Here is a little table on Charter School and regular DC Public School attrition or growth, based entirely on the statistics displayed in a very recent DC OSSE report
( http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/dc-student-mobility-study/281/ )
I hope the table comes through legibly. If it doesn’t, please let me know and I’ll try a different tack.
It shows that there is very significant net attrition from the charter schools from October to June: 6.6% of the PCS student body left, for reasons that I can only guess at. (Many reasons have been proposed, including expulsion and informal push-outs.)
There is essentially no overall attrition from the regular public schools.
The columns labeled as “% change” and ” # changes” are counting from October. Negative numbers mean a loss of students; they are either indicated with a negative sign or parentheses.
Let’s look at this as a graph:
So, yes, there is a very significant attrition from the privately-run, publicly-funded DC charter schools — but not from the regular DC public schools -- as the academic year progresses. Anybody who says otherwise isn’t telling the truth!
What’s more, it looks like the ‘pushout’ is indeed a bit higher from March to April than in most other months (except from October to November), which is what a number of parents and teachers have been complaining about: students who charter school administrators don’t think will do well on the DC-CAS NCLB/RTTT exam, get pressured to leave.
And of course, the charter schools get to keep the funding for all of the thousands of students who are forced or pressured to leave: another point that parents and teachers have been complaining about.
All of which is sort of, if not perfectly, according to law and intention.
The intention is to remove “public” from any say in how schools are run, except as consumers. And, as in the market, them that has the most money gets the best education, and woe to those who don’t have any money or influence: their kids get the very worst there is.
(It would be nice to have a good, personal description of what it’s like in all of those sectors… Maybe in a different post.)
