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Recent quasi-experimental and experimental studies have found that KIPP middle schools-part of a nationwide network of charter schools-have large, positive impacts on academic achievement. In light of these findings,  skeptics have  asked whether KIPP schools benefit from unusually selective student attrition and replacement patterns. We investigate this question using longitudinal, student-level data covering 19 KIPP middle schools. On average, we find that  KIPP schools generally admit students who are disadvantaged in ways similar to their peers in local public schools. Rates of exit from KIPP schools are typically no different than rates at nearby district schools, and students exiting KIPP schools have characteristics similar to those of students exiting local district schools. To replace students who exit through attrition, KIPP schools admit a substantial number of new students in grade 6 but admit fewer students in grades 7 and 8 than do nearby public schools. Unlike local district schools, KIPP's late entrants also tend to have higher prior achievement levels and fewer males than the rest of the KIPP student body. Although it is difficult to gauge the size of any resulting peer effects at KIPP, the  existing peer effects  literature indicates  that the range of possibilities is limited. Overall, we find that KIPP's impacts do not appear to be explained by advantages in the prior achievement of KIPP students, even when attrition and replacement throughout the middle school years are taken into account.

"But, beyond this back-and-forth over the churn in these schools and whether it affected the results of this analysis, there's also a confusion of sorts when it comes to discussions of student attrition in charters, whether KIPP or in general. Supporters of school choice often respond to "attrition accusations" by trying to deny or downplay its importance or frequency. This, it seems to me, ignores an obvious point: Within-district attrition - students changing schools, often based on "fit" or performance - is a defining feature of school choice, not an aberration."

Charter critics often contend that many charters have high attrition, and that lower-performing students leave - whether due to "counseling out" (as may have been the case in the NYT story) or on their own volition - which artificially boosts test scores. The standard reply to this argument from charter supporters is to point to studies (such as this paper on New York City charters and this one on KIPP schools) showing that charter school attrition is similar to that of regular public schools. In addition, supporters point out that these studies that include high-performing charters, though limited in scope and number, use techniques to ensure that attrition does not directly affect their results (for example, put simply, "following" students who leave charters into their new schools).

I've written before about KIPP attrition in response to reports that had been released studying it.  When reports conclude that KIPP does not have high attrition, they tout it on their websites.  When reports concluded that they do have high attrition, KIPP responds with a rebuttal. The problem with most of these reports is that the data they give us has already been analyzed and then turned into percentages, which are only relative measures.  This is why I finally got around to navigating the New York START data system to find the actual raw data for myself which I could then compare to KIPPs annual report card that they release.

Last week, I attended the International Summit on the Teaching Profession. Dr. Linda Darling- Hammond, a professor at Stanford University, was the rapporteur for the session on teacher supply and demand. She said something that caused me to sit up and pay closer attention. Dr. Darling-Hammond reported on some data around the connection between teacher preparation and retention. You may know that the average attrition rate for the teaching profession is 25%. But--and this is big--for those who completed a teacher preparation program, attrition was 15%, yet for those who did not, the attrition rate was 49%. That is significant.

Public concern about pervasive inequalities in traditional public schools, combined with growing political, parental, and corporate support, has created the expectation that charter schools are the solution for educating minorities, particularly Black youth. There is a paucity of research on the educational attainment of Black youth in privately operated charters, particularly on the issue of attrition. This paper finds that on average peer urban districts in Texas show lower incidence of Black student dropouts and leavers relative to charters. The data also show that despite the claims that 88-90% of the children attending KIPP charters go on to college, their attrition rate for Black secondary students surpasses that of their peer urban districts. And this is in spite of KIPP spending 30-60% more per pupil than comparable urban districts. The analyses also show that the vast majority of privately operated charter districts in Texas serve very few Black students.

There are much more subtle ways to fraudulently raise test scores than tampering with student test papers.  One that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the practice by many charter schools of improving their test scores through attrition.  Up until recently, these charters have not been very upfront about this factor contributing to their success.  With everything that these charters have at stake in preserving their reputations and their rich funders, I can understand why they might try to conceal what they're doing.  Of course they have the right to portray their business in the most favorable light possible.  That's what most businesses do.  The reason that I've become so involved in uncovering the truth behind these successes is that these ruses have tricked politicians into believing that one of the big solutions in fixing education is to expand the influence of charter schools.  Only states that agree to lift caps on charters were even eligible to apply to Obama's Race To The Top initiative.

"There now exists a fair amount of evidence that Charter schools in many locations, especially high performing charter schools in New Jersey and New York tend to serve much smaller shares of low income, special education and limited English proficient students (see various links that follow). And in some cases, high performing charter schools, especially charter middle schools, experience dramatic attrition between 6th and 8th grade, often the same grades over which student achievement climbs, suggesting that a "pushing out" form of attrition is partly accounting for charter achievement levels."

Teacher attrition among first year teachers may be as high as 10 percent, according to a new data analysis from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.

Though TFA reports the recent attrition rate as 92% completing the first year and 91% completing the second, there are some regions that have much higher quit rates than others. In Kansas City, they fired about 200 experienced teachers last year to make room for new TFA recruits.  The superintendent who made this decision, John Covington, resigned in August to take a job leading Detroit's school system.  Left behind, were the first year TFA corps members who surely did not get the kind support from their co-workers that helped people like me survive my first year. From an article I just read in the Kansas City Star, I've learned that Kansas City may have been the biggest disaster in the 2011-2012 school year for TFA.  They report that 32 out of 141 first year corps members, about 25%, will not be returning.  And that is just so far as there will surely be some who just haven't decided if they are coming back next year yet.

You'll often hear the argument that half or almost half of all beginning U.S. public school teachers leave the profession within five years. The implications of this statistic are, of course, that we are losing a huge proportion of our new teachers, creating a "revolving door" of sorts, with teachers constantly leaving the profession and having to be replaced. This is costly, both financially (it is expensive to recruit and train new teachers) and in terms of productivity (we are losing teachers before they reach their peak effectiveness). And this doesn't even include teachers who stay in the profession but switch schools and/or districts (i.e., teacher mobility).* Needless to say, some attrition is inevitable, and not all of it is necessarily harmful, Many new teachers, like all workers, leave (or are dismissed) because they are just aren't good at it - and, indeed, there is test-based evidence that novice leavers are, on average, less effective. But there are many other excellent teachers who exit due to working conditions or other negative factors that might be improved

Policymakers, administrators, and advocacy groups have correctly diagnosed a major problem plaguing the teaching profession-high rates of teacher attrition-but have missed the mark in their prescriptions for fixing it, concludes a new report released this morning by the New York City-based TNTP, formerly The New Teacher Project. In essence, it contends, most school leaders fail to identify and encourage the very best teachers to stay in schools. In part, it says, that's because of the K-12 field's tendency to uncouple decisions about retention from discussions of teacher quality. The consequences of these practices, according to the report, has particularly affected low-performing schools, where a revolving door gradually makes it harder to develop a critical mass of effective teachers to sustain improvements. In such schools, the report estimates, a high-performing teacher who leaves will be replaced by an equally effective peer less than a tenth of the time.

This study makes a distinction between a school having high attrition and one having difficulties in hiring. It does so by exploring the relationship between definitions of hard-to-staff schools, school demographics, and school conditions that are often associated with a school being hard-to-staff.

L.A. Times reports that abound half of all  teachers in charter middle and high schools left their jobs each year over a six-year period studied by UC Berkeley researchers, who released their findings last week. Why such an incredibly rate of attrition?

"The media loves the story of miracle schools. Imagine that! A school where 90% or more pass the state tests! Where 100% graduate. Where 100% are accepted into four-year colleges. Michael Klonsky once said to me, miracles happen only in the Bible. When the subject is schools, miracle claims should be carefully investigated."

Despite being promoted as a viable alternative to traditional public schools, privately owned charter schools in Texas have higher attrition rates for black students than comparable urban public schools, says a University of Texas at Austin study. Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig's research shows that, although many privately operated charter schools claim that 90 percent or more of their students go on to college and many, such as the Houston-based KIPP chain of schools, spend 30-60 percent more per pupil than comparable urban school districts, more black students drop out and leave charter schools.

There's some research that shows charter schools suffer from higher teacher turnover than traditional public schools do. One recent estimate put turnover in charters at 25 percent per year, compared with just 14 percent in traditional public schools. Several explanations have been offered for this attrition. Charter school teachers, for instance, tend to be relatively young, and more susceptible to making quick exits from the profession, some studies suggest. Dissatisfaction with working conditions, and lack of administrative support have also been cited as reasons why charter teachers tend to head for the door. A new paper, based on research as well as a survey of charter school teachers, offers school leaders and charter management organizations advice on how they can keep more charter school teachers in the fold. Released by a Boston nonprofit called Teach Plus, the paper says charter schools can reduce teacher turnover by taking four steps.

"The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers-typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)-and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points. This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction. Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the "ends-justify-the-means" assumptions and practices-the broader "no excuses" ideology-underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP. Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools)."

Now, as I ponder a recent CSA member survey, I see how many of you have lost your optimism.   Whether Principals, Assistant Principals or Education Administrators, 48 percent of you were dissatisfied with your jobs in 2009 compared to 59 percent today. Among Principals the rate of dissatisfaction was 68 percent in 2009, which was when the city and state budget cuts began but we were cushioned by President Obama's American Recovery Act. Today, 73 percent of Principals are dissatisfied with their workload, their wages and their job security. As demands on Principals continue to rise and budgets shrink, we better think about how we'll recruit and retain APs, EAs and teachers to fill the Principal pipeline. Back in 2006, when The New York Times reported that a startling number of experienced Principals were fleeing the Bloomberg/Klein school system, the DOE seemed to think the attrition was a normal result of baby boomer burn-out or fear of accountability. Experienced educators were often viewed as enemies of change.

"In numerous previous posts I have summarized New Jersey charter school enrollment data, frequently pointing out that the highest performing charter schools in New Jersey tend to be demographically very different from schools in their surrounding neighborhoods and similar grade level schools throughout their host districts or cities. I have tried to explain over and over that the reason these differences are important is because they constrain the scalability of charter schooling as a replicable model of "success." Again, to the extent that charter successes are built on serving vastly different student populations, we can simply never know (even with the best statistical analyses attempting to sort out peer factors, control for attrition, etc.) whether the charter schools themselves, their instructional strategies/models are effective and/or would be effective with larger numbers of more representative students. Here, I take a quick look at the other side of the picture, again focusing on the city of Newark. Specifically, I thought it would be interesting to evaluate the effect on Newark schools enrollment of the shift in students to charter schools, now that charters have taken on a substantial portion of students in the city. If charter enrollments are - as they seem to be - substantively different from district schools enrollments, then as those charter populations grow and remain different from district schools, we can expect the district schools population to change.  In particular, given the demography of charter schools in Newark, we would expect those schools to be leaving behind a district of escalating disadvantage - but still a district serving the vast majority of kids in the city."