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]

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.