Interesting. Now I am just curious... What is behind your not trusting what she wrote?
I picked a school that Ravitch mentioned. She criticized Urban Prep's "miracle" by noting that test scores among 11th graders were very low:
Astonishingly, the state Web site showed that only 17 percent passed state tests, compared to 64 percent in the low-performing Chicago public school district.
Yes, well...hmm. She was comparing Urban Prep to the test scores for
all the 11th graders in the entire city of Chicago. And she used the judgmental terms like "astonishingly" and "low-performing" to color her writing. I am a scientist and we are taught not to do that. The data is supposed to speak for itself.
I realized that she was comparing Urban Prep to the whole district. Then I learned that Chicago has
this many public secondary schools. Some are in poor neighborhoods. Some aren't. It didn't seem correct to compare an inner city school with schools in distant upscale neighborhoods where 90% or more of students pass the tests --- especially given all the data on the subject showing disparities.
So I compared Urban Prep's test scores to other schools in
its own neighborhood. The picture is much different. Robeson High school is about mile from Urban Prep.
Test scores there are scary low: in 2010, not a single student passed the science test, 1% passed mathematics, 4% passed reading and 2% passed writing. Compare to
Urban Prep: 16% passed science, 11% passed math, 25% passed reading, and 33% passed writing. Demographics at the two schools are nearly identical: >99.5% African-American, 98% low income. And remember that Urban Prep is new, and its students came from neighborhood schools. Note also that the school that Urban Prep replaced
had the lowest test scores of any school in Chicago the year before it was closed. Compare also to
TEAM Englewood , which is next door to Urban Prep and where the percentage of passing scores on the four tests are 3%, 8%, 12% and 16% in the order mentioned above. Now let's go to
Hope College Prep High School, which is about a mile north of Urban Prep. The percentage of students passing the four tests in 2010 were 12%, 16%, 9% and 15% respectively. Again, same demographics.
Urban Prep's website says that when they started,
only 4% of their students passed the state tests as freshmen. If this information is correct, it looks like there has been a big improvement among students at Urban Prep by the standards of standardized testing. Given that most of the students came from the neighborhood around the school, the claim doesn't seem unreasonable.
Compare to
Northside College Prep where 99% of the students passed all the tests. Or
Payton College Prep, where results are only slightly lower. The demographics in these schools are NOT like those at the other schools (racial diversity and only 1/3 low income). They are 16+ miles north of the other schools but not too far from each other.
To me at least, it seems disingenuous at best for her to criticize a charter school that's doing better than the public schools around it. I suspect that ideology drove a lot of what she wrote. I can't help but think that if she was
really trying to find the truth, she wouldn't have made such general statements or used such colored language.
From what I can see, Urban Prep is trying very hard to raise the expectations of its students. In the kind of environment surrounding them, I think this is really great. I doubt the same could be said of the schools surrounding it.
Phew.
Val
