Horace Meister (a pseudonym) worked as a data analyst for many years in the New York City Department of Education. He is currently conducting research at a major university. In this post, he addresses some of the common misperceptions about charter schools. I cannot explain why everyone who writes about SA feels the need to be anonymous.
The Charter School Myth
Hilary Clinton recently remarked “there are good charter schools and there are bad charter schools…most charter schools, I don’t want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest to teach kids, or if they do they don’t keep them.” This upended a comfortable consensus that had emerged in the past decade. Politicians, both Democrat and Republican, blindly support charter schools. Facts are ignored or denied.
Simultaneously, a number of unflattering stories came out in the press about the Success Academy charter chain in New York City. It turns out that the charter chain suspends large numbers of kindergarten and first grade students.[i] It also turns out that the charter chain tries to force out challenging students.[ii]
Success Academy should serve as a lesson, debunking the mythologizing of charter schools that has become so widespread in education reform and political circles. But before examining the myth of Success we must address a deliberate obfuscation often introduced into such analyses by some defenders of charter schools.
We assume that the purpose of charter schools is to educate the same students as the public school system. In other words a successful charter school should have great outcomes with students living and growing up in challenging circumstances and environments. A charter school that creams students, that selectively gets rid of large numbers of challenging students, or that otherwise manipulates its outcomes is not fulfilling the purpose of charter schools. Talk of magnet public schools or the all too many zoned public schools that, due to the unfortunate segregation in American neighborhoods and communities, are not diverse, is irrelevant to the policy issue under discussion. The bottom line is that thousands of public schools and tens of thousands of teachers are dedicated to students that American society has put at significant disadvantage. The relevant policy question is—do charter schools show up the public schools doing this critical work?
So, what do we know about Success Academy?[iii]
Success Academy schools have a student body very different than public schools. The New York City Department of Education’s (NYCDOE) School Quality Report data show that. Success Academy has a very different student population than the NYC public school system.[iv] On average, a Success Academy school has sixty six percent fewer English Language Learners (4.7% vs 13.8%), forty three percent fewer special education students (12.3% vs 21.4%), eighty six percent fewer of the highest need special education students (.9% vs 6.5%), and forty percent fewer students living in temporary housing (8.1% vs. 13.4%) than a public school. These disparities will only grow as Success Academy’s push into gentrifying and middle class neighborhoods continues.[v]
Success Academy has very high and selective attrition rates. SA has high attrition rates particularly among special education students and English Language Learners.[vi] The attrition rate increases as students advance to the grades when they will be taking the state tests.[vii] “This pattern repeats cohort after cohort with growth in early grades, followed by sharp winnowing accumulating over time.”[viii] The selective nature of the attrition is crucial, since that is the distinguishing characteristic between attrition at Success Academy and that at public schools. Such selective attrition is characteristic of the charter sector.[ix]
Success Academy suspends students at extremely high rates as a deliberate strategy to get challenging students to leave. “The charter school network suspended its students at more than double the rate of the New York City public schools, eleven percent to five percent” with a much less challenging student population.[x] “In its first two years, Success Academy 1 suspended 8% and 2% of its students respectively. Over the next five years, however, those numbers jumped to 12%, 15%, 22%, 27%, and 23%…By the way, the out of school suspension rate for 2011-2012 at Upper West Success, a school where 29% of students qualify for free lunch and 10% for reduced price lunch? 5%. Apparently suspension rates in the high 20s are a necessity for schools where 78% of the students are in or near poverty.”[xi] Insiders report that “school leaders and network staff members explicitly talked about suspending students or calling parents into frequent meetings as ways to force parents to fall in line or prompt them to withdraw their children.”[xii]
Success Academy forces high need special education students to leave. “But The News found a disturbing number of suspension cases where the network’s administrators removed special-education pupils from normal classrooms for weeks and even months, while at the same time pressuring their parents to transfer them to regular public schools.”[xiii]
Success Academy employs additional strategies to winnow out challenging students. For example, they mail the annual reenrollment forms to only preferred families.[xiv] By the way, public schools as a general rule don’t even have reenrollment forms. A student on the roster of a public school remains on the roster.
Teaching at Success Academy is focused on test prep and practice. It appears that teachers are mandated to focus overwhelmingly on test prep.[xv] To such an extent that students wet their pants out of the induced anxiety.[xvi] This leads to high teacher attrition rates, with over 30% of teachers annually leaving the charter chain entirely.[xvii] Often because the teachers could not abide by the way SA wanted them to treat students.[xviii]
Despite these shenanigans the academic outcomes of Success Academy schools are questionable.
A Success Academy education does not seem to prepare students for success in high school. Only 21% of SA middle school graduates passed their classes and earned at least 10 credits (44 credits are required to graduate high school in NYC) in their 9th grade courses. Note that since SA is a relatively new charter chain these data only exist for their first school, Harlem Success Academy 1.[xix] And not a single SA student scored well on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT).[xx]
Success Academy seems to do a mediocre job of growing their students academically. For the sake of argument we will use test scores on the New York State exams as a measure of success, since Success Academy likes to boast about those scores. The NYCDOE calculates growth targets for every school.[xxi] On the English exams three Success Academy schools exceeded, two schools met, one school approached and one school did not meet expected growth targets.[xxii] On the Math exams only two schools exceeded, four met, and one approached the expected growth targets.
Success Academy seems to do a very poor job with their high need students. The data provide a measure for how students in each school’s bottom third do. Only two Success Academy schools exceeded and two schools met English growth targets for these students, while two approached and one did not meet the target. In Math, four schools did not meet the expected growth target while two exceeded and one met the targets.
Other analyses have found similarly poor outcomes from Success. An examination of 2012 and 2013 fourth grade scores found that “Success schools dropped by about 40 points while other schools that had such high 2012 scores dropped by about 20 points. But in math, two of the four Success schools had a smaller drop than the other schools and the other two Success schools had about the same drop.”[xxiii] A different analysis of the 2013 data found that “Success Academy scored in the 39th percentile on English exam growth for their overall student population and in the 21st percentile on English exam growth for the students who began with scores in the lowest 1/3 of students.”[xxiv]
Overall these are rather sorry outcomes that nonetheless overestimate Success Academy’s performance since even growth measures don’t account for selective attrition and other SA tactics. Still the growth metrics do a better job than pure performance metrics in measuring the true contribution of a school to student learning.
What can be learned from Success Academy? There are of course positive take-aways from Success. Additional learning time, such as that mandated by SA, is likely a positive intervention strategy for some students requiring additional academic support. SA offers the equivalent of about fifty additional schools days, thanks to their extended school day.[xxv] That is of course expensive and we know that SA spends thousands of dollars more per student than public schools with similar populations.[xxvi] There is no question that additional funding for schools helps improve outcomes for students growing up in poverty.[xxvii] New York City is now directing additional funds, along with other initiatives such as extended learning time, to their Renewal schools, schools that serve a disproportionately disadvantaged student body. Providing schools with such supports can benefit students at both charter and public schools.
Teachers must be given the time and support to grow into the tremendous responsibility that every educator has for student success. As Success Academy first year teachers are assistants in the classroom ideally working with and learning from excellent and experienced teachers. Such an initiative, at a national scale supported by local districts and the federal government in collaboration with schools of education, is definitely worth a look.
[i]http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/kindergarten-young-suspend-student/
[ii] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html
[iii] An earlier review of claims made by and about Success Academy can be found here https://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/12/researcher-charter-chain-built-on-hyperbole/.
[iv] The data can be found in the file here http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/06F7DE89-AA46-4509-9A0C-600038728D14/0/2014_2015_EMS_SQR_Results_2015_12_09.xlsx. For explanation of the various metrics see http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/5347DA79-B985-4CBF-B56E-B05C8380C53B/0/201415EducatorGuideEMS11122015.pdf. The Success Academy schools with data include five schools in Harlem, two in the Bronx. Two schools, one in Bedford Stuyvesant and one on the Upper West Side have demographic but no academic performance data as they are too new. All the other twenty three SA schools are so new that they have no Quality Report data at all.
[vi] http://commonal.tumblr.com/post/58209601458/harlem-success-academy-charter-and-attrition
[vii] http://insideschools.org/blog/item/1000359-vanishing-students-at-harlem-success#
[viii] See the data here http://danielskatz.net/2015/11/25/eva-moskowitz-cannot-help-herself/.
[ix] See https://dianeravitch.net/2015/02/09/the-unholy-alliance-charters-the-media-and-research/.
[x] http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/student-discipline-race-and-eva-moskowitz%E2%80%99s-success-academy-charter-schools
[xi] http://danielskatz.net/2015/11/25/eva-moskowitz-cannot-help-herself/
[xii] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html?_r=0
[xiii] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/success-academy-fire-parents-fight-disciplinary-policy-article-1.1438753
[xiv] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/nyregion/at-a-success-academy-charter-school-singling-out-pupils-who-have-got-to-go.html?_r=0
[xv] https://dianeravitch.net/2013/10/04/mole-in-success-academy-speaks/ and https://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/07/my-conversation-with-a-success-academy-charter-teacher/ and http://nymag.com/news/features/65614/index3.html. Interestingly enough there has been a recent attempt by some apologists to claim that Success Academy is a progressive pedagogy paradise. First-hand reports by teachers (i.e. those not describing carefully arranged guided and pre-scheduled tours) provide an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary.
[xvi] http://www.businessinsider.com/students-wetting-pants-success-academy-charter-schools-2015-4
[xvii] http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/teacher-turnover-success-academy-charter-schools with data suggesting even higher attrition rates found here http://citylimits.org/2014/08/20/why-charter-schools-have-high-teacher-turnover/.
[xviii] http://www.wnyc.org/story/302768-high-teacher-turnover-at-a-success-network-school/. It has been suggested that “The pedagogy in the Success Academy schools is rote, highly disciplined and punishment, suspensions, are commonplace, perhaps the pedagogical/discipline practices chase away teachers of color.” https://mets2006.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/success-academy-charter-school-staff-diversity-why-is-the-staff-overwhelming-white-tone-deaf-by-choice-a-diverse-workforce-is-essential-in-the-21st-century/. Some telling reviews of Success Academy’s culture can be read on Indeed.com http://www.indeed.com/cmp/Success-Academy-Charter-Schools/reviews and on glassdoor.com https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Success-Academy-Charter-Schools-Reviews-E381408.htm. Other first-hand accounts can be read here https://dianeravitch.net/2015/04/27/a-former-success-academy-teacher-steps-forward-to-tell-her-story/ and here https://dianeravitch.net/2015/12/01/former-success-academy-teacher-why-i-resigned/.
[xix] See column CW on the following file http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/06F7DE89-AA46-4509-9A0C-600038728D14/0/2014_2015_EMS_SQR_Results_2015_12_09.xlsx under the “student achievement” tab.
[xx] http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/gonzalez-success-charter-students-fail-top-city-schools-article-1.1833960. It would not be surprising if SA has already begun intense SHSAT prep for this exam for their students in response to this, now widespread, statistic. While unfortunate that tests are driving so much of what happens in schools that may be the best way to open high school opportunities for their students.
[xxi]The data can be found in the following file http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/estimated-versus-actual-days-learning-charter-school-studies. See columns P, V, AT, and AZ under the “student achievement” tab. Broadly speaking one third of all schools each exceed, meet or approached their growth targets. The remaining ten percent of schools did not meet their target. See pages 24-25 in the document here for an explanation of these growth targets http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/5347DA79-B985-4CBF-B56E-B05C8380C53B/0/201415EducatorGuideEMS11122015.pdf.
[xxiii] http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/08/13/how-to-define-success/
[xxiv] https://dianeravitch.net/2014/09/12/researcher-charter-chain-built-on-hyperbole/
[xxv] Somewhat disappointingly it appears that the better test results claimed by many charter schools often reported as an “estimated days of learning” metric are less than the actual extra days of learning at those charter schools. See http://www.shankerinstitute.org/blog/estimated-versus-actual-days-learning-charter-school-studies.
[xxvi] See Table 2 here http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/ttr-charter-rent_0.pdf
[xxvii] See http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~ruckerj/Jackson_Johnson_Persico_SFR_LRImpacts.pdf. Of course the additional funds must be spent sensibly.
