caroline, a blogger from San Francisco who is vocally opposed to the KIPP schools there (and the one outside commenter on my blog - thanks!), is upset that some (many?) charter schools don't replace kids who leave the school. I can see her point, especially as it affects comparisons to traditional district schools who contend with new students over the course of the school year.
I know that some charters in Boston don't take any kids after the first few months of their intake year; others take kids only during the first few years, and then not afterwards. I can't speak to the specific policies of each school.
I think if you take the view that charter schools make this decision only to boost their scores, I can see why the district schools complain. Not only are their jobs made harder by this decision, but it may inflate the scores of the charters that use this policy.
However, let's look at this policy from the perspective of the students and teachers in the school.
Does it make the jobs of the teachers, who are already teaching a challenging group of kids, a little bit easier? Probably. Does it mean that the kids who stick around get a better education than if their classes were repopulated? Probably. Would district schools choose this policy if they could? Probably.
Let's look at a specific example. Let's say a group of kids entered a school in 5th grade with an average DRA level of about 3rd grade. Let's say that by the beginning of 7th grade, they're reading at a 6th grade level. They've made a year and a half of progress each year. What happens when you add a 7th grader into the school who's reading at a third grade level? Is that good for him? Is it good for his classmates?
Here's what I think. Adding a couple of new students early on in a cohort's time in the school tends not to hurt it too much. It's when schools take in a lot of new students into a cohort (often for financial reasons), that schools and their students (new and old) tend to struggle. Without naming names, I can think of a couple of schools in which this has caused problems over the past couple of years. One of those schools is generally strong; the other is weak. Both schools were weakened partially by taking a lot of new kids.
In the end, it's really a balancing act between what's best for the kids in the school and the school itself, and the needs of the kids on the outside looking in. Since I dedicate a ton of my time to the student I already have, and they have a ton of their own issues, I'd say that I have to side with them and not let it others. But I'm open to persuasion.
What do other people think?
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I assume that this issue is a funding-neutral one, i.e. that a charter school has an incentive to fill its vacated seats in order to retain funding from the state?
ReplyDeleteA bigger question that has to be examined is what kind of place this sort of complaint comes from. There seems to me to be an obsession with a)comparing charter and standard public school 'performance,' as if there is some kind of zero-sum game where the success of one implies the defeat of the other b)ensuring that charter schools operate under the exact conditions that standard public schools do in order for this comparison to be 'valid'. Which begs the question - if charter schools can't operate under different circumstances than standard public schools, then what's the point of having them? Which I think is really the point - people object to the very idea of charter schools for reasons that go deep, and all of this stuff about creaming etc. is just a way to vocalize that profound objection. Where that objection comes from needs to be put on the table.