Archives for category: Graduation rates
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Tennessee: New Governor Selects Voucher Advocate as Education Advisor

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
17

The newly elected Governor Of Tennessee, Bill Lee, has selected the former director of Betsy DeVos’s Tennessee Federation for Children as his education Policy Advisor.

DeVos founded the American Federation for Children, which has numerous state affiliates.

The DeVos groups advocate for public funding of religious schools, homeschooling, cyberschooling, and anything other than public schooling.

If the people of Tennessee want to keep their public schools, they will have to persuade their state legislators to oppose the new Governor’s education agenda.

The linked article in Chalkbeat says that students in voucher schools get lower test scores, which is true. It also says that kids who use vouchers have higher graduation rates, which is not true, because the dropout rate from voucher schools is very high, and the “graduation rate” does not include the large number that left and returned to public school. If it did, the voucher schools would have a far lower graduation rate than local public schools. The first such study, from Milwaukee, reported that 44% of the voucher students dropped out to return to public schools, but were not included in the denominator when the voucher schools’ graduation rate was calculated. Only the survivors were counted.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Tennessee, Vouchers

José Espinosa: The Truth About Charter Schools That Boast About a 100% College Acceptance Rate

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2018 //
12

José Espinosa is the Superintendent of the Socorro Independent School District In Texas. This article appeared in the El Paso Times.

Superintendent Espinosa thinks the public should know the truth about charter schoools that claim to have a 100% college acceptance rate. They are lying. Rightwingers in Texas and charter promoters are planning on a big expansion of charters in the state, peddling their wares with unverified claims about their “success.”

He writes:

When something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Dating back to 1954, the Better Business Bureau used this catchphrase to alert the public of shady business practices.

In the new era of school choice, this catchphrase can be used to alert the public of misleading business practices by charter schools in order to protect our most prized possessions — our children.

Every year, certain charters tout a 100 percent college acceptance rate as their major marketing pitch to lure parents away from traditional public schools.

The reality is the public isn’t told acceptance to a four-year university is actually a graduation requirement at some charter schools.

It specifically states in certain charters’ student/family handbooks that a student may graduate and receive a diploma ONLY if the student is accepted into a four-year university and has completed 125 hours of community service.

Reading lengthy student/family handbooks carefully before considering charters is just as important as reading the fine print before signing contracts.

We must also ask, “Why is Corporate America bashing our traditional public schools, yet it doesn’t demand transparency or accountability from charter schools?”

While 100 percent of charter seniors get accepted to college as required, the public has a right to know the percentage of charter students who didn’t make it to their senior year.

Ed Fuller, Pennsylvania State University professor, found in one of his studies of a particular charter network that when considering the number of students starting in the ninth grade as a cohort, the percentage of charter cohort students who graduated and went on to college was at best 65 percent.

In other words, 35 percent of ninth-graders at a charter network didn’t make it to their graduation….

Just like the BBB, it is our duty to alert the public.

If charters insist on boasting about 100 percent college acceptance rates, then traditional public schools must insist that our communities be fully informed.

Charters’ news release could read: “Since we require students to get accepted to a four-year university in order to graduate, our seniors have a 100 percent college acceptance rate. However, more than 30 percent of our cohort students in the ninth grade didn’t graduate from our charters. Therefore, we had less than 70 percent of our cohort students graduate and get accepted to college…”

Lauding charters who lack transparency and discount students while bashing El Paso’s public schools disparages the hard work, relentless dedication and success of Team SISD.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Testing

Eva Writes a Letter to Parents to Explain 70% Teacher Churn in Her High School

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
65

Chalkbeat reports that Eva Moskowitz wrote a letter to parents of students in her high school, explaining why 70% of the teachers left in one year.

High expectations are hard on everyone, she says. Draconian punishment is not easy.

But in the end, her methods pay off, she says. Only 33% of KIPP graduates persist to finish college. Of course, we have no idea how many of Eva’s 16 high school graduates will finish college because they graduated only a month ago.

Categories Discipline, Graduation rates, Harlem Success Academy, KIPP Charter Schools

G.F. Brandenburg: D.C. Is Losing Large Numbers of High School Students

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2018 //
6

In recent years, reformers have decided that the District of Columbia is their best model, even though it remains one of the lowest performing districts in the nation (but it’s scores are rising) and the D.C. achievement gaps are double that of any other urban district. Remember that D.C. has been controlled by dyed-in-the-wool corporate reformers since 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty took control and installed Michelle Rhee as chancellor.

Nearly half its students are in charter schools, and the charter schools make bold claims about both test scores and graduation rates. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the D.C. public schools actually have higher graduation rates than the D.C. charter schools, despite charter propaganda.

G.F. Brandenburg cites an analysis of graduation rates by blogger Valerie Jablow, which confirms the superior performance of D.C.’s public schools.

But what should be a larger concern, as he points out, is that both charter high schools and public high schools are losing a large number of students. Wouldn’t it be nice if the education leaders of D.C. stopped the competition for bragging rights and joined together to figure out why they are losing so many young people?

Categories Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Graduation rates

Gary Rubinstein: Success Academy Flunks at Least One of Every Six Students

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2018 //
21

Gary Rubinstein learned something new from a Success Academy press release. It was supposed to demonstrate the chain’s “low” attrition rate, to explain why the 73 first grade students in the original class dwindled to only 16 high school graduates. But Gary noticed something unintended: how many students were left back.

Categories Graduation rates, Harlem Success Academy

D.C.: The Lies That Charter Advocates Tell

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2018 //
18

This spring, the D.C. public schools—under tight corporate reform control since 2007–were rocked by a scandal about graduation rates. It started when Ballou High School boasted about its 100% graduation rate, a story that was then celebrated by the local NPR station. After teachers blew the whistle, NPR returned to investigate and discovered that many of the graduates did not qualify for a high school diploma due to their long absences and lack of credits. This prompted a systemwide audit, which determined that a large proportion of the district’s graduates were unqualified. The system was cheating to boost its apparent (but false) success.

Emily Langhorne of the Progressive Policy Institute wrote an article for the Washington Post to declare, proudly, that charter schools were not implicated in the graduation rate scandal. In fact, she asserted, the charter numbers are audited, and every graduate is really, truly a real high school graduate.

“What’s happened in DCPS is tragic — not only that the number of students graduating declined but also that DCPS has been graduating students who aren’t prepared for life beyond school.

“Yet there is a story of real academic progress in the nation’s capital. It’s the story of the other public schools, the ones educating nearly 50 percent of public school students. It’s the story of D.C.’s charter schools…

“In 2017, D.C.’s 21 charter high schools graduated 73.4 percent of their students in four years. Since the PCSB audits every graduating student’s transcript, that number is an accurate reflection of student achievement.”

Unfortunately, this happy account leaves out some very important but inconvenient facts.

I turned to two experts on the District of Columbia Public Schools.

One of them, Mark Simon of the Economic Policy I statute, told me there had never been an independent audit of the graduation rate# at DCPS charter schools. Langhorne refers to an audit by the PCSB, the Public Charter School Board of the District of Columbia. This is not an independent agency. The data were supplied by the individual charter schools. The Progressive Policy Institute advocates for charter schools. No genuinely independent audit was ever conducted of charter school graduates.

I then turned to Mary Levy, a civil rights attorney and fiscal watchdog of D.C. schools for many years.

She wrote me that the Langhorne article was “highly misleading.” First, she agreed with Simon that there had been no independent audit of the numbers, unlike the audit of the public schools’ data.

She added: “About a third of charter school students leave their schools–and the cohort–before the date of graduation. The majority of 9th grade charter students do not graduate from charter schools. [The emphasis is hers.]

Screen Shot 2018-06-22 at 3.00.32 PM

Levy added:

We don’t know where those who leave charter schools in the 9th grade go–some surely transfer to DCPS (District of Columbia Public Schools), enlarging that cohort, some move out of DC, some drop out. We also know that DCPS 9th grade enrollment includes a number of students in their second year of 9th grade, due to insufficient Carnegie units, thus inflating the percentage based on Grade 9 enrollment. The extent to which this happens in charter schools is unknown.”

To see all the data download the excel file here.

Categories Accountability, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Fraud, Graduation rates, Rhee, Michelle

Jan Resseger on Michelle Rhee’s Collapsing Legacy

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2018 //
8

It is one of the curiosities of our time that reformers point to D.C. as one of their triumphs, based on the gain of a few points in test scores on NAEP and rising graduation rates.

D.C. remains one of the lowest performing districts in the nation. And on those same NAEP tests that gladden the hearts of reformers, the D.C. schools have the biggest achievement gaps between blacks and whites and between Hispanics and whites of any urban district in the nation.

D.C. is not a model for the nation.

Reformers pointed to impressive graduation rates as evidence for the D.C. Miracle.

Now we know that the D.C. graduation rates were phony, and that about a third of graduates received diplomas despite absences and lacking credits.

Jan Resseger writes here about the collapsing legacy of Michelle Rhee.

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Fraud, Graduation rates, Hoax, Rhee, Michelle

Reader: The Non-Miracle of Success Academy’s Graduating Class of 17 Students

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2018 //
50

 

The senior class at Success Academy’s Liberal Arts High School has 17 members.

When they started in kindergarten, there were 73 students.

By the end of eighth grade, there were 32 students.

Four years later, there were 17, all of whom were admitted to college.

Gary Rubinstein wrote recently that we can’t be sure of the real attrition rate because some of the original 73 might have been excluded and replaced; unlike real public schools, Success Academy does not admit new students after third grade.

So impressed was SA’s board chairman, billionaire Dan Loeb, by the “success” of the high school with 17 graduating seniors that he gave Eva Moskowitz $15 million to add more high schools.

But one of our regular readers, who signs in as New York City Public School Parent, says the media should look to the public schools to find schools that consistently achieve success for far greater numbers of students who are poor, African American and/or Hispanic:

Seventeen students? Success Academy has been careful to expand only within NYC, where there are 1.1 million students in public schools. I looked up the most recent data and 5,400 African-American and Latino students in NYC graduated with ADVANCED Regents diplomas. Another 26,000 African-American and Latino students graduated with Regents diplomas. Seventeen students is 1/3 of 1% of the African-American and Latino students who graduate from NYC public schools with the ADVANCED Regents diploma. And when Success Academy graduates 10x as many students, it will still be only 3% of the total number of African-American and Latino Students who graduate with the most advanced diplomas in public schools.

There is an underlying assumption to many of the fawning profiles of Moskowitz in which (white) reporters continue under the (racist) assumption that finding an African-American or Latino student who can perform at grade level — let alone above — is such a rare and unusual occurrence that this charter sending 17 of those students to college is working miracles. All of the public school bashing news articles focus only on the 10% or 20% of the lowest performing schools and pretend that the other 80 or 90% of schools where students do graduate and do perform well do not exist! They focus on the 50% of students who struggle and ignore the fact that in a school system that is larger than many states, there are many tens of thousands who do well.

The press wrongly believes that because there is a relative dearth of African-American and Latino students in the big specialized high schools,that means they are only in failing schools. That is far from true. Those students are thriving in public high schools all over NYC — from Townsend Harris to Bard to Beacon to Medgar Evers and many, many more. I have no idea how many dozens more but the number of high schools that graduate African-American and Latino students who go on to excellent colleges is not small.

It’s a shame that Medgar Evers College Prep High School — where 100 African-American and Latino students graduated with Advanced Regents diplomas in 2017 (and even more with regular Regents diplomas) — is invisible to reporters in their rush to promote the “miracle” of 17 students graduating from a charter and going to college.

It’s a shame that Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics – whose students are significantly more economically disadvantaged than at Success Academy — is invisible to reporters who marvel at 17 Success Academy students graduating and going to college and ignore public high schools with far fewer resources where 100 students are graduating with almost all of them going to college.
Categories Education Reform, Graduation rates, Harlem Success Academy

John Merrow: Time for Reformers to Admit that Test-Based “Reform” Failed in D.C.

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2018 //
64

Ever since John Merrow realized that Michelle Rhee was a con artist, he has been on a tear, exposing the fraudulent  claims of reformers.

One of them is that the District of Columbia is a paradigm of reform, the very quintessence of the miracles that happen when test scores are the center of a system of rewards and punishments.

The recent graduation rate scandal sent a loud signal, bringing back memories of the test score scandal in 2011 that was swept under the rug.

Merrow writes here:

“The emperor has no clothes, and it’s high time that everyone acknowledged that. Proof positive is Washington, DC, long the favorite of the ‘school reform’ crowd, which offered it as evidence that test-based reforms that rewarded teachers for high student scores (and fired those with low scores) was the magic bullet for turning around troubled urban school districts.

“But now we know that about one-third of recent DC high school graduates–900 students– had no business receiving diplomas, and that they marched across the stage last Spring because some adults changed their grades or pushed them through the farce known as ‘credit recovery,’ in which students can receive credit for a semester by spending a few hours over a week’s time in front of a computer.

“The reliable Catherine Gewertz of Education Week provides a through (and thoroughly depressing) account of the DC story, which she expands to include data from DC teachers:  “In a survey of 616 District of Columbia teachers conducted after the scandal broke, 47 percent said they’d felt pressured or coerced into giving grades that didn’t accurately reflect what students had learned. Among high school teachers, that number rose to 60 percent. More than 2 in 10 said that their student grades or attendance data had been changed by someone else after teachers submitted them.”

First came George W. Bush’s “raise the test scores” campaign, followed by Arne Duncan’s “raise the graduation rate campaign.” Both of them produced lies (cf. Campbell’s Law).  Both superficial reforms proved to be malignant in their impact upon students, teachers, and schools.  Students were lied to about their proficiency, administrators and teachers cheated, school curricula were debased, standards were lowered, and confidence in public schools dropped.

Republicans and Democrats (CAP) are scrambling to work around this latest debacle.

Merrow reminds his readers: Henderson=Rhee. No change. No evidence that Antwan Wilson will change anything because he comes from the same cult of test-and-punish.

Another setback for “reformers,” who never admit failure even as their sand castles dissolve.

Categories Accountability, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Graduation rates, Testing

D.C. Critic: Investigation of Graduation Rates Did Not Include Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2018 //
10

 

Here is a curiosity. The recent investigation of graduation rates in the D.C. Public Schools–which revealed that one-third of the graduates lacked the minimum qualifications to graduate–did not include charter schools. Nearly half the students in the D.C. schools attend charter schools.  Why were they not included in the investigation?

D.C.’s answer to the scandal is to create an “Office of Integrity.” Former teacher Erich Martel says that is not enough because such an office would be subservient to the authorities creating and covering up the scandal.

He writes:

 

Council Education Committee Chairman and Members, Council Members,

(Council staff: Please print the attachment for your CM, thank you)

 

DCPS chancellor Antwan Wilson’s proposed “Office of Integrity” is inadequate because it is not independent of the education hierarchy that ignored it for years.  Teachers and school staff will not trust any office that is within the DCPS bureaucracy.  And, it doesn’t cover charter schools, voucher recipients, college funding recipients or home schools.

 

The bill before the MD state legislature calling for an Investigator General under a proposed “Education Monitoring Unit” that is INDEPENDENT of the state education hierarchy with an independent funding stream is a far better alternative, more likely to fulfill its intended function. 

 

It has to have investigative powers with full due process protections as the proposed MD bill spells out.

 

Alternatives for DC might be:

An education investigator general (or whatever name) under the DC Inspector General,  DC auditor, with authority over DCPS, DC charters, DC voucher recipient schools, DC college funding recipients and home schools.

 

And – I am waiting for the Council to conduct an independent audit of DC charters’ graduates compliance with attendance requirements and fulfillment of graduation requirements.

 

Erich Martel

Retired DCPS high school teacher

Ward 3

ehmartel@starpower.net

Categories District of Columbia, Graduation rates, Scandals
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