Drop CPS’ reform strategy: CPS neighborhood school growth outpaces charters
When mayor Rahm Emanuel recently heralded a small gain on the average Chicago Public Schools elementary “MAP” test results, I knew something wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t what he said; it was what he didn’t say. You see, this is the first year the MAP scores can provide a more decisive apples-to-apples comparison of charter schools and traditional public schools.
The result? Public school students learned far more in one year than charter school students did.
I reached this conclusion after analyzing this year’s MAP scores and I shared my results with several local reporters. Soon afterward, the Chicago Sun-Times conducted their own analysis for a story that was published on Sunday, Aug. 31. Their results differ from mine because they used a slightly different methodology, but the overall conclusions are the same: student growth in reading in neighborhood schools far outpaces growth in charters.
MAP stands for Measures of Academic Progress. Public and charter school students across the city took this national assessment in 2013. Each child got an individual score to serve as a baseline. By calculating the difference between that score and the 2014 score, CPS can determine the amount of learning growth each child attained in the year between the exams.
Until now, schools were judged on student attainment scores, not student growth. This is important because — like magnet schools — charter schools lean heavily on their ability to enroll students who are more likely to have higher attainment than their neighborhood peers by virtue of the degree of parent involvement needed to enter a child into a charter school lottery. Chicago’s charter schools also expel students at more than 12 times the rate of our public schools, which calls into question their own confidence in their ability to effectively teach the most difficult-to-reach children. When you consider those factors, the attainment of charter school students could be more a result of their admissions and expulsion policies than their teaching.
This is where the MAP assessment comes in. The MAP is designed to measure teaching and learning. In fact, CPS trusts it so much that it uses the results to determine teacher and principal evaluation ratings. It’s also used to rate schools on CPS’s five-level rating system.
If CPS can use MAP growth results so broadly to rate teachers, principals, and schools, one would expect CPS to use those same results to rate its school reform strategy, which is dominated by the proliferation of privatized charter and turnaround schools, where a private operator replaces all or nearly all of a school’s staff. How did Emanuel’s reform schools do? What kind of learning growth did they foster? Why didn’t Mr. Emanuel say anything about it? Surely he knew.
So I downloaded the publicly available MAP results and conducted a preliminary analysis. For the sake of consistency I am deferring to the Sun-Times results, which were similar to mine. The MAP report lists the “growth percentile” assigned to each school based on student Drop CPS’ reform strategy: CPS neighborhood school growth outpaces charters - Chicago Sun-Times:
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