'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly
Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, loses more than 10% of its enrolled student population each year once testing starts, compared to 2.7% at nearby schools
Brendin Smith was only four years old when his mother, Monique Jeffrey, realized her son was no longer wanted at Success Academy. Jeffrey says that administrators at one of the charter school’s Brooklyn locations told her the kindergartener “wasn’t going to make it”. Jeffrey later found out that Brendin was one of 16 students who been placed on the school’s “Got to Go” list, a list uncovered by the New York Times that singled out students that the school wanted to shed.
Success Academy, the largest charter school network in New York City, also has some of the highest test scores. Critics have alleged that the city achieves this in part by driving low performers out.
A Guardian analysis has found that the school system loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared with the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.
The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged”. This school’s relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.
According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. “Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”
Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who focuses on education policy, said: “It could be that Success is counselling out weaker students, encouraging them to leave, or it could be that Success is not backfilling [replacing students] in the same way that traditional public schools do, or it could be a combination of those two things.”
Whatever the cause, Kahlenberg said the decline “provides a tremendous advantage to Success that we have be aware of when we compare the test scores”. Not replacing lost students with new ones in later years could provide Success a significant test score advantage, since highly transient students tend to do worse in school.
Brian Whitley, a researcher at Success Academy, said some of this enrollment shrinkage is to be expected since, up until last year, Success did not accept new students after the third grade. In an email to the Guardian, Whitley also argued that enrollment numbers don’t take into account whether public schools are losing even more kids and taking in new ones to replace them. Last March, Success Academy’s CEO, Eva Moskowitz, told the Brian Lehrer Show that if Success added new students in older grades, the incoming students’ lower academic preparation would negatively affect the schools’ other students.
To make its calculations, the Guardian pulled data from 25 Success classes that had enrollment numbers from pre-testing grades up until the fourth, and pulled comparable data from public school classes that were either in the same building or one block away from Success Academy sites.
The analysis also found that at sites where the majority of Success Academy’s student populations are from low-income families, classes in the school’s later testing grades served far smaller proportions of students with disabilities (13.2% vs. 27.6% ), students with limited English proficiency (2.4% vs. 16.3%), and poor students (78.7% vs. 92.1%). Such demographic data from many of the earlier grades is not publicly available, and thus it is difficult to determine whether these types of students are dropping disproportionately within Success Academy’s 'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly | US news | The Guardian:
