Smoke and mirrors and charter schools

I went through the book “A Chance to Make History” by Wendy Kopp. Kopp was one of the leading organizers of the charter school push. 

Several claims are made:
(1) “In Philadelphia, an organization called Mastery is turning around previously low-performing district schools and dramatically outperforming district wide averages.” (p47)

(2)”so many of the highest-performing charter schools in the country” are “working with fewer dollars per pupil than traditional schools.” (p114)

(3) Kipp Gaston Prep has educated majority-Black, “school lunch” children and the “results are impressive…. 100 percent of seniors were accepted to college.” (p114)

By my estimation, (1) and (2) are very misleading. 

According to Daniel Denvir (http://www.thenation.com/article/how-destroy-public-school-system/ ret:10/9/2015) in the September issue of the Nation last year:

“Michael Masch, the school district’s former chief financial officer and a progressive fan of Mastery’s work, makes a point of noting that the charter network engages in prodigious outside fundraising. Mastery is “not doing more with less,” Masch says. “They’re doing more with more.” [paragraph] In fact, the basic structure of school financing in Philadelphia is rigged to benefit these privately managed companies….” And “Renaissance schools run by Mastery have demonstrated strong test-score gains. Even so, the district-run Promise Academies showed the same encouraging results—until their budgets were gutted.”

Claim (3) is probably the most horrendous, ignoring poverty’s effect on non-English speakers and disabled people. Moreover, Kipp does not graduate all their students. According to Education Week, a think tank funded partially by the pro-charter Gates Foundation, “KIPP schools have substantially higher levels of attrition than do their local school districts. Our analysis revealed that on, average, approximately 15% of the students disappear from the KIPP grade cohorts each year.” The Gaston Prep also “enrolled a lower percentage of students classified as English Language Learners (11.5%) than did their local school districts (19.2%)” and “enrolled a lower percentage of students with disabilities (5.9%) than did their local school districts (12.1%). (Source http://www.edweek.org/media/kippstudy.pdf ret: 10/9/2015)

It’s a shame. People are really being thrown under the bus here.