This week, I am taking a look at Co-Location (see previous post here), and one co-location that has been peaking my attention has been APEX Academy. According to APEX academy‘s website (which is basically only half done and is filled with nonsense placeholders) APEX started as a small school in LAUSD, but eventually decided to become a independent charter school. It resides on the 3rd floor of the Helen Bernstein Main Building.
Is it technically a “co-location”? Kind of – it opened with the rest of the Helen Bernstein Campus, so the site has never known existence without the co-location. But it does provide an interesting look at a set of demographics that is not as common:
The district school (Bernstein) is less poor and whiter than the charter school it is co-located upon. The charter school seems to be attracting a slightly different demographic (although it is minimally different).
The test scores, however, are massively different:
Source: CAASPP Data – www.caaspp.cde.gov
Helen Bernstein outperforms APEX in English by a margin of 29% and in Math by 12%. Here we have a situation almost reversed of Celerity Nascent – where the district school is massively outperforming the charter school.
These are schools that have been co-located for 7 years (at the time of this data) and they are so vastly different in their performance. It goes to show why a case study methodology here is so important – each case has its own unique features, and they cannot be compared exactly from one to the other.
But if that is the case – how can LAUSD make judgements on how co-locations can be effectively allocated? Is there a way for co-locations to benefit both schools equally and raise all boats? Or perhaps we are stuck in an environment of educational competition, fighting for student enrollment – and classroom space is just one of those lures that schools want to control. Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at how those fights have panned out this year.