Charter school success

I read Stossel's article instead, and I don't see anything about anybody closing the schools down:
This New York Charter School Is Helping Low-Income Students. But the City Is Holding It Back.

What I see instead are complaints that New York won't raise its cap. But what does that actually mean? The answer is giving more taxpayer money to the charter schools. I'd be all for criticizing in NYC if it was restricting students from attending who wanted to pay their own way. But I have zero issue with the government not paying for even more kids to attend schools run by a private business.

 

The narrator claims that proponents of public schools don't want competition, but that's untrue. They want fairness and too often charter schools do not operate under the same set of rules.

The Success Academy appears to do very well, as measured by student test scores. While the report included the fact that teacher attrition is an issue (saying "so what?"), it didn't mention the extent of student attrition, which is reportedly an issue. Other issues include millionaire CEO buying property and renting it to charters and using nefarious tactics to obtain disability resources for students who do not need them.

Eva Moskowitz May Expand “Success Academy” to Florida

Here's more. Don't believe everything you see in a 7min video.

Why Don’t Success Academy High School Students Take Any Advanced Regents Exams?

Success Academy is a charter network with about 40 schools in the New York City area. They are known for their high standardized 3-8 test scores. Though it has been proved that their test scores are somewhat inflated by their practices of shedding their low performing students over the year and also by, at some schools, focusing exclusively on test prep in the months leading up to the tests, they still have these test scores to show their funders and the various charter school cheerleaders.

Success Academy has spent eighteen years carefully cultivating their image. They want families to think that they have the highest expectations and that families should trust them to educate their children because those higher expectations will lead to those students learning the most. And we all know about their 3-8 state tests in Math and ELA. But it is pretty ‘odd’ that their students don’t take the more difficult Regents. The most likely reason for this is that Success Academy only wants information public that makes them look good and avoids any action that could reveal public data that reveals that they do not live up to their reputation. So I believe that they don’t allow their students to take the Regents because they believe that the scores on those Regents won’t be as impressive as their 3-8 state test scores compared to other schools. If I am right then this is an example of Success Academy choosing to preserve their inflated reputation over giving their students the opportunity to challenge themselves on these competitive exams.

This is important because Success Academy is held up as a model network that gets so much media attention every time ‘100%’ of their seniors are accepted to college and every time state test score results come out. It is kind of like the Lance Armstrong of charter schools. And when it was revealed that Lance Armstrong was actually not as good as he pretended to be, it was a big deal for sports writers to write about. But a thing like Success Academy’s lack of Regents scores is not something that any inquisitive professional writer about education in New York thinks to investigate. Perhaps there is a good reason that Success Academy does not have their high school students take the advanced Regents. We won’t learn that reason if nobody asks about it.

 

Smoke and mirrors. Among a number of other issues, their graduation rate sucks.

Success Academy Games U.S. News & World Report Best High School Ranking


When you go to the top schools list, they feature three statistics on the main view: Graduation rate, college readiness, and enrollment. Enrollment isn’t part of the ranking calculation but Graduation Rate, which they define as the number of students who enter 9th grade and graduate 4 years later, is 10% of the ranking.

For all the schools in the top 80 in New York state, the second lowest graduation rate was 92%. The first lowest was Success Academy with a 75% graduation rate.

 

What's interesting to me is you have proponents of charter schools make these grand claims, but in the same breath, they object when people ask that we hold charter schools to the same standards of public schools when it comes to testing, transparency, non-discrimination, etc. I don't categorically object to charters. They can fill gaps in a useful way. But I do object to the attempts to drain our public school funding with misleading and disingenuous claims.

 

Charter schools should be held tot he same standard as public school as far as testing goes. I don’t understand why a private or charter school would NOT hold themselves to that standard… makes it much easier to brag if you are doing better than the public school.

 

It's been mentioned before, but you could probably do a little more research than simply assuming everything on a youtube video is true.

Gary Rubinstein's Blog: Former Success Academy Teacher Speaks Out

 

So their students have relatively more academic minded parents, who are more involved in their children's education.

That's a problem with evaluating charter and private schools: it could reflect a measurement of the students going in, as much as of the education received.

 

Some of the Detroit charter schools promoted by Betsy DeVoss, Trump's Secretary of Education. These and other charter schools actually performed worse than Detroit's regular public schools which had a record of substandard performance.

On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance. Two years later, its charter was renewed.

Or if you live downtown, you could try Woodward Academy, a charter that has limped along near the bottom of school achievement since 1998, while its operator has been allowed to expand into other communities.​

A sobering look at what Betsy DeVos did to education in Michigan — and what she might do as secretary of education

Not saying that all or even most charter schools are inherently bad, those that opened in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina performed significantly better than than Orleans Parrish public schools. They were also subject to regulation and periodic evaluations unlike the unregulated schools in Michigan under DeVos.

Whitmer, Michigan Democrats have to fix what Betsy DeVos did

Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost. (Published 2017)

 

The reality is, there is no “special sauce” to their teaching methods. If there was, the public schools would be doing it too! The OP suggests the public schools should be “copying” charter schools, but what is there to copy?

I’ve always thought Charter schools are a fine idea as alternative where the public schools are utterly failing, inner cities and such. If there is any value at all, maybe just having a clean slate and new buildings brings some value. But those Devos run schools noted above show that positive returns are far from assured (in the academic sense) even compared to bottom tier crumbling school districts.

In the grand scheme? Seems like it’s become more of a grifting and/or ideological op where low paid, unqualified teachers are processed in and out and students are processed as well. They don’t want to be held to the same standard because then the illusion crumbles.

 

There is some special sauce- kick out low performers, make parents spend more time on their kids' education, and make teachers do more for lower pay. Some of these can't be done in public schools, and some of these shouldn't be done in public schools.

 

^ bingo. Charter schools are like gerrymandering. You get to pick your constituents.

 

Our school system is broken. We have a one size kinda fits all mentality. For decades we told kids they needed college… have to go to college. We structured HS as a way to promote students to college.
Those that were not college material got left behind with very few educational options. Vocational options were underfunded and looked down upon. Basic work force skills were dropped and defunded in many schools. Many HS students have no desire to be in the classroom and their parents only send them as a free daycare.
America needs to refocus on vocational work. Welding, plumbing, HVAC, etc.. all provide a good living ( better than McDonalds and no whining about a living wage.)
Students that just don’t want to go to school.. kick them out. They screw up the opportunities to learn for the other students . Minimum wage workers are always needed.
The secret sauce
Teach those that want to learn. Want to succeed.( Whether in a traditional HS or Vocational school). Those that only sow havoc and discord. . let them find another way to succeed . Want to be a great football coach? Have Tebow and Harvin. Same in the classroom.
That doesn’t mean have only high intelligent students. Have students with desire to learn to improve. Then provide teachers that enjoy seeing their success .Many”bad” teachers feel unsupported by admin, unsuccessful in the classroom because of the disruptions and failures that are truly out of their control. Give them good students and many bad teachers would turn around. If not… they too can find another venue for their occupational success.

 

Well said. I would suggest, however, that at the most basic level, schools are failing because parents aren’t doing their jobs.

 

My friend we may disagree on several issues, but we certainly agree on our fair share as well. Well said.

 

Oh NO DOUBT…
But we aren’t allowed to blame parents. That’s taboo. It’s everyone else’s fault

 

Heh? Taboo according to whom? Usually it's the teachers and not the parents, who get raked over the coals.

 

Right
Teachers get the blame when continually parents that are failing their kids. much easier to blame a teacher than to tell a mom or dad that they aren’t doing right by their kid. How often do we see 13 year kids getting arrested at 2 am or find out there is t a parent at home all night most weekdays? In tampa and browsed that was fairly normal. Too many parents feel either inconvenienced by their kid or want to be best buds with their kid. Not enough want to actually parent and help their kids truly succeed.