Charters don't need to cheat for high scores: Column
Big-city school superintendents warrant their own "tough jobs" TV show. On average, they cycle out every few years — the result of a hard job made harder by charter schools appearing to outperform them.
Some react by accusing those charters of cheating. New York City schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña is one. Recently, she insisted that charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, achieve better results only by pushing out "bad" kids.
Fariña and the mayor who tapped her, Bill de Blasio, are national leaders of the surging progressive movement, so her words quickly confirmed the beliefs of hundreds of school superintendents and union leaders who assert the same: Charters cheat, so let's stop them.
Some charter schools do have too-high suspension and expulsion rates. But those rates explain little about why these charters succeed. What really matters are attrition rates — students who actually drop out. After all, if you get suspended but return, maybe that's not a bad thing.
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Take Boston's high-performing Brooke Charter Schools as an example. The suspension rate there is 20%. Sounds high, but the attrition rate is only 5.5%.
"We use suspension to help draw clear lines about the responsibilities all members of our school communities have to each other," says Brooke founder Jon Clark.
In high-poverty Ward 8 of Washington, D.C., about 90% of Achievement Prep students re-enroll each year — an astonishing number for a high-transient neighborhood. Their academic record is just as striking, and there's no evidence the school pushes out "bad" students.
New York's Success Academies draw the most complaints, in part because their low-income and minority students outperform many middle-class schools in the city. Something must be amiss, right? And yet the attrition rate there for the past few years is about 10%, far lower than many schools in the same neigborhoods.
To be sure, not all charters have strong track records on discipline. In order to maintain calm, focused classrooms, many charters have been too quick to discipline or expel disruptive students. Collegiate Academy in New Orleans fit that bill until just recently.
When school leaders realized how high their expulsion rates were, they decided to provide more chances for students. Now all New Orleans schools follow suit. The state-run Recovery School District requires schools to take their case to a central committee before expulsion.
As for school chiefs such as Fariña, every day they pursue conspiracy theories is another day they delay learning the real reasons why top charters succeed — it is another day those lessons are not learned in their own schools.
Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. Richard Whitmire is author ofOn the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope.
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