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

[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.)