New Charter School Info Out *drumroll*...

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Turns out the alternative education system Mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to as a model for Chicago Public Schools has problems of its own.
State achievement test data released Wednesday for the 2010-2011 school year shows Chicago charter school chains are struggling right along with CPS, some scoring below district averages.
Noble Street for example was the only one of nine charter networks to beat state-average test scores in each of the chain's schools. On the other hand, a majority of schools in Aspira and North Lawndale charter networks scored below average.
In other cases results wildly varied from school-to-school. CICS Hawkins high school was among the bottom high schools in the state with an 8.9 percent passing rate. CICS Northtown saw 38.7 percent passing.

Linky.

I read a comment about this that strikes me as correct: charter schools are about reforming labour, not education.

And what makes this "Noble" chain different? As with most private schools, it seems like simple biased samples:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to stage another publicity stunt in a school on the morning of December 16, 2011. Following a vote by his hand-picked Board of Education to continue expanding the city's charter schools despite growing evidence that the majority of them are "failing" (by the usual measures of school success, such as scores on standardized tests) and that those that "succeed" (such as the Noble Street Network of charter schools) do so by forcing out students who endanger test score "gains," Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has scheduled another in his long line of publicity stunts to push his version of reality.

...

The event, coming a little over a year after the screening of the charter school propaganda movie "Waiting for Supermen," will be held at a school that has become notorious among real public high schools for its mistreatment of students who are most likely to lower its all-important test scores. The "Noble Network", since its founding in 1999 by former Wells High School teacher Michael Milkie, has deftly utilized its ability to require conditions for student continuation in the school to force out its least successful students. They then return to their neighborhood high schools, or drop out entirely, but the blame is usually placed on the real public schools, while Noble Street (whose motto is "Be Noble") continues to gather praise from Chicago's plutocracy — and the city's mayor. The students who are pushed out of Noble Street's schools are routinely listed as having "withdrawn" voluntarily.

Linky.

As always, Democratic connections seem to underlay a lot of these schools:

Yet, under a proposal before the Board of Education on Wednesday, the politically connected UNO, with three of its nine schools falling below district averages, is slated for three new elementary schools for 2013. LEARN stands to get a new campus next school year and two more in 2013 despite struggling with its South Shore campus. And Catalyst, whose two campuses appear to be underperforming, is expected to get the OK to open a third school.

Linky.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel reacted angrily Tuesday to questions of whether it was a conflict of interest to award management of six new turnaround schools to the Academy for Urban School Leadership, whose former executives were handpicked by the mayor to help run Chicago Public Schools.

...

The principal of AUSL's Bethune School of Excellence was a co-chair of Emanuel's mayoral campaign. The former chairman of AUSL's board is now president of the city's Board of Education. CPS's new chief operating officer also comes from AUSL.

Linky.

And, shockingly:

Two years after Illinois lawmakers approved a more thorough accounting of charter school performance, the state has released data that will allow the public for the first time to see how individual charter schools are measuring up against traditional public schools.

The report cards are somewhat limiting, only looking at a school's performance in 2010-11. But the trends show that despite their celebrated autonomy, discipline and longer school days, charter schools are struggling to overcome the poverty that so often hampers underperforming neighborhood schools.

Charters with the highest numbers of students from low-income families or those with recognized learning disabilities almost universally scored the lowest last year on state exams, a trend common throughout CPS.

Linky.

Someone call the ******* Mayor! This is such a shocking revelation!

 

[Bri]

Several studies have shown that students at private schools perform no better than those at public schools once you adjust for socioeconomic differences of the students, so it's not a big surprise that charter school students don't perform better than those at traditional public schools.

-Bri

 

[casebro]

Six of nine average or above doesn't like failure, does it?

 

[tyr_13]

Six of nine average or above doesn't like failure, does it?

Actually it does.

 

[shemp]

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Several studies have shown that students at private schools perform no better than those at public schools once you adjust for socioeconomic differences of the students, so it's not a big surprise that charter school students don't perform better than those at traditional public schools.

I have read otherwise.
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1

Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991). This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.

Joshua Angrist
"Randomized Trials and Quasi-Experiments in Education Research"
NBER Reporter, summer, 2003

One of the most controversial innovations highlighted by NCLB is school choice. In a recently published paper,(5) my collaborators and I studied what appears to be the largest school voucher program to date. This program provided over 125,000 pupils from poor neighborhoods in the country of Colombia with vouchers that covered approximately half the cost of private secondary school. Colombia is an especially interesting setting for testing the voucher concept because private secondary schooling in Colombia is a widely available and often inexpensive alternative to crowded public schools...

A comparison of voucher winners and losers shows that three years after the lotteries were held, winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished eighth grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades. Lottery winners also scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. A follow-up study in progress shows that voucher winners also were more likely to apply to college. On balance,
our study provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the possible benefits of demand-side financing of secondary schooling, at least in a developing country setting.(6)

Herman Brutsaert compared student performance in government and parochial schools in Belgium (which subsidizes parents' choice of school) and found (a) higher mean scores in parochial schools and (b) a lower correlation between parent income and performance in parochial schools (i.e., government schools exacerbate inequality).
Multi-country comparisons of independent and government schools consistently find a private school advantage both in performance and cost.

 

[tyr_13]

I'd like to see how they controlled for confounding factors. I see this argument sometimes with how prevalent 'private education' is in Japan, ignoring the fact that much of that is in the form of extra education and high-end schools from high competition and social emphasis on one.

In short I'm questioning the applicability of your citations here as they have been so misapplied in the past.

 

[Beth]

Six of nine average or above doesn't like failure, does it?

Actually it does.

Why do you say that? What would constitute success to you?

 

[Brainster]

Actually it does.

Only compared to Lake Woebegon.

 

[fuelair]

Linky.

I read a comment about this that strikes me as correct: charter schools are about reforming labour, not education.

And what makes this "Noble" chain different? As with most private schools, it seems like simple biased samples:



Linky.

As always, Democratic connections seem to underlay a lot of these schools:



Linky.



Linky.

And, shockingly:



Linky.

Someone call the ******* Mayor! This is such a shocking revelation!

Any school - public or private or semi-private (charter schools) - that can choose it's students will perform better than any school that must take students by selected geographic location or random assignment. Any school that can select at will students to remove as needed will do almost as well.

With no offense, any near idiot or better should be able to follow that point. There are no magic teaching behaviors that can overwhelm the level of the average student in the school past early elementary level (Pre-K-3rd grade for all practical purposes). One single (multiple)study verified thing covers that: students who cannot read at grade level or very near it by 9 years old can never learn to read well enough to be able to read for learning- i.e. they cannot ever read at the level of the textbooks for any course above low elementary level.

That was drummed into we teachers in ca. 2002-2005 by the schools and the newsrag Orlando Sentinel - and shortly after each time it was brought up again, the high schools were castigated because too many students with Level one (low elementary school level per multiple tests) reading ability were not improving in reading - which according to the brain-based studies that showed they could not they could not. And, therefore, they were failing classes because they could not comprehend the material but the high school teachers were being blamed for it. That is still going on in Florida (and most other states at varying levels) though no research has changed that basic point...

 

[Dancing David]

I have read otherwise.
Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1Joshua Angrist
"

Your quote cites two dated studies?

And the source is very dated ; "The data are drawn from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted in 1994-1995 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement "

 

[Dancing David]

IHerman Brutsaert compared student performance in government and parochial schools in Belgium (which subsidizes parents' choice of school) and found (a) higher mean scores in parochial schools and (b) a lower correlation between parent income and performance in parochial schools (i.e., government schools exacerbate inequality).
Multi-country comparisons of independent and government schools consistently find a private school advantage both in performance and cost.

Thiss one?
A study of 1,795 Belgian elementary students in 15 public and 25 Catholic schools indicated that Catholic schools influenced high academic achievement in children of low socioeconomic status to a greater degree than public schools did. (SK)

Home and School Influences on Academic Performance: State and Catholic Elementary Schools in Belgium Compared. Published in 1998?

Seriously?

No recent studies?

 

[Alt+F4]

Your quote cites two dated studies?

And the source is very dated ; "The data are drawn from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted in 1994-1995 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement "

Not only is it dated, it only included 7th and 8th graders and only looked at results in math and science.

 

[Alt+F4]

Any school - public or private or semi-private (charter schools) - that can choose it's students will perform better than any school that must take students by selected geographic location or random assignment. Any school that can select at will students to remove as needed will do almost as well.

Of course. The top high school in NYC, Stuyvesant, is staffed by union teachers as is the worst high school. What's the difference? Stuyvesant (like the other top schools) has a specialized test to determine admission. These schools only admit students they want.

 

[tyr_13]

Why do you say that? What would constitute success to you?

The premise is that public schools are failing badly, so the 'average' would be failing. If three of nine were doing worse than that, then they must also be failing. I assume that the 'average or above' six of nine were not one average and five above or it would have been absurd to combine the two categories together, meaning at least two were average, which is failing. That's at least five out of nine failing then, which if it were a test, would fail.

 

[Beth]

The premise is that public schools are failing badly, so the 'average' would be failing. If three of nine were doing worse than that, then they must also be failing. I assume that the 'average or above' six of nine were not one average and five above or it would have been absurd to combine the two categories together, meaning at least two were average, which is failing. That's at least five out of nine failing then, which if it were a test, would fail.

Thank you. That's an interesting train of logic. I wouldn't have figured it out on my own.

 

[Puppycow]

I'd like to see how they controlled for confounding factors. I see this argument sometimes with how prevalent 'private education' is in Japan, ignoring the fact that much of that is in the form of extra education and high-end schools from high competition and social emphasis on one.

In short I'm questioning the applicability of your citations here as they have been so misapplied in the past.

In Japan, you have to have great grades and very high test scores to even get into the best public high schools.

It's hard to make comparisons when the schools choose their students.

Any school that gets to pick its students and/or kick out the students it doesn't want can't be compared with a school that has to accept every student.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

I'd like to see how they controlled for confounding factors. I see this argument sometimes with how prevalent 'private education' is in Japan, ignoring the fact that much of that is in the form of extra education and high-end schools from high competition and social emphasis on one.

Neither condition describes the work I reference above. The random-assignment voucher lottery is as close to a double-blind trial as you'll get in education research.

In short I'm questioning the applicability of your citations here as they have been so misapplied in the past.

You can see for yourself that these studies address the question. In any case. I gave the references to two (Lassibile and Gomez, Angrist. et. al) so you can check. I mention also Herman Brutsaert, but you'll have to search with that name, since I don't recall the publication. See also Lockheed and Jiminez (referenced above) and various studies of the Chilean voucher policy.

Andrew Coulson pointed out a defect of studies that "control" for parent income: they use "free and reduced lunch" as a proxy for "poor". Government schools use this classification. If a parochial school does not offer government-subsidized lunch and charges one price, it will have no use for the classification. All such a school's students will be classified as "non-free/reduced price lunch", whatever their parents' income. Caroline Hoxby has pointed out a second difficulty with studies that compare charter schools to the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools (the "public" schools): the proper comparison is to the schools that charter kids would otherwise attend, not to all government-operated schools.

 

[ponderingturtle]

The answer is clear, to improve test scores we as a society need to stop trying to educate the worthless kids.

 

[Malcolm Kirkpatrick]

Not only is it dated, it only included 7th and 8th graders and only looked at results in math and science.

When Chubb and Moe studied the factors that influence school success, they used gains between 10th and 12 grade, iirc, on standardized tests of reading, Math, and Science. They did not use Social Studies because Social Studies scores did not correlate with anything (which is pretty funny if you know any statistics). When I studied the impact of district size and age (start) of compulsory attendance, I used 4th and 8th grade Reading and Math scores. I prefer 8th grade because schools have had more time to add value and overwhelm parent impact than 4th grade scores. 8th grade is better than 12 th grade unless you follow individual students (which I cannot do since NCES will not release data at thet level of detail to unaffiliated researchers). because too many students leave before 12 the grade.