Urban charter schools are succeeding—so get out of their way

[theworldismine13]

There shouldn't be charter schools in the US period.
There should be public schools and private schools.
All education funding should be poured into public day-cares, preschools, elementary, middle, high, and undergraduate universities.
Nothing should go to private or for-profit schools.
Urban charter schools are working just like magnet schools. They just grab who ever is best, and shave off those who can't cut it, they aren't special.
More teachers, more training, more oversight, more techniques used to succeed, close the funding gaps, allow for more, don't allow religious zealots to interfere in schools, if all of this happened, we would see comparable results in public schools.

why would this nation put money into a system that we know doesnt work

people like you are more worried about saving a decrepit bureaucracy than the minds of black children

 

[DEAD7]

why would this nation put money into a system that we know doesnt work

people like you are more worried about saving a decrepit bureaucracy than the minds of black children

 

[tmonster]

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that are run outside traditional public systems. They are not bound by many of the rules that govern conventional schools, nor, typically, must they hire unionized teachers. Enrollment is open, with lotteries when there is a surfeit of applicants.

they get to cherry pick the students with the best potential. no municipal pensions for the teachers intrusted with the youth and workforce of tomorrow.


boils down to more Koch brothers union busting

yup
another tidbit I got from Dianne Ravitch the other day is that they have no hiring standard and are part of the big push is from right wing groups who want to be able to teach creationism with public money and want to be able to fire teachers who try to teach evolution in their publicly funded classrooms, with impunity. These schools are basically a means to undermine separation of church and state. You are all watching the increasing thirdworldization of the US and the continued march of the anti-intellectual movement

.

 

[tmonster]

why would this nation put money into a system that we know doesnt work

people like you are more worried about saving a decrepit bureaucracy than the minds of black children

bullshyt
the system does work
what has failed is the socioeconomic structure and what you are pushing will only cause more of the same
it's no coincidence that local poverty coincides with failing public schools
it has been repeatedly shown that those of your ilk are willing to lie about the success of charter schools in push their agenda and as far as I am concerned this article simply can't be trusted as much as a screed written on toilet paper or a stump speech

 

[tmonster]

i prefer to donate to charter schools like urban prep, but thanks

Urban Prep Achieves 100 Percent College Acceptance
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/loca...100-Percent-College-Acceptance-254436321.html

The Same Old Miracle School in Chicago, with a High Attrition Rate
By dianeravitch
July 7, 2014 //
A few years ago,I wrote an article in The New YorkTimes about “miracle schools” that weren’t. I called out Mayor Bloomberg, as well as Arne Duncan and President Obama for making grandiose claims about schools that allegedly graduated 100% of their students or saw dramatic test score gains. On closer inspection, none of the miracles was true. In the schools where the scores jumped by 50 points, they mysteriously fell in a year or two by fifty points. In the schools with amazing graduation rates, what was not disclosed was their high attrition rates, that is, the large number of kids who left before senior year. In my research, I was aided by the detective work of Gary Rubinstein in New York City and Noel Hammatt in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Gary subsequently created a wiki site to keep track of miracle schools. So far, he has not found one that holds up to close scrutiny.

But NPR just ran a story about one of the schools that I debunked in 2011. Noel Hammatt again tracked down the data and showed how many students drop out before graduation.

After NPR described Urban Academy as a charter school where 100% graduate and 100% are accepted into four-year colleges, Noel Hammatt wrote this comment:

“−

Noel Hammatt •

I wrote about Urban Prep years ago (see http://bit.ly/Noel9 for my article that appeared at Harvard’s Nieman Center.) and Dr. Diane Ravitch used some of my research in an Op-Ed in the New York Times ( http://bit.ly/Noel91 )to point out that the story of Urban Prep is a marketing story, not a balanced story or a “miracle school” by any means. In the year that I wrote about Urban Prep their graduation rate was nothing to brag about. It is not unusual for UP to start with 155 students in the 9th grade, and four years later graduates around 55 Seniors. What is so startling in the story line in this story was the set up… where the story line says “and barely half [of African-American males] will graduate from high school.” Then the story immediately goes into data about Urban Prep, where suddenly the focus is NOT on graduation rate at all, but on the % of graduating seniors who are accepted into a four year college. No other high school looks at these numbers, and Urban Prep does it because it is the easiest to focus on while ignoring more damaging data.

What of this less stellar data? Here is what I wrote about Urban Prep in the Harvard piece. “The use of anecdotal data to promote a certain ideological version of “school reform” is only effective when the media are too lazy to dig behind a “press release” version of the news. In fact, it reminds me of the hype over a Chicago charter school highlighted for achieving 100 percent acceptance of its graduates in colleges. In spite of news outlets across the country reporting that this all-male, all African-American charter high school had beaten the odds (I in no way minimize the importance of the students being accepted into college), not one noted that only 17.2 percent of the students had passed the Reading and Mathematics portion of the Prairie State Achievement Examination, a key high school test in Illinois. Out of 1139 schools in the state taking this exam, Urban Prep Charter High School ranked 1067.”

“A year after I reported the data above, ALL of the scores for Urban Prep had gone even lower. Their average passage rate on the Prairie State Achievement Examination went from 17.2% to 14.7%, making it again one of the lowest performing schools in the state. The average composite score on the ACT was a paltry 16.5, which is lower than the average score for ALL African American students in the country.

“To look at the achievement another way, not one student in the 2011 PSAE scored at a level 4 (the highest level) in either Mathematics or in Science in the entire school.

“In my article at the Nieman Center for Journalism I was basically asking journalists to dig a bit deeper into the data before creating a story based on self-reported “hype.” Apparently no one at NPR read or appreciated my work. It would be nice to think that NPR is capable of digging deeper than a headline or a schools marketing report.

“(The statement about barely half graduating from high school is misleading as well. According to the Schott Foundation the number of African American males graduating IN FOUR YEARS is 52%. This is quite different from suggesting they NEVER graduate high school. See http://thegrio.com/2012/09/20/… for more.”

Why does the media fall for these stories? Well, they are dramatic even if untrue. Then, to the simpleminded listener, they show that privately managed schools are better than public schools. And they satisfy a basic human longing to believe in miracles. Reading or hearing this story on NPR leads to the conclusion that there are simple solutions to difficult problems. There are not.

 

[tmonster]

The debunking of miracle schools

Welcome to miracleschools.wikispaces.com, a place to gather research about schools that are touted in the media to demonstrate how well the current reform movement is going.

Who maintains this site?
This site was started by Gary Rubinstein and Noel Hammatt, two educators. They were introduced to each other by Diane Ravitch, after each had sent her independent investigations of miracle schools. After Diane Ravitch wrote a New York Times Op-Ed citing the work, Newsweek published a top 10 "miracle schools" list, which made us realize that two people might not be enough to counter the current so-called reform movement. This site is an opportunity to get other people involved.

Why are you doing this? Do you like insulting hard-working kids and teachers?
The current reform movement in education is based on principles that have not been proved. The only 'proof' that the current reformers have of the effectiveness of their policies is a handful of 'miracle' schools. They claim that the only difference between these miracle schools and the failing schools down the street is the hard-working staff. The implication is that if teachers were made to work harder through the threat of being fired -- or actually fired, then eventually all schools could replicate such success.
Since this is the only 'proof' the reformers have, it is important that these miracles be scrutinized. If it turns out that they are not truly miracles, but just pseudo-miracles, it is important for the public to know. And we do not see this as insulting the kids or teachers from the miracle schools we debunk. Just because they are not miracle schools, does not mean that they are not good schools. The point is that there are other schools that are just as good that are getting shut down since they are failing to be miracles. It is important to reveal that the miracle schools aren't that miraculous either.

What is the definition of a miracle school?
Informally, a 'miracle' school is one that is significantly outperforming the nearby schools in its neighborhood despite working with the same student populations and the same limited resources.
More formally, we think that a true miracle school would have the following eight characteristics:
1) A low attrition rate
2) High test scores
3) High graduation rate (for high schools)
4) High college acceptance rate (for high schools)
5) Fair representation of ELL and Special Education students
6) A high percent of students who qualify for free or reduced meal prices
7) Funding equivalent to the nearby 'failing' school
8) No evidence that the school discriminates against low performing students
If a school fails to have any of these factors, I would say it is not truly a miracle school.

You've debunked many miracle schools. Have you found any genuine ones?
No. Not by the above definition. They all have failed several of the above characteristics. We try, as much as possible, to be unbiased researchers. Though we have a working hypothesis that there are no miracle schools, though there may be schools where many significant resources and conditions come together in order to create the school as an "outlier, we have not concealed any true miracle schools that we've found in order to support our hypothesis.

How do you decide which schools to investigate?
We mainly investigate schools that have been highlighted by politicians or the media. For example, Newsweek published a list of the top ten miracle schools, so these were worthy of investigation.

What are some of the most common things that cause a school to lose its 'miracle' designation?
There are several things that we look for. The most common, and easiest to detect (in some states) is attrition. A school with high test scores often has nearly half of their students leaving before finishing their program. Another thing to look for is what the admissions process is for these schools. If the process is too difficult, many of the most needy families will be discouraged from applying. Additionally, if there are "hidden" conditions or tests that exclude those not highly motivated or high-performing, then the school would lose it's "miracle" status. Sometimes the schools often have very low test scores, yet the politicians then tout other qualities, like high graduation rates, for example. We can then ignore those schools, since there is no miracle. Other things are hard, if not impossible, to uncover. For example, the funding issue. If a school gets a lot of private money and then claims they spend less per student, it is hard to dispute, but sometimes possible.

How can I get involved?
To contribute, send a request to register for this wiki. Then send a detailed email to garyrubinstein then-make-the-at-sign yahoo.com.
If you've investigated a school that you think would be a good addition to this site, send us the link to a post about that school. If you would like to be assigned a school to investigate or would like to check the facts of an investigation that is already in process, let us know and we will find a way for you to participate.

 

[tmonster]

In making the case for vouchers—which provide government funding to pay the tuition at any private or religious school that parents choose—Romney exaggerates the evidence; indeed, some of his claims are simply false. He points to the D.C. voucher program, which began in 2004, the first program to use federal tax dollars to subsidize private-school tuition—as “a model for the nation.” He asserts that “After three months, students [in the D.C. voucher program] could already read at levels 19 months ahead of their public-school peers.”

This is flatly wrong. A Congressionally-mandated evaluation of the D.C. program found that students with vouchers made no gains in either reading or math. As the report stated, “There is no conclusive evidence that the OSP [Opportunity Scholarship Program] affected student achievement.” Romney claims that 90 percent of voucher students graduated from high school, as compared to only 55 percent in the low performing public schools of D.C. But here he exaggerates. The federal evaluation of the program said that 82 percent of the students receiving vouchers graduated from high school as compared to 70 percent of the students who applied to the voucher program and were not accepted. This is a respectable gain, but nowhere near as large as the numbers Romney cited. Because students who enter a lottery tend to be more motivated than those who do not, reputable social scientists usually compare the outcomes of those who won the lottery and those who did not.

 

[tmonster]

Urban Prep

Two posts about this school, which started the miracle school investigations:

http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2011/03/06/same-kids-same-building-same-lies/

http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2011/06/16/same-kids-same-building-same-lies-redux/

A nice analysis of breakdown of scores by income level

http://madisonamps.org/2011/10/11/some-truth-about-urban-prep-and-why-it-matters/

Another post that includes this school can be found at the Harvard University Nieman Watchdog:

http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00505&fontsize=up

In 2011 the scores for the school went down, significantly. When Gary and I first reported on this school, only 17.2% of students at urban Prep passed the Prairie State Achievement Examination for English and Math. This year, only 14.7 passed. In spite of all the hype about students being accepted into college, they clearly are not producing students capable of meeting even basic levels of academic achievement. And, by the way, they are again failing to meeting Adequate Yearly Progress.

http://schools.chicagotribune.com/school/urban-prep-chtr-englewood-high-school_chicago
Chicago Tribune has them with 0% college ready on all 4 parts of ACT compared to 7% for district

 

[tmonster]

edit

 

[theworldismine13]

bullshyt
the system does work

how the fuk can anybody say something like that with a straight face

what has failed is the socioeconomic structure and what you are pushing will only cause more of the same

how the fuk do you separate the public school system from "the socioeconomic structure", the public school system IS the fundamental part of the "socioeconomic structure" of this country, they are one and the same, that is why the public school has to be destroyed to address poverty

it's no coincidence that local poverty coincides with failing public schools

exactly

it has been repeatedly shown that those of your ilk are willing to lie about the success of charter schools in push their agenda and as far as I am concerned this article simply can't be trusted as much as a screed written on toilet paper or a stump speech

the only thing thats been shown is that there is a group of people that are more interested in saving union jobs and a decrepit bureaucracy than in developing the young black mind

 

[Just like bruddas]

It's all good until you start seeing kids rocking walmart and target shirts for advertisement

 

[theworldismine13]

the attrition rate is a bogus point, as long as the attrition rate of urban prep is lower than the dropout rate at schools with the same demographic then urban prep is doing a good job

in other words if 30% of urban prep students get kicked out but 50% of african american males are dropping out of regular public schools, then urban prep is doing a better job than regular public schools

and the same goes with the test figures, you have to compare the test scores of urban prep with the test scores of the same demographic not with the entire state, if its doing better than the same demographic then its doing better, if its not doing as well as the entire state then thats just something that needs to be worked on, that wouldnt be evidence of failure

 

[tmonster]

how the fuk can anybody say something like that with a straight face

easy it's the truth

how the fuk do you separate the public school system from "the socioeconomic structure",

easy, just look at which one came first especially for the minority population you allegedly seek to protect

the public school system IS the fundamental part of the "socioeconomic structure" of this country

yes, it is a part of it

they are one and the same

well shyt you could not even wait a paragraph to contradict yourself
what you just wrote is simply idiotic blather
not worth my time

 

[tmonster]

the attrition rate is a bogus point, as long as the attrition rate of urban prep is lower than the dropout rate at schools with the same demographic then urban prep is doing a good job

in other words if 30% of urban prep students get kicked out but 50% of african american males are dropping out of regular public schools, then urban prep is doing a better job than regular public schools

and the same goes with the test figures, you have to compare the test scores of urban prep with the test scores of the same demographic not with the entire state, if its doing better than the same demographic then its doing better, if its not doing as well as the entire state then thats just something that needs to be worked on, that wouldnt be evidence of failure

Jesus...you conflate drop out attrition with getting kicked out attrition
thanks for playing

 

[ExodusNirvana]

There shouldn't be charter schools in the US period.
There should be public schools and private schools.
All education funding should be poured into public day-cares, preschools, elementary, middle, high, and undergraduate universities.
Nothing should go to private or for-profit schools.
Urban charter schools are working just like magnet schools. They just grab who ever is best, and shave off those who can't cut it, they aren't special.
More teachers, more training, more oversight, more techniques used to succeed, close the funding gaps, allow for more, don't allow religious zealots to interfere in schools, if all of this happened, we would see comparable results in public schools.

Dudes hate government so much that rather than address the real problem...MOTHERfukkING REFORM...they want to do away with it completely

You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater