The New York State Board of Regents recently decided to permit the Ember Charter School in Brooklyn to expand and add a high school. Charter schools get permission to grow if they have demonstrated success. Gary Rubinstein checked state data and found that Ember’s greatest “success” was getting rid of students by attrition.
The Regents must know this too. Why did they vote to expand a failing charter school?
Rubinstein writes:
Currently there are 267 charter schools in New York City. In New York State the charter ‘cap’ is 460, though the cap for New York City is 267 so as of right now, no new charters can open in New York City.
Charter school supporters often complain that the cap needs to be lifted or that some of the out of NYC charter slots could be given to New York City. But there are two ways that charters can get more students even without lifting the cap. The most obvious way is for charters to reduce their attrition rates. So a network like Success Academy has about 40,000 students right now. But about 75% of their students who start in kindergarten don’t make it to graduation. Success Academy could probably increase their population to 70,000 if few of their students weren’t on the official or unofficial ‘got-to-go’ list. The other way to evade the cap is for existing charter schools to expand into more grades.
Ember charter school is a K-10 school that currently has 568 students. They were recently permitted to add high school grades based, in part, on the school’s ability to raise test scores. If you go to their website you will see a very impressive looking graph:
The light green line shows the percent of their first cohort’s math percent passing the state test from grade 3 to grade 7. It went from 28% in grade 3 down to 23% in grade 4 and then again to 14% in grade 5 Then an amazing reversal occurred and in 6th grade they shot up from 14% up to 56% and the next year they had 82% passing in grade 7. It seems to be an incredible turnaround from 14% to 82% in just 2 years.
When faced with a miracle statistic like this, there are two questions that cross my mind. The first thing I wonder is how much of this growth is based on attrition. The second is whether they were able to replicate this success for their other cohorts.
For that first cohort who finished 7th grade in 2018, I found on the New York State data site that this cohort once had 60 students when they were in first grade. By the time they got to the miracle 2017-2018 year where they got 82% passing the math test, they were down to just 28 students. Here is a graph of their percent passing math and their cohort size on the same graph.
As you can see, the two graphs are practically mirror images of each other. When they were 3rd graders, 16 out of 57 was 28%. When they were in 7th grade, 23 out of 28 was 82%. So basically they got 7 more kids to pass the test.
I made a similar chart for the second and third cohorts. The second cohort had similar attrition, they went fro 71 students down to 37 between 4th grade and 7th grade but they did not get the 82% passing by 7th grade. They only got to 43% passing, even with the nearly 50% attrition.
The third cohort was the lowest performing of all. They had almost no attrition, keeping around 65 students throughout. They only had 6% of that cohort passing in both 3rd and 4th grade. And by 6th grade they were up to 23%, well below the district.
So just like so many other charter schools, when they can’t cheat by booting out their students, their test scores are nothing special. How they get permission to expand is definitely a scandal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The call should be to shut them down.
Any school with high attrition rates has failed its students. It can hardly be called “a success.” Any school can look better on paper by forcing out the neediest, most difficult and expensive to educate. This is not success. It is statistical chicanery!
But schools can look good by never admitting the most difficult, expensive, or disruptive students to begin with. That is how most progressives pick their schools.
The question for K-12 education is whether it is better for all high school graduates to function at a 12th grade level or for there to be a high number of high school graduates eve if many of them function at an elementary school level.
superdestroyer says: “But schools can look good by never admitting the most difficult, expensive, or disruptive students to begin with.” This is true. And if those schools that never admit the most difficult, expensive or disruptive students to begin with and they also have high attrition rates with the students they do admit (which excludes all the above) then something is very, very wrong. Agree?
I certainly understand why any charter would prefer to exclusively teach the students who make them look good, but that doesn’t make it right.
“Growth based on attrition”
What a concept.
Growth based on attrition is the model when education is considered an individualist effort instead of what it is, a civic responsibility. Corporate scum made schooling into a free market disaster.
Oops, I used a no-no word to describe corporate education “reform” and went into moderation. Let’s try again without that word:
Growth based on attrition is the model when education is considered an individualist effort instead of what it is, a civic responsibility
Nope. Algorithm had Bush brain and misunderestimated me.
Growth by Attrition
To grow, you must discard
You know, because it’s hard
To grow some weakly plants
That haven’t got a chance
Ember Charter School to expand and add a high school: translation = more dollars siphoned off from the actual real public schools which admit all students who live in the district unlike charter schools. A huge waste which undermines the actual real public schools.
You are correct, but I’m slowly coming to the belief that, however important and vital they are, financial waste arguments about charters and privatization should not be our primary arguments anymore. They should be reserved for policy-making time, not political messaging time. I recently had an airport conversation with some, while professing to think qanon is bonkers, the idea of protecting children from trafficking and abuse was one that ultimately interested her enough to pay attention.
Off the cuff, I immediately said, “Rather than pay attention to this organized political pedophilia poison, you know where you could really do something about child abuse? Pay attention to the forces that are trying to undermine and take away public education. There are kids who are being bounced around failing schools while others make money off them. The long term damage they do to these children and the damage they are doing to kids in public schools because of neglect are real child abuse taking place today that we can do something about.” Not sure if it resonated or made me look like a kook. But we parted on friendly terms.
Charter schools are a financial product that turns young people, particularly black and brown students, into a commodity while they undermine the schools that serve the neediest and most expensive to educate.
I don’t disagree, RT. My point is that your argument equates turning children into commodities “particularly black and brown” ones. I have used this same line of reasoning since I read Diane’s first book. And where has that gotten us? My point is that those children, particularly the black and brown one, are personally suffering from a provable form of child abuse. We need to lead with that kind of argument because the one we’ve been using, at least in Ohio, has done nothing to change the status quo. It has only been strengthened and the people behind it have all moved up the elected official ladder.
More to the point, if you lead with the financial malfeasance argument, it is about you, the taxpayer. If you lead with a child abuse argument, it is about each individual child. Arguments about what is happening to children subjected to these schemes should replace any financial talking point. At least that would be my recommendation if I were consulting on this.
Do the Republican leaders in Ohio care more about financial fraud or child abuse? Seems to me they care about neither.
Position of final cohort size on upper graph is wrong. Correctly positioned, the attrition cause of improvement is even more evident.
That is how charters play with data making parents believe they do better in teaching their students the the Traditional Public Schools.
When the truth is the traditional Public Schools do better even with some of our students not on grade level.
They should close them if they are failing our students .Period
I will never understand why the incompetent education journalists have embraced the privatizers’ lie that attrition doesn’t matter, when attrition is an enormous red flag.
Maybe the education reporters aren’t incompetent and ignorant. Maybe they are scared. Maybe they are lazy. Maybe they are like the one WNYC reporter many years ago who thought that she could cover up her own biases by inventing a way to do an embarrassingly incompetent charter attrition study that would be approved by the most powerful charters. Her invented study chose to compare one high performing charter’s attrition rate only to a select group of troubled and failing public schools — not to all public schools, not to good public schools, and not to other charters with less stellar state passing rates. Her “news” was that parents pulled their kids from troubled public schools at high rates, too. She did not think it was newsworthy at all that parents pulled their kids from lavishly funded high performing charters more frequently than they did mediocre charters and public schools that weren’t failing and troubled. She didn’t want to know if they did because that wasn’t newsworthy to her.
Attrition at the very highest performing charters is almost always significantly higher than attrition at mediocre charters. I am not a reporter, but as soon as I realized that very high performing charters had outrageously high attrition rates, I knew something smelled rotten. Anyone who isn’t racist would know some students weren’t welcome, and those students were the ones whose academic performance didn’t benefit the charters.
In every professional activity, there are individuals who somehow never get fired, but no one ever knows what to do with them. Yet somehow their incompetence is “balanced” by things such as just being nice or related to the owner. In journalism, I am convinced these people cover education issues everywhere.
Unfortunately, in the case of education journalists, the “incompetence” is valuable because those who have power do not want to have anyone but bootlicking incompetents covering them.
Competent journalists are moved out. Kate Taylor at the NYT finally woke up and was soon gone. Replaced by reporters who see no evil when it comes to charters, but always make sure to characterize any voices of criticism as coming from the biased teachers union.
In the world of NYT education journalists, there are no parents failed by high performing charters with their extraordinarily high attrition rates. The only parents who matter to them are the ones whose kids were allowed to remain, and they are constantly quoted about how well their kid was served. The only other low income parent who exists for NYT education reporters are those whose kids are failed by their public schools. There are no parents failed by high performing charters because high attrition rates are always the fault of those parents. Or they are the fault of the kindergarten and first grade students that charters demonize as violent and unteachable which apparently the education reporters accept as truth because of the race of the kid. Would any of them accept that if all those kindergarten and first grade students labeled as violent were white?
Chalkbeat NY’s education reporter was somewhat better than the NYT, and asked some good questions of Robert Pondiscio after he wrote his book about Success Academy (Oct. 16, 2019). The Chalkbeat reporter asked about self-selection, and Pondiscio said this:
“I think this has been hiding in plain sight for a very long time, including in a footnote in the [research firm] MDRC study of Success [showing that only about 50% of students who won a spot in Success actually enrolled], which puts numbers on exactly what I saw.
The orthodoxy in ed reform is that we can do this for every kid — it’s a random lottery, first come, first served. That’s simply not how it works.
First you win a seat in the lottery. Well, that just starts the process. The next step is you’re invited to a welcome meeting, which, to their credit, Success could not be more clear and emphatic about what they stand for and what they will not stand for. And then comes a “confirm your interest” email, where you have to actively say yes, I want to continue. Then there is a uniform fitting. And then there is a dress rehearsal for kindergarten.
At every step of the way, some number fall away. Why? Could be any number of reasons.
The undeniable fact is, it is simply not possible for a child to find himself or herself in a Success Academy seat in August unless that child’s parents have voted with their feet repeatedly and either are enthusiastic about the school’s culture or willing to go along with the school’s culture.”
END OF QUOTE
What is sad about this is that the Chalkbeat reporter, while somewhat better than the NYT reporters, failed to follow up with what was right in front of his face after Pondiscio’s response above.
If a charter school BEGINS by having all kinds of pre-enrollment requirements so that ONLY the parents who are the most motivated to jump through hoops even enroll, how the heck does that charter school ALSO have high attrition rates once they start out with this already highly-curated group of parents?? Remember that the 50% of parents who don’t enroll their kids after attending those meeting don’t count.
The high attrition rates are for the parents who were most motivated, who jumped through many hoops to enroll their kid. And not one education journalist thinks that is odd that so many of them leave a charter they jumped through hoops to enroll their kid. The high attrition rates aren’t for kids whose parents won the lottery. The high attrition rates are for kids whose parents won the lottery AND were proven to be highly motivated enough to enroll their kid after attending multiple pre-enrollment meetings. Any decent journalist would question why so many of THOSE parents would leave. But the Chalkbeat NY reporter did not.
That’s what has always been missing. The obliviousness of education reporters has always been well-rewarded. Not one of them follows up by asking the obvious questions after a charter promoter tells them that only half the parents who win lottery seats jump through all the hoops to enroll their kid.
Robert Pondiscio made it clear the ONLY the most motivated lottery-winning parents enrolled their kid. Which would beg any reporter with a brain to ask why – if they started out with such a motivated group of parents – a high performing charter would still have such high attrition rates.
But not asking questions that might make those in power mad seems to be what too many education reporters do. Or maybe they are as incompetent as they seem. I have no idea which is true. But I know that I read articles that don’t answer any of the questions a normal parent would have and wonder what is wrong with those journalists.
Dear NYT and Chalkbeat journalists: I already know some parents are happy with charters or vouchers. What I don’t know is why so many of the most motivated parents who jumped through hoops to enroll in a charter would then leave. And neither do you. Or maybe you do and have simply been covering up the obvious by writing endless stories about the miracle that charters can perform.
I guess writing stories about how high performing charters only want to educate high performing kids is not allowed because that doesn’t adhere to the accepted pro-charter narrative.
NYCPSP,
I had an email exchange with NY Times reporter Eliza Shapiro about an article she wrote claiming that black and brown parents support charters. The article said that there were very large numbers of children on charter waiting lists; the source was a five-year-old press release by the lobbyists at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. I offered to meet over coffee and she refused, saying that I was untrustworthy. She then blocked me on Twitter, assuring that she would never read anything I wrote.
I think journalists should be open to different points of view. She is not.
Eliza Shapiro, who’s done a lot of the NY Times’ reporting on NYC schools, went to Columbia, where two of her relatives were professors. She then went to Columbia U’s School of Journalism, where her father was a professor. Later she joined the New York Times, where her mother was an editor.
Imagine being an education “reporter” in this day and age in this nation and not even be willing to listen what Diane Ravitch has to say about education policy. That would be like tuning out Einstein for his knowledge of physics, Leonard Bernstein for his understanding of music theory, or, to be charitable, the Idiot to assess American fascism. What a fecking maroon!
Charter schools often engage in nepotism, but I suppose the NYT is familiar with the practice.
Diane,
It says it all that Eliza Shapiro is skeptical of your motives but treats every press release put out by a pro-charter organization and every study funded by a pro-charter organization as gospel. Because their motives are never to be questioned.
But you, who have spent so many decades looking at evidence and thinking about this must not be trusted.
I am not sure Shapiro has even once interviewed a parent whose kids were drummed out or counseled out of supposedly high performing charters — and we know from Gary Rubenstein that they aren’t hard to find given the high attrition rates!! Instead, the only parents whose opinions are amplified are the ones the charters hold out for her.
And FLERP!, you are absolutely correct about Shapiro’s privileged background. I knew she went to Columbia but not the J school — her work reflects very poorly on the J school, and I happen to admire many of the past and present faculty there. And I can’t imagine any of them condoning the type of reporting she does. Amplifying the pro-charter narratives and throwing in a line to demonstrate her reporting is fair and balanced (by Fox News standards) like “Mr. Smith, a union teacher, challenges what this wonderful caring charter CEO who only cares about kids says.” Not surprisingly, either because of ignorance or intent, Shapiro seems far too lazy to learn about what the supposedly extremely biased pro-union critics of charters are actually criticizing and why. She is content to write her charter-PR based stories and include a disclaimer that someone she makes sure to inform readers is rabidly anti-charter “disagrees” and thinks it is not her job as a reporter to explain why they disagree. We are left to assume they disagree because, like Diane Ravitch, they are simply untrustworthy folks whose views Eliza Shapiro believes aren’t even worth explaining.
What is most laughable is she believes she is too pro-public education because the charter folks understand how gullible she is and play her like a violin. She writes a pro-charter story with a small disclaimer to make it “fair and balanced” and the pro-charter industry accuses her of being too pro-public school, knowing that next time she will bend over backward even more trying ever so hard to write a story that they won’t criticize. She has no clue she is being played but many of us are embarrassed for her, especially when she cites how she knows she is unbiased because she is criticized by the charter folks! And Susan Collins knows she is unbiased because some Republicans criticize her!
One of the dangers of our democracy is reporters, especially at the NYT, who are so insecure that they don’t independently know how to do good, truthful reporting. They believe that being criticized by both sides is a sign of excellence and not a sign that they are being played by the far right which has no concern for the truth. Doing the job of journalist and informing readers of the truth is a sign of excellence. If the truth gets you criticized by the side that lies a lot, that doesn’t mean that you are biased. Journalists used to know that. Now they think that making liars and truth-tellers equally unhappy means that they are excellent journalists!
Perhaps Eliza Shapiro can get some real science reporters at the NYT to explain to her why high attrition rates matter, especially high attrition rates for something that is being presented as truly outstanding and miraculous. It’s a red flag. Things that are truly outstanding and miraculous are not things that caring parents suddenly decide they don’t want anymore, especially when those parents have jumped through hoops to get them for their kids.
Who is that female reporter. Please name names as otherwise the perp can continue to get away with lies, exaggerations and falsehoods.
Regent Cashin and other members vigorously opposed adding high school grades to Ember, to no avail, a connected lobbyist collected letters from electeds, Regents leadership cast aside objections, actually bent the rules to pass the motions. The expanded grades, 9th and 10th grades have 17 kids on each grade, disgraceful, I suspect teachers are uncertified, I wonder about student attendance, sadly the victims are the children. The Regents leadership should be ashamed