Charters and Miracle Shrinkage

The IDEA charter school chain has a checkered history, but it continues to demonstrate the many ways that charter schools can go wrong and game the system while they're at it.

IDEA made big headlines back in 2021 when it turned out that one of the major functions of Texas's largest charter chain was to make life sweet for its top executives. These are the former Teach For America whiz kids who used the charter's funds to get a private jet and a luxury suite at San Antonio's AT&T Center. Heads rolled, the state investigated, and eventually placed the schools in conservatorship-- and remember, this was in Texas, a state that has no small tolerance for charter school shenanigans.

There have been other misadventures, like the IDEA schools in Louisiana that tagged out of the charter business, but couldn't seem to do anything useful about helping their students find a new school. 

But that's part of the brand-- IDEA likes to bill their schools as "public" schools, except they are very unlike public schools in ways that matter-- a lot. They are a business, and they make decisions about whether to stay open or close (even in the middle of the year) based on business reasons. 

Now, in El Paso, IDEA has pulled one of the classic charter school tricks-- the Incredible Shrinking Cohort.

As reported by Claudia Lorena Silva in El Paso Matters, the two El Paso IDEA campuses, Edgemere and Rio Vista, had a combined total of 256 eighth graders in 2021. Four years later, 124 seniors graduated.

So, a hair over a half of the class lost.

If an actual public school had a dropout/flunkout rate of 50%, that would be cause for alarm. IDEA's Regional Director of Operations says not so fast. "All the students who left IDEA, for whatever reason, were not dropouts. They either transitioned to the schools or the districts that they came from, or they transitioned to other schools outside the area."

This is part of what we're talking about when we say that true public schools have a mission to serve all students and charters do not. For a public school, every student who lives in the boundaries of their district is the district's responsibility. For a charter, once that student is out the door, he's not the school's problem any more. 

A charter can, like IDEA, just claim that their curriculum is too rigorous for some students. When a student is struggling in a true public school, the school's job is to help that student. When a student is struggling at a charter, they can just show that student the door and wash their hands of him (and in some cases, they are more than happy to do so, because good numbers on test scores are an important marketing tool). 

We've known this for years and years-- when measuring a charter school's success, an important data point is the number of students that were jettisoned on their way to graduation. How large is the cohort shrinkage between entering and exiting? If a charter is touting its miraculous results, but not including that data point, there's a reason-- those two factors are related. A 50% shrinkage rate means that these schools have failed to serve half of the students they were entrusted with. It's not an impressive addition to the IDEA record.