A charter objects to school rankings
After our post yesterday about the report comparing charter schools to regular public schools, we heard from one charter whose director objected to the list of the bottom-ranked charters in the study. Marcos Aguilar writes:
On June 10, 2008, you posted a list of “Bottom 5 Charters” in an entry on the Los Angeles Times Blog, The Homeroom, among which our school, Academia Semillas del Pueblo, was included. According to the Los Angeles Time Ethics Policy, “People who will be shown in an adverse light in an article must be given a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves. This means making a good-faith effort to give the subject of allegations or criticism sufficient time and information to respond substantively. Whenever possible, the reporter should meet face-to-face with the subject in a sincere effort to understand his or her best arguments.” It goes on to say, “Our coverage should avoid simplistic portrayals.” As a matter of fact, no one in our school was notified of this planned publication by LA Times staff, we were not given any opportunity to defend ourselves, nor any opportunity to rebut this simplistic, albeit negative, portrayal of our school.
I write to express my protest with this list and our inclusion on any “worse schools” list. Academia Semillas del Pueblo excels at what it does, providing an excellent education to historically disenfranchised and educationally disadvantaged children in East Los Angeles where school violence, perennially low performing schools and overcrowded classrooms are the norm. More importantly, Academia serves students who are discriminated against by the LAUSD, because their first language is not English. When students whose mother tongue is a language other than English, they are condemned to a ball and chain educational program that attempts, through drill and kill methodologies, to force-feed them English language instruction -– to the detriment of all else. To make matters worse, District school culture is typically also alienating to non-English speaking parents, and adults who have been educated abroad, further placing children at risk educationally, by crippling their support network at home.
Moreover, our school is not just like any other school. It is an Indigenous community-based school, meaning that it is a response to a demand made by families in our community for a culturally relevant education that honors our mother tongues as a foundational strength instead of as a deficiency, in our case these languages are Nahuatl and Spanish. I know of no school in Los Angeles that can offer this alternative, and definitely no other school that teaches ANY Indigenous language. Yet, our students don’t merely learn respect for their family culture and language, they also study Chinese, and progress quite well in learning English through a Spanish/English 90/10 dual immersion program. Not to mention that our students and teachers have been immersed in the International Baccalaureate programs, as we prepare them to be future leaders by offering a world-class educational model.
The LA Times “Bottom 5 Charters” list of course considers none of the above. It is an oversimplification of very complex social entities -– schools. However, even when compared to the three schools ours was compared to, Buchanan, Bitely, and Dorris, the LA Times could have asked, “How do English Learners fare in these schools?” Especially because you wrote, “One area where charters lagged, Wohlstetter's report noted, was the performance of students not fluent in English. That was an area of mixed results in the charter school association report, where regular district schools did better overall in the elementary grades, but not in middle or high schools.” When comparing Academia’s student performance in the California English Language Development Test (CELDT) as compared to these three schools, important indices of success surface. On average, only 29% of the English Language Learner students at the three comparison schools combined achieved Advanced or Early Advanced levels of proficiency in English this year, compared to 41% overall at Academia. While an astounding 86% of our sixth graders achieved Advanced or Early Advanced English proficiency, which speaks greatly of our students’ ability to learn English through our model. This is yet another important fact omitted by your piece -- that the model of language instruction matters. Simple logic would clarify why our students may not fare as well on English-only standardized tests while they are still acquiring English. In our model of language instruction, students from kinder through fourth grade are taught academic content primarily in Spanish. This is a well-researched and proven model of language instruction that shows its best results when students begin to acquire greater levels of academic fluency in English AND Spanish after five to eight years of instruction, or from the fifth through the eighth grades. In approving a full five year renewal of our k-8 charter last academic year, LAUSD staff wrote of our school, “LAUSD’s Program Evaluation and Research Branch conducted a “Value Added” study of the school’s test scores, the results of which suggest that: a. Cohorts of students at Academia experienced growth in grades 5 and 6 that was substantially higher than the LAUSD mean in English Language Arts. b. Cohorts of students at Academia experienced growth in grade 5 that was slightly above the LAUSD mean and in grade 6 that was substantially higher than the LAUSD mean in Math.” This is an important measurement of our school’s accomplishments with our students, but by no means the only one.
Your article raises an interesting and controversial question, “how should we measure charter school performance?” I suggest that the best way to measure our school’s performance is to compare apples to apples. Dual immersion programs to dual immersion programs for example, Native language programs to native language programs, Chinese language learning to Chinese language learning and opportunities for disadvantaged youth overall. In comparing our school’s API score of 622, I would suggest you compare our school to other dual immersion schools in LAUSD. Of thirty-two dual immersion programs that exist in LAUSD however, only one is a 90/10 model and only five others are even close. This is important because research indicates that these more intense models yield the best results, and because other models include a much greater percentage of English language instruction, thereby creating a very different model. When Academia is compared to the six similar dual immersion schools in LAUSD (Hillcrest, Grand View, Meyler, Montara, & Weigand), our school rates competitively and in some respects far better. The average API score of these schools is 662, only forty points greater. However, our sister dual immersion schools only averaged a 2 point growth in their performance compared to a 37 point improvement for Academia. One of our sister dual immersion schools scored 574 this past year. Should we compare rates of parent participation? Parent satisfaction? Student safety and engagement? Community empowerment? I could go on. As taxpayers, our parents know that their dollars are better spent at our school than anywhere else they could enroll their children in Los Angeles, because not only do we offer more for less, but we offer their children what the District is incapable of doing thus far, a community-defined quality education for all.
Marcos Aguilar,
Tlayecantzi Executive Director
Semillas Sociedad Civil
