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I picked a school that Ravitch mentioned. She criticized Urban Prep's "miracle" by noting that test scores among 11th graders were very low:


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

Quoting a Chicago Sun-Time article

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/5061648-417/help-for-charter-schools.html
Help for charter schools
By ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter May 29, 2011 12:37AM

"Board members approved the renewal of Urban Prep-Englewood�s charter even though the school failed to meet its accountability targets, due to low test scores.

Only 17 percent of Urban Prep juniors passed their state exams last year, far lower than the district average of 29 percent. On the positive side, that beats the 8.4 percent passing rate in the neighborhood schools that Urban Prep kids would normally attend.

Chicago Public School officials said they were impressed by the intense college-going culture at Urban Prep, which has won headlines and personal kudos from Emanuel for garnering acceptances for every senior to four-year universities two years running. Its first graduating class included one senior who was accepted to prestigious Johns Hopkins, despite a 15 ACT score � well below the 18 often accepted at far less exclusive schools.

CPS officials noted that they put Urban Prep on a short leash by requiring it to come up with a plan to pull it out of what would normally be considered �academic probation� by the fall of 2012."

<end of excerpt>

Blogger Mike Klonsky writes this about Urban Prep:

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2010/03/winners-losers-in-race-to-top.html

"The larger questions raised by Urban Prep's success have to to do with test scores, the cornerstone of Arne Duncan's school closing and turnaround policies under RTTT. Urban Prep's are nothing to write home about (I don't think test scores in general are anything to write home about, but that's me). According to the Sun-Times:

'The average ACT score of Urban Prep's all-black male student body -- 16.1 -- is below the Chicago Public Schools average of 17 but above the CPS black male average of 15.4. On state tests, Urban Prep kids fell below even the CPS black male average, with only 15.3 percent of juniors passing last year.'

It's interesting that the school's entire graduating class has been accepted to four-year universities even though only 12% of them met the college readiness benchmark in reading and only 36% met the benchmark in English on the ACT exam. And while UP's composite ACT score is a few (3) points higher than nearby high schools, it's important to remember that UP ISN'T a neighborhood school. It draws its students from 31 different zip-codes in the city."

<end of excerpt>

Sending lots of unqualified students to college is not something to boast about.

There have been many criticisms of the Brookings piece Bostonian posted.

I am open to the possibility that these additional services(including health clinics, discipline classes, classes for parents before the child is born) are not effective...this if of great interest to me, and I will continue to read up on it. BUT my overall impression from reading a good deal of work on this subject is that WELL-DONE birth-3 and preschool programs accomplish A LOT. They are CERTAINLY more cost-effective than programs later in life, and, need I point out, they cost a whole heck of a lot less than jail. Here is an abstract from a paper I recently read on this. Note how the annual return decreases as the kids get older. You have to start young, as in babies, as in expecting parents. I'm convinced.


Paper is Age 26 Cost�Benefit Analysis of the Child-Parent Center Early Education Program, in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Child Development.

In the NYT, Paul Tough links to and summarizes many of the reactions to Ravitch's column at

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/08/education-reforms-two-month-warning/
Education Reform�s Two-Month Warning
July 8, 2011

I agree with Mike Petrilli's pessimistic/realistic response,

http://www.educationgadfly.net/flypaper/2011/06/the-ends-of-education-reform/
The ends of education reform
June 7, 2011.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576500531066414112.html
Super Teachers Alone Can't Save Our Schools
By STEVEN BRILL
Wall Street Journal
August 13, 2011

A superstar teacher or charismatic principal rides to the rescue! Downtrodden public school children, otherwise destined to fail, are saved! We've all seen that movie�more than once, starting with "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me" in the late 1980s and more recently with documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery," which brilliantly portray the heroes of the charter-school movement. And we know the villains, too: teachers' union leaders and education bureaucrats who, for four decades, have presided over schools that provide comfortable public jobs for the adults who work there but wretched instruction for the children who are supposed to learn there.

One of the heroes of this familiar tale is Dave Levin, the co-founder of the highly regarded KIPP network of charter schools (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). But Mr. Levin would be the first to tell you that heroes aren't enough to turn around an American public school system whose continued failure has become the country's most pressing long-term economic and national security threat.

...

Mr. Levin acknowledged that he was at least free to try because he was not straitjacketed by a union contract. He could hire and fire as he pleased, set work hours, move the staff around�everything that he needed to make KIPP work.

"That's totally true," he said. But "if you tore up every union contract in the country, that would just give you the freedom to try�. Then you would have to train and motivate not 70,000 or 80,000 teachers"�the number now teaching in charter schools�"but three million," the approximate number of teachers in American public elementary and secondary schools.


As Mr. Levin explained to me, "You can't do this by depending only on the kinds of exceptional people we have around here who pour themselves into this every hour of every day."

"I feel overwhelmed, underappreciated and underpaid," a teacher told me one morning at one of the Success Charter Network schools in Harlem. Like KIPP, these are schools whose students consistently top the charts in achievement scores, often testing at or above the level of students in affluent nearby suburbs.

"I work from 7:30 to 5:30 in the building and then go home and work some more," the teacher told me. "I get disrespectful pushback from parents all the time when I try to give their kids consequences. I get feedback from my [supervisors], who demand that I change five or six things by the next day. I think we are doing a great job, so I keep at it. But there is no way I can do this beyond another year or two."

<end of excerpt>

According to the article, there are

47.4 million students in public schools
3.3 million teachers in public schools
1 million students in charter schools
72,000 teachers in charter schools

School reform predicated on finding 3.3 million "super" teachers will not work.

I propose we convert all public schools to the Summerhill model (A.S.Neill) and let the magic work itself... :-)

Anyone in a job where they are pushed to perform will feel this way. Coaching people on finding an emotional outlet and finding time for them to take time off will address this. Getting positive feedback from parents, supervisors, and forming a relationship with the same outside of work will sustain teachers through the days of doubt. Its another piece of the puzzle.



The tyranny of low expectations, again.

I do not think there are any "super" teachers, just highly motivated, well-led teachers. We have a leadership deficit and a motivation deficit.

Many of these media mentions throw the word "failure" around.

What would success look like in a public school?

What would success look like in a school where nearly every student is Black or Latino? Where 70% of the families that send their children to your school each day speak another language at home?

What would success look like in a school where 75% of students are indigenous, and most of the teachers are considered foreigners or colonizers? Where sending your child to a school with better test scores is not practical?

What does success look like for mentally retarded students or those with multiple disabilities?

Actually, it seems to me that expecting "super" teachers is setting an impossibly high bar.

I agree that most people who are being pushed to perform will feel overwhelmed, underappreciated, and underpaid.

I wonder what "indigenous students" means. Is there any evidence that having white teachers is the cause of any group's undperformance?