Does CA charter deserve strokes or pokes for its attrition rate?
By Caroline Grannan
Parents Across America founding member, San Francisco
Blogger Alexander Russo raised some questions about happy-talk PR by a K-12 charter school in Lodi, Calif., which put out a press release announcing that its first cohort that started at the school in kindergarten is now graduating — with eight of the original 60 kids still at the school. Russo questioned whether that attrition rate should be discussed.
Well, I’m the queen of exposing charter school attrition, but I can see too many potential factors at work to criticize the attrition between kindergarten and grade 12 in this case. I don’t know when the school’s middle and high school opened, for example — what if it wasn’t clear that it would ever expand to middle and high school and only the boldest risk-takers chose to stick around?
But there’s still an attrition story here. I looked at the numbers for the middle school and high school grades. The three middle school grades are considerably larger than the high
