by David Safier
Want to start a charter school, but you don't really have the knowledge or experience to offer a quality education for your students? Want to be able to scrimp a bit on salaries and supplies so you can give yourself a healthy salary and even have some money left over to contract with a school management company you happen to run on the side?
Here's my advice: start a school geared to African Americans, Hispanics and/or drop outs.
Now don't get me wrong. It's not easy educating students from these groups. Actually, they're probably the toughest groups to succeed with for a number of reasons that don't need to be restated here. To do a good job, you'd need to hire excellent, experienced teachers, spend as much money as you can on supplies, texts and computers and work your tail off yourself.
But if you don't care too much about succeeding educationally, if you're in it to run a successful business, go with underprivileged minorities and dropouts every time. Expectations are low. All you have to do is meet, or come close to meeting, those low expectations, and you'll be able to fill your school with students year after year.
If you open a charter for the most intelligent and motivated students, or even for moderately successful students, you'd better be good. Their parents will inspect every textbook and every assignment. They'll be asking their children what they did in school today and how good the teachers are, and they'll expect detailed answers. Their children will tell their parents if things aren't going well. Woe be to the director of one of those charter schools who's not offering the students a quality education.
A large number of charter schools are geared toward minority students and dropouts, and many of those don't have their students' best interests at heart. Imagine Schools, which I've posted about over the past few days and will continue to write about for awhile, says 51% of its students are from low income families — 39% black, 33% white and 22% Hispanic. If they were doing their best to educate those students, that would be considered well intentioned, even noble. But if they're running their schools on the cheap, that's deeply cynical. And based on what I have read, the management of Imagine Schools cares more about the bottom line than about education. That sounds deeply cynical to me.
So here's how it's done. Set up a charter school in a low rent area, preferably where the schools have bad reputations and they're bursting at the seams with students. Put together a beautiful brochure and a good sales pitch to let parents know how terrific your new school will be. Maybe call it a College Preparatory Academy to get the parents drooling. Let them know, of course, that their children will be getting private school quality educations for free. Chances are you'll have a waiting list before you open the doors in September. And so long as you don't completely screw up, you'll be able to keep your desks filled.
Drop out schools are easy to sell as well. Traditional schools are often happy to get rid of those students, and their parents will be overjoyed if you can keep their children in school. If the potential drop outs are off the streets and reasonably content, education is secondary. Most parents won't give you much grief even if their kids aren't learning anything. After all, they wouldn't be potential dropouts if they had been doing well in school before.
This is one of the dirty little secrets of charter schools — how many of them are set up to attract minority students and potential drop outs and aren't as concerned with education as with keeping the classrooms filled with students and the state money rolling in. It's a common enough practice, there's even a term for it: the sub prime education market, where you convince people without means they can have the house education of their dreams for their children, then make your money and leave them with broken dreams.
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Blah blah blah! Too many words wasted on these last blogs. Imagine Rosefield is Imagine’s “golden child”. This is not the typical Imagine school nor is it the typical student that Imagine targets in it’s diabolical plan to cash in. Rosefield has a student body with 20% minority and 35% free and reduced. let’s all take a moment and applaud Imagine’s outstanding accomplishments with these students and then let get back to what’s happening with the majority of their schools throughout the country. The real dialogue should be about the students that suffer that most economic oppression and are being sold a pretty picture with no subsistence behind it!
A.E.W.
Before we get further into this discussion, can you let me know who “we” are? You don’t have to, of course, but if it’s not a group, and you don’t have a tapeworm (thank you, Mark Twain), “I” would make more sense.
BTW, you didn’t respond to our argument above that goes to the heart of your post. Do you feel that Imagine is cherry picking the disadvantaged in AZ based on its school locations?
Hi Mr. Safier,
Thank you for the response.
You called our back of the book analysis ‘silly’, but we compared Imagine Rosefiled to every single elementary school in that zip code, thus using location as a proxy for demographics. We can tell you with much certainity that affluent, well educated parents are NOT driving their children to Suprise AZ to attend a charter school, no matter how well performing, and that all of these schools are drawing from the same demographics.
But since you asked here are the %Economically Disadvantaged for the above schools…
School,District,Reading Proficiency %,Math Proficiency %, Charter?, %Econ Disav. in Surprise, AZ 85379
—
Carden Traditional School Of Surprise, Carden Elementary, 89.3, 85.7, Yes, 32.7
Sonoran Heights Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 80.4, 84.0, No, 1.5
Sunset Hills Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 76.0, 76.2, No, 2.1
Imagine Charter Elementary School At Rosefield, Rosefield Charter Elementary School, 79.2, 74.5, Yes, 38.7*
Rancho Gabriela, Dysart Unified District, 75.8, 71.9, No, 2.9
Ashton Ranch Elementary School, Dysart Unified District, 69.6, 70.7, No,
Marley Park Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 71.8, 69.5, No, 1.7
Countryside Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 69.7, 69.3, No, 1.7
* – base on grades 3-5, from 2006 ADE report card. All other data from School Matters.
Do you have a suggestion for a better way to compare how Imagine Rosefield is doing compared to similar schools using ADE data and test scroes? We have ELL data if you would like to see that too.
We don’t want to leave any impression about charters, we are only presenting how Imagine Rosefield is performing compared to neighboring schools. You are the one making the case that Imagine schools are not performing. To us it looks like Imagine Rosefiled, the largest Imagine school in AZ, is performing. This may not be the case with the rest of the Imagine schools in AZ, we haven’t looked.
Maybe instead of calling us silly and questioning our motives, you could engage us in a reasoned discourse. We didn’t use name calling on any of your arguments or analysis.
Thank you.
AZ Ed, I don’t know who you are since you don’t use your name (absolutely fine by me), so I’m not sure I’m addressing a private individual or someone who is part of an organization that has a stake in defending charter schools.
Defend charter schools all you like. As I’ve said, I’m a supporter of a good, well regulated charter school system that makes sure the schools are spending their money for the students’ benefit and are doing their best to educate their students. And it’s always good to have a commenter who calls me on what I write. It keeps me honest.
Having said that, you should use a higher standard in your line of defense if you want to be taken seriously here. The analysis in your comment is meaningless. If you compare scores across schools, you also have to compare the students as well to show the schools have similar populations, which you haven’t done. It may be impossible to compare the students. But without an understanding of the student populations of the various schools, head-to-head comparisons are meaningless.
You want to leave the impression that charters do a better job of educating students than traditional schools. The problem is, the most recent and careful study of charter schools nationwide, conducted by Stanford University, concludes that students at charters in Arizona score lower on standardized tests than students at traditional public schools if you compare equivalent populations. I don’t know if Stanford got it right, but at least it’s not a silly comparison like the one you make, which begins with the conclusion you want to reach and works backward to the analysis you present.
We have no knowledge of Imagine schools, but let’s take a look at the largest Imagine charter school in Arizona, Imagine Charter Elementary School At Rosefield in Surprise, and compare it to surrounding schools (same zip code, using School Matters data)…
School,District,Reading Proficiency %,Math Proficiency %, Charter?
—
Carden Traditional School Of Surprise, Carden Elementary, 89.3, 85.7, Yes
Sonoran Heights Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 80.4, 84.0, No
Sunset Hills Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 76.0, 76.2, No
Imagine Charter Elementary School At Rosefield, Rosefield Charter Elementary School, 79.2, 74.5, Yes
Rancho Gabriela, Dysart Unified District, 75.8, 71.9, No
Ashton Ranch Elementary School, Dysart Unified District, 69.6, 70.7, No
Marley Park Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 71.8, 69.5, No
Countryside Elementary, Dysart Unified District, 69.7, 69.3, No
Data from http://www.schoolmatters.com/
Seems like Imagine is holding its own and out performing most of the district schools it competes against. We haven’t looked at its TerraNova scores but we would expect a similar correlation. Of course the irony here is that a another charter school is SIGNIFICANTLY outperforming them all.
In addition, according to its website Rosefiled uses Saxon Math in its curriculum (the same program used at BASIS) and an excellent phonics program called Spaulding.
Are all the Imagine schools in Arizona in low income, high minority areas? It doesn’t appear so, some are and some aren’t….
————-
Imagine Charter Elementary School At Cortez Park
3535 W Dunlap
Phoenix, AZ 85051
Imagine Charter Elementary School At East Mesa
9701 E Southern Avenue
Mesa, AZ 85208
Imagine Charter Elementary School At Rosefield
12050 N Bullard Avenue
Surprise, AZ 85379
Imagine Charter Elementary School At West Gilbert
14919 South Gilbert Road
Gilbert, AZ 85296
Imagine Charter Middle School At Cortez Park
3535 W Dunlap
Phoenix, AZ 85051
Imagine Charter Middle School At West Gilbert
14919 South Gilbert Road
Gilbert, AZ 85296
Imagine Charter School At Bell Canyon
18052 North Black Canyon Highway .
Phoenix, AZ 85053
Imagine Charter School At Sierra Vista
1746 Paseo San Luis
Sierra Vista, AZ 85635
Imagine Elementary At Desert West
6738 West McDowell Road
Phoenix, AZ 85035
Imagine Elementary At Glendale
5050 North 19th Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85015
Imagine Elementary At Tempe
1538 East Southern Avenue
Tempe, AZ 85282
Imagine Middle At East Mesa
9701 E Southern Avenue
Mesa, AZ 85208
Imagine Middle At Surprise
12050 N Bullard Avenue
Surprise, AZ 85379
Imagine Middle at Desert West
6738 West Mcdowell Road
Phoenix, AZ 85035
Ouch! Telling it like it is!
David, this is making my head hurt. What would have to happen for people to understand that a strong and healthy and vibrant public school system is the best kind of school system for our America – and then to get people to all pull together to make our public schools strong and vibrant and able to educate our children to become the citizens our America needs for the world to come???