In my last post, I calculated the acceptance rates of LA schools by dividing the number accepted by the populations of the senior class. What I found was that of the top twenty schools 13 were charters, 5 were magnets and 2 were traditional schools. This got me thinking – how do the charters across the whole district stack up to LAUSD Schools.
Maybe you remember what a box plot is (yeah…I’m going all the way back to 6th grade math). A box plot shows a box, where the line represents the range of the data, and the box represents the the middle 50% of all data. The line in the middle of the box is the median.
In the box plot above, we can see that LAUSD has low acceptance rates compared to charters. The median LAUSD school has about 11% UC acceptances, while the median charter has about 17%. In addition, the 25th percentile of charter schools do almost as well as the 50th percentile of LAUSD. But what if we pull out those magnet schools we here so much about?
By separating out magnets, we can see that magnets significantly outperform charter schools, this time reversing the trend seen before. Magnet’s median is almost 21% (compared to the charters’ 17% mentioned earlier). Furthermore, magnets have a higher range, and their 50th percentile does better than almost 75% of charter schools.
Magnets have been getting quite a bit of press recently as the solution to the districts’ falling numbers. These numbers back up the suggestion that magnets have something special to offer. This is especially true since the magnet program is a K-12 program, and many of the 12th grade students represented above joined the magnet program in their earlier years. I should note, I have a bit of a bias (just a tad) growing up a magnet student and being a magnet teacher…but I was also a traditional school and charter teacher, so I have a stake in all these numbers.
Next time: Look up your school’s UC Acceptance Rates.