Envision Schools again...
An op-ed in today's Chronicle by Envision Schools' chief education officer and founder contains an eye-catching claim:
Second, information on the grade-level performance of an incoming 9th-grader is not part of the API system. So this would presumably be based on CAT's internal assessments. Comparing those results to the students' later performance on an entirely different assessment tool (the state's standardized testing) isn't sound methodology.
Third, what middle schools are graduating students from 8th grade with 5th-grade-level skills, if Lenz' account is accurate? What are the feeder schools for CAT and Metro? I hope the Envision folks who've been posting here can answer some of these questions.
As you know, I'm a charter skeptic, so chances that I'll send my own 8th-grader to a charter high school are pretty remote. But her classmates are certainly open to it. Should kids who are achieving at or above grade level be concerned about attending a school where the vast majority of their classmates will be far below grade level? If not, what do CAT and Metro do to meet the non-low-achievers' needs?
Consider two charter public high schools in San Francisco: City Arts & Technology and Metropolitan Arts & Technology. Both were founded by Envision Schools to provide underserved students with a rigorous college-performance curriculum, and both boasted the largest test-score gains of any San Francisco public high school in each of their second years. Of course, small schools and large schools are different, but City Arts ranked at the top when compared against similar schools in 2006, and both schools are expected to rank well when the similar-school scores for 2007 are released.First, these schools, especially CAT, are currently recruiting my daughter and her 8th-grade classmates. So the fact that a significant majority of their incoming students are severely underperforming is quite a concern. Can a school that has to focus so hard on bringing most of its students up to grade level meet the needs of their non-underperforming classmates too?
The schools accomplished these results despite the fact that two-thirds of their students tested at a fifth-grade level when they entered ninth grade.
Second, information on the grade-level performance of an incoming 9th-grader is not part of the API system. So this would presumably be based on CAT's internal assessments. Comparing those results to the students' later performance on an entirely different assessment tool (the state's standardized testing) isn't sound methodology.
Third, what middle schools are graduating students from 8th grade with 5th-grade-level skills, if Lenz' account is accurate? What are the feeder schools for CAT and Metro? I hope the Envision folks who've been posting here can answer some of these questions.
As you know, I'm a charter skeptic, so chances that I'll send my own 8th-grader to a charter high school are pretty remote. But her classmates are certainly open to it. Should kids who are achieving at or above grade level be concerned about attending a school where the vast majority of their classmates will be far below grade level? If not, what do CAT and Metro do to meet the non-low-achievers' needs?
Labels: Charters
12 Comments:
"both boasted the largest test-score gains of any San Francisco public high school in each of their second years"
This is pretty disingenuous, given that CAT's API score dropped 30 points in its third year, erasing 33% of the "gain" made in the second year. And it is a little misleading that the author of this puff piece failed to mention that the API scores of schools which test fewer than 100 students (as both MAT and CAT did in their first year of operation) are notoriously unreliable, so much so that the CDE releases them only with an asterisk, and the notation that they should be "carefully interpreted." So, when comparing second year scores to first year scores, the big "gain" should be "carefully interpreted", especially when much of it evaporates in the third year.
why do these educators blast the NCLB, but continue to put test scores out there as a source of accomplishment?
I wonder why folks are so quick to judge the piece and the schools without also wondering about the other traditional schools in SF, in comparison. Even with the 30 point drop mentioned by the first poster, CAT appears to have posted a net 60 point increase over the last three years when the average for the rest of the schools in SF seems to be little more that struggling to stay even. Maybe our question or Caroline's should be, "What isn't SFUSD doing to increase student achievement and test scores?" We might all be able to learn something from these schools.
To respond to poster #2, I think they use test scores as part of their accomplishment list to try to point out that their alternative models actually have "real world" validity too, not just fluff.
I'm glad you brought up the performance of the other SF high schools, because it gives me an opportunity to promote two of them whose performance puts most others to shame (including CAT) - Galileo and Balboa.
In just the time that CAT has been open (since 2004-05), Galileo's growth API has gone from 674 to 753 - a gain of 79 points. In that same time period, Balboa's growth API has climbed from 628 to 684 - up 56 points.
Because of the difference between "growth" API and "base" API, the amount that CAT's API has risen is less than it appears. The growth API in 04-05 was 658; in 06-07, it was 701 - up 43 points. Respectable, yes - but far from unique, and certainly not the highest gain when compared to what you call "traditional" schools.
leaving the new marin/msat kids aside; do the other schools have anything close to the racial/socio-economic mix of metro? galileo or balboa, specifically?
i think cat is pretty evenly divided 20% black/white/latino/asian/other; whereas i think ( not sure) metro is much higher black/latino.
The Calif. Dept. of Education has an interesting tool that assigns a score to school ethnic diversity. It takes some fishing around to find it, and I can't make a link work.
This year CAT shows high diversity and Metro doesn't. Other schools with high diversity scores include Balboa, SOTA and Gateway. The ones that have low diversity scores tend to be heavily Asian, reflecting the school district's makeup.
There are a lot of other factors to consider besides race, although you can find the racial makeup of each school here:
http://portal.sfusd.edu/template/default.cfm?page=school_info.profiles
Note that with 20% white students, CAT is one of the "whitest" high schools in the district. However, no one should assume that all white students are middle class, or that all students of color are poor.
You should also look at the percentage of students at each school who qualify for free or reduced price lunch (about 32% at MAT last year; about 49% at CAT; about 59% at Balboa; about 61% at Galileo); this gives a rough estimate for "socioeconomic status" of students.
Another key factor in how challenging a population is to educate is the % of English Language Learners (18% at MAT; 8% at CAT; 20% at Balboa; 22% at Galileo.)
the last post is very informative, thank you.
you are correct in that "white" doesn't mean middle class, and the info given helps me wade through all the statistics.
i have a feeling that SOTA and gateway have very few english language learners or qualifying students for free/reduced lunch! although their numbers reflect diversity.
i must say.. this is a great website!
"Diversity" is a really slippery term; there are many ways in which a school can be "diverse" even if the students look much the same. For example, when the school district started using mother's education level as a "diversity" marker, we started having schools with population of both Asian students whose mothers were educated through college in this country, and also Asian students whose mothers emigrated from rural China with little formal education - on paper, "diversity", but to the naked eye, "similarity".
Same thing with SES (socioeconomic status); two students can look much the same, but be from different economic backgrounds which give them very different perspecvtives on life, and perhaps provide very different challenges towards learning.
I recall recently seeing an article in a midwestern newspaper lavishing praise on a school which was supposedly educating a very large percentage of low income minority students, but was achieving very high scores overall. When I looked up the school to see what this miracle was really all about, it turned out that the school had 35% low income students of color; the rest were middle class white. I wondered what exactly about having 35% low income, or students of color, made a school qualify as such a paragon of "diversity"; a school with that student makeup here (even if you substituted Asian for white) would be blasetd as being "segregated" and "elitist." So I guess diversity is in the eye of the beholder, and it sometimes tells you more about the person claiming diversity than it does about the population they are supposedly describing.
One thing for sure about charter schools - no matter how much they want people to think that because of the number of students of color they enroll, this somehow means that they are taking on the "most challenging" students, this is absolute hogwash. The most challenging students to educate are those who have no parental support at home, no one to even look into the charter option and make a reasoned decision that this environment might be best for the particular child. By law, no student may be assigned to a charter school unless it has been requested, so students whose home lives are so chaotic that no one even fills out the high school application form (resulting in the student being assigned after those who do fill out the form, to any school which still has a vacancy) is ever assigned to a charter school. Likewise, students who run into trouble at their assigned high school may be transferred out to another school as a means of "dealing with" the problem; again, these students are never sent to a charter school.
So charters are not educating the kids who have no support at home, and they are not educating the troubled kids who bounce from school to school, falling farther behind each time, because of their inability to get along with others.
When charters start doing their share to help educate the most challenging kids in our district (not the "cream of the crop", whose parents are willing to do the work required to get into a charter school's "random" lottery - work which in some cases involves filling out a 9 page application!) then I will listen to their claims of "miraculous" test score gains.
so; how could a district like SFUSD deal equitably with those "most challenging" students?
"spread" them evenly throughout the district?
provide specific schools to address their needs?
create more "newcomer high"concepts.. but for longer terms?
or.. do we just let them fall to lowest common demoninator.. neighborhood school w/o any plan?
the previous post of private school tuitions becomes the relevant discussion for many families who don't want to deal with this!
These are all good questions. Here's another one - how does it help the most challenging students when boosters for schools like CAT make extravagant claims for their "success" with a student population which is less challenging? And if those claims result in more students with family support bailing on conventional schools, how does that help the more challenged kids?
well; i guess if more families bailed..into private schools, magnet public schools(SOTA), and charter schools (CAT); the kids left would be the self-selected ( through default) group of challenged learners.
problem solved.
it's all too overwhelming. and in today's chron front page blurb on the loss of science in schools; it gets even bleaker.
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