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The lack of teacher pension costs alone that are saved with charter schools far outweighs to NYC taxpayers any rent that might be collected.
And lets face it - charters give some kids (basically all underprivileged minorities) an actual chance at a decent education. And they are taking advantage of it. All-inclusive public schools have failed for decades to give those kids a chance. They are not miraculously going to transform now and suddenly start working - that's just poppycock. Sure send traditional public schools more money and see what you can do, and good luck. But don't stop charters that are actually working for those kids in them.
"Lets all fail together" isn't a better policy than "let some succeed". Screw those who are denying black and Hispanic charter school kids a chance they can't get at standard schools.
The lack of teacher pension costs alone that are saved with charter schools far outweighs to NYC taxpayers any rent that might be collected.
And lets face it - charters give some kids (basically all underprivileged minorities) an actual chance at a decent education. And they are taking advantage of it. All-inclusive public schools have failed for decades to give those kids a chance. They are not miraculously going to transform now and suddenly start working - that's just poppycock. Sure send traditional public schools more money and see what you can do, and good luck. But don't stop charters that are actually working for those kids in them.
"Lets all fail together" isn't a better policy than "let some succeed". Screw those who are denying black and Hispanic charter school kids a chance they can't get at standard schools.
Charters aren't working though, their test numbers are not significantly higher and that is even with their advantages. So you are just spouting unsubstantiated bull**** and platitudes.
So if you want to come back with something that resembles reality or an actual argument and not just platitudes that aren't backed up with well.... anything then we can have a discussion but simply stating things like "all inclusive public schools have failed for decades to give those kids a chance" without giving anything resembling a coherent point as to what they failed out (a chance at what), why charter schools would do better, and really anything or any measure by which they have failed then we can start talking but simply throwing up a BS statement like that gets you nowhere.
Also the goal of public education isn't simply to save taxpayers money, that shows where your mindset is regarding education. Not caring about anything but the money or the numbers (which you conveniently don't provide).
Charters aren't working though, their test numbers are not significantly higher and that is even with their advantages. So you are just spouting unsubstantiated bull**** and platitudes.
So if you want to come back with something that resembles reality or an actual argument and not just platitudes that aren't backed up with well.... anything then we can have a discussion but simply stating things like "all inclusive public schools have failed for decades to give those kids a chance" without giving anything resembling a coherent point as to what they failed out (a chance at what), why charter schools would do better, and really anything or any measure by which they have failed then we can start talking but simply throwing up a BS statement like that gets you nowhere.
Also the goal of public education isn't simply to save taxpayers money, that shows where your mindset is regarding education. Not caring about anything but the money or the numbers (which you conveniently don't provide).
Last time i look, the evil eva academy have multiple schools ranked in top 5%. Are you going to show me some studies that charter school is not working from some union backed study?
Charter school work, some work better than others. Accountability is there. Thanks to the iron-clad union contract, there is no accountability or incentive for the public school teachers to do better. Why should they? Either way, they are set for life.
Last time i look, the evil eva academy have multiple schools ranked in top 5%. Are you going to show me some studies that charter school is not working from some union backed study?
So you just don't want to accept reality because it doesn't fit your ideas about schools, good job preemptively throwing out any studies or anything that contradicts your views which you haven't backed up with anything.
For those who actually want to understand the issue and don't want to remain ignorant, Successes numbers are high but there are some reasons for that, some good, a lot not so good.
She also lost a ton of her students from kindergarten class to 4th grade class.
The first thing I did was take a look at the Success Academy Bronx 2 school. This is a K-3 school so the only students who took the state tests in the school were the 97 third graders. And, yes, 97% of those passed. Now since they have only one grade that was tested, it is also true that the pass rate for the entire school is 97%, but I think it is a bit misleading to leave out this detail while other schools are K-5 or K-8. Still, 97% is a very impressive score.
As far as serving the ‘same kids,’ it is interesting to compare the demographics of a Success Academy that shares a building with a public school. Harlem Success Academy 1 and P.S. 149 is a representative example. In 2012 Harlem Success 1 had 14.2% students with disabilities, 5% of students with limited English proficiency, 65% free lunch, and 13% reduced price lunch while their public school roommate had 28.2% students with disabilities, 8% LEP, 74% free lunch, and 5% reduced price lunch.
The Success Academies Network has 14 schools, but most of those schools don’t yet have a third grade class. One school is K-7, three are K-5, and three are K-3. In looking at their results, I focused on their fourth grade results because there are four schools to analyze there, and for each school I can do a comparison of last year’s results to this year’s results.
On average, they scored 54% on reading compared to 27% across the city and 80% on math compared to 35% across the city. I made a scatter plot of all the 4th grade schools comparing their 2012 scores to their 2013 scores, seeing if there were any ‘outliers’ who were outperforming schools that had comparable 2012 scores. I made the public schools blue, the charters red, and the Success charters yellow.
For ELA, Success as well as other charters, had much bigger drops than other schools that had the same 2012 scores. 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. All in all, the fourth grade test scores did remain good.
So the next thing I looked at was their student attrition. If they ‘lost’ many students, these scores are tainted. Now there is only one Success school that has been around since 2007. That school started with 83 kindergarteners and 73 first graders. Those cohorts just tested in 6th and 7th grade, respectively. The school has ‘lost’ a big chunk of those original 156 kids. Of those 73 first graders in 2007, only 35 took the seventh grade test. Of the 83 kindergarteners, only 47 took the sixth grade test last spring. Overall, they have ‘lost’ 47% of the original two cohorts. If this is one of the costs of having such high test scores, I’m not sure if it is worth it.
For the four cohorts that just took the fourth grade tests, those 316 students were, back in 2009, 443 kindergarteners, so they have ‘lost’ 29% of those cohorts. Now their high test scores aren’t completely explained by this nearly 30% attrition rate, but it is still something worth noting as we consider if this program is ‘scalable’ or not.
When a school is ‘healthy,’ teacher are happy there and want to stay there. The Success schools are known to have huge attrition of teachers, in the neighborhood of 50% per year. I received this comment recently from a teacher who taught at one, which indicates that there are some good things about the school, but that there is a lot of test prep as well:
I worked at Success Academy for two years. I hated it and I was miserable, as were most of my co-teachers, but the reason Success continues and will continue to do well on tests is that they have a progressive, research based curriculum in K-2. It’s not that the teaching is awe inspiring, it’s just that it’s consistently good. Though the staff skewed young, some of the teachers even had their own kids at the school. The school is heavy TFA — but the corps members have to work only as assistants their first year. The curriculum is semi-scripted. For example, they give us the basic teaching points for each unit, but it’s up to the teacher to decide how they want to deliver the lessons, and if their students need more of this or less of that. Success is also really on top of their RTI so its a bit harder for kids who get behind in pre-testing grades to go unnoticed. Also, they’ve been using common core for way longer than it was required.
Combine that with hardcore test prep and you get good results. My co-workers and I hated working for Success, but everyone, including myself have taken much of what we learned at Success and taken it into our new settings. I did see a little bit of counseling out, but the creaming people talk about is way overblown.
My larger concern is how bogus these test are. In my opinion, Success Academies deliver a high quality and relatively well-rounded education for low-income minority children. My concern is that even with a good education, kids need a ridiculous amount of test prep to pass the test. The test prep at Success runs like a machine. The kids get small group instruction all day during test prep–even the principals often stop their administrative duties to teach small groups. They even pull lower grade teachers to teach groups of test preps while assistants lead their classes. I hated that place, but I can’t deny their curriculum is excellent and they know how to do test prep right.
I guess the question is what, besides attrition and test prep, is helping this school get such good test scores, and are there any lessons that other schools can learn from them? For one thing, I know that Success Academy schools generally have two teachers per class. This is something that would be very costly to scale. Also, though they do hire new TFA teachers, those teachers are never lead teachers, but function more as teaching assistants. This, I think, is a pretty good use for TFAers and I’ve suggested before that all first year TFAers should serve this kind of role. Also, at least according to the commenter who was not thrilled with her experience there, they do seem to have a good curriculum. Another thing I should note is that I am less skeptical of a school where they start in kindergarten than I am with a KIPP middle school that starts with kids in 5th grade. Early childhood education is something that I support, and the success of Success is an example of this helping.
Still, I’m not convinced that what they have gained in their high test scores outweighs what they have lost, particularly 50% of their original kids at the first school, and 30%, so far, of the kids who are now fourth graders.
In general, these good test scores, I think, should make the ‘reformers’ more nervous than elated. From my perspective, I don’t think that the scores are devastating to my cause. I don’t think they really prove that there are super teachers out there who can get the ‘same kids’ to excel, even if it is just on standardized tests, since I’m not convinced they are truly the ‘same kids.’ But the ‘reformers’ should be very careful about this. They already had Success as a big success story, as well as a bunch of others like KIPP and Democracy Prep. Now they still have Success, but they have lost some of their schools they used to take credit for. I’m not sure how they can reconcile their idea that test scores are an accurate measure of school quality with the fact that many of the schools they have been touting have lost their luster by that measure.
And what ‘excuse’ is there for these other schools. Surely behind closed doors they are accusing Success of some kind of manipulation, either by extensive test prep or by booting even more kids than they do. I wonder if this could start some kind of charter civil war.
When I expose a charter school that has low test scores, remember that I’m not doing this because I think that the school is ‘bad’ because of those low scores. For me, it is more of a “give them a taste of their own medicine.” I don’t think a few days of testing in Math and reading can capture all that is learned in a school year. The ‘reformers’ can keep pretending that they do and then one day there will be an expensive enough test that will be ‘test-prep proof’ and then suddenly they may find that they have no more schools to hold up as examples.
Another article on her schools policies for pushing difficult students out
Charter school work, some work better than others. Accountability is there. Thanks to the iron-clad union contract, there is no accountability or incentive for the public school teachers to do better. Why should they? Either way, they are set for life.
There absolutely is accountability for public schools, more so in fact. The fact you would say that shows your total ignorance on the issue.
Charter schools are not held to the same accountability standards as public schools (I know there is major differences in ELL reporting and paperwork and there are plenty of others), and you still haven't defined success because if thats your barometer the numbers sure don't show that (see above.)
I would direct people to anything put out by M.O.R.E. to give people an idea of what you people really want. But you can break it down to:
1. No competition (no charters, no vouchers, etc)
2. No accountability (no standardized testing)
Some platform.
Not exactly fair comparisons if you put public schools who are obligated to take everyone up against charters nd privates that take only who they want. Some lack of critical thinking skills you got there.
"you people"? :roll eyes: Anyway, Carmen Farina makes not even half of what you say. If Eva's backers can cover her salary, then let them cover rent rather than making the rest of the public school system do it. Here's an article discussing the law that makes charter schools a lucrative investment. Wall Street Hearts Charter Schools, Gets Rich Off Them | FDL News Desk
Finally, if the 1% wants to help, why do they do everything except talk to teachers about the problems effecting inner city schools? Would they seek providing health care to the poor without speaking to doctors....and if someone dies from not taking care of themself, would you blame those doctors?
Are you kidding? People do that all the time.
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