Charter school cooks the books

[IndianaGreen]

Charter school cooks the books

A Chicago charter school sent 100 percent of its graduating seniors to college--by not counting the 43 percent who didn't go to college, explains Rachel Cohen.

July 15, 2010

URBAN COLLEGE Prep Charter Academy--the nation's first all-boys charter school--has found an ingenious new way to boost its stats: cheating.

A Chicago Sun-Times article last week heralded the success of the school's 100 percent college-bound rate for its first class of graduating seniors. If it were true, the achievement would have been a very impressive feat.

The school was established in 2006 in the notoriously neglected neighborhood of Englewood on Chicago's South Side. The first year's inbound freshman class of 166 students, drawn from the 98 percent African American neighborhood, was required to wear uniforms of suits and ties and pushed to raise test scores fast.

The school reported in its very first year that it had broken its fundraising goals, attracting plenty of corporate funding support in addition to its allotment from the Chicago Public Schools system.

Yet according to the Interactive Illinois Report Card, the school failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress standards in 2009, with only 15 percent of students meeting or exceeding grade level proficiency in all areas of standardized testing, well below the Chicago district's 62 percent.

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/15/charter-cooks-the-books

[msongs]

1. let's play word association - Chicago, Duncan, money nt

[freethought]

2. It's not about education, its about profit, rather the illusion of it

It seems that not even a day goes by that I don't hear about some charter school is cooking its educational results or its accounting books.

When Enron collapsed, people realized that everything that the company had accomplished was a total illusion! A mirage in the desert that would pull the desperately thirsty to their death. It seems that is just what the charter schools are doing. Maybe not all of them, but definitely some of them.

This is something that is truly sickening. The pursuit of profit at all costs is going wind up devouring us alive.

I don't pretend to have any answers about what to do about American public education. Personally I think this is a multifaceted problem. But I am reasonably sure that charter schools aren't the answer.

[femmocrat]

3. Can anyone verify this?

"95 students out of 166 in fact gives the graduating class a college-bound rate of 57 percent, substantially lower than the 69.8 percent average rate of other Chicago public high schools, according to the Chicago K-12 Examiner."


ON EDIT:
On closer examination, there is a misprint from the Chicago K-12 Examiner, which actually says: "This yields an overall school graduation rate of 64%, or nearly 6 points lower than the average district rate of 69.8%."

Graduation and college-bound rates are not the same thing.