by Alain Jehlen in Schools and Youth
Posted on August 17, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Last Modified on August 26, 2009 at 1:34 pm
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In light of the recent Globe investigation that found charter schools generally enroll fewer children with disabilities and fewer children who don’t speak English fluently than district public schools, I thought it would be interesting to compare Prospect Hill Academy with the two districts where it is based, Somerville and Cambridge.
Here’s what the state Department of Education says:
| “limited English proficient” % | special education % | |
| Somerville | 16.8 | 22.7 |
| Cambridge | 7.1 | 22.1 |
| Prospect Hill Academy | 1.7 | 6.6 |
These numbers don’t prove the school is purposely selecting students, but I do know of a kindergarten special education teacher who had students turned away by Prospect Hill Academy.
At any rate, the numbers do show that test scores at the charter school can’t usefully be compared to those of the Somerville school district.
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What reason was given by PHA when the special ed teacher’s students were turned away? I hope she comments on this.
It would be insightful to get comments from the respective school administrations on this issue.
Are the test scores being used to compare these schools against each other? If so, are the scores reported without qualification about the student populations?
I wonder how the ESL and special ed services compare among these schools?
It would be good to have links back to the Globe’s article and the Dept. of Ed. report.
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I’ve added links to the Globe article and to the Department of Education school and district profiles.
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Prospect Hill Academy requires an entrance exam in order to place kids in the proper grade. At least one special ed kid that I know of was told she would be required to repeat a grade. This was not acceptable to her parents, so she did not attend PHA. That may be the way that they keep the numbers of special ed kids down. Also, because the numbers of SPED kids at PHA are so low, they probably don’t have the dedicated staff for special ed. That would also discourage parents from sending their kids with special needs there.
I don’t think that charter schools are directly comparable to regular public schools for that reason. However, they may serve a population that is not so measurable. A number of people have told me that they preferred to send their kids there because they feared that the average student would get lost in the system of a big public school. PHA has very strict disciplinary guidelines(no homework equals detention). A kid that might tend to slack will be more firmly encouraged to toe the line than they might at the regular Somerville Public Schools. Certain cultures also tend to prefer the mandate of strict behavioral conduct. I think that a large portion of our Haitian population use the charter school. (Sorry, I don’t have numbers.)
The Choice Program at the Healey is a hotbed of active parents who put a lot of energy and talent into supporting their kid’s education. Many of them transfer to the charter, but this is becoming less of the case in recent years.
The interesting thing is that Somerville High is actually smallish (and getting smaller), so that the average student is less and less likely to get so lost as they may used to have, say maybe 15 years ago. Anecdotally, low performing and high performing students at SHS are said to be well served.
The stuff that PHA has that made me consider it for my kids were the strong emphasis on Spanish, the inclusion of Drama in the ed program, and the slightly longer school day. They’ve stayed in the regular public schools, though, (grades 8 and 11 now)and seem to be doing fine. The art, music and sports programs are more varied and probably better than at PHA. It’s a shame the current budget crisis took the wind out of the sails for bringing back languages in the middle school grades. Vince McKay was championing that cause, but now it ain’t happening. C’est la vie.
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It is my opinion that certain other elementary schools in Somerville are selective too. I am not a fan of the process for my children to go to an elementary school in Somerville when the time comes. I can almost bet that my sons will not get into Brown since we live in Ward 3.
Also, I use a website called http://www.greatschools.net and am able to see what each elementary school does and doesn’t do. I like the site because it is not biased towards or against anything and I can make up my own mind. I can see the pass/fail rate of the MCAS and can say without a doubt that my sons will not go to any elementary school in our area. Our children will either go to St. Catherine’s or we will move.
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Janine – the demand has picked up to the point where if you want to get your kids into the Brown School first grade, you essentially have to get them into the Capuano for pre-K, then apply to get into the Brown kindergarden. This wasn’t the case five years ago.
Residency has nothing to do with it (should it? that’s a topic to be discussed separately): we’ve heard of parents who had a child in private kindergarten and couldn’t get into the first grade at Brown even though they live on the same block as the school. So it’s pre-K, K, and in.
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My impression of Alain’s post was that MCAS scores do not reflect the quality of teaching at public schools, because the profile of the student body is so different from that of some charter schools. Janine flat-out rejects that interpretation, or maybe she is just ignoring it? Her response does, however, serve to remind that the selectivity may be on the part of the parents rather than the school. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that decisions on funding not ignore those differing profiles.
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Tricky – my son’s birthday is September 7 so public school will not take him until he is 5 for pre-k. St. Catherine’s will take him regardless of being born after September 1. They told me that it is 7 days, not 7 weeks after the cut off date. I was told about residency from the Somerville Public School system when I called to find out how to register him. Residency is not the top one but it is taken into consideration.
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Two responses: to the larger, charter school issue, and to Janine D.
1. Not related to Prospect Hill itself, but to charters in general — I was part of an interview committee with a candidate who was currently an assistant headmaster in charge ofr discipline (not sure of her actual title) at a charter school in Boston. She said that she was under pressure by the administration to kick out kids who had repeated disciplinary problems. These kids would go back to their school district. So that’s another potential population not being educated at charters, if it’s true in general at charter schools.
2. Janine, I had the opposite experience — a child who turned 5 in August. He entered K at 5 years, 3 weeks old, and has done fine in school academically, finding a few subjects challenging. BUT by grade 4 I wished I had kept him back a year. He was in class with some boys 2 years older because they were born in SEpt or Oct. and were held back. Also, the girls matured much faster than the boys. I think the extra year would have given him more confidence. I’ve heard the same from the parents of other boys in this situation, not sure about girls. Just something to think about.
Also, I would trust visits to the classrooms more than a website that seems based on parents’ ratings (and only a handful of parents). I happen to like the Brown School, but have friends equally happy at other Somerville public schools. It is harder to get a seat in a 1st grade class at Brown these days, and kids transferring from other
Somerivlle public schools have priority over those from private schools. There’s usually more space after grade 1, or if you’re willing to stay on the waitlist all summer.
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Interesting discussion! For a review of the District’s school registration procedures please visit the Parent Information Center of our website, http://www.somerville.k12.ma.us/pic.
PIC Director, Regina Bertholodo, reports that in the 2009-2010 school year, 96% of students were placed in their parent/guardian’s first choice school and 4% were placed in their second choice school.
Living in Ward 7 is not a detriment to someone who wants their child to attend school in Ward 1. However, children who attend public kindergarten programs in School X are given preference for placement in available Grade 1 seats in School X (over students transfering from another school in or out of the District).
Warmly,
-gk-
Gretchen Kinder
Coordinator of R&D, Public Information and Grants
Somerville Public Schools
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I have, and continue to, work with Charter, public, private, college, and DYS students. You’d be surprised at how similar all of them are. The most spectacular – from a Charter in California – talked his way into three years of a rich scholarship at Harvard, including a half dozen trips to Sri Lanka where he started a community organization. There are very bright kids everywhere, and, increasingly, when schools recognize that kids-teach-kids more than teachers or libraries or laboratories do, schools reflect the communities their students and faculty create – in classrooms, labs, libraries and activities. (I learned that peer “schtick,” incidentally, from Sandy Jencks when I was courted by Harvard Ed 40 years ago this Fall. I ended up going to UMass where the faculty were better, but Sandy was probably right.)
Prospect Hill is an exceptional Charter School. Quite good, particularly for pre-college, since their placement rates – and rates of scholarships – are quite high, particularly in competitive institutions. That doesn’t say anything about elementary, however, where their history (founded as an almost-proprietary school by Europeans) may still echo. In high school, their focus on projects is both creative and effective, and, as a small school, they engage shy kids quite beautifully.
I’d like to warn people about GreatSchools (http://tinyurl.com/mek2mr), however. Not because they’re bad, but, rather, because there is more to get from easily available public sources, and more reliably (see particularly, here http://tinyurl.com/lysq7o). Another source, by the way, is Standard & Poor’s School Matters (http://tinyurl.com/mykms) funded by the Gates Foundation. On the No Child Left Behind MCAS criteria, used by all three sources, both Somerville and Prospect Hill came out as pretty much a dead heat – with about the same numbers of goals met and not met, stress and not stress (http://tinyurl.com/nm9ykw). On the other hand, for years SHS gamed that system, by holding back 25% of its freshmen, to bump their 10th grade MCAS scores. If you really think that is good education, you’re more than welcome to choose Matignon, where the former SHS Headmaster shifted when he was challenged for just that game.
While there is a strong preference for small schools among groups like the Gates and Lucas Foundations, there is no national statistical, measured, or comparative data to suggest size has much to do with either student performance or eventual placement. I, myself, went to New Trier High School, on Chicago’s North Shore, that, at the time, had 5500 kids, dwarfing SHS, but also had a college placement rate of over 92%, dwarfing Prospect High’s numbers.
If it’s not size, and, since the dollars are roughly equivalent per kid, not money, the key questions ought to be what parents want for kids and what kids, ultimately, want for themselves. Somerville High has 42 highly engaged ethnic and language groups and represents the city of the future. Prospect Hill doesn’t have that many seniors. For some this range may be too broad; for others too messy or chaotic; for still others too narrow or elite. It depends.
For example, it depends considerably about how you – or your kid – view age and age cohorts. There are many alternatives to “social promotion” – including projects, after and in-school study, summer, and individualized activities – that make grade retention as bad an educational choice as it has long been a social stigma. Somerville is working away from retention as a standard practice, and Prospect Hill still uses it as a placement technique. Now skill level might actually make some sense if the k-12 system had a real, linear justification, but it doesn’t. The only reason we have eight grades, for example, is that the first graded school – the Quincy School in Boston – had eight rooms, and that was because of the contractor, not because of any magic formula or test score.
Somerville’s got a lot of work to do to really abandon retention, and, on the other end, to really prepare all students to start college without remedial coursework. Yet that is still a feasible and practical goal, which, for a public school system, is profoundly significant.
We know, for example, that kids retained – either at admission or at the end of a year – have a much, much higher dropout probability. They not only feel diminished, but they’re separated from their friends and supporters. Yet it took a long time for public schools to recognize this, and the worst ones (those with very poor graduation rates, etc.) still use retention routinely.
Like others on this list, I strongly encourage parents – and kids – to visit schools which they may want to join. Get to know some teachers and some kids. The School Councils all have open meetings, so visit some of them. Some are open and dynamic, listening to teachers, kids, administrators and others (like me), and you can get a good sense of the “school climate” from that and from visiting some classes. Do it. Don’t just talk about them. Get to know them. They’re where your taxes are going, and from where our future as a city will come.
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Good morning.
While I agree that, by definition, Prospect Hill Academy Charter School (PHA) serves a subset of students whose parents choose to attend an information session, apply to our lottery, and ultimately register for our school, I caution against reading too much into the statistics cited in the Globe article. Yes, on average, PHA serves a lesser percentage of students classified as LEP and Special Education than the traditional district public schols, but our numbers must be contextualized in two important ways.
First, PHA embraces the inclusion model when educating students with different learning needs. As such, all of our teachers, not just specialists, are supported and encouraged to employ strategies that specifically benefit LEP and/or SPED students but, in fact, equate to good teaching for all students. In turn, we are able to reduce the number of referrals in particular for SPED by incorporating effective teaching strategies as a matter of course in every classroom, i.e. breaking down large assignments into smaller chunks, presenting information in multiple modalities, etc. It is also important to note that in many districts, the numbers of students in Special Education are inflated due to referrals for issues pertaining more to behavior than disability. In his series entitled “The Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys,” Kunjufu documents the long history of overrepresenting boys of color in Special Education as a function of a system that is not set up to meet their learning needs. At PHA, we are extremely mindful of this research and by incorporating aspects of the “Response to Intervention” approach to supporting struggling students, we have had some real success in preventing unneccesary SPED referrals.
Second, and this is mostly a function of economies of scale (and perhaps a legitimate cause for criticism of charter schools in the aggregate), as a single school, PHA does not have the depth of supplemental resources that can be found in larger districts. As such, we are not always equipped to meet the needs of students who possess learning challenges that require the most specialized forms of instruction. We do our best with the resources that we have and certainly meet our legal/moral responsibilities, but some parents ultimately choose to send their children to schools that are set up more comprehensively to meet their children’s particular needs. By no means are we oblivious to the financial implications of this reality, but viewing it from an educational perspective, it is difficult to argue with parents who are appropriately advocating for the best educational outcomes for their children.
In truth, the arguments against charter schools have not changed much in the past 15 years, and they essentially boil down to three major factors: (1) the funding formula, i.e. the notion that charters are “taking money” from districts; (2) the admissions/lottery process, i.e. the notion that charters are skimming from the top and do not serve a representative subset of the overall school population; and (3) dissemination, i.e. the notion that charters have failed in their founding mandate to be laboratories of innovation that ripple beyond the finite numbers of students that they serve. While the first two criticisms are primarily legislative in nature, the third one is where we, as educators, have some real leverage. At the end of the day, we are all in this for the same reason: to provide our students with the very best education that they so desperately deserve. While we by no means profess to have all the answers, rest assured that we are asking the hard questions and are more than eager to engage in constructive dialogue about what we, and others, are doing to combat the achievement gaps that continue to plague our children and our society, to promote equity of access and opportunity for all students (regardless of race, class, and previous levels of educational attainment), and to ensure that every child is taught by an outstanding teacher every day that s/he is in school.
As Barry requested at the top of this thread, my goal here is to provide some perspective from the viewpoint of Prospect Hill Academy, and I am more than happy to participate in a forum to discuss the Globe article and/or other matters raised in the subsequent posts.
Regards,
Jed Lippard
Head of School
Prospect Hill Academy Charter School
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