A charter school teacher on what works.
I have been disappointed in how the charter debate—the next great thing! the worst thing ever!—obscures what to me is the most important question: What makes successful charter schools successful, and how can those pieces be incorporated in regular public schools that need to improve? The journalism on this is lacking, which is why I was glad to read this post from a teacher at the SEED School in Washington, D.C., on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog. Dan Brown points to specific approaches that he thinks make his teaching work, approaches he believes need not be the domain of charters only. (They aren’t, necessarily. But if you teach at a traditional public school and get the kind of meaningful oversight, support and feedback from your administrators that Brown does, raise your hand.)
posted by Linda Perlstein at
12:20 PM
6 Comments:
If you teach at a traditional school and get to kick out 70% of your students, as the NY Times reported that the SEED school does, you are also at an unusual advantage. Though I would view that as a two-edged "advantage," since it so conveys giving up on the challenging students whom you were trying to support. I'm surprised that this asterisk is given such short shrift.
CarolineSF - I'm interested in that 70 percent attrition rate. Can you tell me when that NY Times piece ran? I've found one from 2009 but it doesn't provide that figure. Thanks!
The story does provide the numbers that lead to that figure.
New York Times Sunday Magazine, 9/27/09, "The Inner-City Prep School Experience
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27Boarding-t.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
The key paragraph is pasted below. The wording is a little bit strangely mooshy, and we have to do the math ourselves. Of 70 students in the entering class, 20 graduate, the text makes clear, though in its oddly mooshy way. 20 out of 70 is 28.57% = thus 71.43 of the students left. And the content of the paragraph makes it clear that SEED was *dismissing* them, as opposed to *they just left*. SEED claims to have reduced the expulsion rate by half in the year preceding the story, but the college-going success claims for SEED are, obviously, based on the graduating classes with the 71.43% expulsion rates.
Here's the paragraph from the article:
"Some kids don’t last beyond the first year or two at SEED. Until recently, the school lost about 20 percent of the student body each year — mostly in middle school and mostly boys. The incoming class of 70 students slowly dissipated each year so that by senior year, the remaining students barely filled a gym bleacher. The high attrition made the school’s much-lauded college acceptance rate less impressive: If a class of 70 seventh graders fell to 20 students by the time of graduation, those remaining 20 students were arguably among the best — at least in terms of self-discipline and a willingness to stick it out — of the original class. Adams, who became the head of SEED two years ago, has been improving the attrition rate by reducing the number of staff members with authority to dismiss students and taking a more nuanced view of dismissal-worthy offenses. During this past school year, the attrition rate dropped by more than 50 percent."
(It appears to me that the reporter was grappling with trying to get this information in while downplaying it with the oddly mooshy language. I would question that from both the standpoint of news judgment and, possibly, ethics -- why protect SEED by softening information that doesn't reflect well on it? -- but there you are...)
Thanks. I'm actually wondering why the reporter chose to focus on the attrition rate in the first year and not the more recent year. Both deserve attention. If the first year's attrition rate was indeed 70 percent, why not say so outright? And if the attrition rate was cut, in fact, by more than 50 percent, why not talk about what steps were taken to make such a vast improvement?
Of course, the attrition rate for traditional public schools is never zero. Students are counseled out, suspended, expelled, etc. from neighborhood schools - or, more likely and more frequently, they're voting with their feet. Which is why some charters are so successful. Attrition rates for all schools should be examined more thoroughly.
The attrition rate for traditional public schools at the middle school level can't be compared to the attrition rates of charter schools that don't replace the students who leave (or in the case of SEED, apparently, are pro-actively expelled).
It's different at the high school level because then you're talking about dropouts, but public middle schools replace the students who leave. That's turnover (or "mobility" in education jargon), but with attrition, we're talking about students who leave and are not replaced.
If SEED is both a middle and high school it gets complicated as to whether to call it "attrition" or "dropout rate" -- a 70% dropout rate is a notable asterisk too. But again, be clear: at the middle school level, you cannot compare charter school *attrition* (that at KIPP schools is well known) with public school *mobility*. That comparison is unsound and invalid.
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