But Brill has it wrong. The student bodies aren’t the same. Here’s a breakdown, according to the NYC Public School Parents blog.
At P.S. 149, 20 percent of the kids are special education students; and 40% of these are the most severely disabled, in self-contained classes. Eighty-one percent are poor enough to receive free lunch, and 13% are English Language Learners. In 2008 (the latest available data) more than 10% were homeless.
[Correction: Eight-one percent is actually the "poverty rate" at P.S. 149 according to one May 2010 New York City government report on the school. It does not refer to free lunches. The city's School Report Card on P.S. 149, says that 68 percent of P.S. 149 students are eligible for free lunches and 2 percent for reduced-price lunch. The city's School Report Card on the Success Academy shows that 49 percent are eligible for free lunches and 21 percent for reduced-price lunch.]
Traditional public schools have to educate every student who is eligible to enroll. They can't counsel students out, as many charters do, or select who they want. This is not an excuse for bad schools. But it is part of the reason that the job of the traditional public school system, which still educates about 95 percent of all schoolkids, is far more complicated than many reformers today would have you believe.
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profession because it will identify effective teachers as ineffective and ineffective teachers as effective. Some bad teachers will be fired but some good ones will too. Others will leave in disgust.
That’s what happened, for example, in New York City when Carolyn Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, learned that her “value-added” score made her the worst eighth grade teacher in the entire city. The score of course didn’t reflect that her students already scored near 100 percent proficiency and were doing advanced math — but the formula didn’t care.
The value-added formulas actually compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance, as Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas wrote here. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, he wrote, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not.
No, Abbott’s case wasn’t an aberration. Lots of scores are wrong. Yet state after state insists on foisting this on teachers and even principals.
• CCA’s owner/operators receive a management contract that pays them close to $1 million a year (a rate that is higher on a percentage basis than what Cherokee County currently spends on our public schools). These funds are above and beyond the additional, regular operating money that charter schools receive from the school district.
• CCA’s owner/operators were not required to purchase a guaranteed bond (a form of insurance) that pays the school district in the event the CCA closes midyear (and dumps over 1,000 students back into the system).
ATLANTA — The committee campaigning for the passage of a charter-school constitutional amendment on the November election ballot is getting nearly all of its funding from outside Georgia.
The bulk of that money comes from a Walmart heiress and from companies that operate charter schools, according to a report the group submitted last week. Meanwhile, a committee working to oppose the amendment is funded entirely by Georgians, including many educators and administrators.