Media: Fact-Checking Urban Prep's "100 Percent" Grad Rate Claim

At long last and after much prodding, a mainstream journalist has found a way to let readers know that Urban Prep's 100 percent graduation rate is based on the percentage of seniors finishing the year (107 of 107), not the percentage of entering freshmen (150) who've made it through to the end. 

Comments

[Chris Lehmann]

But why is there no mention that Urban Prep has been very happy to let people believe their 100% graduate rate for a very, very long time?

And all you had to do was check the history of their wikipedia page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Urban_Prep_Academies&action=history

The number of freshmen who started at the school was deleted the same day I wrote this:
http://practicaltheory.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/1232-Urban-Prep-and-The-Whole-Story.html

[Kate]

40 transfers in the first 3 years (and none in the final year) is certainly an interesting statistic. Sounds like weeding out, but is it initiated by the school or by the kids?

How do regular public schools report graduation rates? Kids who move away with their families may still graduate, and that's such a different picture than kids who are pushed to transfer out to raise the school's numbers.

[Bruce]

The question is still unanswered. We don't know how many of the 150 who enrolled graduated in four years, either at Urban Prep or another high school. Not all students who leave a school are failures. Many move and transfer for reasons other than academics. It is still possible that 100% graduate in four years - just not at Urban Prep.

[Bruce]

The question is still unanswered. We don't know how many of the 150 who enrolled graduated in four years, either at Urban Prep or another high school. Not all students who leave a school are failures. Many move and transfer for reasons other than academics. It is still possible that 100% graduate in four years - just not at Urban Prep.

[Alexander Russo]

educators in chicago have been talking about this for almost a year now -- especially since tim king is (or was) running for mayor.

king finally addressed the attrition issue in a recent Q and A, claiming that it was transfers not pushouts, but my chicago readers aren't believing it, by and large

http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/district-299/2010/11/quote-tim-king-explains-urban-prep-attrition-sorta.html#comment-324530

[Mullins]

If you think that's bad, you should check out the numbers reported by North Star Academy (part of Uncommon Schools) in Newark. Celebrated for 100% college admissions, yet they have only about a dozen seniors this year (and the students they started with were heavily creamed on the front end). They've skated by unquestioned on their "100%" college-going myth for years.

[CarolineSF]

That's what the SEED school in D.C. is like too. The New York Times magazine reported that it has a record of expelling 70% of its students between enrollment and graduation (the magazine clearly indicated that they were expelled).

A study of KIPP schools here in the SF Bay Area by the research organization SRI International showed that 60% of their students left the schools before completion; that those 60% were not replaced; and that they were consistently the lower-achieving students.

This is notable with the KIPP schools because they're middle schools (all in the study were) -- so these aren't students dropping out of school (at least unless they're going outlaw) -- they're transfers to other schools. Public middle schools replace students who transfer out, but the KIPP schools don't, so the 8th grade is far smaller than the 5th grade.

To clarify what I'm saying -- a high school like Urban Prep shows high attrition, but if it's compared to a public high school that also serves high-poverty students, the public high school is likely to have a high dropout rate. But there is nothing in public schools to compare to the attrition from those KIPP middle schools.

Largely, even when the press reports on this, reporters uniformly appear not to grasp the import, and tend to bury the information.

[CarolineSF]

Also, the practice of "counseling out" is notorious. So how do you distinguish between a student whose family is told by school officials that the school isn't the "right fit" and a student who "chooses" to leave?

A friend working in an Oakland, CA, public school that receives many transfers from a much-hailed charter middle school said the charter claims that the students leave voluntarily, but when the child and parent are both in tears when they show up in the public school office to transfer in, that's a flexible definition of "voluntarily."