Professor Diane Ravitch questions Green Dot’s claims of miraculous results:
“an article in the Los Angeles Times on August 17, 2010, which said about the Green Dot takeover of Locke High School, “First-year scores remained virtually unchanged and exceptionally low. This year, the percentage of students proficient in English rose modestly from 13.7 percent to 14.9 percent; in math, from 4 percent to 6.7 percent.” When he was interviewed for that article, Mr. Petruzzi did not question the data. Instead, he told the reporter that keeping enrollment high was more important than test scores. He may well be right, but the data support my point that the conversion of Locke to a charter did not produce an educational miracle.
As for the cost of Locke’s turnaround plan, according to an article in The New York Times on June 24, 2010, it will run to $15 million over four years, mostly supplied by private sources. In that article, Mr. Petruzzi agreed that the added cost was $15 million, which is more than double what the federal government will make available to other turnaround schools. As the Times reported:
“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Skeptics wondered if the effort was replicable. How many schools will be able to spend $15 million to get increased attendance and modest test score gains?”
The entire article is a brutally honest assessment of the difficulties in turning around one of the most persistently low-performing schools in the country and that the process takes hard work, self-reflection, and TIME. Your response, Joanne, is to reference Ravitch’s bizarre criticism that dramatic change hadn’t occurred after one year. Who’s more out of touch with reality here: Green Dot or Ravitch?
The point Professor Ravitch makes is that there are no miracles in public education. The purported miracles are generally just deceptive marketing for a particular brand or organization.
It takes time, hard work, and RESOURCES to improve a school. There is no magic sauce. And the idea that Green Dot has figured it out any better than others is a fallacy.
As charter corporations increasing compete with local public schools for students and resources, we need to make sure we keep the conversation data driven and not let stories or marketing exaggerations drive public policy.
Joanne S. Jennings, you and Professor R. are defending abysmal failure. It would be one thing if we were talking about a failed company like Global Crossing, and you were asking everyone to invest in it. Since it doesn’t exist your tremendously ill advised opinion would have no effect. It is impossible to buy Global Crossing, so your advice would have no harmful effect other than wasting people’s time. However, this case is altered. Locke High School is a bona fide miracle. It was a miracle that Steve Barr convinced a principal and the majority of the teaching staff to sign over control of the school. It was a miracle Petruzzi and his team were able in an incredibly short time period were able to assume operational control and rapidly improve. Re-read the first paragraph. Less than 5% of the students at best graduated from college. More probably it was 1 or 2 percent. Now Green Dot has increased the number of high school graduates many times over, and 53 percent of the seniors are attending college instead of 5%. If you truly cared about the children in our city and others in our country who are forced to go to similar failed schools, you would rejoice at the success of Green Dot. Instead, you advocate not only a failed public school system, but one that actually does grave harm to the lives of children. Attending a pre-Green Dot Locke High School is like forcing children to attend an educationally lead lined, asbestos covered, and mold ridden school that results in a 25% high school graduation rate and a 1% college graduation rate. You must be in denial, because I refuse to believe you could be so deliberately callous about the lives of these young people.
The fact that high quality education requires resources?
The fact that private organizations like Green Dot are not inherently better than public ones?
The fact that these supposed miracles (like the Green Dot example) have been consistently debunked with actual data?
Are you suggesting that privatization via charter schools is the only way to bring resources to starved public services? If so, you are artificially restricting our policy choices.
How about adequately funding public education? Why should any child attend a school with mold and lead and asbestos? Do we really need a private entity to correct that?
California has underfunded its public schools for decades as a result of Prop 13 and other bad, ideologically-driven policy decisions. That underfunding has been particularly damaging to high-poverty communities that lack the ability to offset the inadequate state funding with parental contributions.
I repeat - We should NOT be making public policy decisions based on marketing stories.
And insulting those who speak truth to power is not going to shut us up.
You are ridiculous. What do you not understand about less than 5% of Locke students who entered the freshman class graduating from college? You care about rhetoric. Here is a failed public high school that is now a successful public charter high school. Read the first paragraph again. “The Alain LeRoy Locke High School opened in 1967 to provide a safe and secure place for learning. It was supposed to be an antidote to the tensions that led to the 1965 riots in the surrounding Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. Four decades later, however, violence and chaos were the norm at Locke, and the school had become emblematic of systemic failure. Of the 1,000 students who entered as freshmen in 2003, just 250 graduated in 2007, and about 50 ended up enrolling in college. (A much smaller number actually earned a college degree.) At best, that’s a 5 percent success rate. Such dismal results landed Locke in the bottom 1 percent of all California high schools.” Then the article that you apparently can’t read due to your ideology and extreme denial of the truth points out: “Most recently, 53 percent of the 2010 entering ninth grade class (the graduating class of 2014) enrolled in college—a 10-fold increase from just six years before. These results represent important progress toward Green Dot’s ultimate goal with all its schools: that every student graduate from high school prepared for college, leadership, and life.” If you cared about students and not union politics, you would weep that such equity and justice has reached into Watts - a place where justice and equity have rarely been on display. True, funding for California is pathetic. But the failed traditional public schools would only squander any additional funds. New Jersey has funded the poorest 28 school districts in the state at nearly twice the national average for the past 30 years. NJ on the NAEP 8th grade reading exam ranks 50th out of 51 states (including DC) for the size of the achievement gap. Your union has written the laws and regulations in Sacramento, Trenton, Albany, and in nearly every state capital to the extreme detriment of our poor urban youth, Black and Latino. It is a system designed to serve adults, and so it is designed to fail students. Learn the truth. Stop living in denial, and please stop opposing giving poor Black and Latino parents the same rights that most affluent white parents enjoy - the right to choose which school their child attends.
Judging by your rude, illogical and inaccurate comments, Green Dot management is very touchy about its record.
Your disdain of fair funding for public schools and your knee jerk attack on unions is very consistent with privatizers’ ideological agenda. You comments suggest that you hate public education and love charter schools precisely because they are private.
I love public education and, although a parent and not a school teacher, am very grateful for public education unions that protect my child’s school from people like you.
You also need to check your NJ data, which is as inaccurate as the rest of your arguments.
First, there are 31 former Abbott districts in the state, not 28.
Second, Abbott funding has not been around for 30 years. Some of the earlier court rulings go back that far, but not the higher funding levels.
Third, New Jersey is consistently a national leader in public education outcomes. Abbott funding actually resulted in a significant narrowing of the test scores between wealthy and low-income students.
However, like other standardized tests, NAEP scores reflect family income. New Jersey has some of the wealthiest and most impoverished communities in the county. A gap in test scores is inevitable unless that poverty is addressed.
And your supposed concern for Black and Brown folks is not convincing. What you really want is to take away our democratic rights so you can force your privatization agenda down our throats and grow your revenues on our children’s backs.
You are not shutting me up or shutting me down, no matter how rude and ill-informed your comments. You are just further revealing the “character” of Green Dot’s management.
It is all about setting expectations, providing support systems and the funding….charter/private/public….they work if they are properly funded for teachers, assistants, security, pscyhologists and psychiatrists, equipment, computers, books and athletic equipment. The problem starts in pre-school….that is why pre-school must be publicly funded for all children so they can get an early start on pre-reading and math skills. I am a former teacher of ESL in a public school, myself a product of a public school education and sent both my sons to public school through high school and college.
COMMENTS
BY Joanne S. Jennings
ON September 17, 2015 01:22 PM
Professor Diane Ravitch questions Green Dot’s claims of miraculous results:
“an article in the Los Angeles Times on August 17, 2010, which said about the Green Dot takeover of Locke High School, “First-year scores remained virtually unchanged and exceptionally low. This year, the percentage of students proficient in English rose modestly from 13.7 percent to 14.9 percent; in math, from 4 percent to 6.7 percent.” When he was interviewed for that article, Mr. Petruzzi did not question the data. Instead, he told the reporter that keeping enrollment high was more important than test scores. He may well be right, but the data support my point that the conversion of Locke to a charter did not produce an educational miracle.
As for the cost of Locke’s turnaround plan, according to an article in The New York Times on June 24, 2010, it will run to $15 million over four years, mostly supplied by private sources. In that article, Mr. Petruzzi agreed that the added cost was $15 million, which is more than double what the federal government will make available to other turnaround schools. As the Times reported:
“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Skeptics wondered if the effort was replicable. How many schools will be able to spend $15 million to get increased attendance and modest test score gains?”
Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/myth-charter-schools/
BY James
ON September 17, 2015 03:09 PM
The entire article is a brutally honest assessment of the difficulties in turning around one of the most persistently low-performing schools in the country and that the process takes hard work, self-reflection, and TIME. Your response, Joanne, is to reference Ravitch’s bizarre criticism that dramatic change hadn’t occurred after one year. Who’s more out of touch with reality here: Green Dot or Ravitch?
BY Joanne S. Jennings
ON September 18, 2015 04:05 AM
James,
The point Professor Ravitch makes is that there are no miracles in public education. The purported miracles are generally just deceptive marketing for a particular brand or organization.
It takes time, hard work, and RESOURCES to improve a school. There is no magic sauce. And the idea that Green Dot has figured it out any better than others is a fallacy.
As charter corporations increasing compete with local public schools for students and resources, we need to make sure we keep the conversation data driven and not let stories or marketing exaggerations drive public policy.
BY Montaigne
ON September 18, 2015 10:39 AM
Joanne S. Jennings, you and Professor R. are defending abysmal failure. It would be one thing if we were talking about a failed company like Global Crossing, and you were asking everyone to invest in it. Since it doesn’t exist your tremendously ill advised opinion would have no effect. It is impossible to buy Global Crossing, so your advice would have no harmful effect other than wasting people’s time. However, this case is altered. Locke High School is a bona fide miracle. It was a miracle that Steve Barr convinced a principal and the majority of the teaching staff to sign over control of the school. It was a miracle Petruzzi and his team were able in an incredibly short time period were able to assume operational control and rapidly improve. Re-read the first paragraph. Less than 5% of the students at best graduated from college. More probably it was 1 or 2 percent. Now Green Dot has increased the number of high school graduates many times over, and 53 percent of the seniors are attending college instead of 5%. If you truly cared about the children in our city and others in our country who are forced to go to similar failed schools, you would rejoice at the success of Green Dot. Instead, you advocate not only a failed public school system, but one that actually does grave harm to the lives of children. Attending a pre-Green Dot Locke High School is like forcing children to attend an educationally lead lined, asbestos covered, and mold ridden school that results in a 25% high school graduation rate and a 1% college graduation rate. You must be in denial, because I refuse to believe you could be so deliberately callous about the lives of these young people.
BY Joanne S. Jennings
ON September 20, 2015 04:26 AM
Montaigne,
What specific fact are you objecting to?
The fact that high quality education requires resources?
The fact that private organizations like Green Dot are not inherently better than public ones?
The fact that these supposed miracles (like the Green Dot example) have been consistently debunked with actual data?
Are you suggesting that privatization via charter schools is the only way to bring resources to starved public services? If so, you are artificially restricting our policy choices.
How about adequately funding public education? Why should any child attend a school with mold and lead and asbestos? Do we really need a private entity to correct that?
California has underfunded its public schools for decades as a result of Prop 13 and other bad, ideologically-driven policy decisions. That underfunding has been particularly damaging to high-poverty communities that lack the ability to offset the inadequate state funding with parental contributions.
I repeat - We should NOT be making public policy decisions based on marketing stories.
And insulting those who speak truth to power is not going to shut us up.
BY Montaigne
ON September 20, 2015 09:11 PM
You are ridiculous. What do you not understand about less than 5% of Locke students who entered the freshman class graduating from college? You care about rhetoric. Here is a failed public high school that is now a successful public charter high school. Read the first paragraph again. “The Alain LeRoy Locke High School opened in 1967 to provide a safe and secure place for learning. It was supposed to be an antidote to the tensions that led to the 1965 riots in the surrounding Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. Four decades later, however, violence and chaos were the norm at Locke, and the school had become emblematic of systemic failure. Of the 1,000 students who entered as freshmen in 2003, just 250 graduated in 2007, and about 50 ended up enrolling in college. (A much smaller number actually earned a college degree.) At best, that’s a 5 percent success rate. Such dismal results landed Locke in the bottom 1 percent of all California high schools.” Then the article that you apparently can’t read due to your ideology and extreme denial of the truth points out: “Most recently, 53 percent of the 2010 entering ninth grade class (the graduating class of 2014) enrolled in college—a 10-fold increase from just six years before. These results represent important progress toward Green Dot’s ultimate goal with all its schools: that every student graduate from high school prepared for college, leadership, and life.” If you cared about students and not union politics, you would weep that such equity and justice has reached into Watts - a place where justice and equity have rarely been on display. True, funding for California is pathetic. But the failed traditional public schools would only squander any additional funds. New Jersey has funded the poorest 28 school districts in the state at nearly twice the national average for the past 30 years. NJ on the NAEP 8th grade reading exam ranks 50th out of 51 states (including DC) for the size of the achievement gap. Your union has written the laws and regulations in Sacramento, Trenton, Albany, and in nearly every state capital to the extreme detriment of our poor urban youth, Black and Latino. It is a system designed to serve adults, and so it is designed to fail students. Learn the truth. Stop living in denial, and please stop opposing giving poor Black and Latino parents the same rights that most affluent white parents enjoy - the right to choose which school their child attends.
BY Joanne S. Jennings
ON September 25, 2015 12:07 PM
Montaigne,
Judging by your rude, illogical and inaccurate comments, Green Dot management is very touchy about its record.
Your disdain of fair funding for public schools and your knee jerk attack on unions is very consistent with privatizers’ ideological agenda. You comments suggest that you hate public education and love charter schools precisely because they are private.
I love public education and, although a parent and not a school teacher, am very grateful for public education unions that protect my child’s school from people like you.
You also need to check your NJ data, which is as inaccurate as the rest of your arguments.
First, there are 31 former Abbott districts in the state, not 28.
Second, Abbott funding has not been around for 30 years. Some of the earlier court rulings go back that far, but not the higher funding levels.
Third, New Jersey is consistently a national leader in public education outcomes. Abbott funding actually resulted in a significant narrowing of the test scores between wealthy and low-income students.
However, like other standardized tests, NAEP scores reflect family income. New Jersey has some of the wealthiest and most impoverished communities in the county. A gap in test scores is inevitable unless that poverty is addressed.
And your supposed concern for Black and Brown folks is not convincing. What you really want is to take away our democratic rights so you can force your privatization agenda down our throats and grow your revenues on our children’s backs.
You are not shutting me up or shutting me down, no matter how rude and ill-informed your comments. You are just further revealing the “character” of Green Dot’s management.
BY Amy Geffen
ON October 1, 2015 11:34 AM
It is all about setting expectations, providing support systems and the funding….charter/private/public….they work if they are properly funded for teachers, assistants, security, pscyhologists and psychiatrists, equipment, computers, books and athletic equipment. The problem starts in pre-school….that is why pre-school must be publicly funded for all children so they can get an early start on pre-reading and math skills. I am a former teacher of ESL in a public school, myself a product of a public school education and sent both my sons to public school through high school and college.