Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part Three
So far, the first two episodes of StartUp’s podcast series about Success Academy has been completely one sided. Fortunately, that begins to change in episode 3 (which can be found here).
To education reformers, grade 3-8 state test scores are the proof that schools in this country are ‘failing.’ And the promise that charter school supporters made about 10 years ago was that if charters got a chance to take the money and the students, they would show that they could get the 3-8 test scores up in their district. For the most part, charter schools were not able to deliver on this promise. All, that is, except Success Academy. This episode tries to get under the hood of Success Academy’s very successful approach to getting high test scores, and what conclusions can and can’t be drawn from them.
On one metric, percent of students scoring ‘proficient’ on the state tests, Success Academy performs extremely well. With over 90% of their students scoring a 3 or 4 on the state tests in math and reading, they have, by this metric, outscored the wealthier suburbs. And compared to neighboring schools where they may have only 30%, this sounds like Success Academy is 3 times as good as the neighboring school. But ‘percent getting a 3 or better’ metric can skew the comparison between two schools. Here’s how: The fifth grade test in reading takes place over two days and has something like 60 questions on it. Students take the test and they are scored and rather than get scores based on percent correct, something everyone can relate to, instead they are ‘scaled’ to another number. For 2017-2018, they were scaled to a maximum score of about 700 and a minimum score of about 500. Then the cut scores are made. Last year a score of 3, which counts as ‘passing’ was set at 609 for 5th grade reading. Now suppose there are two schools, one has 90% ‘passing’ and the other has 50% ‘passing’. It seems like the 90% passing school is much better than the 50% passing school. But what if it turns out that in the 90% school, most CONTINUE READING: Revealing Podcast About Success Academy — Part Three | Gary Rubinstein's Blog