Strong Schools Can Withstand Teacher Turnover?
Posted on August 28, 2013
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A recent NY Times article about young, inexperienced teachers and teacher turnover focused on the YES Prep charter schools. In that article, Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, stated, “Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers. The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”
So, one has to ask how Ms. Kopp defines strong schools. YES Prep did win the first Broad Prize for charter schools. But how strong are YES Prep schools? Do they have strong student achievement growth? Do they graduate a high percentage of students enrolled? How well do students perform after high school?
Let’s look at some data from Texas that I have readily available.
Do YES Prep Schools have high achievement and student growth? I think anyone examining both the percentage of students proficient and the value-added growth scores indicate a pretty strong school. I won’t present the details, but the percentage of students passing the state tests is certainly above average and the valued-added measures provided by the state (which are problematic in some respects, particularly because they are correlated with the achievement of students in the year before entering a school) are also above average. I guess they get “two claps
