Mayor Daley's "last middle finger" to public schools. How the odds are stacked in favor of charters.

[madfloridian]

This story illustrates how easily public schools are painted as the problem, while it is never mentioned how often they get students returned from charter schools....because they are unable to meet the standards.

That Mayor Daley said such a thing shows how clueless some of the political leaders are about what is really going on....how these schools "counsel out" non-performers and send them back to public schools so they won't affect their scores.

From the Chicago Reader.

Charters unload problem students onto neighboring public schools - then reap the benefits.

On February 16, the Union League Club gave out its Democracy in Action award to deserving local high school students, and Mayor Daley was on hand to give a rousing speech—calling on regular public schools to make like the charters and transform ordinary neighborhood students into high-scoring, high-achieving, college-bound stars. Specifically, the mayor was hailing Urban Prep High School, a south-side charter school. But his unspoken message to all teachers was "work harder and stop whining."Consider it one last middle finger from Daley to the teachers and their unions because—well, why not?

Watching it all with a mixture of revulsion and disbelief was Eric Wagner, a social studies teacher at Kelvyn Park High School on the predominantly Hispanic northwest side. "I was there because one of my students—Jennifer Velazquez—had won the award," says Wagner. "I'm thinking, this is really inappropriate. There aren't even any charter school kids who won the award. Why is he ripping us?"

A public school student won. The charter students did not. Mayor Daley was either spinning or he actually did not know. Either way is a slap in the face to the public schools and to the winning student.

Here is what had happened just a few days before Daley spoke.

What Mayor Daley didn't say—what he probably didn't even know—is that just days before his speech eight students from Pritzker College Prep, a school just down the street from Kelvyn Park, unceremoniously showed up at Kelvyn's door, having flunked out, dropped out, or been kicked out.

"I'm sitting there listening to the mayor rip into regular public schools and public school teachers, and meanwhile these kids are showing up at our door 'cause the local charter doesn't know how to deal with them," says Wagner. "I don't want to start a fight with the charters, but after a while this stuff gets hard to take.

This has been going on for a long time in Chicago as well as other cities. From Substance News about Chicago.

How charter schools kick out feisty kids, leaving the families to send the kids back to public schools or home school


While Chicago's charter schools were pushing out their low scoring and at risk students on a regular basis, as early as the middle years of the first decade of the 21st Century, Chicago public school officials were using every opportunity to work with U.S. Department of Education officials during the Bush administration to promote charters and denigrate the regular public schools. On January 25, 2007, Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan (above left) and Chicago Board of Education President Rufus Williams arranged for then U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings (above at podium) to do a major visit to Chicago celebrating the supposed success of the No Child Left Behind law. Instead of doing the event at a real public school like Whitney Young High School, which was a mile from the media event (above), Duncan and Williams chose the Noble Street Charter High School for the event

Here is more.

Beginning in Chicago and a few other cities (KIPP discovered the same trick in California in the early years of the 21st Century), and slowly advancing since, the practice of keeping kids in your charter school until the money rolls in (following the census of students that takes place on the 20th day of each semester) and then dumping them out (often to nowhere, or to an overburdened local real public school) has become the standard for charter schools across the USA. It is ignored by Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education just as it was ignored by Arne Duncan when he was "Chief Executive Officer" of Chicago's public schools from 2001 through 2008, the years that Noble Street and others were perfecting the scam.

The attrition rates are alarming, but there is no media questioning them. Just a few bloggers, that's all.

From the EdWize site in 2010:

Vanishing Students, Rising Scores

As it turns out, high-performing charter middle schools in the New York City also have extremely high rates of attrition in their testing cohorts :

Eight of the thirteen schools have enough data to allow us to examine cohort size between 5th grade, when students enter, and 8th grade, when they graduate.<2> In four of these schools, more than 25% of the students vanished from the cohort. Of these four schools, three saw cohort declines of 30%, and one lost nearly 40%. All of these charters have been nationally or locally acclaimed as great schools that are in high demand. The average attrition for this group of eight is 23%. (charts follow.)

These attrition rates contrast starkly with what I found in regular public schools, where the size of cohorts tends to remain the same or rise. (charts follow.)

As the testing cohorts shrink, the percent of remaining students who are proficient rises dramatically. Seven of the thirteen middle school charters have more than 20% attrition in their testing cohorts. All seven have proficiency rates that rise to over 90%, with an overall average of 94%. That rate drops 21 points for charters with less than 20% attrition.<3> (charts follow.)

Information is not made public regarding the academic proficiency of students who vanish from the cohort. What I do know is that dramatic rises in the percent proficient seem to parallel the rates of attrition in the testing cohorts. I have charted these in the latter part of this post.

In a Florida county recently the frustration of a school board member really showed publicly. The local district school board has no control over a local charter school. This school remains "elite" by "counseling out" or just expelling those who do not perform well. There is nothing the school board can do as the students are sent back to the public schools, yet the money usually stays with the charter.

Before I retired I had many of these charter school and magnet school "rejects", and the hardest thing was helping them regain confidence in themselves. They felt like failures because they had been told they were. It took a lot of working with them to help them get over their dismissals.

FL school board member demands that charters account for kids sent back to public schools.

School Board member Frank O’Reilly wants district official to start tracking how many students are transferred from charter schools to public schools as a result of their grades, social economic status or behavioral issues. During a work session this morning, O’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.”

It wants to be called a public school, yet though it takes taxpayer money...it refuses to keep all students it accepts.

Thank God we have the public schools to take those students who are dismissed from charters and cherish and teach them. Trouble is at the rate we are going those schools may not be there much longer.

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. k n r

[Starry Messenger]

2. k&r

[madfloridian]

3. Read the part about how the charter K class could not handle the 5 yr old.

"We showed up after school let out for the meeting Karen that had scheduled before Wilson's big blow-up. But something told me we wouldn't be talking about his improvement anymore. Erin was out of town, so as Wilson ran around on the playground, I faced the principal, Karen and Anita alone.

Karen got to the point. "We don't have the resources to handle him." She said we should re-enroll Wilson in our neighborhood public school, which had a special needs program. The principal blathered on about how they'd tried to help kids like Wilson in the past but it "only made things worse." Anita praised Erin and me for our hard work as parents in a way that sounded patronizing, even though I could tell she felt bad.

Each of them had more to say, but I wasn't really listening. I couldn't get past the part where they'd actually kicked a five-year-old—my five-year-old—out of kindergarten."

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1938

IMO if they are getting public money, they should be able to provide for all kids.

[madfloridian]

12. Told him to take his kid to the neighborhood school...

said their charter did not have resources. They should be providing services to ALL kids, just like public schools.

[LetTimmySmoke]

4. The charter stuff is no different from all the standardized testing BS in the last 10 years.

It's about corporations trying to take a piece of the education budget pie. It's about corporate profits and market share. That's it.

[madfloridian]

5. They are taking public money and depriving public schools of needed funds.

It is about the testing, you are right about that. As Arne recently said:

82% of all schools could now be labeled as "failing" under NCLB rules.

"After a decade of No Child Left Behind
We're approaching 100% "failure"

Arne Duncan said Wednesday, that 82% of all schools could now be labeled as "failing" under NCLB rules. The DOE estimates the number of schools not meeting targets will skyrocket from 37 to 82 percent in 2011 since states have "raised standards" to meet the requirements of the law. Yes, we're truly racing towards the top."


But the number of charter schools is growing, the amount of resources taken from public education is growing....and the funding of public schools is getting less and less each year.

The testing lets them label schools as failing and "turn them around" into something else.

[Jefferson23]

6. I read your OP's consistently and each week this entire scam grows

more diseased. It seems to be expanding across the US at avalanche speed too..incredible.



K&R

[madfloridian]

7. Though few will admit it, the movement accelerated the last two years.

It was Bush's policy for education, but the Democrats fought him on it. Now the Democrats are totally on board with it. Howard Dean even said charters were the future.....and he had the nerve to say that the battle between unions and charters was nearly over. He sounded pleased.

[Jefferson23]

8. Dean said that? I mean I don't doubt your source, but where the hell

does that lead us? Perhaps if we do not decide on becoming street fighting men, we may lose everything we ever had from FDR.

[madfloridian]

9. Link. He joins the rest of the Dem leaders in that stance.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2011/05/howard_dean_the_battle_between.html

[Jefferson23]

10. Thanks for posting, but ugh..how disappointing to hear Dean.

What are they going to do next, invite Michelle Rhee to be a keynote speaker at the next Democratic convention??

This is bad stuff, very bad.

[madfloridian]

11. She is one of Arne's favorite people.

And I would not be surprised to see her as a speaker there.

[snot]

13. K&R'd. It's stealth theft from public funds to benefit those who are already better-off,

AND re-segregate by class.