NYC Traditional Public Schools Outperform Bloomberg's Corporate Charters

[Hannah Bell]

While schools that did well on their tests even under the state�s higher bar continued to get A�s, like the high-performing P.S. 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, schools whose students had been barely passing under the old standards fared worse.

Charter schools over all received lower grades than traditional schools, a result the teachers� union president seized on.

Sixty-one percent of traditional public schools, which are unionized, got A�s and B�s, compared with 48 percent of charter schools, where union representation is rare.

�This means that either the strategy Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have touted so often for school reform � the creation of more charter schools � isn�t working,� said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, �or that the entire progress-report methodology, which relies almost completely on standardized test scores, is flawed.�

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01grades.html?_r=3&ref=todayspaper

[hlthe2b]

1. YES! I LOVE hearing this.

How do we get this finding the publicity it needs?

[aquart]

2. HAH!

And I say, HAH! again.

[WinkyDink]

3. You seem to think "student performance" is what this is all about, instead of---wait for it---$$$$$.

No Public Dollars Left Behind.

[rpannier]

4. Race to the Top... Of the money heap

Race to the Bank

[Hannah Bell]

6. no, i know it's about dollars. the post is simply more evidence for that fact.

if it were about helping kids, the many stories like this would slow down charterization.

instead, they're speeding it up in a full frontal assault.

gotta get 'er done before too many people get wise.

[rpannier]

5. Two things from the article caught my eye

1. But the popular Community Roots Charter School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, beat the city and state averages with its English and math grades, even though it did worse than other schools with largely middle-class populations.
***So, basically it did poorly against schools that it is measured against -- middle class schools. But it did better than schools from lower-middle class and poor areas. Kind of like a Division I school going 1-10 and their lone win was against a Div III school.

2. The city warned against drawing a broad conclusion and noted that the charter school the union runs in Brooklyn received a D. (With regard to Unions).
***Congrats the Matt. You found one Union Rep Charter school that got a D and used it as your reason why union schools might not be better. Yet the Union run, non-charter Public Schools still did better.
Matt, you're a doofus

[Starry Messenger]

7. recommend.

[Orlandodem]

8. Take that Obama/Duncan/GOP/Rhee/Klein!

[LWolf]

9. No surprise here. nt

[Mefistofeles]

10. I bet media-darling Michelle Rhee will be silent about this

Kicked.

[Tatiana]

11. And the research continues to prove that charters do no better than regular public schools.

So pretty much, these charters are places to experiment on our poor, underserved minority and low-income students. They don't receive the experienced teachers or specialized services they need to succeed (especially if they are below grade level in reading and/or math or have a learning/behavioral disability).

Someone needs to go to the President and tell him to stop this charter madness. Stop taking valuable dollars away from the public schools that serve EVERYONE. We need that money for new books, curricular materials, and technology for our kids.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

12. Are grade comparisons fair? '25% is...absolute performance...on...tests' and '60% of the grade is.....

'60% of the grade is...progress'

IMO, this means that, if charter schools overall are much more likely to be located in high poverty areas, their grades are biased downward when compared to those of non-charter schools.

What I'd like to see is charter and non-charter raw scores on the components of the overall grade, especially the 'progress on state exams' component, where there's no built-in bias against poverty-area schools.

And, what ARE the distributions of neighborhood poverty or free-lunch receipt in charter schools and non-charter schools in NYC? Does anyone know?

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01grades.html?_r=4&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print :

"The report cards ... primarily measure a school�s success based on how its students progress on the state English and math tests, which are given to all third- through eighth-grade students every year.

Each year, the city has modified the complicated algorithm by which it calculates a school�s letter grade, but the core of the formula has remained the same. Sixty percent of the grade is based on how much students progress on the state exams, and 25 percent is based on the absolute performance of a school�s students on those tests.

The other 15 percent takes into account other factors like attendance and opinion surveys of parents and teachers."

[Hannah Bell]

14. hardly; if charters are so good, we'd expect to see more progress in low-baseline areas

than in ones already performing better than average.

[glitch]

13. Privatizeers don't carry about actual performance, they just want the money public education gets

from taxpayers.

All they need is to spin the perception that privatized (schools in this case but whatever) perform better long enough to get the loot. Same with every other taxpayer funded entity, like Social Security or the Postal Service or the Military.

Perception is all, performance is incidental to the point of irrelevance.

[goclark]

15. Surprise, surprise ~ the tip of the iceberg

Please review my posts on the subject.

It's all a shell game to destroy the Public Schools and look what we are getting.

I really feel sorry for ALL the children and families, Public or Charters.

[ThomCat]

16. They were doing everything to undermine the public schools

and they were lavishly feeding money to the charter schools.

Yet the charter schools did worse.

They were bending and breaking rules to favor the charter schools. They were doing everything possible to screw the public schools and destroy moral. They were doing everything possible to break the teachers unions in the public schools.

They were doing everything possible to take the great students and put them in the charter schools so that the charter schools would automatically get the highest scores and highest grades.

Any student with language problems, emotional problems, family problems at home, or living in poverty got thrown back into the public schools because they "weren't a good fit" for the charter schools." The public schools also got almost all the special ed kids, and more and more of them as time when on and the charter schools could boot them out for "not being a good fit here." So the public schools were set up to fail.

The city did everything they could to set this up as a rigged competition so that charter schools would win this match, and win it by a big margin.

Yet somehow public schools won, and won by a big margin. :woohoo:

Why? How?

Because privatized schools don't care about their teachers, and they don't really care about their students either. They also don't care about teaching in any flexible ways to find out how students need to be taught, how they learn most effectively. They are rigid, sticking to a method as if only that method works, and often it doesn't.

And the privatized schools pay the teachers the lowest, cheapest wages so they get the newest, least experienced teachers who are most willing to stick with that one rigid method and may not know other ways of teaching and might not have the experience to be as flexible.

And, without a teachers union you don't have all benefits and support that a teachers union offers.

And, when you have a privatized organization you skimming money away as profit. That's money you aren't spending on kids. Public schools aren't always totally efficient, but they spend all their money on running the schools, paying their teachers, or supplies for the kids. They aren't giving that money away to make rich people richer. Privatized schools will always have this flaw. They have to give way part of their budget to make rich people richer, and they can't spend that money on their school, their teachers or their kids.

Public schools know that there is stuff that you have to pay for that is more important than the bottom line. Like special ed. Like the quality of the cafeteria. Like Phys Ed. None of this stuff will show up on a standardized test. None of it will show up on a bottom line. But all of it is important. When people like Bloomberg and Klein aren't trying to gun public schools, we get to give kids these things that make public schools work, and work well.