At a time when the question of how to best serve our neediest students at all schools is a key focus at the local and national levels, media analyses of the impact of student attrition at charters and district schools can be a useful contribution to the discussion. Unfortunately, an article recently published by SchoolBook misses the key point of this question in its failure to acknowledge that charter attrition’s effects come not from the number or type of students who leave, but from most charters’ decisions not to replace those students.

Gary Miron did a great job addressing this issue in his recent study on KIPP, and Mathematica recently confirmed some of his key findings (though they argued that the impact of these practices were relatively minimal).

In general, Miron and others have shown that both urban charters and urban district schools serve populations with high rates of student mobility — every year, relatively high percentages of students change schools in New York and other cities, and students who change schools (in general) tend to be lower achieving and have higher needs. This is what the SchoolBook article focuses on — if you just look at the percentage and type of students who leave schools in any given year, you’re not going to find big differences between district and charter schools.

The key difference is that in district schools, the students who transfer out are replaced by equally needy students who transfer in, including in higher grades. Overall, this keeps enrollment numbers and overall percentages of high-need students fairly stable — in a K-5 district school, if you have 50 kindergartners arrive in 2012, you’ll see roughly 50 5th graders graduate six years later. Not all those students will have started as kindergartners, but those who left will have been replaced by students with fairly similar demographics and achievement levels.

In contrast, even charter advocates admit that most charters choose not to replace students who leave with incoming transfer students, especially in upper grades. This means that at charters, the neediest students are the most likely to leave before graduation, but either they aren’t replaced or they’re replaced in very limited numbers. This is why you’ll often tend to see graduating classes at charters which are much smaller than entering classes.

Based on what we know about the demographics of students who transfer compared to those who stay in schools, the upper-grade students who remain in a charter with high attrition will tend to be those with relatively lower needs and higher academic achievement. In NYC, we’ve shown that the charter middle schools with the highest attrition and non-replacement rates are also the same ones which show the greatest increases in scores in their highest grades. The Mathematica study showed that at KIPP, incoming transfer students tended to come in with higher achievement levels than students who transferred into district schools, a pattern also noted by the principal of the charter school highlighted in the SchoolBook article when discussing his school’s test score increases.

The other element of this that the article doesn’t fully address is the impact of the different discipline codes at the charters. The quotes from the parents and charters leaders in the article are fairly contradictory on this point — they acknowledge that disagreements about discipline were a primary factor in making these students leave the school, but don’t define this as being “kicked out.” The lack of a good way to either measure (1) how frequently these “nudge out” transfers happen or (2) the impact the exit of students with discipline issues has on the remaining students’ academic performance are major problems with the research in this area. Some charters do have high rates of suspensions, but lower-level types of discipline are much harder to track.

Overall, the fact that this article doesn’t even acknowledge that practices around attrition and replacement represent a legitimate difference between charters and district schools makes its analysis significantly less useful and more misleading than those from the Charter School Center itself or the researchers at Mathematica — and very disappointing.

Thank you to all of those who have reached out on behalf of New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries (AECI) teachers. Join us for the final push of our call-in campaign to support these educators.

This week we are targeting board chair Irma Zardoya, president and CEO of the New York City Leadership Academy, to help demand justice for teachers at this charter school in the Bronx.

In January 2010, teachers at AECI formed a union to provide a positive and stable learning environment for their students. They have been working for two years without a contract. Meanwhile, AECI’s administration has engaged in a campaign of intimidation against teachers; they have suspended, terminated and otherwise disciplined union activists and supporters.

Call board chair Irma Zardoya at 917-882-3533 and tell her to respect teachers’ rights.

Go to the UFT’s campaign page for talking points and additional
information »

Please report back to us through the campaign page above or our Facebook page and pass the word along to friends and colleagues.

To learn more about the issue, read “Contract talks stalled at South Bronx charter“from the Sept. 6 issue of the New York Teacher.

Thank you to all of those who have reached out on behalf of New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries teachers. Our call-in campaign is building momentum and we need your continued support as we enter Week 4.

This week we are targeting board member Robert Burton to help demand justice for teachers at this charter school in the Bronx.

Teachers, parents and other community members are participating in this call-in campaign to support the teachers at AECI.

In January 2010, teachers at AECI formed a union to provide a positive and stable learning environment for their students. They have been working for two years without a contract. Meanwhile, AECI’s administration has engaged in a campaign of intimidation against teachers; they have suspended, terminated and otherwise disciplined union activists and supporters.

Call board member Robert Burton at 917-376-4182 and tell him to respect teachers’ rights.

Demand that the board:

• End all retaliation by administration against teachers and staff involved in the organizing and contract campaign.
• Respect educators’ right to strengthen their school community by advocating for the best working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students.
• Negotiate a contract in good faith.

Go to the UFT’s campaign page for talking points and additional information »

Please report back to us through the campaign page above or our Facebook page and pass the word along to friends and colleagues.

In June, School Stories published the names of the 10 charter schools with the highest suspension rates. Many of these were middle schools and three had suspension rates at least four times above the city average.

Now, the city test results are out, and two additional facts emerge about these schools.

First, students in these schools weren’t just suspended; they also disappeared. Specifically, as classes moved up from one grade to the next, the number of students in them got smaller and smaller. The average reduction was 15% between 5th and 6th grade alone, which is when the size of cohorts is most likely to shrink.

Classes shrink faster at these charters than as just about any other charters in the city. All three, in fact, rank in the top five citywide (and citywide the median reduction from 5th to 6th grade is 6%).¹

The second thing we learn about these high-suspension schools from the latest testing results is that as students disappear the passing rates rise dramatically. The average gain between grades 5 and 6 was 21 percentage points.²

So what’s the relationship between high suspension rates, shrinking cohorts and rising passing percentages?

The most benign way to tell that story is to claim that attrition and suspension have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Under this scenario, less school time for troubled kids is actually a good thing, so good in fact that these suspended kids experience terrific academic growth — much better than they otherwise would have — which accounts for the rising passing rates. True the cohorts are shrinking, but that’s only because other students, not these troubled students, are disappearing to lower grades-levels or other schools.³

Hmmm.

What seems more likely is that some students with behavioral problems, and possibly emotional disabilities, are being pushed out of these schools by repeat suspensions. If that’s the case, then the students who remain are generally those who arrived more ready to learn and then became even more so after seeing what quick work had been made of their more rambunctious peers. We don’t know if that that’s true, but we do know that many charter schools sanction this approach. In a report from the charter community itself, for example, the writers record what some charter operators see as the happy outcome that results from ridding schools of troublesome kids:

“…By this logic, schools should be full of students who share a common culture of learning, provided that the culture is not defined in an exclusive fashion … a student who leaves one school to find a better fit at another should be considered a success story.”

A success?

Was that how we were supposed to be measuring the success of charter schools?

Everyone who works in education understands just how hard it is to create the kinds of school cultures that keep kids focused on their education. And we do not have enough information to know for sure how many struggling students are pushed out of charters by a culture of punishment (though we do have anecdotal evidence). What we do know, however, is that these schools are public schools, and at public schools we take it as our mission to support every student who shows up at the door.

If these charters are suspending students right out of the school, we would not call that a success story.

We’d call it a disgrace.

¹Another two middle school charters have similarly high attrition between grades 5 and 6, at 19% and 25%. All five belong to the same two charter networks: Uncommon Schools (the Collegiate schools) and Deborah Kenny’s Harlem Village. In fact, the seven schools with the highest attrition all belong to these networks.

²It should be noted that a fourth charter school, South Bronx Classical, followed the same pattern as these three middles schools — over four times the city average for suspensions, a 39% reduction in size of the cohort, and a 36 point increase in the passing rate. Because this post focuses on middle schools, I have omitted it from the main body of this text.

³While we don’t know for sure that shrinking cohorts indicate that students have left the school altogether, it seems much more likely that they have left than that they have been left back. When students are left back, we expect the class they join to rise in size — or at least to stay the same. But in these schools, the pattern is just the opposite — most cohorts shrink, including the ones that would be receiving students from shrinking cohorts. It seems likely therefore that numbers are shrinking because students left the school.

For those who have already called-in this past two weeks, the educators at AECI thank you. We are certain our message was heard by the board and is having an effect, but we must keep up the pressure.

We want to ask you to once again call another board member to help demand fair treatment for teachers at this charter school in the Bronx.

Read our post from two weeks ago for the background on this campaign.

Call board member Maria M. Ramirez today at 917-807-2273 and tell her to respect teachers’ rights.

Demand that the board:

• End all retaliation by administration against teachers and staff involved in the organizing and contract campaign.
• Respect educators’ right to strengthen their school community by advocating for the best working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students.
• Negotiate a contract in good faith.

Go to the UFT’s campaign page for talking points and additional information »

Want to stay informed?

In January 2010, educators at the NYC Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries (AECI) in the Bronx formed a union at their school to provide a positive and stable school culture for their students. Educators delivered letters to the school’s principal and board of directors that called for a more formal voice in school operations to “strengthen our school community and enhance the educational experience of our students, faculty and administrators.” A few months later the board formally recognized the union, and contract negations began.

Since then educators at the charter school have been working for two years without a contract. The teacher-led contract committee diligently attended all bargaining sessions in hopes of reaching a contract that would serve the interest of the entire school community. Negotiations reached impasse last winter.

Due to the stalled negotiations teachers salaries have been frozen and union activists have suffered harassment from the administration. AECI’s administration has engaged in a campaign of intimidation against teachers; they have suspended, terminated and otherwise disciplined union activists and supporters.

Educators at the school just want to focus on educating their students free from harassment and with a contract in place.

Call board member John Kwok today at 917-807-3502 718-482-4806 OR 718-482-4825 and tell him to respect teachers’ rights.

Demand that the board:

• End all retaliation by administration against teachers and staff involved in the organizing and contract campaign.
• Respect educators’ right to strengthen their school community by advocating for the best working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students.
• Negotiate a contract in good faith.

Go to the UFT’s campaign page for talking points and additional information »

In general, charter advocates have become somewhat more responsible about acknowledging the impact of demographic differences in charter and district school enrollments on charters’ academic performance. The recent release of the New York City Charter School Center’s “State of the Sector” report is one example, and we had hoped that the existence of its database (which offers straightforward comparisons between enrollments at each New York City charter school compared to its Community School District) would help further efforts towards a more fully informed discussion of the role of charters in school reform.

Unfortunately, last week’s publication of a guest essay by American Enterprise Institute researcher Daniel Lautzenheiser in Rick Hess’ EdWeek column marks a return to the simplistic rhetoric and unsubstantiated assertions which Hess himself has warned are becoming too common among self-identified “reformers.” In “A Tale of Two Schools,” Lautzenheiser makes the claim that Democracy Prep’s high test scores come despite its enrollment of “the same kinds of students” as its academically struggling co-located school, the Academy of Collaborative Education (ACE). He offers no data to back up this assertion, other than the fact that the two schools share a building in Harlem. However, if he had taken a moment to check the Charter School Center’s database, he would have found that in 2010-11, Democracy Prep served fewer students who were eligible for free lunch, fewer students who required special education services, and fewer students who were English Language Learners than the average district school in its neighborhood.

Taking a closer look at Democracy Prep’s enrollment in comparison to ACE specifically (as we did in 2010) shows that other than the first year ACE opened, these patterns have been true throughout both schools’ existence. In addition, though Democracy Prep no longer publicly reports the type of services its Special Education students receive, evidence from 2008-09 showed that only 18% of its students with IEPs were mandated to be in self-contained classes, compared with 50% of Special Education students at ACE.

Sources: NY State Report Cards; NY State Charter SPED Invoices; NYC CSC Database

Researchers like Lautzenheiser who seek to hold up Democracy Prep as a model for district schools to follow should stop making the argument that such schools are succeeding with “the same students” without checking the data first to see if their claims are true. Criticizing the academic performance of the ACE school community while failing to recognize the greater challenges that community faces is not helpful in moving forward in finding ways to improve the educational experience for all the city’s children.

Thomas Lopez-Pierre

The founder of the latest group to try to cash in on the big money flowing from Wall Street to New York City’s charter schools has a disturbing history. Potential donors and charter parents who received Thomas Lopez-Pierre’s recent email seeking $250,000 in donations to support his new “Harlem Charter School Parents PAC” (of which he will serve as treasurer and spokesman) should take a moment to Google his name before signing on. When they do, they’ll discover that Lopez-Pierre is also the creator of the Harlem Club, which became infamous a few years back for its founder’s misogynistic and classist descriptions of that organization’s mission and for his own beliefs about women’s place in the home and society:

Thomas Lopez-Pierre was looking for just the right men for the Harlem Club, a private social club for African-Americans and Latinos that he was forming in Manhattan.

For $5,000, mid-career professional men could become charter members; $2,500 would make them general members. But this club did not want just any moneyed men. Rap stars, Hollywood glitterati and professional athletes — what Mr. Lopez-Pierre labels the ”ghetto-fabulous crowd” — would not be welcome.

Women could join the Harlem Club, too. But only as associate members. And they had to be 35 or younger, unmarried, childless, college educated and willing to submit a head-to-toe photograph, to prevent unattractive women from making the cut … More »

It’s always good to see issues of school segregation and integration back on the table as part of the education reform discussion; most recently, the discussion of this important reform goal was triggered in New York by Eva Moskowitz’s latest demand of the state that her chain of schools should be exempted from following the state charter law which requires that all charters serve high-needs students in proportions comparable to those of local schools. However, Moskowitz’s claim that her purpose in seeking this right to play by different rules than other charters is simply to expand school integration is deeply disingenuous. Paradoxically, she seemingly simultaneously wants to argue that she should be allowed to expand because her schools are successfully serving the same demographics of students as New York City’s district schools and to argue that her schools are better because, unlike many of the local district schools, they’re economically integrated. Conveniently, her new dedication to integration seems to have emerged just after the new law requiring greater demographic parity was passed.

Similarly, Moskowitz’s claims to the state that requirements that her chain’s schools recruit and retain high needs students provide “perverse incentives” to over-identify those students misses a key point. The three year limit she complains about is designed to counteract another “perverse incentive” built into the law — the temptation to target charter recruitment so that the lowest-need students from within the three target areas are disproportionately enrolled in lieu of students with greater needs, increasing the chances that charters will both be able to hit their enrollment targets and achieve higher test scores than schools which enroll the higher needs students within these groups (who are less likely to test out of the category). While over-identification of these students is an important issue, the solution is not to remove the part of the proposed policy which ensures that charters will be held accountable for serving students with the greatest needs. In Moskowitz’s case, her recent decision to drop preferences for “at risk students” from her lottery process indicates that these protections are especially important in ensuring accountability among the schools in her network. More »

Harlem Village Academy is currently enjoying some media attention thanks to founder Deborah Kenny’s new book, Born to Rise. At the Teach For Us blog, Gary Rubinstein looks at the school’s most recent numbers and finds high student attrition (as we did two years ago) and alarming staff turnover.

When a school is truly great, teachers want to keep teaching there year after year.  So it should be telling that in this school over the past three years the amount of staff turnover was 2007-2008 53%, for 2008-2009, 38%, and for 2009-2010, a whopping 61%.  By comparison, the teacher attrition for the entire district in 2009-2010 was just 19%.

He also posts a letter from an outspoken former HVA teacher who writes, “No school with a 60% teacher turnover rate should be praised in the press as the model for other schools to follow.”

A post this week at Insideschools.org raised some familiar questions about student attrition and test scores at Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy I.

Many uptown Manhattan parents hope that winning the lottery for a seat at Harlem Success Academy I will put their child on the path to academic achievement. But just because a child gets into Harlem Success does not mean he or she will complete 5th grade there. The school — part of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy network — has a high attrition rate, leading critics to charge that the school may push out low achieving or difficult students.

Harlem Success denies that’s the case, and says the attrition can be explained by children moving away–or even skipping a grade. Without better data from the state, it’s impossible to say who is right. But one thing is certain: Harlem Success loses a lot of kids between kindergarten and 5th grade.

In an email to Insideschools, our own Leo Casey wrote, “It may be significant that the bulk of the attrition at Harlem Success Academy 1 seems to have come in the tested grades.”

The release of a new “State of the Sector” report by the New York City Charter School Center will hopefully mark a turning point in efforts to have a more substantive conversation about charter schools’ demographics and performance in our city. As local media have noted, the report is one of the first from within the charter sector itself to acknowledge some troubling data on charter schools that we and other analysts have been discussing for several years.

Specifically, the report found that, compared to the average school in their Community School District in 2010:

• 68% of charters served a lower proportion of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch
• 72% of charters served a lower proportion of students with IEPs
• 96% of charters served a lower proportion of English Language Learners

The report also noted that the charter sector was experiencing significantly higher turnover of principals, teachers, and students than the district:

• 26-33% of charter teachers left each year between 2007 and 2011, compared to 13-16% at district schools
• 18.7% of charter principals left each year between 2005-06 and 2010-11, compared to 3.6% at district schools
• Charter middle school enrollments shrunk by 5.9% from 2010 to 2011, compared to an increase of 3.2% at district middle schools

More »

As originally envisioned, charter schools were supposed to be a way of empowering communities to have a stronger voice in decision-making at their local schools — with community leaders, parents, and teachers on the boards and decisions being made in ways that gave stakeholders direct access rather than layers of bureaucracy.

In New York, however, the expansion and oversight of the state’s charter sector seems to be moving in the opposite direction. As evidence, I encourage a review of yesterday’s decision by one of the state’s charter authorizers to allow the Success Charter Network to merge at least five of its schools (and soon eleven, and likely eventually all forty of their schools) under a single board — essentially creating a new school district run by non-profit corporate leadership rather than public officials or local leaders.

If you haven’t heard much news about this plan, it’s not surprising — while the boards of the network’s schools approved the mergers in February, the DOE didn’t have a hearing to get local input on the proposal until this past Friday (with two days notice) — and didn’t release any of the documents explaining what the mergers would look like. More »

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn was in the news this week after he and his firm were hit with an $11.2 million fine for insider trading. Based on an investigation by authorities in the UK, Einhorn was cited for selling millions of shares of a troubled business just minutes after an executive there quietly revealed to him that the company was in financial trouble:

“Einhorn is an experienced professional with a high profile in the industry,” said Tracey McDermott, the FSA’s acting enforcement chief. “We expect someone in his position to be able to identify inside information when he receives it and to act appropriately. His failure to do so is a serious breach.”

If the name sounds familiar to many New Yorkers, it may be because of his recent flirtation with becoming the white knight of the beleaguered Mets franchise; others may remember him for his fame as the financial analyst whose decision to bet on the collapse of Lehman Brothers made him a huge profit in 2008.

For those who follow education, however, Einhorn now joins the ranks of fellow hedge funders who have been implicated both in questionably ethical business decisions and in the New York City charter school sector. More »

Most of the coverage about the Department of Education’s role as a charter authorizer in recent weeks has focused on the management scandals at the Believe Network and the decision to close Peninsula Prep after three years of C’s (although interestingly enough, the role of for-profit charter manager Victory Schools has mostly been left out of the Peninsula Prep story, despite quotes from current Victory executive and past DOE Charter Office head Michael Duffy in the Times coverage of the school’s closing).

Equally important, however, was the DOE’s decision to grant a two-year renewal to the third school it had placed on the closure list this year — Opportunity Charter School, a charter founded to serve students with special education needs. The DOE’s threat to close Opportunity had inspired a passionate response from the school’s community, including powerful presentations of evidence from the district’s own progress reports showing its success in helping students with intense special education needs achieve academically and graduate from high school at rates well above other schools in the city. More »