I found myself reading yet another strict charter school puff piece today

[conuly]

Every one of them tries to make the claim that the way to get poor minority students to behave and do well in school is to "reject victimhood" and be super strict.

If you ever find yourself reading one of these articles, keep these two questions in mind:

1. How do the results from these students compare from students who applied to this school but didn't get in?
2. What percentage of admitted students leave, are expelled, or are counseled out prior to their actual last year of school?

I guarantee, these questions will never be answered in the article you're reading. There is, in fact, a reason for that - and yet, people still keep writing them, which I guess means other people keep accepting them uncritically.

Comments

[spiralsheep]

There was a scandal involving both your points 1 and very 2 in my local grammar schools when I was a teen. Some parents seem to love sacrificing their kids to build steep-sided educational pyramids though.

[conuly]

What I really want to see is a 30 years later study on these kids. (Of course, I'd also want to see one on kids who go to "elite public high schools", which can be so very toxic. Test scores and college acceptance rates are not the only thing of value in a high school!)

[sabotabby]

I assume every charter school that is successful is successful because they only select for kids that will do well academically. Not hard. Let's see them try to improve the grades of my homeless kids or the one guy who just sits there like a lump and plays vidya games all day.

[conuly]

Oh, no, all articles about Super Successful Strict Charters make a point of mentioning the lack of any screening process.

Except... there is a screening process, obviously, because students must apply. Even in NYC, where every student in theory has to go through the high school application process, if you fail to hand in your application (or failed to put down any schools your child could realistically get into) you still end up assigned to a school with seats... but not a charter school.

[loligo]

Exactly! A strictly structured environment like that would have been just fine for my younger kid, but a disaster for my older kid... so I would never have applied to send her to a school like that! Obviously not all parents have realistic assessments of their kids needs and abilities, but enough of them do that you get a skewed pool of subjects when you weed out all the families that go HELL NO when they read the description of the school.

[conuly]

Well, yes, that too - but what I was getting at is that you're also weeding out the families who can't be bothered to care about their kid's education even a little bit, because those families certainly aren't going to go through the extra effort, no matter how small, to research and apply to a charter school.

And I'll bet that those parents who are willing to go through that effort are also disproportionately likely to line up extra tutoring for their kids whether they need it or not, jump through hoops to get into the better sorts of summer and school break camps, find the money to sign up for extracurriculars, and so on. At the very least, they probably sit down and make sure their kids do their homework every night and read a little bit during vacations.

[thekumquat]

Just like London where most schools have to be 'comprehensive' so 'to ensure we take the full range of abilities, we operate a Fair Banding Test, where scores are divided into quintiles and we take the same number from each quintile.'

Except you have to know to enter your kid for the test - often a different one for every school, though some boroughs have a joint one for a few schools. The existence of the test is often news to many parents, when the primary schools organise a session to explain the admissions system to secondary schools.

Guess when the deadline for entry is? If you guessed 'around the first day of term in September', you'd be right. While a few tests can be done at a primary during the school day, most require parents to get their kids to some hall a few miles away, for 8am on a Saturday. So that rules out the less-committed families...

There's a lot of churn on waiting lists as kids generally get a school and then move up waiting lists. But the waiting lists for places is always kids with a band test result over those who don't.

[conuly]

Oh, yeah. I don't know what the NYC high school admissions landscape looks like now, but back when A was enrolling they had two different tiers of "unscreened" schools - unscreened, and limited unscreened, which gave priority to children whose parents had the money, knowledge, and determination to run around attending a zillion info sessions. Most of those info sessions were at least after the workday, and IIRC they at least in theory also accepted a visit during your borough's high school fair on a weekend, but one particularly batshit school only did school tours during the school day, and your kid had to be in attendance during the tour.

They dropped that during E's admissions. I will say this for the DoE, when you point out that their good intentions have discriminatory results, there's a tiny chance they might listen.

[conuly]

(Also, do not ask me about the SHSAT. Not unless you want a long rant that may or may not have punctuation.)

[thewayne]

The cool thing is that when the student is admitted, the school gets paid for the year! So if they can get the student to self-select themselves out, the school keeps the money! (probably true in most states)

Charter schools are pure evil.

[conuly]

This particular school is in the UK, so I don't know how their funding works at all.

In NYC they're paid by day-by-day attendance. My middle school very openly admitted to us all that they'd like us to show up for at least the first few hours on the last day before break so they could get that attendance in, and then they wouldn't squawk if our parents collected us all the second it was taken. The kids' elementary school danced around the topic during one teacher-led presentation on The Importance of Attendance and refused to give a solid yes or no on the question of "is it okay if my kid misses one day to visit Grandma" until I finally got fed up several minutes in and said "What she's not saying is that they want your kid here so they get the funding, but obviously if your kid is doing mostly well and it really is just one extra day off it's not actually going to affect their learning, can we move on". The teacher did not question my version of reality, so I imagine she must have been relieved to change the subject.

[thekumquat]

In England, mostly funding matches the numbers on roll, though when schools get inspected they do now check that the numbers in attendance plausibly match numbers on roll - used to be common for all the badly-behaved kids to be sent on a trip on Ofsted day, so that behaviour looked good...

Was it Michaela the school being described?

Poverty of low expectations is a problem - for white working-class boys in rural towns, in particular, as well for various groups in cities - but selection brings a whole new set of problems.

[conuly]

Was it Michaela the school being described?

Yup, looks like. I am intensely interested in hearing any dirt you might have, despite the fact that none of this affects me even a teensy bit.

(Also: I cannot believe the nerve of her bitching in the article about her poor facilities that she's sure she got because they hate her and then saying "Oh, but you don't hear me complaining!" I mean, maybe she did get those facilities because the people who assign those things hate her, but she literally was just complaining.)

[minoanmiss]

Every one of them tries to make the claim that the way to get poor minority students to behave and do well in school is to "reject victimhood" and be super strict.

I have been rolling my eyes at "reject victimhood" for decades since it has always seemed to actually mean, "Pretend bigotry doesn't exist for our comfort, not least so we're not even asked to help you mitigate its effects on your life."

Also yes absolutely to everything else you've said.

[conuly]

It seems to mean that because it definitely means that.

[gwydion]

People are always shocked when I tell them about this.

[conuly]

It seems like basic fact-checking to me. Do they just not do that?

[gwydion]

I think a lot of people aren't up on education issues and charter school/voucher advocates talk a good game and the reporters don't fact check because they'd need to know they were being zoomed and know to look for things like meta studies. It's faster and easier to just believe them, so ordinary people with no kids who don't teach don't know.

[conuly]

It’s bare minimum critical thinking! If it sounds like they’re trying to sell you something, they probably are, so you’d better double check.

[silveradept]

I wonder of anyone keeps statistics on those things you mention, or can get grant funding to do longitudinal studies to answer these questions. Because it would shed a lot of light on just how selective these supposedly unselective "strictness will make the Poors and the Blacks" schools are.

[conuly]

There’s definitely data somewhere, but it’s fragmented.