or not?
Someone wrote a comment about why public school parents change public schools. I wrote a short personal note about why I moved my son from his public school. I’m sorry it took the focus off what you wanted to discuss.
Jack’s comment that started this thread was:
“By contrast, Eva dumps her kids with an appalling disregard for what happens to them after she dumps them. She treats children like trash.
If the public schools did what Eva does, and dumped 75% of its students with no place for them to land, there would be tens of millions of children with no school to attend.”
Eva DUMPS kids whose parents are just like you and wanted an orderly school.
I confess I don’t understand the motives of people who profess to be very sympathetic to the parents who want an orderly school but don’t want to talk about why such a huge percentage of those parents who wanted an orderly school are finding that orderly school extremely unwelcoming to their kid.
But I hope you agree that the parents who enroll their children in Success Academy kindergarten classes because they are seeking out an orderly school are no more likely to have disruptive and bullying children than any middle class white parent who keeps invoking how much he values an orderly school.
Why wouldn’t you want to discuss what happens to all those parents who want an orderly school and jump through hoops to do everything that orderly school asks of them, if the orderly school decides they don’t want to teach their kid?
Some people would have no sympathy because deep down they believe that it is absolutely plausible that huge numbers of Success Academy kindergarten lottery winners are disproportionately violent and incorrigible discipline problems, even though every single Success Academy student has a parent just like flerp and places a very high value on having their kid in an orderly school. In fact, the very process of enrolling a 5 year old in a Success Academy school — having to attend pre-enrollment meetings, sign behavioral contracts, etc. weeds out ALL the parents who aren’t as committed as flerp is – if not more committed – to have their kid in an orderly school.
The 5 year olds who enroll at Success Academy are far less likely to be “discipline problems” than in any other school.
The 5 year olds who enroll at Success Academy are as unlikely to have “discipline” problems as any group of white middle class 5 year olds whose parents jumped through hoops and signed behavioral contracts and promised to do anything the school asked because they wanted their kid in an orderly school.
It isn’t possible to discuss how to make schools more orderly while ignoring that schools are using “orderly” as an excuse for why they treat the students they don’t want to teach so badly.
It isn’t possible to discuss how to make schools more orderly while ignoring the implicit racism of folks who don’t see the racism in turning a blind eye when a charter school EXCLUSIVELY for committed parents who jumped through hoops to enroll their kid in an orderly school pushes a false narrative that a disproportionately high number of those 5 year olds act out violently. If those kids were middle class white kids, that school would have been investigated years ago to find out what was going on that caused perfectly normal 5 and 6 year olds with no propensity for violence to supposedly be acting out. It would have been investigated to learn why so many parents who desperately wanted this orderly school would feel they had no choice but to withdraw their child.
Somebody should calculate the cost of producing one of Eva’s survivors and ask if this is a good use of public funds. Somebody should also do a longitudinal study on Eva’s “scholars.” What percentage of them graduate from college?
If “Success Academy” is Eva’s vanity project, Eva’s New York donors should pay for her project, not the public. A school that receives so much outside funding should not be able to take money from the under funded public school budget. It basically operates as a tax avoidance strategy for Wall St. It should be a private school paid for by private funds.
If they get their degrees, a follow-up study about how many get work at venture”philanthropies” or charter schools would be interesting.
If Success Academy were a public school with a 75% attrition rate it would be (negative) headlines on every ed reform echo chamber outlet and promoted by every ed reformer as people “fleeing” the school or “voting with their feet”.
Just CRAZILY biased treatment of charter and private schools compared to public schools.
People can check this ed reform bias towards charter and private schools and against public schools themselves and “school choice week” is a good week to do it, because ed reformers market the school choice ad campaign as “agnostic” as to type of school.
Yeah, right.
Go to any of the ed reform sites, leaders, unversity departments, lobbying shops, etc and look for a SINGLE positive mention of any public school, anywhere. You won’t find any. When you’re done with that go look for a single criticism or even question about any charter school or publicly funded private school. That’s banned in the echo chamber- you won’t find any. No criticism. No real questions.
I don’t mind that this “movement” exists to promote and market privatizing K-12 education- it’s an ideology and they may certainly believe it and promote it- but shouldn’t that be revealed to the public, who might mistake what ed reformers do as real “analysis”?
Precisely the sort of “analysis” one gets in any article from the Fordham Institute for Securing Big Paychecks from Oligarchs to Executives of the Fordham Institute for. . . [infinite loop]
“The 74
Starting soon: What will next fall’s recovery plans look like? Are states doing enough to drive equitable recovery? Join The 74’s
beth_hawkins
in a discussion of state plans with
EdReformNowUSA
today at 2 pm ET”
Please join the ed reform echo chamber outlet for a discussion that is limited to other echo chamber members, who will then determine policy for the public schools they don’t support, hope to replace with privatized systems, and never invite.
Privatized education is a colossal failure but the ed reformers continue on. Ed reform is a cargo cult.
Would the President of Harvard be more likely to give a commencement speech at Success Academy (2019) if self- appointed wealthy ed reformers from Wall Street and Silicon Valley had given the university piles of money?
Does Harvard take pride in creating, training or facilitating opportunists? Does it seem like it has more people associated with it who lack interest in the common good than other think tanks with students or, is the word elite synonymous with screw your neighbor?
Unrelated- I think Harvard’s president should praise its graduate, DiSantis’ surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. He has an MD and a doctorate in health policy from Harvard.
Ladapo. Should that be spelled Lapdogo?
It fits.
Lapdogo. LOL.
Headline from an article, today, about DeSatan’s new bill banning teaching of materials that will inculcate “white guilt”:
Governor DeSantis: White Supremacy’s Helicopter Mom
Linda,
CNN commentator Van Jones gave the Success Academy commencement address in 2021. I don’t know if he is a true believer or even understands the harm that his tacit endorsement of the “some parents just don’t want good schools and it’s their fault that their kid isn’t a high performing scholar” really does.
We don’t have a good discussion about education when Van Jones gives a loud endorsement to a school that promotes the view that some parents – obviously the “bad” ones – would pull their kids from a well-funded, academically strong, safe school for their kids because they don’t actually want their kids to have a good education.
Is Van Jones ever going to acknowledge that maybe – just maybe – that school doesn’t really want to teach their kids? Or does he blame the parents, giving support to those who say that there is no reason to spend money to improve schools because those parents don’t care anyway. Does Van Jones believes that to be true?
Because he certainly shows no curiosity about why so many parents would leave such a school, and why the administration of that school blames the parents for rejecting such a school when it was handed to them on a silver platter.
Van Jones was educated at an Ivy League school and his milieu at CNN is the richest 1.0%. It’s where the fusion of market and political power is taught and confirmed- where the elite make transactions they determine to be best for the nation.
Van Jones is a Center for American Progress senior fellow.
History will damn Ivy League colonialists, white and black- Georgia Gov. Talmadge first proposed privatization as a tool for segregation -and nothing’s changed.
Wall Street’s Robin Hood Foundation Board – Paul Tudor Jones, Gates-funded Roland Fryer and, Marion Wright Edelman who endorsed her son’s Stand for Children, ..
CDF has $20 mil. in assets and Stand for Children has $7-8 mil.
Van Johnson’s justice and green initiatives, how much do they get from Wall Street and Silicon Valley?
Diane’s ethical framework is highly developed. As one of the American republic’s heroes she is rare.
Thank you, Linda.
More ed reform work to “improve public schools” this year:
“Jennifer Berkshire
BisforBerkshire
·One third of students in the entire country now attend school in a state that has enacted an education gag order, all from the right.”
Aren’t you glad all your lawmakers just follow this echo chamber blindly? Really getting it done for public school students. Just adding value to public schools every day.
The 74 coverage in “school choice week”
https://www.the74million.org/
Three articles overtly promoting charters and vouchers as an unquestioned and absolute good, zero articles promoting any public school or system, anywhere.In fact, public schools can’t even get a “neutral” article- some good, some not so good- any coverage is negative.
Is this what qualifies as “agnostic” in ed reform? Because no one outside their echo chamber would believe that for a minute.
If it isn’t going to be “school choice” week and instead is going to be a week of bashing public schools and promoting and marketing charters and vouchers, couldn’t they just say that so no one mistakes this for anything other than a “movement’ that promotes privatization AND does little or nothing for existing public schools or public school students?
Education Next, “school choice week”:
https://www.educationnext.org/choice-flexibility-accountability-drive-school-improvement-what-explains-charter-success/
“Rah rah for charters, boo hiss for public schools”
Every single ed reform group. Just call it “charters and vouchers week”, which makes it exacly the same as every other week in ed reform. They don’t need a week set aside- it’s the sum total of their work.
Education Week purports to be the newspaper of record for U.S. K-12 education, but it is to U.S. education what Le Temps–the collaborationist Nazi newspaper was to politics in Vichy, France. It has become the official propaganda organ of the Deform occupation of our schools.
Education Week is distinguishable from Ed Next only by the overtness of the latter’s Deforminess.
Yikes. I was thinking of Education Week. Ed Next has always been overtly rightwing Libertarian.
EdNext is funded by the Hoover Institution.
In a bi-partisan spirit, let me just say that the graphic design of EdNext is some of the best I’ve seen, or at least used to be. I haven’t read it in some time. Elegant and contemporary.
Thankfully, Georgia has a new Education law that defines “On-time Graduation Rate.” It complementarily defines “attrition rate” or what I call “student loss rate.”
KIPP Metro Atlanta Schools, Inc., recently claimed its KIPP Collegiate Academy Charter High School “continues to maintain a graduation rate that surpasses the district and state average.”
Yes, but, as elsewhere, “graduation rate” in KIPP Inc.’s claim means the federal “Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate” or ACGR. ACGR is very much just a high school’s 12th grade graduation rate and not a graduation rate indicative of the whole school, grades 9 through 12.
Although KIPP Collegiate Academy’s ACGR for 2021 was 85.3%, high as claimed, the charter high school’s On-time Graduation Rate was 39.3% (estimated), hence a 60.7% student loss rate! None of the ten Atlanta strictly public high schools faired as badly!
In contrast to ACGR, On-time Graduation Rate indicates, without judgment or funny business, a high school’s capabilities to enroll a cohort of students starting 9th grade for the first time as of October 1st and to then retain and nurture all cohort members through to graduation four years later.
Thus, it is possible a high school could have a zero-percent On-time Graduation Rate and a 100% ACGR.
More here…
https://mailchi.mp/3b680e456259/atlanta-high-school-on-time-graduation-rates-2018-2021
The games people play with numbers! Juking the stats. (The Wire)
100 percent of our students who graduated graduated. LOL.
Bob,
That’s pretty much the case for Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy (CSK). CSK continues to be highly praised for its 100% graduation rate for 2021. Thirty-three students started 12th grade and 33 students graduated. Yet, enrollment figures show CSK lost 17 students out of the 50 that started at CSK four years earlier, in 2017, for an estimated 34% student loss rate.
Mind you, this is “Black” educators playing the game of “Juking the stats” and harming “Black” children in the process. And doing so in association with the name Coretta Scott King, for crying out loud! So, what manner of “racism,” implicit or otherwise, might that be, absent “White” educators doing it to the “Black” children? (This is a case where the argument “Black people don’t have the power to be racist” falls apart.)
Black people of privilege making book off of Black middle class and poor communities- too many of them are the face of ed reform paid by Wall Street and tech tyrants- they have a lot to answer for.
Ed Johnson,
Thank you – this is a very important point. And it’s also a point that reveals that education reformers have NEVER been at all interested in promoting arguably good ideas if those good ideas interfere with the primary goal — to push a false narrative that charters are performing miracles.
Part of the reason that I find Success Academy administrators so reprehensible is that they don’t want the kinds of honest discussions that would help all students – their goal is to push the narrative that helps the school.
Furthermore, what I find most disgusting is that these administrators invoke “the kids”. We are supposed to believe that the means — dishonesty — justifies the ends – students who are allowed to remain whose parents are happy.
But in fact, the students who are allowed to remain would have the exact same education if Success Academy was honest. But the administrators would be unlikely to reap the same lavish financial and professional rewards without the false narrative that they are performing miracles and can turn any kid into a high performing scholar.
In short, neither the students at Success Academy, nor their parents benefit from lies. The administrators do.
Getting back to Ed’s point –
Gary Rubinstein’s links show something that doesn’t really make sense.
Gary correctly points out that Success Academy’s own blog states that there are 137 seniors at Success Academy this year, due to graduate in 2022.
But according to NYSED data from last year, 2021, there were only 103 11th graders enrolled. So where did the extra seniors come from?
Are some – or all? – of them those MIA students from previous years?
Presumably Success Academy didn’t enroll some new high performing ringers for senior year.
Maybe it is not that 75% of the students disappear. Maybe it is that even with the best education money can buy from Kindergarten through 8th grade and even making your high school EXCLUSIVELY for those 8th graders who have been educated in middle schools whose test scores “prove” their kids are the best-educated in the state — there are still an extraordinarily high percentage of those 9th graders who benefited from many, many years of Success Academy’s vaunted education prowess who do NOT finish high school in 4 years.
Educators who cared about kids and not their own careers and compensation would be absolutely transparent about “retention” instead of hiding it. Success Academy starts with the most motivated parents, who commit to doing anything the school asks them to do to support their child’s education, and Success Academy still seems to “retain” (i.e. fail) many students from Kindergarten through high school.
Does anyone know how many? If giving at-risk students more years of education — if slowing down the curriculum — is a practice that benefits many students who might struggle with a too rigorous curriculum, why hide it? It doesn’t benefit the students who need more years to hide it. And it doesn’t “hurt” the students who can handle a faster-moving or more rigorous curriculum to acknowledge it.
But it does benefit a school promoting itself to hide that. It hurts the administrators’ ability to hold itself out as a miracle worker.
There is no excuse for the lack of transparency and dishonesty when it comes to the disappearing students. There is no excuse but implicit racism for the fact that those who job it is to do oversight to be complicit in allowing false narratives to amplify.
It does great damage to the students. The only people it helps are the adults whose careers benefit from it.
I can recall a teacher in our high school that got very emotional when a student dropped out. Some of them felt it as a personal loss. Most teachers are generally on the side of encouraging students, not discarding them.
nycpsp– Correct me if I’m wrong, but there might also be a money-grab question hidden in there. I can only speak as a local, but I have found my pubschsys loath to allow a student to repeat a grade even when it seems an appropriate and helpful idea. Many hoops to jump through, probably including evaluation/ IEP. I have always suspected this has more to do with the extra cost to the schsys than with the umpty-ump studies showing retention causes drop-out. I wonder whether charter schools get to keep going back to the well for multiple retentions via their privilege to ignore various rules, & their general lack of accountability.
p.s., I too would like to know whether retention might improve results for some struggling students. Or at least have the subject studied more closely. And I don’ t mean some state law holding back 3rd-graders based on some score on a questionable test. Just some flexibility. Pubschs have been putting kibosh on this since the ‘60’s; studies need to be updated & what better study subject than charters allowed retain as often as they like.
bethree5,
From the extremely limited data I see, I am guessing that Success Academy “retains” students fairly often. Unfortunately, that charter school’s historical lack of integrity means that “retaining” may not be an attempt to teach students, but instead a way to get them to leave so their charter network is absolved of all responsibility. Something that public schools can’t do, of course.
But in terms of knowledge gained — it would be incredibly useful to do a real analysis of Success Academy’s retention policy. I have known adults who repeated an early elementary school year and have said that it turned out to be an extremely positive experience that they believed made a huge difference (although of course no one can ever know).
But charter schools are incentivized differently. And if the students who are “retained” simply get older for their grade and feel more isolated and humiliated until they leave the school, then clearly that kind of “retention” benefits a charter school, not a student.
It would be very good to know what happens to all the students who are asked to repeat a year to see whether that works and when.
But bethree5, I think there was a very good reason why public schools became anti-“retention” in the 1960s and I think those are probably valid reasons.
Why is “retention” necessary? Why can’t the curriculum be slowed down when students need it? Every 11 year old can be in 5th grade even if they are learning math that some 3rd or 4th graders are learning and reading books that some 6th graders are reading.
I can only speak anecdotally, but it seems so obvious to me that students progress at different speeds even during a single school year. A kid might get stuck on adding fractions and take a month to get it, but once it clicks that kid might immediately understand how to subtract, multiply and divide fractions in a few days.
It is a shame that Eva Moskowitz would rather use her bully pulpit to demonize public schools and young children, or use it to urge the Senate to confirm Betsy DeVos for the good of America’s children. If she was a person of integrity, she could actually use her bully pulpit to advocate for students — and I don’t just mean the students whose academic performance makes her look good. When those are the only students someone is advocating for, then what that person is really advocating for is themselves.
What really works with students who struggle to learn or have serious behavioral problems? The selfish folks who benefit when the public believes the false narrative that a cheap “no-excuses” charter school works miracles don’t care enough about those kids to tell the truth.
There is a movie to be made about a greedy, self-promoting charter CEO who is visited by the ghost of (insert religious holiday here) past, present and future and comes to understand how many children are harmed by their selfishness. That charter CEO changes their ways and no longer justifies the harm they do to many students by invoking the kids who make them look good. Instead, that charter CEO spends the rest of their life actually doing good.
Highly implausible, I know. What a shame.
Jon Michaels’s book, “Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s threat to the American Republic…
Today’s fusion of market and political power -this running of government like a politicized business- has the effect of sidelining and defanging otherwise independent, expert and truly mandarin civil servants and marginalizing the populist contributions of an otherwise empowered and diverse civil society.”
“Fusion’s threat” to America is Success Academies, Bill Gates and Fordham Institute. “The contributions of civil society, diverse in nature,” derive from the Network for Public Education.
“Fusion’s threat” is the Children’s Defense Fund’s endorsement of Stand for Children.
“The contributions of civil society, diverse in nature” come from people like Nikole Hannah Jones.
Is it not true that the Success Academy achievement scores are far and away above those for the City as a whole? Do their scores not rival those of the rich kids in the suburbs? It is well known that the curriculum of Success Academy is demanding on both students and teachers. If students wash out they just go back to where it seems most of the commenters here want them to be — in union run public schools. Can we say then that the Success Academy may not be the answer to all students needs, but at least some of the underprivileged kids in New York are getting a quality education? Some success is better than the alternative!
We know that Success Academy students get high schools because SA sheds the kids who don’t get high scores. Are those who who survive getting a quality education? We don’t know that.