Charters can be a student ‘dumping ground’
Alternative education has taken on another role: a “release valve” for high schools.
vantaged students — some say against their wishes — into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts.
“I would show up, I would sit down and listen to music the whole time. I didn’t really make any progress the whole time I was there,” says Thiago Mello, 20, who transferred to Sunshine from another alternative charter school he enrolled in after his grades slipped at Olympia.
The Orlando schools illustrate a national pattern. Alternative schools have long served as placements for students who violated disciplinary codes. But since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 refashioned the yardstick for judging schools, alternative education has taken on another role: a silent release valve for high schools that are straining under the pressure of accountability reform. As a result, alternative schools at times become warehouses where regular schools stow poor performers to avoid being held accountable. Traditional high schools in many states are free to use alternative programs to rid themselves of weaker students whose test scores, truancy and risk of dropping out threaten their standing, a ProPublica survey of state policies found.
Concerns that schools artificially boosted test scores by dumping low achievers into alternative programs have surfaced in connection with ongoing litigation in Louisiana and Pennsylvania, and they echo findings from a legislative report a decade ago in California.
The role of charter alternative schools like Sunshine — publicly funded but managed by for-profit companies — is likely to grow under the new U.S. secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, an ardent supporter of school choice. In her home state of Michigan, charter schools have been responsible in part for a steep rise in alternative-school enrollment.
In Orlando, alternative charters exploit a loophole in state regulations: By coding hundreds of students who leave as withdrawing to enter adult education, such as GED classes, Sunshine claims virtually no dropouts; state rules don’t label withdrawals for that reason as dropping out. But ALS officials cannot say where Sunshine students actually went or whether they took GED classes at all.
ALS ran seven of the 10 high schools statewide with the most withdrawals to adult education in 2015. Sunshine ranked first. If all such withdrawals from ALS schools in Florida were counted as dropouts, the number of times that students quit school statewide that year would increase by at least 5%. In Orlando’s Orange County Public Schools, which serve more than 200,000 students, the number of dropouts would jump by at least 80%.
In a written statement, district officials disputed that transfers to Sunshine helped elevate their school system’s standing under state accountability rules. Students who quit to pursue adult education do count against the district’s overall graduation rate, even though they aren’t labeled as dropouts, they said.
“Any national or state recognition the district has received is the direct result of our parents, students, teachers, and school administrators working hard,” the statement said.
ALS President Angela Whitford-Narine says the company is continually improving to help students who have struggled academically earn enough credits to graduate. Its management fee supports back-office functions like human resources, she says.
“I can’t even begin to say we have this all figured out,” she says. “But every day we get better at it.”
The symbiotic relationship be- tween Olympia and Sunshine sheds light on a neglected sector of American K-12 education: a sprawling system of “alternative” schools that serve roughly half a million of the nation’s most vulnerable students.
Supporters say alternative schools provide more resources for struggling students. And the best do, through small classes, caring teachers, flexible schedules and extra counseling and tutoring.
But a broad swath of the schools shortchange students, ProPublica’s analysis of federal data shows. Nationwide, nearly a third of the alternative-school population attends a school that spends at least $500 less per pupil than regular schools do in the same district. Forty percent of school districts with alternative schools provide counseling services only in regular schools.
Alternative classes are sometimes taught in crumbling buildings, school basements, trailers and strip malls. Some lack textbooks and, in many, students sit in front of computers all day instead of engaging with teachers.
States often hold alternative schools to lower standards. Some, including Florida, exempt them from achievement goals, oversight or reporting rules other schools must follow.
While 6% of regular schools have graduation rates below 50%, ProPublica’s analysis found that nearly half of alternative schools do. “If you do it right, you can catch those kids and get them through,” says Leon Smith, a lawyer at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, which has pushed for reforms in Connecticut. “If you do it wrong, it’s a dumping ground.”
LOST IN THE SHUFFLE
In recent years, Olympia has held special assemblies for students with academic problems where an ALS representative has pitched the company’s schools as a way to graduate.
“They called us up to a classroom, all the kids that were doing bad and everything,” says Justin Cowans, a senior at Sunshine. He transferred out of Olympia last school year, he says, after a counselor told him he “had to leave the school because of my grades.”
ProPublica’s analysis shows that the school district’s alternative-school enrollment tripled from 1,300 students in the 2009 school year to 3,900 in 2014. A driving force: Sunshine and its sister ALS schools.
Asked how they ended up at Sunshine, several students say staff members at traditional high schools told them to transfer because they had fallen too far behind. Or, if they tried to enter the Orlando schools from outside the district, counselors told them their academic records were too weak and directed them to Sunshine.
One day in early 2014, Jacquline Haas was sitting in chemistry class at Olympia High when she was summoned to the guidance counselor’s office. A quiet student who had never been in trouble, she nervously left class.
When Jacquline, a junior, arrived, she joined 10 to 15 other students. A man representing Sunshine High told them the school could help them catch up on credits so they could graduate.
Jacquline was shaken, disappointed by the idea of leaving Olympia. “It just kind of popped my bubble,” she says.
She ultimately decided not to go to Sunshine. But her mother was irate when she heard the school had recruited her daughter.
To Jennifer Haas, the message was clear: Her daughter was not welcome at Olympia because of her borderline grades and test scores. The year before, Haas had given counselors information on her daughter’s type of ADHD. She believed the school responded by trying to push Jacquline out.
“I said, ‘ Jacq you’re too smart to go to these,’ ” Haas recalls telling her daughter after looking through the school brochure. “You’re just hanging in the crack. They’d rather you go all the way through the crack to protect their numbers.”
Harold Border, Orange County’s chief of high schools, says the district’s traditional high schools are supposed to monitor and assist students having difficulty and not send them to alternative charters if they don’t want to go. The assemblies students described at Olympia were “not a practice that we support or promote,” he says.
The district’s chief communications officer, Scott Howat, says transfers to alternative charters are voluntary.
Former Olympia guidance counselor Sue Gagne says the assemblies angered some parents and students. “There were a few kids, they were offended: ‘Why would you put me in this assembly with these losers?’ ” she says. Some parents would complain to the principal, she says, and “want us fired.”
But, she says, counselors were trying only to give students every chance to graduate.
A DISTURBING PATTERN
Orlando schools are not unique. About a year ago, lawyers for students complaining of discriminatory treatment in alternative schools in a school district near New Orleans discovered student transfers from regular schools shot up just before the state’s annual tests were given.
A similar complaint has been filed in Pennsylvania. It alleges that “these programs have become a revolving door which spirals students away from being able to successfully complete high school, ultimately fueling Pennsylvania’s dropout rate.”
The Louisiana and Pennsylvania complaints, filed with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, are pending.
In Orlando, Sunshine reported only 100 students graduated with standard diplomas and no special conditions from 2013 to 2015.
Many more exited without diplomas but weren’t counted as dropouts. From the day in 2012 when it first opened to the end of the 2015 school year, Sunshine High coded 1,230 withdrawals as students leaving for adult education. At least nine of the company’s other charter schools statewide, including three in Orange County, followed a similar pattern. Not counting Sunshine, the other ALS schools in Florida reported 5,260 more such withdrawals.
Whitford-Narine says ALS schools will help students find GED programs if it looks as if they are going to drop out. In an email, she wrote that Sunshine reports a student is enrolling in adult education based on what the student or parent said their plans were — rather than actual evidence of enrollment.
Asserting without evidence that former students are pursuing adult-education degrees appears to violate state rules. For the code to be used accurately, state education officials require that schools have evidence students either enrolled in an adulteducation class or passed the GED test, spokeswoman Cheryl Etters said in an email. A promise to enroll is not enough.
When told Sunshine reports sending many students to adult education, Gagne, the former Olympia guidance counselor, was surprised.
“Oh gosh, so they don’t finish Sunshine either,” she says. “I assumed they were finishing getting their diploma and going on to whatever they wanted to do.”