Charter school cooks the books ("100% college acceptance" = fraud)

[Hannah Bell]

URBAN COLLEGE Prep Charter Academy--the nation's first all-boys charter school--has found an ingenious new way to boost its stats: cheating...The school reported in its very first year that it had broken its fundraising goals, attracting plenty of corporate funding support in addition to its allotment from the Chicago Public Schools system.

Yet according to the Interactive Illinois Report Card, the school failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress standards in 2009, with only 15 percent of students meeting or exceeding grade level proficiency in all areas of standardized testing, well below the Chicago district's 62 percent...

A Chicago Sun-Times article last week heralded the success of the school's 100 percent college-bound rate for its first class of graduating seniors. If it were true, the achievement would have been a very impressive feat...The question, of course, is what's become of the other 71 students who began in the 2010 class? And why did reporters not pick up on the shrinking pattern in Urban's good news?

...95 students out of 166 in fact gives the graduating class a college-bound rate of 57 percent, substantially lower than the 69.8 percent average rate of other Chicago public high schools, according to the Chicago K-12 Examiner...

http://socialistworker.org/2010/07/15/charter-cooks-the-books

[LWolf]

1. But...we're basing our ed policy on Duncan's "Chicago Miracle,"

just like GWB based his on the fraudulent "Texas Miracle," right?

Charter schools like the Prep Charter Academy are the reason that Obama, and Duncan, and Bill Gates, and Eli Broad, are so determined to flood the nation with more charter schools.

Right?

[Angry Dragon]

2. It is time to oust duncan

and get a real educator into the Department of Education

All I see him doing is selling public schools to corporations
Education is not about making money, it is about real education
to teach students how to think, not what to think

I did not mean to post to yours'........sorry

[LWolf]

3. That's okay. I agree with you. nt

[Hannah Bell]

4. what i want to know is, where are the many folks who cheered when the story about this school's 100%

college acceptance rate came out?

at the time they pointed to this as an example of the superiority of charters over public schools.

will they step forward now & say, "gee, we were wrong, maybe we should dig a little deeper into this matter"?

or will they just ignore the new evidence & continue to uncritically cheer every pro-charter story that comes out?

the original story got over 200 comments. how many will "the rest of the story" get?

every one of these "miracle" stories will turn out to be false. every single one.

[LWolf]

5. They'll ignore it because it doesn't support their position.

It's the American way.

[Hannah Bell]

6. that's my guess too.

[elehhhhna]

11. I knew that claim was horseshit as soon as it came out.

100% = cherrypicking

any idiot should have figured it

[izzybeans]

7. Umm... CPS's drop-out rate hovers between high 40s and low 50s.

So something isn't adding up here either. It's mathematically impossible for 68% of entering freshman to be accepted into a college. A false comparison was made here:"..95 students out of 166 in fact gives the graduating class a college-bound rate of 57 percent, substantially lower than the 69.8 percent average rate of other Chicago public high schools, according to the Chicago K-12 Examiner...".

Scroll down and look at district generated numbers, which researchers typically assume are "cooked" favorably for the district as well.

http://research.cps.k12.il.us/cps/accountweb/Reports/citywide.html

Either way, what matters most beyond reducing these drop out rates regardless of school types, is reducing both the debt burden of higher education and the astronomically large dropout rate in college. A huge % of those students who graduated from that school will not finish college because it is unaffordable. No amount of political hand-ringing on this issue will change that fact. We need action and honest arguments on all sides.

[Hannah Bell]

8. here's the story as originally presented at DU:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7908432

from this source:

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/tim-king-students-urban-prep-charter-academy-persons/story?id=10088324

you won't find any mention that the original class actually had 166 students, while only 107 graduated, an attrition of 35.5%.

most recently, 107 graduates changed to 95 graduates, for an attrition rate of 42.7%:

http://www.examiner.com/x-36525-Chicago-K12-Examiner~y2010m7d9-Its-a-miracle-Urban-Prep-loses-more-students-still-has-100-collegegoing-rate

Nor was there any mention in the article of the fact that the students' test scores were substantially below district & state averages.

http://iirc.niu.edu/School.aspx?source=School_Profile&schoolID=15016299025010C&level=S

equivocate as you like, the fact is, the shiny propaganda was misleading & false.

[opihimoimoi]

9. Charter schools are doomed from the start...its a business using cheap teachers, etc

Its a SCAM

[gratuitous]

10. Well, we all know what WON'T work for education, and that's more funding

See, that only works when you're trying to bail out financial institutions that are too big to fail, and you want to keep the talent that ran those institutions into the ground on the roster, so to speak. So you have to throw great big gobs of money at those titans of the free market in order to keep them operating at peak efficiency.

Schools? Heck, here's a piece of chalk, a cracked chalkboard and some leftover texts from the 1950s. Oh, and a class size around four dozen. Now get to work, you lazy overpaid teachers!

[Hannah Bell]

12. gee, it's a day later & only a handful of comments. where are the 200 who cheered

when urban prep supposedly had no drop-outs & everyone got into college?

come on, where are you? surely you want to be fair & impartial, eh?

eh?

[Hannah Bell]

13. k

[boppers]

14. Socialist worker cooks the story.

"100 percent college-bound rate for its first class of graduating seniors"

"what's become of the other 71 students who began in the 2010 class"

Well, duh, they aren't graduating seniors.

[Hannah Bell]

15. boppers doesn't get it.

[boppers]

16. Yes, I don't.

That would be an alternate point, that any simple number hides a large number of truths.

The article leads with a simple number.

That would not be my error.

[girl gone mad]

17. How did it go from 107 graduates to 95 graduates?

what happened to the 12 additional graduates they initially touted?

[proud2BlibKansan]

19. So what happened?

I notice you're eager to blame the source. But that's not where the lie originated.

[Fumesucker]

18. K&R, thanks for posting..

[blindpig]

20. What can one expect from a commercial enterprise?

Deceptive advertising is the norm.

k&r

[surrealAmerican]

21. What we have here is a failure to properly investigate news stories ...

... before publishing them. The Sun Times ought to be ashamed to have published what amounts to the charter school's press release without questioning the content. Sadly, that's par for the course these days.

[maryf]

22. K&R

On a tangent, I'd like to see a report on those 95 college bound kids a year from now and see how many stay in college...and another in two or four years to see who completed the program...actually I'd like to see such a report from the school where I teach, from all schools reporting on college bound graduates....