Last time, I pointed out that PUC charter schools has a vastly lower homeless population than surrounding schools. This difference, however, is not unique to them. It is true for most charter schools across Los Angeles. Charter schools in Los Angeles have much lower populations of homeless students than traditional district schools. This trend holds not […]
Homeless Students in Los Angeles: Part 2
PUC Schools, a non-profit charter network which operates 5 schools in the area I discussed in the last post, has an extremely low homeless student population. According to their enrollment data (which was recored last Fall), out of their student body of 5,316 students, 3 were classified homeless. That is 0.06% of their student population. […]
Homeless Students in Los Angeles: Part 1
My students are currently working on their Magnet Capstone Projects. These are interdisciplinary projects where they take an issue important to their community, Highland Park, and analyze prior actions in a historiography, write an argumentative essay and create a piece of accompanying art or technology to address the issue. As a teacher, it’s a lot […]
Long Term Hiatus
I started this blog about two years ago. And today, I am going to sign off for a long while. When I started this project, my daughter was 6 months old, didn’t really move around, napped a whole bunch, and fell asleep early. I also didn’t really have many extra-curricular activities at my school – […]
Green Dot’s Suspension Rates are Higher than Reported, but they are Mostly In-School Suspensions.
Last week, I reported that Green Dot’s suspension rates were some of the highest in the city. The top three suspension rates for all LAUSD schools in 2016-17 were Green Dot schools. And across their entire network, the suspension rate appeared to be significantly higher than the rest of the district. And yet, had an […]
A few LA charter schools severely skew Charter Suspension Data
In my last post, I alluded to a major difference in charter school suspension rates vs traditional school suspension rates. This was wrong and shortsighted. If you look at averages, charter schools in Los Angeles Unified suspend at a rate that is 3 times higher than traditional schools. That is an unduplicated number, meaning that […]
Who gets suspended in Los Angeles? And what for?
The CDE revamped their suspension dataset, and it is a much more powerful tool. Before you could break the data down by race, but now there are several more several demographic factors to break apart. And it can give us a better idea of exact who gets suspended in LA. The graphic above shows unduplicated […]
Green Dot’s Suspension Rates Continue to be Remarkably High
A month ago, the California Department of Education released 2016-17 data on suspension rates. When they were released, several news outlets looked at the aggregate data and noted that problems still existed (KPCC and EdSource). But when I dug into the data I noticed something kind of strange. Green Dot’s suspension rates are astronomically high. […]
The Low-Growth Schools of Los Angeles
Before I dive into some disappointing facts, let me say this: when I talk about low-growth or negative results , I am not doing it to single out individuals or teams. What I am trying to do is point out a weakness so that people can come together to make change. That being said, there […]
The High-Growth Schools of Los Angeles
When I looked at the growth data I presented last week, I was struck by the variety of results that schools got. Take Aspire Firestone Academy, a charter school in South Gate. Their data is all over the place. Most schools in Los Angeles are like this. There are some grades that had high growth […]