Mayor de Blasio signed a bill Tuesday to require the city to publish reports detailing the demographics and academic records of all charter schools co-located with traditional public schools.
Officials will have to spell out the number of kids who get free lunch, proportion of kids learning English and special education students, racial breakdown, and test scores at the schools involved in the controversial co-locations.
“Reports will be a valuable tool for parents [and] educators,” de Blasio said.
Charter school entrepreneurs were not impressed:
Jenny Sedlis, executive director of the pro-charter StudentsFirstNY, dismissed the new law a “political theater,” noting much of the data can already be accessed by the public.
One piece of data the public can't access is exactly what happens to those kids who start at charter schools and end up out of them.
The vaunted Harlem Success Academy 1, for example, had a 56% attrition rate:
Harlem Success Academy 1 Has 44% Graduation Rate, 56% Attrition Rate
Eva Moskowitz and her backers like to tout a 100% graduation rate at her schools, but as Norm Scott points out in an Ed Notes piece, it's not a 100% graduation rate when 56% of the students disappear from the school before graduation:
The longer Success Charters are in business, the more they get exposed. This one is big. I'm sure the remaining 32 kids out of the 73 who began 8 years ago are fine. Does anyone know what happened to the 41 kids who were not there to graduate? Would a study of those kids be worthwhile as a check on Success claims of success? They will argue that kids move around in public schools too -- but most end up in other public schools. Did the missing 41 end up in other charters or mostly public schools? And how about this? If Eva's schools are so great an attraction - and we know people choose places to live based on schools - why did they just disappear? We also know that she is allowed wide leeway in the neighborhoods they can draw from. One would expect if parents really found Success such high quality you would see more than 44% stay around. Eva can answer some of these questions by making the data on the missing available - names and number please. (Can someone FOIL this given their claim they are public schools?)
Where did the other 41 children who started first grade at Success Academy 1 with the class that is now graduating go?
And why won't the press take up that investigation instead of just taking Moskowitz's claims of 100% graduation at face value.
When you have an attrition rate of 56% of your graduating class, you do NOT have a 100% graduation rate.
Now there's some data we'd like to access, Jenny.
Where do the former HSA's go?
For that matter, why do they go?
Do they go on their own accord?
Are they pushed?
Is it a combo?
Are all charters colocated? Would others be exempt from this provision?
ReplyDeleteIs this just for co-located schools? is that your question? I'll see if I can find that answer.
DeleteThe DOE does have the information on what happened to the students who attrit out of charter schools--they move out of the City, they transfer to another charter or public school, they go to a private school, they have health problems that require alternate education programs. So, though, it might not be easy for the public to get the information, the DOE should simply RELEASE that information so the public can understand exactly how most charter schools work by "counseling out" the kids along the way.
ReplyDeleteThis is the kind of information that the charter industry does not want readily available, and since the DOE has functioned as an ancillary to Success Academy, at least during the Klein/Black/Walcott Years, I can see why the DOE would make it difficult to access the data.
DeleteMaybe we'll get it now that de Blasio has signed this bill.