Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In a recent New York Times article titled At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice, Mitoko Rich wrote of how charter schools seem to be developing something of a “youth cult” in their teaching ranks. She reported that in the charter network “teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable and, at times, even desirable.”
Teachers in the thirteen YES Prep Schools, which are located throughout Greater Houston, have a reported average of two and a half years of experience. The teachers who work for Achievement First—which has 25 schools in Connecticut, Brooklyn, and Providence, R.I.— “spend an average of 2.3 years in the classroom.” And the individuals who teach in the KIPP schools and the Success Academy Charter Schools stay in the classroom for an average of four years. This youth culture—or culture in which most classroom practitioners have little teaching experience— differs from that of our country’s traditional public schools where teachers average nearly fourteen years of experience…and where public school leaders have made it “a priority to reduce teacher turnover.”
In the NYT article, Jennifer Hines, senior vice president of people and programs at YES Prep, was quoted as saying, “We have this highly motivated, highly driven work force who are now wondering, ‘O.K., I’ve got this, what’s the next thing?’ There is a certain comfort level that we have with people who are perhaps going to come into YES Prep and not stay forever.” (Note: New teachers at the YES Prep schools receive just two and a half weeks of training over the summer before arriving in the classroom.)
Rich says it was Teach for America (TFA) that was mostly responsible for introducing the idea of a “foreshortened teaching career.” TFA is an organization that recruits “high-achieving” college graduates and places them in some of our neediest schools. In a piece for Policymic, Benjamin Cosman wrote about TFA recruits. He said that after just five weeks of training, “Teach for America participants lead a classroom for two years, slap it on their resume, and leave the school with a bevy of opportunities.”
Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, contends that “strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers. The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.” (Question for Wendy Kopp: Are you sending your teaching recruits into the “strongest” schools?)
Mark Naison, a professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham University and a man who once viewed Teach for America as a positive program, has a difference of opinion regarding teacher turnover. He has been disappointed that TFA doesn’t instill a commitment to teaching in its program participants. In fact, Naison no longer allows TFA to recruit his college students.
Naison said the following about Kopp’s organization:
Until Teach For America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.
He added:
Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach For America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make. Nor do they encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career; indeed, the organization goes out of its way to make joining TFA seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher-paying professions.
Several years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was: “use teaching in high-poverty areas as a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it effectively advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.
After reading Rich’s article about the high turnover rate of teachers in charter schools, Catherine M. Ionata responded in a letter to the editor. She wrote:
The charter school representatives in your article defend the rapid turnover of teachers. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, even says that teachers can become great in one or two years! Would we expand this idea to other professions? Do we think the best lawyers are those fresh out of law school? Should we choose a rookie physician for complex surgery, because this surgeon is more “enthusiastic” than veteran surgeons?
Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, said, “To become a master plumber you have to work for five years. Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?”
Education expert Diane Ravitch also weighed in on the subject after reading Rich’s article:
Can you imagine that a “teacher” who graduated college in June is already “a great teacher” by September?
Why do we expect entrants to every other profession to spend years honing their craft but a brand-new teacher, with no experience, can be considered “great” in only one or two years, then leave to do something else?
This is a recipe to destroy the teaching profession.
How can anyone say they are education “reformers” if their goal is to destroy the profession?
What other nation is doing this?
This is not innovative. In fact, it returns us to the early nineteenth century, when the general belief was that “anyone can teach, no training needed.” Teaching then was a job for itinerants, widow ladies, young girls without a high school degree, and anyone who couldn’t do anything else. It took over a century to create a teaching profession, with qualifications and credentials needed before one could be certified to stand in front of a classroom of young children. We are rapidly going backwards.
Henry Seton, a humanities teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge in Massachusetts, was another educator who responded to Rich’s article. He wrote:
The high teacher turnover at charter schools leaves these institutions fragile and ill equipped to support their most vulnerable students. It takes far more than a year or two in the classroom to develop that elusive set of skills needed to serve our nation’s neediest cohorts of students — young men of color, English language learners and so on. And I have seen some of the most well-regarded charters here in Massachusetts left reeling and in danger of closing after extensive teacher departures.
Benjamin Cosman (Policymic) wrote that young teachers in charter schools “are supposed to save education in the United States.” He thinks, however, that there is a “very real danger in valuing inexperience in the teaching field…” He believes this “supposed remedy” may possibly be hastening the “demise of public education.”
In his article titled It’s Harder for Charter Schools to Keep Teachers, Francisco Vara-Orta wrote about information provided in data collected by the Texas Education Agency. The data, taken from 47 local school districts from 2006 to 2011, showed that the “average teacher turnover rate for charter school districts was 46 percent, compared with 13 percent for traditional school districts.” Vara-Orta wrote that analysis of the data showed that teachers leave charter schools in Bexar County nearly three times more often than teachers in traditional public schools, “which generally pay more and perform better academically.” He continued, “Of the 10 districts rated academically unacceptable by the state in Bexar County last year, all were charters, with turnover ranging from 38 percent to 65 percent…”
Researchers from Vanderbilt University found that the teacher turnover rate in charter schools was nearly twice as high as that of traditional public schools. In addition, the researchers found that teachers in charter schools were also more likely to leave the profession.
Excerpt from the Vanderbilt report titled Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools:
Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this “turnover gap” lies in the differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.
A second reason is that attrition is highest among teachers that are new to the profession. Past research found teachers make important gains in effectiveness in their first three years and smaller gains over the next few years (McCaffrey, Koretz, Lockwood, and Hamilton, 2003; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2005). Given that almost 50% of teachers leave the profession within their first five years (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), many teachers are leaving the classroom before they have developed into optimally effective practitioners. Moreover, exiting new teachers are often replaced by similarly inexperienced teachers and consequently students in schools with high turnover may rarely be exposed to experienced teachers.
Third, turnover affects many of the organizational conditions important to effective schooling, such as instructional cohesion and staff trust. Effective schools hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices (Fuller & Izu, 1986; Bryk & Driscoll, 1988). Schools with high turnover are challenged to develop a shared commitment towards the same goals, pedagogy, and curriculum. The constant churning of teaching staff makes it difficult to collaborate, develop standard norms of practice, and maintain progress towards common goals. This can lead to fragmented instructional programs and professional development plans that must be adapted each year to meet the needs of a teaching staff in constant flux (Guin, 2004). High turnover also makes it difficult for teachers to build relational trust, which is critical towards productive collaboration in schools (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Guin, 2004).
Critics of charter schools argue that students and schools need stability. “When you stay in a school or community, you build relationships,” said Andrea Giunta, a senior policy analyst for teacher recruitment, retention and diversity at the National Education Association.
As might be expected, studies have shown that teacher turnover often “diminishes student achievement” and has a negative impact on “the overall school environment because it creates instability and a loss of institutional knowledge.”
Matthew Ronfeldt, an assistant professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan—along with colleagues Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff—conducted a study on teacher turnover. Their report was titled How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement. Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, said that the problem of teacher turnover had been well-documented. She noted, “One in three teachers leaves the profession within five years.” In their study, the three researchers sought to find out if students “do worse in the year after there is high turnover.” They discovered that high teacher turnover hurt student achievement in English and math—and that the negative impact was as “significant as the effect of free lunch eligibility (a standard measure of poverty) on test scores.” They also found the negative impact to be strongest “among schools with more low-performing and black students. “
In a Texas Tribune article dated January 27, 2010, Brian Temple wrote that at some charter schools in the state “it’s the teachers who can’t wait to clear out at the end of the school year.”
Temple reported that according to data that had been released at the time, 79 percent of the faculty of Accelerated Intermediate Academy in Houston turned over before the 2008-09 school year. At Peak Preparatory in Dallas, 71 percent of teachers did not return…and at Harmony Science Academy in College Station, “69 percent of teachers split.”
Temple continued:
In all, more than 40 of nearly 200 charter operators the state tracked — some which oversee multiple schools — had to replace more than half their teaching staffs before the last school year. Even more established and successful operators, including KIPP and YES Prep in Houston, lose nearly a third of their teachers annually. In contrast, just six of more than 1,000 non-charter school districts statewide had more than half their teachers leave, and none of the 20 largest school districts had a turnover rate higher than 16 percent.
The financial cost of teacher turnover is high. According to a study conducted by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, teacher attrition costs approximately $7.3 billion per year. Since teacher attrition is so costly and has been shown to have a negative effect on student performance, Benjamin Cosman wonders why TFA and charter organizations like the Yes Prep schools encourage teachers to have a “get out while you can” mentality.
Cosman argued:
We should be cultivating teachers who are in it for the long haul, who build steady careers based on longevity, who become the wizened old stalwarts who’ve been around the block a few times. Yes, there are problems with tenure and bad teachers sticking around too long, and those issues need to be addressed. But the exact opposite — getting teachers in and out as fast as we can — is certainly not the solution.
Excerpt from Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States, an issue brief released by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF) in August 2005:
There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that the single most important factor in determining student performance is the quality of his or her teachers. Therefore, if the national goal of providing an equitable education to children across the nation is to be met, it is critical that efforts be concentrated on developing and retaining high-quality teachers in every community and at every grade level…
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 1999–2000 “Public School Teacher Survey,” 47 percent of public school teachers worked with a mentor teacher in the same subject area.12 Sixty-six percent of teachers who were formally mentored by another teacher reported that it “improved their classroom teaching a lot.”13
Mentors are an important factor in providing support for new teachers as they enter the real world of the classroom, but mentoring alone is not enough. Comprehensive induction proves most effective at keeping good teachers in the classroom. Studies demonstrate that new teacher turnover rates can be cut in half through comprehensive induction—a combination of high-quality mentoring, professional development and support, scheduled interaction with other teachers in the school and in the larger community, and formal assessments for new teachers during at least their first two years of teaching.14
I can speak from experience. Mentor teachers can prove invaluable in helping young and inexperienced teachers by providing them with advice, insight, educational ideas and materials that have proved successful in the classroom, and by being a sounding board for them when they feel a need to express their frustrations, insecurities, and fears. Experienced teachers helped me when I was a teaching “ingénue.” Later, when I was a seasoned professional, I helped guide and advise young teachers. I shared books and teaching materials with them. I also listened to their new ideas. Other experienced educators at my school and I found that mentoring new teachers helped us to bond with them and to become a close-knit educational community.
Older teachers provide wisdom. Young teachers bring in a “breath of fresh air.” I think the healthiest school communities have teachers with different perspectives and levels of classroom experience—new teachers, teachers in mid career, and the old sages who have been around the block more than a few times.
One has to wonder how difficult it must be for young and inexperienced teachers to find mentors in their schools if most of the classroom practitioners have little more experience than they. One has to wonder how schools where teachers stay for just two or three years can develop their own culture and institutional memory—as well as a sense of stability and community. One has to wonder how children feel when their teachers come and go so frequently and rarely show evidence of a commitment to their schools and the student population.
It saddens me to think that there are “school reformers” in our country who encourage “foreshortened careers” in education…who think that youth trumps experience…who don’t instill a commitment to education in the young people they recruit for their teaching programs.
SOURCES
At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice (New York Times)
The High Turnover at Charter Schools (New York Times)
Charter schools are developing teachers with short tenure (Examiner)
Teacher Attrition in Charter vs. District Schools (CRPE–Center on Reinventing Public Education)
High teacher turnover in charters: Does student achievement suffer? (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
A Revolving Door (Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff)
Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools (Vanderbilt University)
It’s harder for charter schools to keep teachers (My San Antonio)
Teacher Attrition in Charter Schools 2007 (NEPC–National Education Policy Center)
Professor: Why Teach For America can’t recruit in my classroom (Washington Post)
Teacher Turnover Negatively Impacts Student Achievement in Math and English (The Journal)
Teacher turnover harms student learning (University of Michigan)
Teacher turnover affects all students’ achievement, study indicates (Stanford University)
Churn, Churn, Churn, Is Not Good for Kids or the Teaching Profession (Diane Ravitch)
LA students more true to their charter schools than teachers, studies say (UC Berkeley)
Charter Schools Battle High Teacher Turnover (Texas Tribune)
Teach For America: Let’s Stop Encouraging Teachers to Leave After Two Years, Maybe? (Policymic)
Guest Post: Teacher turnover – who stays and who leaves (Stanford University)
High Teacher Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools (Forbes)
Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States (NCTAF-National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future)
NCTAF Study: Teacher Attrition Costs U.S. Over $7 Billion Annually (American Association of Colleges for Teacher education)
LJM,
Really read the links…. You’ll find what you state is not there… You sound eerily like DavidM…..or another poster…..
Elaine,
This essay, by an anti-reformer like yourself, might be of interest.
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2013/02/thompson-two-soundbites-that-should-be-retired.html
If we are serious about deescalating this destructive conflict over school “reform,” we must stop hurling two unsubstantiated charges:
The soundbite that high-performing charter schools are serving “the same students” as high-poverty neighborhood schools should be retired. We who teach in the toughest schools that serve all students who walk into the door also deserve an apology for that slander, but I’m ready to move on without it.
Similarly, the equally serious charge against charter schools – that they intentionally “push out” difficult students in order to raise test scores – is wrong. Such an attack on the integrity of charter school educators is just as serious as the idea that we in neighborhood schools could have the same success as the top charters if we had their “high expectations.”
We who have been on the receiving end of “reformers’” spin should not do the same thing to charter schools. Unless our evidence meets a very high bar, we should not claim that charters deliberately hurt some students in order to produce higher test scores.
So, I was very pleasantly surprised by Ron Zimmer’s and Cassandra Guarino’s “Is There Empirical Evidence Consistent with the Claim that Charters Schools ‘Push Out’ Low-Performing Students?” It found “no evidence that low performing students are exiting charter schools at higher rates than low performing students in traditional public schools.”
Also, it found that students exiting charter schools had slightly lower achievement levels than their former peers, but this pattern was true for traditional public schools as well. As a whole, the paper provides no evidence that charter schools are intentionally forcing out students to make their test scores look better, at least in the district Zimmer and Guarino studied.
Elaine,
If you read the entire study, you’ll see that test scores are just one part of it. Ravitch didn’t conduct the study. Professor Levin did.
Oh, I know she didn’t, but she bases her objection to school choice on the fact that test scores dropped and diversity decreased.
Some people have explained the results because of a dramatic increase of immigrants from north Africa and Afghanistan (thanks to Sweden’s very liberal, humane immigration laws). I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know that test scores and diversity don’t matter as much as choice.
A poor family says, “We’d like to try another school, please. Our local school is making us very unhappy, despite all our attempts to work with them.”
Ravitch et al respond with, “We’re so sorry, but test scores at this school might dip and there could be less diversity. So, sorry, no choices for you.”
That just doesn’t work for me as a liberal, compassionate response to dissatisfaction with education opportunities.
I’ve read that charter schools in some places are expelling and suspending many more students than traditional public schools.
I don’t doubt that. And where that’s happening, the state, the same state that runs public schools, is required by law to stop it. So we have two parts to the problem. Charter schools are breaking the law. States aren’t enforcing the law. If states start to enforce the law, it seems to me that charter schools (public schools, too) will less frequently break the law.
Gene,
I’m not addressing choice because it’s an argument based on a false premise, i.e. that lack of choice is what causes certain schools to fail.
I’m not arguing that at all, I promise. There are lots of things that cause schools to become unsatisfactory. Everything from poverty to mismanagement to philosophy.
I’m arguing that poor people deserve choice in their education, because they’re human beings and education is a sacred, personal thing to human beings. That’s it. That’s all.
Do you agree with that or not? If not, why?
Anonymously yours,
You wrote:
In Sweden they are not required to maintain disruptive students…. You think being able to keep the good students has any bearing at all?
If not you and hitler youth program would work well…. Disruptive students were sent to prepare for military…. Period….
But nowhere in the two links you provided does it claim that Sweden isn’t required to educate disruptive students. Also, you haven’t addressed the fact that U.S. public schools aren’t required to keep disruptive students enrolled. So, I’m confused as to what your point is.
In Sweden, after 20 years of vouchers, only about 10% of the students go to private schools. This doesn’t strike me as a problem.
Then maybe you should focus on eliminating poverty and rectifying disparate quality in schools across disparate tax bases, thus rendering choice in public education moot. You don’t cure a disease by treating the symptoms. You cure a disease by eliminating the cause.
So, when a poor family says they’d like to attend a school other than their local public school which is unsafe and otherwise unsatisfactory, the answer they should get is, “Well, after we’ve gotten rid of poverty, you can have the same choice as rich people. Sorry.”
That doesn’t seem like a fair answer.
Oh, wait! The money isn’t in the cure, it’s in the medicine. So let’s privatize schools and make sure a quote-unquote public education fills someone’s bank account and ignore the underlying causation.
There’s no reason people can’t work to reduce poverty while giving poor people the choices in education that they deserve.
Former City Council member Eva Moskowitz makin’ a bundle at nonprofit schools
By Juan Gonzalez
Friday, February 27, 2009
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/city-council-member-eva-moskowitz-makin-bundle-nonprofit-schools-article-1.370619
Excerpt:
Eva Moskowitz, the former City Council member who founded a small chain of nonprofit charter schools, is a passionate and abrasive champion of the charter school movement.
She’s also making a bundle.
Moskowitz, who makes no secret of her desire to create 40 charter schools across the city and run for mayor some day, raked in $371,000 in salaries in the 2006-2007 school year from organizations connected to her four schools, tax records show.
Those schools, Harlem Success Academy 1, 2, 3 and 4, have an enrollment of about 1,000 pupils, from kindergarten to third grade.
The nonprofit organizations connected to the schools have yet to file more recent tax returns, but Moskowitz said in an interview late Thursday she received $310,000 last year – the 2007-2008 year – $250,000 in salary and $60,000 in a bonus.
That means Moskowitz, who is responsible for four schools, makes more than Chancellor Joel Klein, who gets $250,000 to run 1,400 schools.
In 2006-2007, she even surpassed John Ryan, the former chancellor of the State University of New York, who earned $340,000 to manage some 70 campuses with nearly 300,000 students.
Needless to say, she left your run-of-the-mill public school principal, with an average annual salary of $124,000, in the dust.
Charter schools don’t perform as advertised, but try getting their advocates to admit that
by Laura Clawson
12/16/12
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/16/1167685/-Charter-schools-don-t-perform-as-advertised-but-try-getting-their-advocates-to-admit-that
Excerpt:
Powerful forces, from politicians to billionaire donors, are promoting charter schools aggressively, saying charters are the answer to the (alleged) crisis in American education. The problem is the results don’t measure up, and instead of admitting that, charter proponents, many of them in very powerful positions, institute double standards or just close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears when it comes to solid evidence of what’s going on. Here are just a few recent stories demonstrating the double standard that benefits charter schools, even as they fail to measure up educationally:
New York City is planning to move a public high school for at-risk kids to a building without science labs, a gym, or daycare facilities for the children of students, in order to make room for an elementary-level charter school run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. Screw at-risk kids, apparently. Eva Moskowitz is politically connected.
In New York state, many charter schools are refusing to turn in teacher ratings as the state has asked. Even though the charter schools aren’t being asked to turn in the same kind of evaluations as public school teachers are subject to, still, they have a million excuses about why this shouldn’t apply to them at all. (Because they’re special.)
A Chicago expo supposed to highlight exciting, great new schools put the double standard on display. Charter schools just aren’t expected to meet the standards to which traditional public schools are held:
But a WBEZ analysis of the more than 100 new schools featured at the expo this year shows 34 percent of them are rated Level 3 by the district, the lowest grade given. Schools receiving the designation include campuses run by some of the largest charter networks in the city, including UNO and the Chicago International Charter School. This is the first year the district has graded charters on the same scale as traditional schools.
In recent years, the district has closed neighborhood schools rated Level 3, citing poor performance.
But the person running the expo doesn’t think such standards should apply to charters, because they’re so good in ways not measured by tests. Except that her organization promotes those very standards when it comes to traditional public schools.
It’s a good thing for charters they aren’t being held to the same standards as traditional public schools, because yet another study, this one from Wisconsin’s Forward Institute, finds they aren’t measuring up:
It is clear from the results of this study that overall, charter schools are underperforming at the core level of their mission—student excellence and achievement.
The data clearly show that public schools are doing a better job offsetting the effects of poverty on education than their charter school counterparts. A concerted effort should be made to ascertain how and why this is the case, replicate that effort in charter schools, and reinforce those standards and methods.
Harlem School For Special Needs Students Fights Success Academy Expansion
By Jeff Mays on July 9, 2013
http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130709/central-harlem/harlem-school-for-special-needs-students-fights-success-academy-expansion
Excerpt:
HARLEM — Since her 6-year-old autistic son enrolled in classes at P.S. 811 in Harlem, Genell Davis, 35, has noticed nothing but steady improvement.
“He’s flourished. He reads now and he’s trying to speak Spanish. He does addition and subtraction and he’s on a level higher than his class,” said Davis, who serves as the parent teacher association president at the co-located District 75 school that serves students with special needs.
But Davis is worried that her son Demetris’ rapid progression will be stunted now that the Department of Education has announced plans for the school to lose three classrooms used for things such as speech therapy and occupational therapy in the 2014 school year to the expanding Success Academy Harlem 1 school at the building on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue.
The move may force already fragile special needs students who have autism, are mentally retarded or are emotionally disturbed to have to travel further to school.
“If you take away that space you are hurting one group of students just to accommodate another,” said Davis. “This is not fair. Success Academy needs to find other resources.”
Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio has stepped into the debate after parents from the school reached out to him. He sent a letter to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott decrying the change, saying that Success Academy, founded and run by former Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, seems to be getting special treatment.
This would be the third time Success Academy was allowed to expand into the school.
Success Academy Harlem 1 expanded in the building and Success Academy Harlem 4 was allowed to move into the building, which is also shared by P.S. 149.
The 2011 DOE utilization plan and 2012 amendments never mentioned this expansion, de Blasio wrote.
“Indeed, these changes appear to be part of a sustained pattern to privilege Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools with space and resources at the expense of the traditional public schools with which they share buildings,” de Blasio wrote.
Review of New York State Special Education Enrollment Analysis
New York State Special Education Enrollment Analysis
Robin Lake, Betheny Gross, Patrick Denice
Center on Reinventing Public Education
.
Bruce D. Baker
December 6, 2012
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-ny-special-ed
This report asserts that differences in charter and district school special education rates are far smaller than claimed in recent reports. While the report does show that under-enrollment patterns vary by grade level and to some extent by location, it downplays the fact that the largest subset of charter schools in its sample—elementary and K-8 schools, most of which are in New York City—do systematically under-enroll such children. Among traditional public schools, the report excludes special education schools while including selective middle and secondary schools; it retains special-education-focused charter schools, thus stacking the deck in its analyses—albeit still not achieving the authors’ desired result. The authors infer—without evidence or foundation—that charter elementary schools may provide better early intervention and avoid entirely whether variations in disabilities by type and severity exist between charter and district schools. Data from New Jersey and Philadelphia show that charter schools often serve sizeable shares of children with mild specific learning disabilities, but very few children with severe disabilities. The report’s objective seems to be to provide the appearance of an empirical basis for an advocacy goal: convincing policymakers it would be unnecessary to adopt “enrollment target” policies to address a special education under-enrollment problem that may not exist. The report’s own findings do not support this contention.
.
Parents furious over shoddy treatment of special needs children at two charter schools
Success Academy charter schools run by Eva Moskowitz have suspended young boys up to 50 days, say parents
By Mark Morales / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
3/14/13
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/parents-furious-shoddy-treatment-special-needs-children-charter-schools-article-1.1289019
Elaine,
I read some place tht charter schools are causing and creating the need for education ghettos for special needs children…. Hmmmm….. Profit motive, I’m sure…. State has to take care of them…. No one left…
Are Charter Schools Expelling Students At Higher Rates than Traditional Schools?
1/9/13
http://www.policyinsider.org/2013/01/are-charter-schools-expelling-students-at-higher-rates-than-traditional-schools-.html
According to an article in this weekend’s Washington Post, the answer is yes, charter schools in Washington, DC are expelling students at far higher rates than traditional public schools.
The article cites the following statistics:
Over the last three years, charter schools in Washington, DC expelled 676 students, in comparison to 24 students expelled by the city’s traditional public schools;
During 2011-2012 school year, charter schools in Washington, DC removed 227 students for discipline violations and had an expulsion rate of 72 per 10,000 students, whereas traditional schools removed three students at a rate of less than 1 percent per 10,000 students.
Charter schools in Washington, DC enroll 41 percent of the city’s students.
While the data is individualized for each charter school in Washington, DC, it does not provide information on what rates students with disabilities were expelled. However, of the 10 charter schools with the highest percentage of expulsions, six have higher rates of students with disabilities than the national average of 13%, as found here.
While a more detailed breakdown of the data is necessary to better understand whether students with disabilities are over-represented in the expulsion rate in Washington, DC’s charter schools, this new analysis should give special education advocates pause, as we know from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights that students with disabilities are over twice as likely to receive one or more out of school suspensions.
Recent reports – such as that by the Government Accountability Office – have illustrated the under-representation of students with disabilities in charter schools, an issue CEC has been eager to address in federal legislation by supporting provisions which would provide technical assistance to charter schools to ensure they understand and can implement the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
A fine example of how the drive for profits above all other considerations can yield bad results, Elaine.
Success Academy school chain comes under fire as parents fight ‘zero tolerance’ disciplinary policy
The charter school chain Success Academy is being criticized for its high suspension rate, as parents complain that special-needs kids are pushed out and students are being denied due process.
By Juan Gonzalez
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/success-academy-fire-parents-fight-disciplinary-policy-article-1.1438753
Excerpt:
Success Academy, the charter school chain that boasts sky-high student scores on annual state tests, has for years used a “zero tolerance” disciplinary policy to suspend, push out, discharge or demote the very pupils who might lower those scores — children with special needs or behavior problems.
State records and interviews with two dozen parents of Success elementary school pupils indicate the fast-growing network has failed at times to adhere to federal and state laws in disciplining special-education students.
At Harlem Success 1, the oldest school in the network, 22% of pupils got suspended at least once during the 2010-11 school year, state records show. That’s far above the 3% average for regular elementary schools in its school district.
Four other Success schools — the only others in the network to report figures for 2010-11 — had an average 14% suspension rate.
Success Academy chief Eva Moskowitz recently defended her network’s “higher than average” suspension rates compared with public schools as a way to promote “order and civility in the classroom.” And this week, the Eli Broad Foundation announced a $5 million grant to Moskowitz to help expand her network from 20 to more than 100 schools.
Those schools outperform city schools on state tests: This year, 82% of the network’s students met standards in math and 58% met standards in English, compared with just less than 30% who were proficient in math and 26% in English citywide.
But The News found a disturbing number of suspension cases where the network’s administrators removed special-education pupils from normal classrooms for weeks and even months, while at the same time pressuring their parents to transfer them to regular public schools.
Juan González: Growing Charter School Chain Suspends Special Needs Kids in Bid to Raise Test Scores
By Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/30/juan_gonzlez_growing_charter_school_chain
Excerpt:
Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his reports for the New York Daily News about how one of the New York City’s fastest-growing chains of charter schools, Success Academy, has far higher suspension rates than other public elementary schools. “More than two dozen parents have come to me complaining about their children — who are special needs, special education children, or children with behavior problems,” González reports, “that they feel are being pushed out or forced out by the charter school in an effort to to improve the test scores.” Success Academy uses its high test scores to attract funding, and just secured a $5 million grant it will use to expand from 20 to 100 schools. González obtained a copy of secretly recorded meetings in which school administrators pressed one parent to transfer her special education kindergarten student back into the public school system.
Colorado’s charter schools enroll fewer with needs
State and Denver officials want to make sure the publicly funded schools aren’t shutting out students with disabilities.
By Jeremy P. Meyer and Burt Hubbard
The Denver Post
06/13/2009
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_12581441
Excerpt:
Colorado charter schools on average enroll fewer students with disabilities than noncharters — lending weight to long-held criticism of the publicly funded schools that are supposed to serve everyone.
But efforts are underway on the state level and in Denver to change the imbalance, including a task force and committee focused on the issue.
“I’m hearing on the national level how wonderful charter schools are — then let’s make them all accessible,” said Stephanie Lynch, consultant with the Colorado Department of Education’s Exceptional Student Leadership Unit who also leads a charter school special-education committee.
Data from 2007-08 show that 6.9 percent of charter school students have identified disabilities, compared with 9.7 percent in all schools…
Most charters with higher percentages of special-ed students were rated either “low” or “average” on 2008 Colorado School Accountability Reports.
Conversely, most high-performing charter schools tended to have fewer kids with identified special needs.
For example:
• “Excellent”-rated Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy in Colorado Springs lists 2.19 percent of its 778 students as having individualized education plans, or IEPs, which address a student’s special needs.
The school’s enrollment form asked whether a student had ever received special-education services and said “failure to disclose an IEP will result in the nullification of enrollment. Enrollment with an IEP is subject to district review and approval.”
School officials changed the wording after an inquiry by The Denver Post.
• “Excellent”-rated Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, recently noted in Newsweek as one of the nation’s top high schools, lists 3.84 percent of its 1,405 students as having an IEP.
• “Excellent”-rated Classical Academy middle school in Colorado Springs lists 3.73 percent of its 429 students as having IEPs.
Here’s another and it pro voucher LJM…..
It states I believe that they can expel disruptive students….so where do they fall back to… Public education mandated by the states ….
http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1131&context=cahrswp
Elaine,
Thankfully the pro-logic folks don’t avoid causality.
LJM,
Try wrapping you head around this study..
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/heyneman/PUBLICATIONS/heyneman.2008.SchoolChoiceInternational.doc