Yet another report has just been released which shows that charters have extremely uneven effects on student test scores — and, in some cases, may actually have a negative impact on the scores of certain types of students. This study has some of the same limitations as earlier work comparing charters to district schools (including a failure to distinguish between high-needs special education students and those with fewer challenges, and the merging of students who receive free lunch vs. reduced price meals). In general, however, it is a worthwhile addition to a growing body of research which documents this pattern of uneven performance, and calls into question arguments that the charter school model should be rapidly expanded without further exploration into whether or not it truly improves student achievement. More »

[Editor's note: This post was co-written by Rhonda Rosenberg and Tina Collins.]

In the past weeks, two new studies have come out about the impact of charter schools on math and reading test scores. One focuses on a small sample of students in a single school (Harlem Success Academy), the other on the students at 22 KIPP schools around the country (including the original KIPP Academy; STAR College Preparatory; AMP Academy; and Infinity Charter in NYC). Both were paid for by the schools they studied, and both conclude that the charter schools were more successful in raising test scores than local public schools.

However, both studies have methodological problems which make some of their conclusions questionable. Neither study fully accounts for the impact of charter schools’ lower proportions of English Language Learners and special education students, and both fail to distinguish between high needs special ed students and those with less severe learning challenges, and between students who receive free vs. reduced price lunches. More »

Over at GothamSchools, Kim Gittleson sheds further light on the charter cohort attrition about which I recently posted. In that post I showed how students disappear at alarming rates from the testing cohorts of middle school charters. As students leave, the cohorts post ever rising passing percentages on state exams.

As I said then, I did not know whether the cohorts were shrinking because the students had been left back a grade or because they had left the school altogether. I also didn’t know the achievement levels of the students who were disappearing. Obviously, if failing students leave and passing students stay, then the passing percentage goes up but not necessarily student performance.

Gittleson helps us out. She looks at BEDS state data, which seems to show that some of these vanishing students were actually left back. Without more information one cannot be sure that these left-back students actually stayed in the school. Regardless of whether they did or did not, however, the sharply rising passing rates in the cohorts seem likely to be influenced by the removal of students with low scores. [UPDATED] More »

Last Friday, shortly after the State Senate and Assembly passed charter cap legislation which included key reforms, Peter Murphy of the charter management New York Charter School Association was condemning the law in the most unequivocal terms. “This bill is a big step backward,” Murphy told the New York Times, “and worse than doing no bill.” Right behind him, Nelson Smith of the National Alliance for  Public Charter Schools, was declaring that

The bill they’ve just approved slowly increases the number of charter schools but puts serious brakes on New York City growth; invites intrusive and redundant audits by the state comptroller; forbids for-profit operators (no matter their track record) from managing any new schools; and adds a patchwork of new provisions, grounded in specious, union-provided non-data,  requiring charter schools to resemble the demographics of surrounding districts. It’s unclear what it will do to the actual chartering authority of New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, or his counterparts at SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute.

In twenty-four hours, both men were singing a very different tune — Murphy here and Smith here.

Why this remarkable about face? Could it be that if the blunt honesty of the original reactions was widely recognized, the Wall Street hedge fund operators which financed the multi-million dollar campaign to win a charter cap increase without any real reform might feel that their money was not well-spent? Have to keep that Wal-Mart spigot flowing, after all.

Much has been said about the high demand for charter schools in entrance lotteries, but little about the choices families make once their children are actually accepted. Looking at attrition rates is important because they may tell us about the choices parents make about their children’s schools. Attrition may also indicate that some students are encouraged to leave or have been expelled. And, if proficiency rates rise over time in schools with heavy attrition, those percentages may reflect the change in the student cohort, as well as or instead of academic progress.

I took a look at changes in the size of student ELA testing cohorts for the thirteen middle school charter s that have more than one year of data between 2006 and 2009.[1] Since all students in the testing cohort must take tests every year, I was able to determine whether cohorts shrink or grow over time.

As it turns out, high-performing charter middle schools in the New York City also have extremely high rates of attrition in their testing cohorts :

• Eight of the thirteen schools have enough data to allow us to examine cohort size between 5th grade, when students enter, and 8th grade, when they graduate.[2] In four of these schools, more than 25% of the students vanished from the cohort. Of these four schools, three saw cohort declines of 30%, and one lost nearly 40%. All of these charters have been nationally or locally acclaimed as great schools that are in high demand. The average attrition for this group of eight is 23%. (charts follow.)

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An article in today’s Times about charter schools across the state details the questionable financial dealings and conflicts of interest of some charters — further evidence of the need for greater accountability and transparency.

The problems underscore what many critics say is New York’s weak system for policing how charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately run, spend money.

Charters, for example, are not specifically prohibited by state law from hiring their own board members or employees as consultants. While the state comptroller’s office — the government’s fiscal watchdog — can audit public schools, it is barred by a court ruling from examining charter schools.

Click on the image for a full size PDF.

The UFT placed a full-page ad in the May 24 issue of the Daily News as part of the union’s ongoing effort to set the record straight on charter school reform and counter the falsehoods being spread by the “blame the teacher” crowd and the Wall Street hedge funds behind them. The ad states, “We’re for schools that serve all students, regardless of their needs, that give parents a real voice, that benefit kids rather than profiteering investors.”

James Merriman, CEO of the charter management NYC Charter School Center and former head of charter school work at the Wal-Mart family foundation, was on the center’s blog this week, complaining that Diane Ravitch and teacher unions were not closely following and publicly declaiming on the education of English Language Learners in… Buffalo.

Why this 500 mile long march to discuss the status of the education of English Language Learners? Why not discuss the status of English Language Learners in New York City schools? After all, Merriman is based here, as is Ravitch and the UFT.

It certainly is the case that in New York City public schools, the state of the education of English Language Learners can only be described as deplorable — their high school graduation rates, their Regents examination passing rates and their proficiency rates on state ELA and Math exams lag far behind students for whom English is their native language. More than once, we have commented on the education of New York City English Language Learners here at Edwize, as has Diane Ravitch in many of her writings.

But Mr. Merriman goes to Buffalo, and not just because neither Ravitch nor the UFT could reasonably be expected to follow developments there closely or feel a particular obligation to comment upon them. You see, the Buffalo Public Schools are not run by Joel Klein, who just happens to be on the board of Merriman’s Charter School Center and is the most faithful ally of charter management in their battles to ensure that charter schools are non-union. No, the man from Wal-Mart would rather avoid comment on what is right under his nose in the field of English Language Learner education, while castigating those who address the issue before us.

Intellectual honesty begins at home.

Since even the New York Times could not figure out how many students vanished from last year’s 6th grade class at Kings Collegiate Charter, let’s set the record straight: the number is 23, and the percent is 30. Thirty percent of the students vanished even as the percent of students deemed proficient rose… hmmm… 38 percentage points!… from one year to the next.

Which is why it would have been nice if after ushering Secretary Duncan in and out the front door of the (freshly painted) charter school, Mr. Klein had taken Duncan around the back where the students from the public school enter every day. These schools are co-located. True, the halls at IS 588 had not been freshly painted for the visit. But halls aside, Mr. Duncan might have seen a perfectly fine — perhaps even a wonderful — public school. Let’s compare. More »

As more light is shed on the education of students with special needs in New York City charter schools, it has become increasingly evident that the New York City Department of Education [NYC DoE] has flouted the local Freedom of Information Law in an effort to keep from the public view not just a full and accurate picture of the state of Special Education in charter schools, but also its own egregious failure to provide the most minimal oversight in that field.

Here is what we now know. In fall 2009, when the UFT started to compile and analyze the information which provided the basis for our report, Separate and Unequal: The Failure of New York City Charter Schools to Serve the City’s Neediest Students, we discovered that the most important data on Special Education in NYC charter schools had never been published and was not in the public realm. More »

Chanting slogans like “Profits, not pupils!” “We want money, not textbooks!” and “First the banks, then the schools!,” a large and spirited group of gaudily dressed faux hedge-funders expressed their enthusiasm for opening (and siphoning profits from) charter schools on May 4 at a rally in front of the New York City Charter School Center.

More photos after the jump. More »

In a recent e-mail that has been spreading through the city’s inboxes, Eva Moskowitz made some wild claims about charter schools’ enrollment of special needs students — even arguing that her fellow charter school managers had been too willing to admit that they served fewer students with special needs than district schools, and that the UFT had “lied” about her own schools’ SPED enrollment. As “proof,” she cited a study that had been posted on the GothamSchools blog — but that research has a fatal flaw.

As we pointed out in our recent report on the failure of most NYC charter schools to serve special needs students, any analysis of their claims about special education enrollment is meaningless without an explanation of the levels of need among the students. A special education student who requires a few hours of speech therapy per week and a student who needs a self contained classroom every day are both classified as needing an Individualized Education Program (IEP), but bring very different challenges to schools. The author of the GothamSchools study left these differences completely out of her analysis, even though the data is available through the Freedom of Information Act (and was included in our report, once we finally received it from the state).

If the charter school management truly believe they enroll the same kind of students that district schools enroll, then they should make these numbers more accessible to the public — since they have nothing to hide.

[Update: Links to the source data are now available.]

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The UFT Research Department just took a look at the hotly-contested issue of special education enrollment in NYC charter schools.

What we found is that even when they do enroll a fair share of special education students, charters do not enroll the same kinds of students with special needs. Using FOIL’d charter school invoices, we found that charters serve much lower-needs special students. That leaves the regular district schools to educate virtually all those requiring self-contained classrooms, and most who need team-teaching settings.

The implication? If charters don’t serve the same kids, their claims of higher student performance are based in part on non-comparable data.

Read the report here: Special Education in Charters and District Schools

Message From New York Charter Parents Association:

A new bill was introduced in the State Senate on Friday, April 30.  This bill would raise the charter school cap to 460; more than doubling the number, without allowing audits by the state comptroller, without charters being required to post their charter and by-laws online, without giving voice to parents on co-locations, without barring profit-making enterprises from making money off operating charter schools and without requiring charters to provide special education services for students at their charter school. More »

In a recent profile in New York Magazine, charter school CEO Eva Moskowitz proclaims herself the savior of public education. However, the article makes clear that Moskowitz does not truly offer any solutions to the thorny problems of urban schools; instead, the culture she has implemented as CEO of Harlem Success has actually magnified problems. The gap between rhetoric and reality calls into question what Moskowitz’s real “mission” really is — and at $400K a year, that’s an important question to ask.

Though she makes the absurd claim in the article that her mission to change public education started as early as first grade (while most of us were concerned about which cartoon lunchbox we would get), Moskowitz’s real mission is to increase her own political power. During her early 2000’s tenure on City Council, Moskowitz conducted a series of education oversight hearings. (Which, according to the article, satisfied her childhood “Watergate” fetish.) In many respects, she intended these hearings to be a launching pad to higher office — but the plan backfired, as her coarse personality turned off voters and resulted in a nine point loss in the race for Manhattan borough president. Her current resurgence of interest in educational issues is intended as a pathway back into the public light, and perhaps higher office.

Moskowitz’s contradictory views on standardized testing are one hint that her interest in public schooling is more about playing to political rhetoric than thinking about what urban students really need to succeed. More »