College degrees elude charter students
High school success often fails graduates at the next level
Like many charter school networks, the Alliance College- Ready Public Schools boasts eye- popping stats: 95% of its low- income students graduate from high school and go to college.
Virtually all in the Los Angeles- based system qualify to attend California universities.
But the network’s statistics suggest that few Alliance alumni are ready for the realities — academic, social and financial — of college. The vast majority drop out.
In all, more than three- fourths of Alliance alumni don’t earn a four- year college degree in the six years after they finish high school.
Publicly funded, but in most cases privately operated, charter schools such as Alliance are poised to become a much bigger part of the USA’s K- 12 public education system. Even as their popularity rises, charters face a harsh reality: Most of the schools boast promising, often jaw- dropping high school graduation rates, but much like Alliance, their college success rates, on average, leave three of four students without a degree.
Statistics for charter schools are hard to come by, but the best estimate puts charters’ college persistence rates at about 23%. To be fair, the rate overall for low- income students is even worse: just 9%. For low- income, high- minority urban public schools, the rate is 15%.
Although many charter schools offer students a more viable path to high school graduation, the low college success rate is forcing the schools themselves to rethink their offerings.
“It’s time for us to pivot,” said Dan Katzir, Alliance’s CEO. Asked to rate the importance of raising the network’s college graduation rate, he said, “This is our work for the next 10 years.”
In many ways, charter schools were designed a quarter- century ago to help close the rich/ poor college gap, though it has taken nearly that long, charter officials say, to do so for more than just a few students.
The first charter school opened in St. Paul in 1992, and since then, the sector has grown. Total enrollment topped 3 million students for the first time last fall, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. More than 6,900 schools enroll about 3.1 million students, about three times as many as a decade earlier. Last fall alone, the alliance noted, more than 300 charter schools opened.
The Trump administration has floated an offer to allowmore access to charter schools, among choices such as private school vouchers and tax credits.
Even educators in the charter world say that simply handing families more choices is unlikely to improve outcomes.
“It’s a big, hard, thorny problem,” said Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep Public Schools, a network of 20 charter schools in New York, Washington, Baton Rouge and Camden, N. J. Although its first alumni are not set to finish college until this spring, the network has pushed to make college completion a priority. He estimated that nearly nine in 10 Democracy Prep alumni are on track for a four- year degree.
Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy program at New America, a Washington think tank, said many lowincome students drop out because they’re overwhelmed by high- level academics.
Others end up at colleges that are a lousy match. Even students at colleges that suit them may suffer from a lack of guidance or difficulties integrating into social and academic life.
“Whatever happens in college that tends to prevent students from graduating, those factors seem to overwhelm whatever preparatory virtues even the best charter schools are able to impart in their students,” Carey said.
Founded in 2004, Alliance operates 28 middle and high schools throughout L. A., serving about 12,500 low- income students. The network was part of a proposed $ 490million plan in 2015 tomove half of the city’s students into charters. Proposed by the L. A.- based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the plan has been opposed by teachers’ unions and members of the city school board.
In its recruitment materials, Alliance says 100% of students fulfill all requirements for admission to a University of California or California State University college. What the materials don’t mention is that since graduating its first class in 2008, just 22% of eligible students have completed college in the six years since high school graduation. Only 6% who start at two- year colleges eventually earn a four- year degree.
Katzir, Alliance’s CEO and a former Broad Foundation managing director, said the poor results should be taken in context, since Alliance’s first job was to raise high school graduation rates.
In 2004, he said, there were 49 high schools in the L. A. school system. “The reason why I remember there were 49 high schools is that the district’s average high school graduation rate at the time was 49%,” Katzir recalled.
At the time, he said, charter schools set out to prove “that you could overcome the high school ‘ dropout factory,’ and you could take these exact same students, provide them with opportunities and access to academic programming that enabled them to complete high school and get into college.” That first decade or so, he said, “we were built to solve a problem in urban communities that no one else had done before, which is actually get poor black and brown scholars through high school. Once we were able to do that, then the question becomes ‘ OK, well, what’s next?’ ”
He noted that for Alliance alumni who attend a group of 150 universities focused on aiding minority students, the graduation rate is 69%. Alliance came up with the list by ranking 4,200 U. S. schools based on their graduation rates for “underrepresented minorities” and found that just 150 had a six- year graduation rate of 75% or higher.
In many ways, the problem is not just a charter school problem but one that afflicts low- income students generally.
In 2013, the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, a Washington- based research group, found that students from the USA’s lowest- income families were about one- eighth as likely as the wealthiest students to have a bachelor’s degree by age 24. For the wealthiest, the rate was 77%. For the poorest? Just 9%.
The 9% figure is “just epically disappointing,” said Katie Duffy, Democracy Prep’s CEO. “A high school diploma is just not going to get our kids to the point where they can have resources and live that life of civic engagement.”
Recent findings suggest that attending a charter school will probably push students toward attending a four- year college, but the most comprehensive graduation research, from the high school class of 2008, put the six- year college completion rate for charter high school students at just 23% for four- year colleges.