According to the principal at Audubon Middle School in Los Angeles, this was a midyear dump of kids to his school. Diane Ravitch printed his email recently.
Are Charters the Silver Bullet?I received an email from Dr. DeWayne Davis, the principal of Audubon Middle School in Los Angeles, which was sent to several public officials. Dr. Davis said that local charter schools were sending their low-performing students to his school in the middle of the year. He wrote: "Since school began, we enrolled 159 new students (grades 7 and 8). Of the 159 new students, 147 of them are far below basic (FBB)!!! Of the 147 students who are FBB, 142 are from charter schools. It is ridiculous that they can pick and choose kids and pretend that they are raising scores when, in fact, they are purging nonperforming students at an alarming rate—that is how they are raising their scores, not by improving the performance of students. Such a large number of FBB students will handicap the growth that the Audubon staff initiated this year, and further, will negatively impact the school's overall scores as we continue to receive a recurring tide of low-performing students."
Ravitch covers several other incidences she has heard about recently.
Before we hop aboard the charter train, which is now driven by Race to the Top and other federal funding, we should pay attention to warning signs. There are new ones every day. In the past few days, I have learned of the following issues.
She mentions a story which was run in Newsweek about maltreatment of disabled students in New Orleans charter schools.
# Newsweek ran a story about the
maltreatment of students with special needs in the New Orleans school districts. Astonishing numbers of children with disabilities
are being mistreated, suspended, and failing to make progress in numbers far different from what happens to similar students in comparable districts. Charter schools are taking less than their fair share of students with disabilities. The article asks pointedly:
"...does the much-touted academic progress of New Orleans's post-Katrina charters come in part because special-needs students are being weeded out?"More from the Newsweek article.
Which raises the question: does the much-touted academic progress of New Orleans’s post-Katrina charters come in part because special-needs students are being weeded out? Certainly, charters appear to be enrolling fewer than their fair share of special-needs kids. The average school in New Orleans includes a disabled-student population of about 9 percent. Overall, 7.8 percent of charter-school students are disabled. That’s not significantly lower than the city average, but when you look at which individual schools have the lowest percentages of disabled students, almost all of them are charters. In fact, four of the highest-performing RSD charter schools in terms of school-performance scores have some of the lowest disabled-student enrollment figures in the city: Dr. Martin Luther King Charter School for Science & Technology, 3.29 percent enrollment; KIPP Believe College Prep, 5.41 percent; KIPP Central City Primary, 6.67 percent; and Martin Behrman Elementary School, 7.31 percent.
In my opinion the charter schools can not legitimately claim to be superior if they can send low-performers back to the real public schools.
Recently a Florida school board member held up a letter by a charter school president telling a student's parents that their child did not meet the criteria of that charter school.
Florida charter school dismisses low performing studentsO’Reilly read a letter sent by Harold Maready, superintendent of McKeel charter schools, to a parent about their third grader who flunked the FCAT.
“Your child does not meet the criteria to be a McKeel student,” O’Reilly read.
If public schools were to reject students based on their academic performance, then they could be A schools, too, O’Reilly said.
“We must take every child that comes through that door whether we like it or not,” O’Reilly said. ‘‘That is a public school paid by taxpayers’ dollars, and I like to remind Mr. Maready of that.”
They get public money, but the district school board has no control over them. None at all. They openly admit to keeping only the high-performers.
Ravitch also mentions the ICEF charter schools in Los Angeles. She shows that not only there are questions about educational superiority to public schools, but she points out the financial disparities.
From her blog link above:
The ICEF charter chain in California, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, was just bailed out by the Broad Foundation and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. The founder of the chain, which enrolls 4,500 students, has resigned. No wonder there is more pressure by foundations and wealthy philanthropists to get more government funding for charters. Many charters and charter chains are not financially sustainable; they have discovered no secrets about economizing and their financial backers can't always be there to save them.
Here is more about the ICEF school rescue from the
Los Angeles TimesThe collapse of ICEF would have been a blow to the charter movement and to the 4,500 students and several hundred employees of an organization whose results have impressed many observers. Charters are independently run public schools that are free from many regulations that govern traditional schools.
ICEF representatives and others said the group's budget problems were caused by insufficient reserves; an overly ambitious expansion — 11 new schools in three years — that resulted in costly debt; and a reluctance to make cuts affecting students. These factors were exacerbated by the recession, which sharply reduced state funding to schools, and this year's late state budget, which has delayed payments to schools.
The rescue plan that emerged Monday was less disruptive than one under discussion as recently as Sunday. That plan would have broken up ICEF, distributed schools and students among other charter schools and forced out founder Mike Piscal.
Riordan is contributing $100,000; Broad $500,000, and philanthropist Frank Baxter $100,000—jump-starting a short-term $3-million campaign to stabilize ICEF. All are longtime supporters of charters and frequent critics of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Looks like they think "throwing money" at a charter school group will work. I am scratching my head because the reformers say that throwing money at public schools doesn't work.
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