'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly [View all]
Source: The Guardian
'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly
Success Academy, New York Citys largest charter school network, loses more
than 10% of students from grade to grade, compared to 2.7% at nearby schools
George Joseph
Sunday 21 February 2016 18.05 GMT
Brendin Smith was only four years old when his mother, Monique Jeffrey, realized her son was no longer wanted at Success Academy. Jeffrey says that administrators at one of the charter schools Brooklyn locations told her the kindergartener wasnt going to make it. Jeffrey later found out that Brendin was one of 16 students who been placed on the schools Got to Go list, a list uncovered by the New York Times that singled out students that the school wanted to shed.
Success Academy, the largest charter school network in New York City, also has some of the highest test scores. Critics have alleged that the city achieves this in part by driving low performers out.
A Guardian analysis has found that the school system loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared to the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.
The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as economically disadvantaged. This schools relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.
According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia Universitys School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.
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Read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/21/success-academy-charter-school-students-got-to-go