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Success Academy Posted Its Latest Test Scores. The Results Are Astounding.
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Topic Started: Nov 26 2015, 06:47 PM (52 Views)
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Nov 26 2015, 06:47 PM
Post #1
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https://reason.com/blog/2015/08/15/success-academy-test-scores-charter
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Free Minds & Free Markets
Success Academy Posted Its Latest Test Scores. The Results Are Astounding. New York's largest charter network outperformed traditional public schools in wealthy zip codes.
Success AcademyNew York released its annual test scores this week, and Success Academy, the city's rapidly expanding charter school network, posted remarkable results. Again.
Success Academy schools did well in English—68 percent of students were proficient, compared with 30 percent in the city over all—but in math, the scores were astonishing. Ninety-three percent of Success Academy test-takers were proficient in math, compared with 35 percent citywide.To put that into perspective, of the 1,282 public schools tested, just 12[*] were part of the Success Academy network, or 1 percent of the total. Yet 5 out of the 10 schools that scored highest in math were part of the Success Academy network. Of the 20 schools that did best in math, 9 were part of the Success Academy network. All twelve schools in the network were ranked in the top 40 for math. Results of this sort were unheard of before Success Academy arrived on the scene.
It's clear that Success Academy trounces the vast majority of public schools, but the rankings appear to show it dominating all but the very best. Are Success schools also markedly better than the other schools in the top five percent in New York City?
They are.
I asked statistician Aaron Brown to take a look at the data. He pointed out that a problem with the rankings is that "the chosen metric is so close to 100 percent for top schools that a big difference in ranking can represent a small difference in kids." So it could be that the quality of the education is really no better at Success Academy than at the other top schools.
To clarify what these results really mean, Brown crunched the numbers by putting all the Success Academy students, plus all the kids who go to the top five percent of other schools, in one pot. Then he took a random sample of 3,065 kids to see how they did compared to the 3,065 kids from Success Academy. This exercise is designed to answer the question: What if those Success Academy kids had been distributed among all of the top schools in the city? Would they have done better or worse in math?
Brown found that they would have performed significantly worse: 310 fewer kids would have gotten a level 4 on the exam, the top score. And 203 more kids would have received a 1 or a 2, which are considered to be failing grades. That would have been a tremendous waste of potential.
Of course, this assumes that all of these schools are drawing from the same pool. That's difficult to determine with any certainty, but we know that Success Academy students, who are selected through a random lottery, tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Seventy-seven percent of its students qualify for free or reduced school lunch. Ninety-two percent of test takers were black or Hispanic.

Success AcademyIt's fun to thumb through the data and see how Success schools trounced their counterparts in wealthy zip codes.
Two-bedroom apartments near Brooklyn's P.S. 321 tend to sell for more than a million dollars, in part because parents are desperate to get their kids into the famed Park Slope elementary school. At P.S. 321, 82 percent of test takes were proficient in math this year. That's respectable—56th highest in the city—but well below all 12 Success Academy schools.
At P.S. 87, which is P.S. 321's counterpart on Manhattan's Upper West Side (except the kids are even richer), 80 percent of students were proficient in math. That earned the school 67th place citywide, or well below every Success Academy school.
In an email, Brown noted selection bias might still partially explain Success' scores:
Any school will look good if its students are the brightest poor kids with the most parental support, and even affluent neighborhoods have some challenging kids and problematic parent situations. Still the overwhelming statistical performance of Success Academies versus even the best other New York public schools sets a high hurdle for anyone who wants to attribute the results to selection bias or test defects.
Let's not forget that when Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) was running for office, he told a teachers-union crowd that Success Academy's founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz, must "stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.”
Last year, I profiled Renee Lopez, a struggling student who was slipping through the cracks at a traditional public school. Then she won a coveted spot at Success Academy and got the help she needed.
For more on Success Academy's political fight with the mayor and the teachers union, watch Reason TV's profile of Eva Moskowitz, which I put together with Nick Gillespie:
[*] There are 32 schools in the Success Academy network, but the state combined 7 middle schools with their accompanying elementary schools in its data reporting. Twelve more schools haven't yet reached grade level to participate in the testing, and one school is a high school, which means students there take a different set of tests.
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UTB
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Nov 26 2015, 06:55 PM
Post #2
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Lets see what Walter Williams about minorities making the grade.
Walter E. Williams: Academic failure of black students a result of liberal racism
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The white liberal's agenda, coupled with that of black race hustlers, has had and continues to have a devastating impact on ordinary black people. Perhaps the most debilitating aspect of this liberal malevolence is in the area of education.
Recently, I spoke with a Midwestern university engineering professor who was trying to help an inner-city black student who was admitted to the university's electrical engineering program. The student was sure that he was well-prepared for an engineering curriculum; his high school had convinced him of that and the university recruiters supported that notion. His poor performance on the university's math placement exam required that he take remedial math courses. He's failed them and is now on academic probation after two semesters of earning less than a 2.0 GPA.
The young man and his parents were sure of his preparedness. After all, he had good high school grades, but those grades only meant that he was well-behaved. The college recruiters probably knew this youngster didn't have the academic preparation for an electrical engineering curriculum. They were more concerned with racial diversity.
This young man's background is far from unique. Public schools give most black students fraudulent diplomas that certify a 12th-grade achievement level. According to a report by Abigail Thernstrom, "The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement," black students in 12th grade dealt with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade; they wrote about as well as whites in the eighth grade. The average black high school senior had math skills on a par with a typical white student in the middle of ninth grade. The average 17-year-old black student could only read as well as the typical white child who had not yet reached age 13.
Black youngsters who take the SAT earn an average score that's 70 percent to 80 percent of the score of white students, and keep in mind, the achievement level of white students is nothing to write home about. Under misguided diversity pressures, colleges recruit many black students who are academically ill-equipped. Very often, these students become quickly disillusioned, embarrassed and flunk out, or they're steered into curricula that have little or no academic content, or professors practice affirmative-action grading. In any case, the 12 years of poor academic preparation is not repaired in four or five years of college. This is seen by the huge performance gap between blacks and whites on exams for graduate school admittance such as the GRE, MCAT and LSAT.
Is poor academic performance among blacks something immutable or preordained? There is no evidence for such a claim. Let's sample some evidence from earlier periods. In "Assumptions Versus History in Ethnic Education," in Teachers College Record (1981), Thomas Sowell reports on academic achievement in some of New York City's public schools. He compares test scores for sixth-graders in Harlem schools with those in the predominantly white Lower East Side for April 1941 and December 1941.
In paragraph and word meaning, Harlem students, compared to Lower East Side students, scored equally or higher. In 1947 and 1951, Harlem third-graders in paragraph and word meaning and arithmetic reasoning and computation scored about the same as — and in some cases, slightly higher, and in others, slightly lower than — their white Lower East Side counterparts.
Going back to an earlier era, Washington, D.C.'s Dunbar High School's black students scored higher in citywide tests than any of the city's white schools. In fact, from its founding in 1870 to 1955, most of Dunbar's graduates went off to college.
Let's return to the tale of the youngster at the Midwestern college. Recruiting this youngster to be a failure is cruel, psychologically damaging and an embarrassment for his family. But the campus hustlers might come to the aid of the student by convincing him that his academic failure is a result of white racism and Eurocentric values.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
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Snidely Whiplash
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Nov 26 2015, 07:40 PM
Post #3
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Well, we should all know black students are just as capable of academic success as any other group. We just have to have high expectations, and not living down to stereotypes.
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UTB
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Nov 26 2015, 08:12 PM
Post #4
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Well, I for one, am getting tired of Negroes whining about charter schools getting the "best" students. If a student has supportive parents, that cares about what he's doing, in most cases the student learns that education is best for him. Far too many parents whoop and holler about their child, when VERY FEW attend the PTSA every month. The parents in the lower sociological strata, very seldom attend any functions that attend PTSA has, except football and basketball functions. Blacks have been deceived into into making athletic heroes of their children with the the expectation that their son will get a football scholarship.
I now ask the question: Are their any Blacks that get scholarships besides a sport scholarship?
My granddaughter did and she's in Turkey right at the moment. She received the Fulbright Scholarship, and she's doing quite well at the moment. She never paid a penny for her education, because she was at the top of her class when she graduated. Due to her upbringing, she excelled in all of her classes, and did'nt have to pay any money for her education.
It's time to know that there are smart students, who ARE NOT sports figures, and the schools I mentioned, are a splendid example of students using BRAIN POWER!
Personally I don't really give a damn about sports figures on a football team, because in the end, twenty years down the road,because most wind up broke as hell.
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