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| Distance from K to 8 at Success can be a downer |
Students of much-touted Success Academy charter school score too low on entrance exam for top city high schools.... The founding class of Harlem Success Academy 1 graduated on Friday.
The class started with 73 enrolled first-grade students in August 2006,
but 32 students were at graduation. None
of the 32 grads, however, will be attending any of the city’s eight
elite public high schools, even though Harlem Success Academy 1 ranked
in the top 1% on state math tests this year and in the top 5% in reading ... Citywide,
some 26,000 eighth-graders took the specialized high schools test in
the fall of 2012, and 20% were offered a seat. So you’d expect a minimum
of five or six students from Success 1 to score high enough to get into
one of the elite schools.... if Harlem Success students had matched even the 12% admission rate for
black and Latino students who take the test, you’d expect at least three
of the Moskowitz students to have been admitted.
Juan Gonzalez, NY Daily News... http://nydn.us/1jxExpu
The longer Success Charters are in business, the more they get exposed. This one is big. I'm sure the remaining 32 kids out of the 73 who began 8 years ago are fine. Does anyone know what happened to the 41 kids who were not there to graduate? Would a study of those kids be worthwhile as a check on Success claims of success? They will argue that kids move around in public schools too -- but most end up in other public schools. Did the missing 41 end up in other charters or mostly public schools? And how about this? If Eva's schools are so great an attraction - and we know people choose places to live based on schools - why did they just disappear? We also know that she is allowed wide leeway in the neighborhoods they can draw from. One would expect if parents really found Success such high quality you would see more than 44% stay around. Eva can answer some of these questions by making the data on the missing available - names and number please. (Can someone FOIL this given their claim they are public schools?)
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 12:36 AM
There
was Eva Moskowitz, head of this city’s fastest-growing and most
controversial charter school network, giving a fiery commencement speech
Friday morning at the first graduation of her chain’s flagship school, Harlem Success Academy 1.
“As
the founding parents of the founding school, you have made history,”
she told the audience of beaming eighth-graders in their caps and gowns
and their cheering relatives.
Days
earlier, Moskowitz had stunned many in this town by asking the state to
grant her 14 new charter schools, thus potentially catapulting her
network to 46 schools.
The first
Success graduating class, for example, had just 32 students. When they
started first grade in August 2006, those pupils were among 73 enrolled
at the school. That means less than half the original group reached the
eighth grade. And just 22 of Friday’s grads will be moving on to the new
Success Academy High School of the Liberal Arts, which is set to open
this fall, while 10 opted for other high schools.
None
of the 32 grads, however, will be attending any of the city’s eight
elite public high schools, even though Harlem Success Academy 1 ranked
in the top 1% on state math tests this year and in the top 5% in reading
— a fact Moskowitz herself proudly highlighted.
“We
are incredibly proud of our eighth-grade graduates . . . who are
proving that zip code does not have to determine destiny,” Moskowitz
said in a written statement.
A network spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday
that 27 eighth-graders took the Specialized High Schools Admissions
Test last fall, but none scored high enough to be offered a seat at one
of the elite high schools that rely on the test, like Stuyvesant,
Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science.
Citywide,
some 26,000 eighth-graders took the specialized high schools test in
the fall of 2012, and 20% were offered a seat. So you’d expect a minimum
of five or six students from Success 1 to score high enough to get into
one of the elite schools.
That
test, though, has long come under fire for the low number of black and
Latino students who make the cut each year — and all of the Harlem
Success graduates are blacks and Latinos.
The first class of Success Academy shrunk from 73 first-graders in 2006 to 32 graduating eighth-graders in 2014.
Still,
if Harlem Success students had matched even the 12% admission rate for
black and Latino students who take the test, you’d expect at least three
of the Moskowitz students to have been admitted.
“We were shocked that none of our students was offered a seat in a specialized high school,” one parent told the Daily News.
Asked about those results, a network spokesman said:
“Our
eighth-graders had challenging coursework in math, history, writing,
science, humanities and drama, robotics and debate. They also had to
take the challenging state tests this year. . . . We are proud that 22
are going to Success Academy’s highly rigorous high school and 10 are
going to other schools, among them highly selective schools.”
Did Countess Eva's staff mark their own tests last year, or were they were tests marked by outsiders? We now know that King Bloomturds data is BS...why not the Countess' test scores...?
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