Gary Rubinstein has been following the attrition rates at Success Academy for years. His interest was piqued by literally unbelievable claims issued by the public relations team at Success Academy. The charter chain, a favorite of former Mayor Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, has very high test scores. It has also been in the news for high attrition rates. It is a truism that the best way to get high test scores is to get rid of kids who don’t get high test scores.
Gary looked at the latest boasts and did some new checking of Success Academy’s claims:
On April 5th The New York Post published their annual ‘100% of Success Academy students get accepted into four-year colleges’ editorial. The class of 2023 will be the sixth graduating class of the infamous charter chain and according to the first paragraph of the editorial, Success Academy has accomplished this feat six years in a row.
I’ve been fact checking claims like this for about 12 years now and if you follow me at all you know that of course the 100% four year college admission statistic is a lie, but you will want to know how much of a lie it is this time.
What I usually do to check these claims is go to the New York State Education portaland go through the different schools. The quickest calculation is to simply compare the number of Kindergarteners who started the school twelve years earlier to the size of the graduating class. This is not the most accurate thing to do since Success Academy only used to ‘backfill’ students who leave up until 3rd grade, but it is still a pretty informative number. As I’ve reported in previous blog posts about four of the first five graduating classes, this led to senior to kindergarten ratios of 2018: 16/73=22%, 2019: 26/83=31%, 2020: 98/353=28%, 2021: Pandemic so I wasn’t able to do this one, and 2022: 137/538=25%.
Success Academy complains that this way of doing is makes the attrition seem worse than it is because it is equivalent to about a 10% attrition per year. But these numbers are actually inflated because they don’t account for the number of students who left and then were replaced in the early years. I once got data on this from the State and was able to use it to get a more accurate number of 22% for the class of 2021.
Looking at the year to year attrition, the thing that always jumps out at me is how almost half the students who are in 9th grade will graduate on time four years later. For this years analysis I found one of the most bizarre examples of short term attrition I think I have ever seen.
So The New York Post editorial mentions that 100% of the 117 students at Success Academy got into 4 year colleges. Looking back at the 2010-2011 school year, there were seven Success Academy schools that had a combined enrollment of 726 students. (For five of the schools I found Kindergarten stats for 2010-2011 but for the Harlem-5 school I used the 78 1st graders in 2011-2012 and for Bronx-2 I used the 93 2nd graders in 2012-2013). So this quick calculation leads to the lowest ever senior to Kindergarten ration of 117/726=16%. And remember, this is an overestimate since it doesn’t count all the students who left but were replaced.
But the craziest statistic I think I’ve ever come across in this type of research is the number of 11th graders that were in the school just one year earlier. It is hard to get this data sometimes because I had to look at Harlem-1 and Harlem-3 schools even though I think there is just one high school, it is kind of confusing. But it shows that Harlem-1 had 89 11th graders in 2021-2022 and Harlem-3 had 81 11th graders in 2021-2022. So this is 170 eleventh graders in 2021-2022 and now ‘100%’ of them are 117 students. But of course 117/170=69%. So where did 31% of the eleventh graders who were at Success Academy last year go? Well it is doubtful that so many would transfer out. It would be like dropping out of the marathon with 100 yards to go. Though it is possible that some transferred out when they were told that they would have to repeat 11th grade
Please open the link and read the rest of this important post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for always being on top of Success’s inflated claims. I’ve also always wondered how these kids do at their colleges? I hope for the students that they do well, but hard to imagine that the training they’ve gotten is helpful for a college curriculum.
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Do robots do well on campus? Don’t they expect you to show independence and critical thinking?
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Four new SA were just approved. They’re advertising on TV like crazy.
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If they have a long waiting list, as they say, why are they recruiting on TV?
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The infamous question.
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Hear at Bob n Darlene’s Real Good Florida School, whar yore chile’s privete school tuishun is compleetly payed for by Govner De Santises new vouchers, we dont haveta take the tests cause we is private you see, an thats a good thang, two, cause, tell the truth, are students is none too brite.
But Darlene thot it wood be a good idear fer us to have sum test scores to brag about, so she got her brother’s yungist girl Charlene Darlin, of the Harlan Darlins, to inroll an take the test cause that girls sharper than the business end of a gig pole, and Im hapy to report that now 100 percent of are studints takin the test is pro fisient. Which is even better than Some Success Academy. So thar.
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Bob n Darlenes Real Good Florida School. Better’n Suck-cess Academy. Which is one of them schools up North, which is a blue flag rite thar cause up North, they got CRT teachin classes n they is teachin high school kids to be trans gender an lord nos whut else.
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lowered nose whut all
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OR
lowered nose whut ailse
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An, 100 per sint of are studints is attendin Bob n Darlene’s Real Good Not Woke Flor-uh-Duh Uni Versity after Colledge. Thats rite. They was all so good, we had to except all of em!!!
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That’d be “fer Colledge,” uv coarse
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If a public school graduated such a small number of students with such a high attrition rate, it would be declared inefficient and too costly to remain open. The right wing ‘NY Post’ portrays Success Academy as an exceptional school when it is a niche school that always gets favorable from the ‘NY Post’ by manipulating its enrollment. Based on the numbers that actually graduate, it is an expensive, unrealistic choice school with Draconian policies.
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cx: favorable reviews from the ‘NY Post’
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Thanks to Gary Rubinstein for doing the work that the shockingly incompetent (or corrupt) folks at the SUNY Charter Institute have refused to do. (It’s hard to believe they get taxpayer salaries when their oversight is so shoddy).
The news media (with a few exceptions who are quickly moved off the education beat) have been complicit with the SUNY Charter Institute’s corrupt practice of ignoring attrition as irrelevant. Gary does more journalism in one day than most of them have done in years. Elizabeth Green at Chalkbeat, Eliza Shapiro at the NYT, and many others have embraced the completely nonsensical, illogical certainty that attrition doesn’t matter. It is the success of the students allowed to remain – whether that is half or one quarter – that matters.
I have always compared lazy education reporters who rewrite press releases with science reporters who don’t believe their job is to promote whatever new “miracle” drug some pharmaceutical company PR person tells them about and gets quotes from a few patients (provided by the drug company) who rave about how the new medication cured them.
Science reporters who wrote endless articles like that would be fired at legitimate news organizations. Education reporters are promoted.
What Gary is finding is OBVIOUS. It isn’t even the tip of the iceberg – it is what someone who doesn’t have the power of an oversight agency or the power of the press behind him can find. And yet he is the only one doing it. Where are the questions of this entity taking public funds directly from public schools? Why is Success Academy, like Donald Trump, held to such a low standard of honesty and integrity when it comes to oversight?
That happens when politicians, the media, and the oversight agency is complicit.
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Wow, looks like AI still has a long way to go… At bard.google.com I posed the query: “how does student attrition at success academy high school in NYC compare to attrition at other NYC schools?”
And received the superficially seemingly well informed and sensible response below… does it not recognize like Gary and his fans that when one successfully graduates from a Success Academy middle school in Far Rockaway Queens one must then inexorably increase the Success Academy attrition rate if one does not next choose to enroll in a S.A. high school about an hour and a half or more commute distant?
Bard:
The attrition rate at Success Academy High School in NYC is 10%, which is lower than the average attrition rate for both NYC district schools and other charter schools. According to a study by education journalist Beth Fertig of WNYC, the average attrition rate for NYC district schools is 13%, and the average attrition rate for charter schools is 11%.
There are a number of reasons why student attrition rates may be lower at Success Academy High School than at other NYC schools. One reason is that Success Academy has a rigorous admissions process, which means that students who are accepted to the school are more likely to be academically motivated and prepared for the challenges of high school. Additionally, Success Academy has a strong focus on discipline and order, which may help to create a more positive and productive learning environment. Finally, Success Academy offers a number of support services to students, such as tutoring and counseling, which may help to keep students engaged and motivated.
However, it is important to note that student attrition is not always a negative thing. In some cases, students may leave a school for reasons that are beyond the school’s control, such as a family move or a change in financial circumstances. Additionally, some students may leave a school because they are not a good fit for the school’s culture or academic program. Ultimately, it is up to each individual student to decide whether or not a particular school is the right fit for them.
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Stephen,
I thought that getting accepted into a Success Academy charter was like winning the lottery. How is it possible that SA has any attrition? How can you explain the kids who are in SA until 9th grade but never make it to graduation? And so few graduates!
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The one experience I recollect contributing to a school’s attrition rate was a sad one… I would have gladly continued to attend till completion, but had I continued to live with the same parents, the commute would have become 3,434 miles, rather more than I’d have needed to get a good start on my homework in the morning.
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Success Academy has a reputation for pushing out students they don’t want. A few years ago, The NY Times wrote about a SA principal had a “got to go” list.
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Notice how Stephen Ronan cites some straw man instead of addressing the points that Gary made.
There were 170 11th graders one year and only 117 students graduated the next year.
So why is Stephen citing the long commute from Forest Hills instead of also being outraged or at least extremely concerned and curious?? How desperate (and racist) does someone have to be to try to convince us that African American students and their parents just don’t appreciate the generosity of white people like Eva Moskowitz who sacrificed so much to give those kids a 100% guaranteed chance to be a high-performing scholar, but they spurned it.
Stephen hasn’t really explained why so many students spurned Success Academy between junior and senior year, but he clearly hopes readers are as implicitly racist as certain education reporters and embrace Stephen’s innuendo that African American families reject high performing schools at much higher rates than white families because …. well Stephen expects us to agree with him that it doesn’t have to be said out loud.
As I have said so many times, Stephen could not get away with his implicitly racist innuendo if those disappearing students were white. Musing about having to move to live with another parent 3,000 miles away is a way to explain how little those missing students mean to him.
Students only have value to Stephen if they make charters look good and if they don’t, they just don’t matter at all.
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Stephen Ronan is lying as usual.
First of all, he is citing an extremely old study about ELEMENTARY schools done by a journalist and some researcher and this study was never peer-reviewed nor published except for being constantly cited by desperate folks like Stephen who can’t counter any of the points that Gary made.
so let’s agree with the study Stephen cites that “proves” that attrition at Success Academy is similar to attrition at the most failing poverty-stricken, under funded publlic schools.
Let\s agree with the study Stephen cites that “proves” that MEDIOCRE charter schools don’t have nearly the outrageously high attrition rate that Success Academy has!
Stephen is one of those people who claim they aren’t racist while they twist themselves into knots “whitesplaining” to us about how African American parents just prefer mediocre charters to high performing ones, and how African American 5 year olds are disproportionately violent when compared to white 5 year olds to justify anything Eva Moskowitz does — whether it is out of school suspensions for very young children to disappearing kids whose African American parents – according to Stephen Ronan – spurned the chance for their kid to become a high performing scholar. Those parents want their kids to be mediocre, and that’s why the attrition rate at mediocre charters is so much lower than the attrition rate at Success Academy. Stephen Ronan blames the PARENTS because he is a racist. The missing students have parents who hate good charters, right, Stephen?
The thing is, we can come up with MANY non-racist reasons why a parent might choose to remove their child from a failing, underfunded, poverty stricken public school.
But Stephen Ronan is claiming that he is NOT surprised that so many African American parents would “voluntarily” pull their kids from a lavishly funded charter school where 100% of the students become high performing scholars and are admitted to college.
Stephen Ronan telling us that he EXPECTS African American parents to leave a high performing charter at the same rate as they leave failing, underfunded public schools is racist. Just plain racist.
The attrition rate at GOOD public schools is much lower than the attrition rate at Success Academy. The attrition rate at INFERIOR charter schools is much lower than the attrition rate at Success Academy.
But Stephen Ronan assures us that he is positive that the fact that African American parents pull their kids from poverty-stricken, underfunded, low-performing public schools proves to him that African American parents just hate good schools. Nothing to see here, folks. Stephen Ronan refuses to compare Success Academy to other charters that have much lower attrition because then he wouldn’t be able to make his racist justification of why so many African American students disappear from Success Academy when they aren’t disappearing at that rate from other charters or other good public schools.
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” it is up to each individual student to decide whether or not a particular school is the right fit for them.”
And it’s up to the “model teachers” to identify what students are a “right fit” and which ones are not.
Which we saw on the videotape.
That wasn’t some newly minted teacher. She was celebrated and honored by Success Academy administrators for her MODEL teaching. She demonstrated perfectly on the video the way that a MODEL Success Academy teacher identifies the students who are a “right fit” for Success Academy and how to treat the ones who are not.
Sadly, parents whose kids are identified as not being a “right fit” at Success Academy are often low-income and have less post-graduate education than those who are a good fit. So the SUNY Charter Institute sees no reason to investigate their complaints. Their voices don’t fit Stephen Ronan’s right wing, racist narrative about how all the missing kids have parents who don’t care about their kids’ education and wanted their kids to be failures instead of scholars.
So-called “journalists” like Eliza Shapiro and Elizabeth Green seem to agree with Stephen Ronan, that is it not curious at all why so many African American students would disappear from a high performing charter – at rates much higher than they disappear from mediocre charters and good public schools. If that isn’t implicit racism, then I don’t know what is.
Because if those were white middle class parents disappearing from a high performing charter school at rates higher than they leave good public schools, Eva Moskowitz fan Beth Fertig would not have dared compare the high attrition rates of a top performing charter school with the high attrition rates of a failing, underfunded poverty-stricken school and declared herself satisfied that white middle class parents hate high performing schools as much as they hate failing ones.
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Gary Rubinstein’s exposing how the “100% of Success Academy students get accepted into four-year colleges” lie works is much the same as how school district leaders, at least the ones here in Atlanta, misrepresent federal guidance to tell “graduation rate” lies, so as to make themselves look good by being silent about high rates of student loss, or attrition. For example, …
https://mailchi.mp/6cc25e88831f/fraudulent-graduation-rate-celebrated-at-atlanta-mays-high-school
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Guess who owns the New York Post.
Rupert Murdoch
“In 1976, Rupert Murdoch bought the Post for US$30.5 million. Since 1993, the Post has been owned by Murdoch’s News Corp. Its distribution ranked 4th in the US in 2019.”
AND… Drum roll please.
“Overall we rate the New York Post on the far end of Right-Center Biased due to story selection that typically favors the Right and Mixed (borderline questionable) for factual reporting based on several failed fact checks.”
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The New York Post, where I was formerly employed full-time, is not the only news outlet that has bolstered Success Academy. Commenters on this blog post, above, have named NY Times reporter Eliza Shapiro, Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green, and ex-NPR reporter Beth Fertig. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t care about NYC education; the NY Post and other local outlets do.
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You write many good stories and your reporting is better than Eliza Shapiro or Elizabeth Green and many others, but that is such a low bar.
I couldn’t find any article where you wrote about the high attrition at Success Academy. Which is especially problematic given that attrition goes a long way in explaining why Success Academy’s passing rates are so much higher than other charters. Instead, your articles amplify the right wing narrative about Success Academy’s miraculous success having no relation to high attrition rates.
Here is a typical excerpt from an article you wrote Sept. 7, 2019, a story embracing Robert Pondiscio’s book (he also blamed the parents for the fact that SA’s attrition rate was so high).
“Success Academy’ “scholars” crushed the competition again this year on New York state math and English Language Arts exams.
Of 7,405 Success Academy kids in grades 3 to 8 who took the exams, 99% tested proficient or higher in math, 90% in English. By contrast, in schools run by the city Department of Education, 46% of students passed math, and 47% English.
A new book by Robert Pondiscio tells the secrets and surprises of Success Academy’s winning academics.
They also outscored several affluent Westchester and Long Island school districts. For instance, Success Academy, with 94% black and Hispanic students from families with an average $49,800 household income, beat Scarsdale public schools, where 8% of kids are black and Hispanic, and the average family income $291,542. There, 88% passed math and 85% English.
How does Success Academy, which runs 45 NYC charter schools with 17,000 students, produce such results?
“They do it by starting with a very exacting, demanding school culture that parents sign up for,” Pondiscio told The Post.”
You wrote an article in which you began by amplifying the hype of Success Academy’s miraculous results, and you buried the truth by amplifying meaningless comparisons to public schools that take every student, including Scarsdale.
You focused on Success Academy “CRUSHING” public schools that take everyone and left out that Success Academy also “crushes” other charters which have lower attrition rates.
Later – after you have already hyped the supposedly miraculous results at Success Academy – you throw in facts that should have been a red flag to you to do more reporting.
“Among the most surprising things Pondiscio learned, he said, is that many families who win admission in the lottery wind up not enrolling…….
…This happens, Pondiscio writes, because Success Academy requires so many preliminary steps and meetings that only the most motivated parents sign on.
“They’ve got to show up, show up and show up again to ensure they remain active in the enrollment process,” he said. “By the time August rolls around, parents are walking in with both eyes open– 100% down with the program. If they aren’t, they fell away.”
The result: a parent body dominated by active, involved families,
“The myth is that Eva Moskowitz is creaming students,” Pondiscio said.
“I don’t think that’s true, but she certainly is creaming parents.”
How can any reporter worth their salt not see the huge contradiction whereby the parent body is DOMINATED by active and involved parents willing to jump through hoops and the fact that the very same study that Beth Fertig did, cited constantly by charter supporters, proves without a doubt that the attrition rate at Success Academy is outrageously higher than other charters whose academic performance is mediocre?
You amplify Success Academy’s “99% proficiency rates” and you mention that the ONLY families who are at Success Academy are highly motivated, and yet you can’t connect the dots between why a higher percentage of those motivated families leave Success Academy than they leave other charters.
What is left is the implicitly racist innuendo that these active, involved parents who enrolled because they wanted their kid to have demanding academics were the liars. Instead of seeing what is right in front of you — that Success Academy didn’t care if parents were active and involved if the rote way of teaching that their inexperienced, barely trained teacher used didn’t work for their kids. Success Academy only wanted to teach the kids who made them look good. It’s right in front of your face. Gary’s attrition studies used information that was easy for any reporter to access. But they chose not to.
There is a lot of implicit racism in choosing NOT to closely examine why Beth Fertig’s often cited study found that Success Academy’s attrition rate was so much higher than other CHARTERS. It is inexplicable that highly motivated parents would want to leave a charter school that reporters keep telling us turns virtually all students into high performing scholars and it certainly is suspicious that Success Academy’s attrition rates are so high FOR A CHARTER.
Instead of writing about that, reporters covered up the extremely suspicious fact that so many of these highly motivated parents were leaving Success Academy by citing that parents also left under-funded low-performing public schools in the same area at similar or higher rates. How is that relevant? Highly motivated parents will leave schools that are failing, but reporters keep citing that Success Academy works miracles and is wildly successful and then justify why they ignored attrition by claiming that parents leave failing schools, too, so they totally expect that highly motivated African American parents would also frequently leave a top performing charter school.
It is implicitly racist for an education reporter not to notice that these parents were NOT leaving mediocre charters at the same rate as they were leaving Success Academy.
It is implicitly racist for an educator reporter to imply that it was the parents’ fault they left! It is implicitly racist for a reporter to use innuendo to make readers believe these parents were lying about wanting their kids to have a top notch education. Success Academy didn’t want to teach their kids. It is obvious that their kids were only welcome if inexperienced teachers could teach them.
Would you hype a for-profit Cancer treatment center that claimed 99% cure rates and excuse high attrition rates for this miracle-performing hospital by saying that you are sure that even though the hospital began with ONLY the most highly motivated patients, it isn’t surprising that so many patients would “voluntarily” leave treatment at a hospital that cures 99% of patients, because patients also leave treatment in the nearby public hospital where most patients die.
Because that is the rationalization so many education reporters give for why they dismiss Gary’s studies as irrelevant and don’t do this kind of reporting themselves.
It’s implicitly racist to decide without an iota of evidence that the blame for Success Academy’s high attrition is not due to significant failure or corruption in Success Academy, but should be blamed on all those highly motivated African American parents who lied about wanting their kid to have a good education.
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I was shocked to see in Sue’s review that only 10% of the students from Success Academy who applied to an exam high school were accepted. Only 10%! And these were the kids who “crushed” their state tests! Why didn’t 90% of these stellar scholars win admission to the exam schools?
There is a very simple reason to explain why some schools get very high test scores: accept those likeliest to get high scores and weed out those who don’t. That’s why Bronx Science and Stuyvesant get high scores, but everyone knows they are selective.
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I was also struck by the photograph that was included in the review. The first high school graduation class was 17 students. According to Gary Rubinstein, the first class started with 100 in kindergarten. Any school with a persistence/survival rate of 17% cries out for closer scrutiny. Where are the missing 83? This school is certainly not a model for the city.
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D.R.: “The first high school graduation class was 17 students. According to Gary Rubinstein, the first class started with 100 in kindergarten. Any school with a persistence/survival rate of 17% cries out for closer scrutiny. Where are the missing 83?”
Perhaps, Diane, you and Gary could collaborate on a missing persons podcast. Track a bunch of Far Rockaway Success Academy kindergartners who make their way through elementary and then middle school near their homes in Queens and then suddenly, shockingly, disappear from S.A enrollment. Fail to ever make an appearance at a distant S.A. High School. You could title it, “The Case of the Missing Limousines”.
And, if it meets with popular acclaim, do a sequel focused on a group of Hunter College Elementary School students who one by one attrit from Hunter doctoral programs without ever enrolling.
Or alternatively, perhaps attempt an analysis of the impact of attrition on measures of academic progress at charter schools that relies on standard methodology for calculating attrition?
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Stephen Ronan,
I am embarrassed on your behalf. Your obsession with Far Rockaway Success Academy students should – at the very least – make you check out how old the students in that school are, since that charter school wasn’t established until 2016-2017 school year, with a Kindergarten and first grade class only.
The oldest students in the Far Rockaway Success Academy were only on 6th grade in 2021-22, so they are only 7th graders this year. So whether or not their families eventually choose to commute into Manhattan or the Bronx when they are old enough for high school is still unknowable.
That OLDEST cohort at the Far Rockaway Success Academy, who were 6th graders last year, was only 45 students, and only 55.5% are economically disadvantaged (a much lower percentage than NYC students overall).
But you now have a big problem because your ridiculous post encouraged me to see how large that 6th grade cohort was the year before — it was 64 students! Far Rockaway had 64 students in 5th grade and the next year only 45 in 6th grade, an attrition rate of 30%!!!! IN ONE YEAR!! And 65% of the 5th graders were economically disadvantaged while the next year’s shrunken down 6th grade class, only 55.5% were economically disadvantaged.
And Stephen, the middle school is in FAR ROCKAWAY!!!
So your entire theory about the missing students from Far Rockaway being because they don’t want to travel to Manhattan is a complete crock. Have the integrity to admit it. They lost 30% of their class between 5th and 6th grade.
Gary Rubinstein and Diane Ravitch are referring to the students from Success Academy schools that were established long enough ago that they HAVE high school age students! And you offer up a fact-free theory about non-existent Far Rockaway Success Academy high school students who don’t want to travel to Manhattan.
But at least your silly error made me take a closer look. I hope you don’t get into trouble since now we can see that an extraordinarily high number of Far Rockaway SA students went missing from that oldest cohort. At one point in elementary school, that cohort had over 80 students!
How many of the 45 remaining by 6th grade will even be left by 8th grade?
You tried to be too clever by half, and instead your snarkiness shone a light at how many students went missing in middle school in Far Rockaway.
I hope that doesn’t get you in trouble with your bosses.
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Thanks, but please please don’t feel embarrassed on my behalf in the current instance as I suggested a podcast focused on S.A. and Hunter cohorts prospectively rather than retrospectively.
At the same time I think we would agree that my basic point could be dulled if you were to determine that virtually all the “missing 83” students lived within a convenient commute of a Success Academy High School. How likely that, you think?
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Stephen,
Are you asking me “how likely” it would be that all the students who disappeared from Success Academy Forest Hills in elementary and middle school when those schools were conveniently located in Forest Hills did so because their parents didn’t want them to have to travel to the high school in Manhattan 3 or 4 years down the road??
The chance of that is 0%.
You are going to get into trouble again, because now you are suggesting that Eva Moskowitz chose to waste a lot of money and pay a huge premium to locate SA’s high school in very expensive midtown Manhattan instead of locating it in far less expensive Harlem or the Bronx because she (intentionally?) wanted to force the poorest students to have a long commute if they wanted to attend the high school. You and I both agree that the high school is very convenient to students who can afford to live in the expensive neighborhoods of Manhattan and you keep insinuating that the missing kids are due to the commute being too inconvenient for the others. You are suggesting that Eva Moskowitz could have saved a lot of money (using it for students instead of real estate) AND made it easier for the SA middle school students to attend SA’s high school if she would not have paid the premium for an expensive location that would also discourage those students from attending!
You keep digging yourself into a deeper and deeper hole trying to change the subject. You just keep making Eva Moskowitz look bad with your insinuations that the high school is too inconvenient for the students and that Eva Moskowitz prioritized the convenience of the affluent students of Manhattan over students in the Bronx and Harlem. You know nothing about NYC public high schools, where good schools attract students from all over the city, who DON’T ride “limousines” there. They ride the subway. I know kids that ride the subway 90 minutes each way from Brooklyn to go to good schools in the Bronx, and kids that commute from Staten Island to good public schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn and students from Queens who take the subway to Manhattan. Your ignorance smacks of desperation. Students in NYC get special student metrocards and take the subways to schools far away and they are willing to have a long commute for a school they like THAT ALSO WELCOMES THEM. They don’t commute to a school that makes it clear that they are unwelcome and puts them on “got to go” lists.
Why would you rather look foolish than admit the obvious? Gary is right about the outrageously high number of missing students and your ill-informed excuses make both you and Eva Moskowitz look bad. Maybe quit while you are ahead. Gary is right, and your attempts to rationalize why a ridiculously high percentage of students go missing makes Eva Moskowitz and you both look bad.
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NYPSP: “Are you asking me ‘how likely’….?”
No, not close.
Please excuse my bluntness, but I think that a methodology is suboptimal that would equate as attrition 1) a student who graduated from a Success Academy elementary and then S.A. middle school but chose not to enroll in a S.A. high school an hour and a half away by public transportation and 2) a student who enrolls in a high school and then departs it prior to graduation.
Years ago I noticed you propounding the notion that A) Success Academy is the ne plus ultra in respect to charter school improvement of academic outcomes B) it has a grotesquely great attrition rate C) A is a consequence of B, and D) by extrapolation, academic success at charter schools is closely interlinked with, and dependent on, charter school attrition.
I noted that (apart from S.A.’s attrition being moderate by conventional measures) in respect to promotion of student academics, the Brooke Charter School network here in Boston was more successful than Success Academy. Its attrition rate was exceedingly low. The difference in achievement between those who stayed and those who left Brooke were minor. If one ranked all the charter schools in Boston by standard measures of student academic progress there was a clear inverse correlation between achievement and attrition. And I encouraged you to further test your hypothesis (D) which seemed not entirely illogical, but countered by evidence.
It appears that you have not.
Or prefer not to share the results if you have.
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I must disagree with Sue. Nearly every day for the last few months the NY Post has run poorly sourced articles promoting Success charters and advocating for raising the cap on charters that read like advertorials bought and paid for by Eva Moskowitz. None of these puff pieces quote anyone who holds a different point of view, or even attempt to explain why so many oppose the unchecked spread of charters, that already are costing the DOE $3B a year and are taking up more and more precious space within our public schools. Murdoch himself is a big supporter of charters and whether he himself ordered the editors to run this series, he clearly hired people who align with his positions on these issues. It has been a shameful display of bias and misinformation; but unfortunately the editors of the NYPost seem to have no shame or interest in publishing the truth on this issue.
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Yes, the Post has openly campaigned in favor of lifting the charter cap. I won’t argue with Leonie.
But here is a fair and balanced piece I wrote on Success Academy, based on a book by Robert Pondiscio: https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/new-book-tells-secrets-and-surprises-of-success-academys-winning-academics/
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Thanks for sharing, Sue; your piece is eye-opening and the stuff about how few parents make it through the enrollment process aligns with other research. However I disagree with Pondiscio because Success creams both parents AND students. In many cases, even the most highly-motivated, invested parents are forced to withdraw their kids from the school if they don’t comply with Success rigid standards for behavior and achievement.
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If Success Academy has only highly-motivated, invested parents, then they should have an extremely LOW attrition rate. That’s the conundrum that Success Academy has never had to explain because there is this offensive innuendo that those highly motivated parents were lying about wanting their kid to have a good education, and it’s their own fault for not being dedicated enough parents.
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How funny, I was just posting my review of that article above, and here you cite it proudly! I agree that it is better than much of what passes for education reporting, but it shows an odd lack of curiosity about the very thing Diane Ravitch’s post is about — the extraordinarily high attrition rates.
But is certainly “fair and balanced” by Fox News standards! It amplifies the miracle test results without mentioning that inexplicably high attrition makes those results irrelevant!
I hope other people will read my critique above which demonstrates the casual implicit racism that so many stories about Success Academy include. First they cite how highly motivated the parents who enroll their kids are, then they pretend that the fact that attrition rates for Success Academy are so much higher than other charters is irrelevant. Not because other top notch public and charter schools have extraordinarily high attrition like Success Academy does — they most certainly do not.
But because failing schools have high attrition too. A justification that only makes sense to an education reporter trying to rationalize their view that reporting on attrition should never be part of the narrative (except to justify it using implicitly racist innuendo where a highly motivated family pulling their kid from Success Academy is not surprising because parents also pull their kids from failing schools!!??)
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A good example of the (intentional?) double standard by education reporters who claim to be “fair and balanced”:
Susan Edelman, who posted above, tweeted this on March 11, 2023:
Susan Edelman@SusanBEdelman
PS 172 in Brooklyn boasts a 96% passing rate on last year’s state math tests. But more than half the school’s 224 kids, 56%, opted out of the tests, so the actual proficiency rate is unknown.
10:08 AM · Mar 11, 2023
THE ACTUAL PROFICIENCY RATE IS UNKNOWN, says Susan Edelman. Because PS 172 is a public school. But she “knows” the “actual proficiency rate” of a charter with extraordinarily high attrition rates. She amplifies it in the story she is very proud of.
This tells me that Susan Edelman understands statistics very well.
Gary Rubinstein’s attrition study, along with the flawed study by Beth Fertig, show that the charter school with the highest test scores also has the highest attrition.
I don’t understand why any education reporter would accept proficiency rates from charters with one of the highest attrition rates of any charter network as “known” and “actual”.
If only PS 172 had simply pushed out the kids who opted out, would Susan Edelman write articles comparing them favorably to Scarsdale?
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The kids who opt out from state tests tend to be high scoring kids. But that doesn’t detract from your point. Journalists are stunningly uninterested in Sucess Academy’s attrition rate.
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Just one month ago, Susan Edelman challenged a public elementary school’s proficiency rates in a tweet.
Yet she believes that her article where she reports as fact that Success Academy CRUSHES state tests is “fair and balanced”.
Your post was about ATTRITION. Susan Edelman doesn’t care about attrition, which raises questions about why she doesn’t.
Good science reporters are taught that a study where half the patients disappear is just as suspect as a study where half the patients didn’t disappear but wouldn’t allow their results to be included. Apparently, Susan Edelman disagrees.
Susan Edelman is a biased reporter. She isn’t alone in priding herself on being “fair and balanced” while writing stories that present Success Academy’s false narratives as fact. But even a casual reader who thinks for themselves can see how she means “fair and balanced” in the Fox News definition.
The NYT pitchbot twitter feed nails these kinds of journalists and makes them look foolish because their reporting does make them look foolish as soon as it is brought to readers’ attention. Until then, most of us read their stories without thinking much about the false right wing narratives their reporting presents as fact.
Susan Edelman does write some very good stories that scrutinize issues with public schools, but I find it very odd that she abandons that kind of close scrutiny when it comes to Success Academy.
Maybe she is afraid that what happened to John Merrow will happen to her. But her blind spot when it comes to Success Academy is evident. Being critical of the DOE is easy – there are dozens of critical articles written by journalists every week. Being critical of a charter with lots of powerful billionaire friends is hard so journalists pride themselves for including any mild questioning (always presenting that as an opinion) in an article that amplifies their right wing propaganda as truth. “Crushes” the state tests. Yep, Susan Edelman is “fair and balanced” for sure.
We are all just lucky that science reporting hasn’t (yet?) been infected by incompetent journalists who believe attrition is irrelevant when it comes to whether the results of a new miracle drug are valid.
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For an excellent discussion of data and accountability, read online Richard Rothstein’s “Holding Accountability to account.”
One example, when doctors are judged by outcomes, they refuse to accept the sickest patients. Heart surgeons treat only the healthiest patients and they have an excellent survival rate. Patients who have a poor prognosis are turned away.
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Diane,
Thanks, I will look at that. It sounds exactly like what happens with education. Susan Edelman’s tweet invalidating the proficiency rates at PS 172 indicates that she understands data and accountability but somehow exempts Success Academy from the standard she holds PS 172.
She identifies herself as a grandma on her twitter feed, so if a veteran journalist is too scared of Success Academy to ask the obvious questions that she poses when it comes to public schools, that doesn’t bode well for public education.
I hold out hope that some newly minted young journalists are braver than their elders, even if their careers will suffer.
There is a former journalist – carolinesf – who sometimes posts here and I wish someone like her had covered education in NYC instead of Susan Edelman. Holding public education to account is important, but it is meaningless if you refuse to hold charters favored by billionaires to the same standards. It’s like Fox News amplifying every misstep of a Democrat while barely acknowledging major wrongdoing of Republicans. It’s not real journalism if you ignore major wrongdoing by one side and spend your efforts looking for wrongdoing by the other side. Susan Edelman smears PS 172 as “BOASTING” while she reports on Success Academy schools as having superior academic performance without once using the word “boasts” (despite Eva Moskowitz being someone who boasts quite often). Her example of “fair and balanced’ reporting actually demonstrates her hypocrisy, not her journalism.
Fox News may report some true wrongdoing about Democrats, but by refusing to see anything bad about the Republicans, no matter what they do, Fox reporters have no business calling themselves journalists. Susan Edelman can keep ignoring Success Academy’s attrition rate or finally – after many years – treat Success Academy’s test scores with the same skepticism she gives to PS 172. But the double standard in her reporting is no different than any Fox News journalist “bravely” going after the Democrats while ignoring any wrongdoing by Republicans.
To Susan Edelman, PS 172 “boasts” and Success Academy “crushes” the test scores. Her words speak for themselves and I hope she reads this and starts to do better. But I won’t hold my breath.
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If you want to understand how complicit the NYC education reporters were, here is an example of a journalist who didn’t simply accept the ridiculous, implicitly racist right wing narrative about high attrition rates for top performing charters being unremarkable, irrelevant and “not newsworthy”.
The Guardian, February 21, 2016
“‘Got to Go’: high-performing charter schools shed students quickly”
Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, loses more than 10% of its enrolled student population each year once testing starts, compared to 2.7% at nearby schools”
From the article:
“A Guardian analysis has found that Success Academy loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared with the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.
The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged”. This school’s relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.
According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. “Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”
It’s stunning that a reporter from a British newspaper asked the questions that the NYC education reporters had no curiosity about.
When you hype Success Academy proficiency rates as valid but warn readers not to accept the proficiency rates of a public school because of their opt out rates, then you are demonstrating your own extreme bias as a reporter.
More from The Guardian:
“To make its calculations, the Guardian pulled data from 25 Success classes that had enrollment numbers from pre-testing grades up until the fourth, and pulled comparable data from public school classes that were either in the same building or one block away from Success Academy sites.
The analysis also found that at sites where the majority of Success Academy’s student populations are from low-income families, classes in the school’s later testing grades served far smaller proportions of students with disabilities (13.2% vs. 27.6% ), students with limited English proficiency (2.4% vs. 16.3%), and poor students (78.7% vs. 92.1%). Such demographic data from many of the earlier grades is not publicly available, and thus it is difficult to determine whether these types of students are dropping disproportionately within Success Academy’s shrinking classes as schools approach the testing years.”
If NYC education reporters had not been complicit in hyping Success Academy press releases, and Success Academy’s results had been presented to the public the way PS 172’s results were, Success Academy might have had to do better. So many children harmed while complicit reporters claimed they were “fair and balanced” and missed (intentionally?) the story that was obvious to every person who didn’t have an extreme pro-charter bias. Rather than scapegoating the highly motivated parents who enrolled at Success Academy and left, a real journalist would have closely examined why a high performing charter would lose so many highly motivated families. The Guardian showed the implicit biases of NYC education reporters who accepted the most implicitly racist justifications for why the parents are to blame for leaving a high performing charter committed to providing their kid the best education.
They ignored Gary Rubinstein and ignored the Guardian and wrote stories that hyped Success Academy as if they achieved those results by good teaching and ignored how many students were being intentionally excluded from the data they were hyping. Something that Susan Edelman didn’t do when it came to PS 172 when she was rightly skeptical of high passing rates.
It makes no sense to me that reporters like Susan Edelman don’t treat Success Academy’s results with the same skepticism that The Guardian and Gary Rubinstein do, with the same skepticism that they treat the results of public schools like 172. I find it hard to believe that their motives are pure. But I do believe they may feel pressured to bend over backward to give Success Academy the benefit of the doubt, which means simply rejecting Gary Rubinstein’s reporting instead of asking questions of Success Academy the way Guardian reporters did.
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^^https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/21/success-academy-charter-school-students-got-to-go
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