The SAT isn’t the only game in town. As most people know, students can also take the ACT to fulfill their examination requirement for college applications. While 57.4% of students in LAUSD and LAUSD charters take the SAT, only 27% take the ACT. But just like the SAT, the ACT participation rate is higher in charter […]
Charter Schools
Charter Schools have higher SAT Participation Rates
You might think that the summer time is a low point for data. But right as summer break began, the California Department of Education released new data: participation rates for the SAT, ACT and AP tests. The data is a year old, but I’ll take it. First, let’s define SAT participation rates: The SAT participation […]
Celerity’s New Schools are Just Their Shuttered Schools with New Names
* This is the longest post I have ever written. Forgive me. Here is a Too-Long-Didn’t-Read Summary: Two Celerity Charter Schools will be closed on June 30. Their charters were not renewed by LAUSD and the State Board rejected their appeal. But in their place, in the same locations, with their same principals, and most of the […]
LAUSD Will Consider 3 New Charter Petitions Next Week
Next week, the LAUSD board will take action on three proposed charter schools that would open in the 2018-2019 school year. One of the three charters is an alternative high school, a topic on which I have absolutely no expertise. The other two are supported by a program called Building Excellent Schools. BES says it “trains high-capacity individuals to […]
Where is LAUSD enrollment shrinking?
LAUSD enrollment is declining. This is not news. But where is that happening? Is it happening all over, or just in certain places?And in what grades? Between in 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, enrollment in traditional LAUSD schools dropped by 9,439 students. Meanwhile, charter school enrollment in LAUSD is growing. In the same time period, charter […]
My Conversation with the CCSA about Charter Locations
Last Wednesday, I wrote about a charter school that was locating 8 miles away from the location proposed in the charter petition. Then, on Thursday, I got an interesting email: the California Charter School Association (CCSA) wanted to chat. Ok, I’ll bite. “The clarity that we wanted to point out is what happens after the petition was […]
Two New Charter Petitions Rely on Faulty Data
In order to get approved, charter founders have to submit a petition to LAUSD, which then has to be approved by the board of education. In all charter petitions, the petitioner must prove that a charter is needed by demonstrating that the area where the school would be located is not served adequately. But for two charters set to open […]
Do Charter Schools Outperform Traditional Schools in UC Admittance?
A few weeks ago, I put out a top twenty list of UC admittance in LAUSD. Almost immediately, people noted that more than half the list were charter schools. LA School Report noted, “Of the top 20 schools in LA Unified with the highest UC acceptance rates, calculated by School Data Nerd blog, more than half […]
Rating the Charter Networks – Part I: Alliance College-Ready
Last week, I highlighted some of the problems with the California School Dashboard (CSD) as it exists right now. My biggest gripe with the dashboard is that it rates whole districts, like LAUSD, but does not rate charter networks as a whole. Instead in treats each charter as an individual school, never aggregating their data. Let’s […]
2016 Year in Review
It has been just over 300 days since I started this blog, and in that time, I have written 95 posts. I started it as a dinky little Tumblr account, and have grown into a full-on Blog. And while I started by just sharing this with my students and friends, there are now people, whom I have never […]