More on Steve Brill's imperviousness to the facts

Steve Brill wrote a pro-charter article in the NY Times Magazine , comparing the results at PS 149 and Harlem Success Academy, the charter school that shares its building. Brill implied that they served the same sort of students. These were his exact words: "Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents."

Last week, Brill responded to online questions at EdWeek; one concerned the claims he made in his NY Times article:

Mr Brill, given the importance of these issues and the crisis in funding for public education today, I was troubled by the unbalanced nature of your recent NYT Magazine cover story. Specifically, Where was balanced discussion of conflicting research on the diversity of the charter school movement, showing that many charter schools - even in new york - underperform district schools; that charter schools enroll significantly smaller proportions of ELL and SPED students than district schools; and that some charter schools do counsel out students, in which cases declining cohorts of students correlate powerfully with increasing test scores? Where was serious discussion from experts on both sides of the education reform divide of the inadequacy of standardized testing as a metric for evaluating student and teacher performance? ....

This is how Brill responded:

The way i stepped through that debate was 1) to acknowledge clearly that not all charters schools are good for kids (didn't you see that statement?); and 2) to use a building that had two schools in it -- one a charter, one a traditional public school -- and compare expenses and results side by side. I labored over this, and think the comparison is valid FOR THOSE TWO schools. And taxpayers pay nothing extra for the school choice that these two schools provide, so i don't understand you statement that the government is using "valuable funding as a stick to spur undemocratic reforms." Choice is usually thought of as being pretty democratic. As for empirical evidence, one thing is clear, we keep spending more money than all other countries with worse results. And the charter i spent time examining spends less with better results.

First of all, nowhere in his article or the above is it mentioned that Eva Moskowitz raises millions of dollars for her schools. According to this spreadsheet, she raised $2.4 million for her four charters in 2009, and pays herself a very hefty salary.

Secondly, it is clear that Steve Brill still hasn't learned a thing.

Numerous blogs have shown since the publication of his article that these two schools have widely different student populations.

Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, The Answer Sheet - Charters vs. public schools: Behind the numbers; Kim Gittleson in Gotham Schools, Brill-ing Down: Adding to Steven Brill’s NYT Magazine Report, and I at the NYC public school parent blog, Journalistic malpractice at the NY Times, have all pointed out in detail the disparity in the sort of students enrolled in Harlem Success Academy compared to PS 149; and how the charter school enrolls far lower numbers of free lunch, English language learners, sped students with serious learning disabilities, and homeless kids.

Here are the figures side by side (taken from each school's NY State report cards from 2008-9, Kim's analysis of sped reports and homeless figures from here and here):

STUDENT CHARACTERISTICS
2008-9	PS 149	Harlem Success Academy
% free lunch	68%	49%
% Limited English Proficient	10%	2%
% IEPs	21%	14%
% of IEPs; more than 20% of day	67%	35%
% homeless students	10%	1%

Apparently, Brill is impervious to correction, with PS 149 serving many more poor students, five times the percent of LEP students, twice as many seriously disabled students, and ten times the number of homeless.

Taking a closer look at the state report cards, I also examined the data relating to teachers and staff:

TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS
2008-9	PS 149	Harlem Success Academy
teacher turnover (2007-8)	22%	50%
total no. of teachers	41	27
% no valid certificate	10%	15%
% teaching out of certification	29%	15%
% <3yrs.exp.	20%	30%
% classes by teachers w/out appr. certificate	27%	18%
total no. of other professional staff	7	26

What’s so interesting about this? HSA had twice the teacher attrition than PS 149 in 2007-8 (the latest available data); with fully half of all teachers turning over that year.

This is not the sign of a good working (or learning) environment. Apparently as a result of this high level of attrition, 30% of HSA teachers had less than 3 years experience in 2008-9– compared to 20% at PS 149.

I’m not all that interested in the comparative figures as regards teacher certification; as there is little convincing research to show that this matters. But the comparative data on “other professional staff” is quite striking: HSA had 27 teachers and 26 other “professional staff” in 2008-9.

Compare that with 41 teachers at PS 149, with only 7 other professional staff. I don't know who all these other “professionals” are, whether they are administrators, fundraisers, PR flacks, or people who actually provide instruction or services to kids; but so little proportional investment in classroom teachers seems to me an indication of poor educational priorities.

Journalistic malpractice at the NY Times

The Sunday Times magazine has posted a blatant piece of propaganda, in the form of one of the most inaccurate and biased articles I have ever seen. It is written by Steve Brill, who did an unfair piece for the New Yorker on the rubber rooms. It seems as though one can make a pretty decent career now in hack journalism, as long as you attack the UFT.

The article blames all our educational problems on the union (as usual); doesn’t mention any of the controversial charter co-locations that are squeezing space from our regular public schools; doesn’t mention any of the myriad charter school financial scandals, or their abuse of student and parent rights; omits any reference to the ongoing (and inexcusable) opposition of the charter school industry to audits, and manages to leave out the fact that it is the hedge fund operators who with their millions of dollars in campaign contributions are driving these policies.

Apart for the sole exception Michael Mulgrew, Brill somehow got around to interviewing only members of the pro-privatization crowd.

Most blatantly inaccurate is Brill's claim that the students at PS 149 are the same as the students at the co-located Harlem Success Academy:

P.S. 149 is rated by the city as doing comparatively well in terms of student achievement and has improved since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the city’s schools in 2002 and appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Nonetheless, its students are performing significantly behind the charter kids on the other side of the wall. To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.

Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents.

Here Brill is parroting Eva Moskowitz, who in the far better NY Magazine article claimed that the children in the other nearby schools “are the same kids we have.”

Really? Twenty percent of the kids at PS 149 are special education students; and 40 percent of these are in self-contained classes, the most severely disabled. Eighty one percent are poor enough to receive free lunch, and 13 percent are English Language Learners. In 2008 (the latest available data) more than 10 percent were homeless.

Compare this with the charter school. Instead of 81% free lunch, 49% of the students at Harlem Success Academy are poor --a difference of 32 percentage points. (CORRECTION: though the data on this are inconsistent, the state report card says that there were 67% free lunch students at PS 149; still a difference of nearly twenty percentage points.)

There are only 2 percent English Language Learners at the charter school; compared to 13 percent at PS 149 --more than six times as many.

HSA claims to have 16.9 percent special education students, compared to 20 percent at PS 149, and even then, few if any of the HSA students are the most severely disabled.

I can't find data on how many students at HSA are homeless, but according to Diane Ravitch, only about 100 of the 50,000 homeless kids in NYC public schools are enrolled in charters.

(UPDATE: I found this overall figure confirmed in this InsideSchools analysis ; as well as a chart showing that HSA had only three homeless students in the 2008-9 school year, less than one percent -- compared to PS 149's 10 percent.)

The Times article also ignores the rampant counseling out of high needs students out at the HSA schools; so common as to be widely reported in the press, including in the New York Magazine article, which included the following statement from a HSA teacher;

At her school alone, the Harlem Success teacher says, at least half a dozen lower-grade children who were eligible for IEPs have been withdrawn this school year. If this account were to reflect a pattern, Moskowitz’s network would be effectively winnowing students before third grade, the year state testing begins. “The easiest and fastest way to improve your test scores,” observes a DoE principal in Brooklyn, “is to get higher-performing students into your school.” And to get the lower-performing students out.

This far superior New York magazine article received over 240 comments, many of them from former teachers and parents at HSA, writing about the overwhelming predominance of test prep and the large number of students pushed out or counseled out of the school.

The fact that Steven Brill and his editors at the Times didn’t attempt to provide any accurate data or a less biased depiction of this issue is not just shocking; it represents journalistic malpractice.

The rapid expansion of charter schools is leading to our public schools becoming more concentrated with high needs students, while taking away valuable funds and space from our public school system, at a time when already their budgets have been slashed to the bone.

Do we need more privatization and more profit making off our students? Should the guys who brought our financial system to the ground also be allowed to undermine our public education system ?

Go leave a comment here, at the Times here or at the Gotham Schools website.