My Charter Fears: Bad Scoreboard
Posted: September 15th, 2010 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 4 Comments »
I worry about the quality of the best charter schools.
This is unusual in charter-world. More typically, folks worry about the mediocre and bad ones.
Few colleagues seem to share my worries about the best ones. The focus instead is how to grow. How to replicate.
(Which I also think is important! I.e., I agree with them it would be irresponsible, when we seem to have a good thing going, not try to get it to many more children.)
1. We pat ourselves on the back for getting kids to do well on state tests. Don’t misunderstand. There is appropriate pride there. Many of the kids have made great gains, legit gains, meaningful gains.
But the tests are fairly easy. Often we’ve moved kids from academically shockingly inept to…kinda ept.
Because many of our charter schools hover near 100% proficiency on the state exams (since it’s a low bar), the type of urgency to do much better, which leads to innovation, is sometimes lacking.
Maybe we should shift to an exclusive focus on how many kids we have scoring at the Advanced level. Instead of “Proficient.” On those lists, we’re still generally lower than the ‘burbs, and I think only the top level probably reasonably correlates with aspects of college readiness.
2. Another key data point we have is “college admissions.” Again, many good charters hover near 100%.
What is the true college completion rate? We don’t know. The data is hard to come by. I’m guessing, at the end of the day, 50%? 60%? Yes, money is an issue. As is socialization/homesickness.
But so is good old-fashioned knowledge, vocabulary, academic skills, and self-efficacy. I.e., sometimes when kids fail in college, it’s because they just weren’t academically ready. And that’s on us.
Right now our school has college “persistence” of about 80% of our grads, but that number will likely go down over time, as it includes people who’ve persisted exactly 1 year thus far.
Sure, that may still be much higher than the equivalent student who, for example, entered our admission lottery and lost. But I bet high-performing charters would do better if every school’s college success rate was published.
3. That’s why I’m excited about two things.
a. A new nonprofit, CollegeSuccess.net (which evidently just changed its name to Beyond 12), helps to track down each school’s true college success rate. They also offer other services, but it’s really the data tracking I’m excited about.
b. There is some new research, not yet officially launched, which will try to examine other long-term outcomes — health, happiness, prosperity — of charter lottery winners versus losers.
We need scoreboards that don’t show us, year after year, at a steady state near “100% proficiency” and “100% college admission.”
Again, that’s not to belittle those accomplishments — many schools don’t achieve those levels, and these numbers do describe very meaningful gains — but just that we’re not unleashing the full potential of the kids.
Have gotten a bunch of emails on this topic, which seems to have struck a chord.
Also got this email:
“Just read your blog. Don’t worry be happy. Also do you have any advice how to pick the correct power ball numbers? Love, Mom.”
Props to you for being so relentless!
Wish those folks who emailed you had posted.
We talk about this a lot at Brooke, especially in the middle school, where we have been rocking the MCAS, of late. But despite our high A+P numbers, we would like our Advanced numbers to be higher. This is especially true for me, since I got to 100% A+P for the first time this year, but my advanced numbers are lower than I would like. We all look to Excel Academy in awe. Their numbers are outstanding.
I like the idea of Advanced on MCAS, but you’re right, it’s a low bar. In addition, the way to get kids to advanced is to make sure they know their stuff (MCAS stuff, that is), make sure they don’t make silly errors, and motivate the hell out of them. But the window is tiny. On 7th math, 5 errors knocks you out of advanced (there’s a little more leniency on 6th and 8th). Don’t know as much about 10th grade, but since the math test is not much different than the 8th grade test (there’s content on there that 6th graders should be able to answer), it should be an easy win there too. So we focus on this, but even if we make those gains, I still think our kids would be missing out on something.
Since we don’t look to the SATs and APs yet (no HS), we look to the SSAT as another measure of what our kids should be able to do. We want our kids to do well on it so they can have a shot at prep schools. They do well compared to a national comparison, but stacked up to the actual kids who take the test they get their butts kicked.
And yet, I’m not sure the only place to look is more test scores. We’re all so data focused in charter school (a good thing) that we always want to quantify what our kids can do. Maybe another part of what our kids are missing are some of the intangibles that suburban, upper middle class kids get in their schools – more freedom, creativity, flexibility in the assignments they do. We think a lot about how we can get our kids ready for competing with those kids. And I think it’s got to be outside of the box of the rigidity of what we do at our schools. I’m not saying we need to abandon what we do, but need to add a new component as they get ready to leave our little bubble and head out into a world where kids are coming in with very different experiences and world views than them How to do that is a whole other question though.
All I know is that we tell our kids how awesome their test score are, and motivate them to go to awesome prep schools, but the percentage who can get in and succeed at the best schools are tiny at this point.
But you know us, we’re relentless. I’m sure we’ll all figure it out at some point.
I am now a fan of the phrase “kinda ept.” Perhaps I will start a Facebook group.