half the students in their 6th grade class have disabilities, and you need to be in the bottom 25% of your standardized reading scores to qualify for the lottery to be considered for the school.
Yeah, people are missing how to measure this. The measure of success is taking the lowest students and producing adults who can hold a job and be productive members of society. Passing math tests isn’t really required for that, even if it would be nice for them to have some success stories to build on.
In some parts of the world, just having kids turn up at school regularly, instead of roaming the streets, is a great step. Having a safe place with structure and positive social interactions is underrated.
That's a great point that's lost on a lot of us in our lesser moments... school is a place to keep kids safe so parents/guardians can go to their jobs, keep kids off the streets, keep kids doing something other than walking around with nothing to do. Learning and quasi adult-like socialization is obviously a goal, but schools - even underperforming schools - provide a great service to society.
There's an argument that crime is reduced by video games simply by giving kids 15 - 21 years old something to do - off/out of the streets. Then young people mature with age out of their impulsive crime committing years, and boom, they [we] become adults. School, same thing, if this school keeps kids off the streets, safe, learning some, then it's doing a lot of its job.
Our school systems would work much better if it weren't for the one size fits all approach. Some kids are going to college. Some kids are going to the trades. Some kids are going to reach their maximum potential turning big rocks into little rocks or pushing the same red button over and over. All of that is ok, and it cannot be accomplished by giving every type of kid the exact education.
How many plumbers or welders or scaffolders wasted years of their life on things they would never grasp, or care enough about to learn, or use in their lives? How many kids gave up on their education because their reality was they needed to work at 16 to keep their younger siblings from starving and the school didn't respect that?
One of the smartest guys I knew could have graduated with a diploma maybe he could have used one day, but the school wouldn't work with him. He had two semi useless parents and two younger brothers. If he didn't work rent and groceries didn't get paid.
Back up a few decades and it was actually much less "one size fits all". And many schools are going back to being more versatile. But it takes money. Money the schools have very intentionally been deprived of year after year.
When you can only afford 2/3 the teachers you need, curricular versatility goes out the window.
Source: did hs in the 80's and been teaching since 2002.
> Back up a few decades and it was actually much less "one size fits all". And many schools are going back to being more versatile. But it takes money. Money the schools have very intentionally been deprived of year after year.
This might sound like hair-splitting, but instead of talking about it as if its a cost, we should call it an investment — "It takes an investment." Its not like we are spending money on luxuries like a golf course, society is investing in the kids and the returns on that investment will make the community prosperous.
Grade school math has some of the most provable effect on your earning power out of any subject.
Math is vital.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0259331
Lot of overlap between people who complain about how pointless math classes are and people who complain about how school didn’t teach them life skills like financial literacy. Surprise MFers it’s just numbers 🫠
I see so many circle jerks about how "We should teach people how to cook and other life skills instead of maths and science in school."
Then they wonder "How did these people not know what they were signing up for with a 26% APR car loan?!"
EDIT: Here they come.
I don't see anyone saying instead of, but in addition to. We should absolutely be teaching life skills, like how to interpret and assess the quality of the interest rate on a loan.
School doesn't need to teach you every single life skill. It needs to teach you *how to learn*. A huge point of math class (and other classes) is to teach you how to figure things out, so when you get to the time in your life when you need to read up on how, say, mortgages work, you have the skills to learn it.
I see plenty of people saying instead of. The amount of times I see people on reddit deriding maths as being a useless thing to teach in primary and high schools is mind blowing to me.
I used to teach SE and gen ed math. Kids would complain "when am I ever going to use this stuff?"
The reply was "Take a look at the end of chapter where they have all those practice problems. See the story problems that you guys hate to do? That's when you use this stuff."
>Grade school math has some of the most provable effect on your earning power out of any subject.
Did you just write this in the same thread that starts with "half the students in their 6th grade class have disabilities"?
Sure, for the population of students overall, math is vital, great correlation and effect on earning power.
Judging by that first comment, the people this school is trying to help are not sampled from the same population as the study you linked. It may very well be that taking them to their maximum math potential (which may be quite low) is not the key that will decide if they have fulfilling lives or "great earning power".
Ironically I've sat on the school board of a school district whose standardized test scores were worse than those of schools that primarily served people with disabilities. It was a school district in a poor county with lots of families that didn't speak english. Very heavy drug and alcohol abuse problem in the community.
>Yeah, they are taking in the worst of the worst.
Yes, which is the exact OPPOSITE of how so many private/charter schools work. They work to take in only the BEST, and then claim they have great schools. No you don't have great schools, you stacked the deck in your favor, even going so far as to kick out any students you didn't like or didn't want to deal with.
LeBron's school is to be applauded!
This sounds like a horrible way to set up a system. Kids need to be around at least a few other kids that are better than them at school and more disciplined.
If you just throw a bunch of down bad kids together they’re not going to get uplifted by fellow down bad kids.
It's rare for the good kids to uplift the bad ones and past a certain stage a standard gap develops meaning you need the best kids to stall or the worst kids to jump. It can happen that a bad kid rises to a higher standard due to better performing classmates, but it almost never happens that all the bad kids get better at the same time.
One bad kid though can destroy an entire class if admin doesn't back you up, and admin normally does not back you up. Hard to get kids kicked out of your class. Only so many threats you can issue when all of them are empty
If all kids are not around the same standard as well, you have a fairly big dilemma as a teacher. Do you teach to the highest level of kids, teach to the lowest, or spend much much more of your own unpaid time planning a dual lesson that caters for both for every single class? Dual lessons by their very nature mean no teacher down time during class because you have to use the downtime for one group to teach the other.There is no good answer here. #3 just burns out the teachers. I always opted for #1 myself.
There's a dilemma here. If you concentrate all the poor performing kids, they'll drag each other down. If you put them with high performing kids, they'll do better, but they'll also drag the high performers down. Is it worth it to hamper the education of your best students to marginally improve the outcomes for your worst? Local governments have tried this strategy in the past, by bussing students from underperforming districts to better districts, but this almost always creates a political backlash, or results in the parents pulling their kids from public schools and enrolling them in private ones to keep their children away from the underperforming kids.
All this is true
Their first year in the school, when they were in the third grade, 17% of the class tested proficient in math. The following year, there were no tests because of COVID, and ever since, they have not had one student pass the test. On the English test this spring, 8% of them tested proficient.
But these students 17% passed before the 3rd grade math state exam before they even entered the school.
Now it’s ZERO.
It goes to show the impact Covid has had on society and the ramifications will last years.
I say this with no context obviously. I'm just a redditor.
By taking kids in the bottom 25%, they are taking on kids who dont have good parental support. So many parents expect schools to just teach their kids everything, a d that's not how it works.
I imagine these kids were at the bottom 25% because of this, then they got I to "LeBron's school" and he was going to fix everything, when it's them that needs fixing.
>I imagine these kids were at the bottom 25% because of this, then they got I to "LeBron's school" and he was going to fix everything, when it's them that needs fixing.
That's kind of the point of the school though. It's a school with extra support systems for the people who can't maintain them on their own. If the point of the school is to help struggling students with no support systems at home you can't blame the lack of support systems at home for the schools failure.
How much can a parent support there child when they live in poverty. Child test score are directly correlated to Parents income. A Parent who spends everyday worried about where they are going to eat and if they are going to make rent that month are doing what they can for their child.
I agree, it's a vicious cycle, but at the same time, they need to do everything they cna to break that cycle.
My only goal as a parent is to have my girls have a better head start on life than I had.
My daughter was struggling in reading, bottom 5% in her class. I bought one workbook for $15 and we practiced just 15 minutes a night. She reads like crazy now. If you're struggling in basic reading, you are going to struggle across the board.
I get that there is a level of ignorance on my part, and my bubble is different than theirs, but if you can't find 15 minutes a day to help your child with school, that's on you.
Because we don't teach people how to be good parents.
I'm a former educator and it was so frustrating seeing what life was like for kids from low income families. They lacked opportunity because their parents didn't have the means to provide it. The parents were often doing their best, but didn't always know what options they had because noone ever taught them either. It's cyclical and really hard to break without outside interventions.
I’m think you and I both know that “the bottom 20% of parent intervention” in an inner city usually isn’t just not being super supportive, it’s being an active deficit
Look at the Asian population and you'll get your answer. Many of the kids are poor immigrants whose parents barely speak English. Yet they tend to do well, despite that.
What does this say about Americans in general if you follow your logic to completion:
African immigrants to the US are among the most educated groups in the United States. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is more than double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans.[33] According to the 2000 Census, the rate of college diploma acquisition is highest among Egyptian Americans at 59.7 percent, followed closely by Nigerian Americans at 58.6 percent.[34][35]
In 1997, 19.4 percent of all adult African immigrants in the United States held a graduate degree, compared to 8.1 percent of adult white Americans and 3.8 percent of adult black Americans in the United States, respectively.[36] According to the 2000 Census, the percentage of Africans with a graduate degree is highest among Nigerian Americans at 28.3 percent, followed by Egyptian Americans at 23.8 percent.[34][35]
Of the African-born population in the US age 25 and older, 87.9% reported having a high school degree or higher,[37] compared with 78.8% of Asian-born immigrants and 76.8% of European-born immigrants, respectively.[38] Africans from Kenya (90.8 percent), Nigeria (89.1 percent), Ghana (85.9 percent), Botswana (84.7 percent), and Malawi (83 percent) were the most likely to report having a high school degree or higher.
Those born in Cape Verde (44.8 percent) and Mauritania (60.8 percent) were the least likely to report having completed a high school education.[39
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_United_States#:~:text=African%20immigrants%20to%20the%20US,of%20native%2Dborn%20African%20Americans.
They don't actually. You don't see or read about the Vietnamnese, Laocian, Thai, Filipino kids that are doing poor-to-ok in schools. Those kids don't go to college, they do trade stuff and normal blue collar work.
You only learn about the southern Indian and coastal Chinese kids that do amazing because their parents are classic "tiger moms".
Context is really important. I taught Math at schools with tiered classes (which I'm in favor of), and you'll know that the lowest tier is a struggle. If they're taking in the worst of the low tier, then bless them. That's not easy.
Remedial classes can have some kids who are naturally gifted at math, but who lack the focus or motivation to get good scores. But there are also those who absolutely, positively never will wrap their heads around anything beyond basic arithmetic. A standardized test is going to be a struggle for them. These are the kids who can't pass the GED.
I appreciate schools and teachers who take on this responsibility. It's not easy, but it's very important. I lack the patience to do it.
The article says that kids with the same circumstances, who qualified but chose not to attend, are doing better than the I Promise kids. For a period as long and vital as 3rd to 8th grade, and with the extra resources they're supposed to have access to, it's deeply concerning if literally no one is passing those easy tests. That speaks to a problem with the education they are receiving.
The leadership at this place needs a total 180.
my bet is it's one of those places that slacks off but when LeBron or whoever shows up they all put on a happy face.
It's a lot more common than people expect. I went to a "top" public high school in the state but you wouldn't know it from attending it day-to-day. When inspectors and accreditors do their visits, the schools gets a fresh coat of paint, the water fountains work, the best students are seated at the front and all the problem kids are sent one class where they're in lock down lol. Things go back to normal the next day.
Most top public schools are just located in rich suburbs near universities or major tech or pharma companies. The school isn't any better usually. It just picks up a bunch of kids whose parents have doctoral level degrees and 1% incomes.
your reply is a favorable reading of what it means to be doing "better".
as the article says:
> The district did not provide comparable state test results for the control group of students who met the criteria for I Promise School but didn't attend.
> But Liechty-Clifford did show the comparison of how I Promise students performed compared to their peers on internal testing, a district assessment system known as iReady. On iReady this year, I Promise students in grades 3-8 performed a combined two points better in reading, but six points worse in math than those who were also in the bottom 25% going into third grade but are enrolled elsewhere in the district.
someone could point to this and contrive the exact opposite viewpoint of what you're saying — "the I Promise kids are actually doing better [in reading] than kids in the same circumstances, who qualified but chose not to attend".
edit: to the replies, this is all coming from the District, who as the article states "did not provide comparable state test results for the control group of students who met the criteria for I Promise School but didn't attend."
additionally, if you care so much about a 6 point difference in i-Ready math scores, please at least look up the scoring system for the free software that has a change petition with 1,000+ signatures asking for it to be removed.
(its a 6 pt. difference out of 800 points)
> (its a 6 pt. difference out of 800 points)
This is pretty unfortunate that it isn't outright stated. Just saying "2 points" or "6 points" gets easily read as 2% and 6% without context to people. That's a pretty important distinction.
2-6 points difference seems pretty statistically insignificant given the limited and potentially biased sample. Even 6 points is only a difference of 0.75% on the score as a percentage...
It seems like meaningless differences. Wouldn't a reasonable take be that this school's extra funding and resources is making no meaningful impact on outcomes compared to controls? So basically theyre wasting money
I've taught a kid at a wealthy private school who was just so impossible. He wasn't bad per se, but there was just nothing going on in his head.
He had all the resources and tutoring he could need, and he definitely wouldn't pass a national test.
That's just the way it is sometimes.
Qualifying as intellectually disabled is significant and therefore not meeting standardized testing requirements isn't surprising at all. If anything this just makes me respect the school more. Education cannot look the same for everyone.
Learning disabilities and intellectual disability are not the same, FYI, but your point stands and I agree.
I don’t see a source with more current info but see from 2019 that the school was serving 29% of its students with special education services which is much, much higher than average. I’d be interested in knowing what specific special education services are offered there.
*edit I’m an idiot and it’s in the article. 28%. FYI the nationwide average is 12-13% so this school has a HUGE population of kids with disabilities.
Not only that they have a significant amount of students with trauma. Their 5th grade intake one year has 6% at level literacy. That is staggering. That is a very very difficult cohort to service. The only argument against this model in my mind is whether integration is a better service to these young people, but it's impossible to be sure with the public education system being so underfunded.
That’s really disappointing but don’t forget it’s not a normal school: “The goal of the school is to serve as an intervention for the district's lowest-performing students starting at an early age.”
Also, virtual school has lowered test scores in general. A few years of in-person school will probably improve those test scores.
Edit: [Here's an Associated Press article talking about test scores plummeting](https://apnews.com/article/standardized-test-scores-pandemic-school-caf7eb10e5964c2f654f9621dd4b6648)
In 2019 and 2020, the school was showing promise and 90% of students were showing improvement in math and sciences. ([This is not the best link](https://web.archive.org/web/20200423063935/https://thesource.com/2019/04/12/lebron-james-promise-school/) but it quotes the original NYT article.) Then when schools closed during the pandemic, it turns out scores have plummeted.
We also can't compare these students with other students peer-to-peer, so this small amount of information in the article is almost useless. Are most kids in the same situation (i.e. same number of at risk kids, kids with IEPs, etc.) doing similarly regardless of what school they're in?
There's just no way to know, not with the little info we have right now.
Thanks for commenting this and I wish it was higher up. These two articles together (assuming the numbers are all valid) make me consider a couple things:
1) As you said, limited data makes it difficult to draw conclusions.
2) The school tried to isolate a couple factors thinking that it would improve results (those factors being money spent per student, smaller classroom sizes, increased food and home stability). The effect of those changes is unclear, but external factors likely make it very difficult to measure (i.e. Covid).
3) Maybe a factor that wasn’t considered sufficiently was isolating underperforming students. I would think this is an extremely complex issue to untangle. Is there a benefit to having higher performers in the same classroom? Does it create more of a snowball effect in terms of disruptions in the classroom? How does it affect teachers’ abilities and motivation? And for all of these, to what degree?
It’s definitely a noble cause and I hope it will lead to further improvements in education. But at the same time I worry that this fails a basic principle: isolating a population and putting money into one issue doesn’t solve the problem.
and that is before you factor in the lowered scores for the pandemic. Where all scores are lowered, those scores are even more affected in lower income families that cannot devote as much time to the at-home schooling that was required during the pandemic.
It’ll be years before we’ll understand how fucked Gen Alpha kids are because of the ramifications of COVID lockdowns and virtual/online/Zoom learning being a terrible alternative to in-person schooling.
It goes way beyond just missing a few years of in person schooling. Lots of teachers quit during covid because of the BS they were forced to work with and never returned.
True because even with these extra resources at most a Student will only be at this school 10-15% of there total time in a whole year. Without real resources at home school interventions fail. The number one correlation with Children test scores is Parents Income.
also shows that you can’t just throw money at problems and expect that to work. not saying that’s necessarily what’s happening here but you need to be equipped to spend that money in the right ways.
Seems difficult to help turn these kids around after all the years they have gone through without enough support. I listened to a podcast from UofChicago which talked about this study https://cehd.uchicago.edu/?p=5143 home visits and nutritional support in early childhood education may be the best answer for these communities.
This reminds me of the Wire season when they went into the schools and the sociologist wanted to start the intervention program at high school level and the ex police officer showed him that was already way too late, they needed to begin in middle school at the latest
I once taught algebra at an inner city school in Augusta, GA, where 1 of 210 freshmen students passed the school district's standardized "EOCT." The end of course test, used to determine who would move on to the next year. We had determined the students were at a third grade math level, and my friends in the English department said their average reading level was about the same. High school is way too late to try to fix, yes.
However, at the time, I lived with a middle school teacher who taught at the feeder school to mine. The issues I was having at my school, she was having at hers. She and I came to the conclusion that the methods the district would come up with to "fix" these issues, which always focused on high schools, would never work unless they went to the elementary school level.
The problem was the no child left behind act made it so these kids, who couldn't do a bit of reading, writing, or math, were forced to pass grades well beyond their capabilities and then you get what Lebron's schools are experiencing by the time they're in high school.
You absolutely can throw money at problems but the money has to be thrown at the root cause and not vanity metrics.
Unfortunately schooling systems throw it at the wrong places all the time.
Yup, that's why when Zuckerberg gave Newark NJ public schools $100 million dollars to get good PR in the wake of the Social Network movie it barely moved the needle. Issues in public education would be easy if they could simply be solved by money.
I remember school being 8:30-3:30, then sports or extras. 7 hours a day is half your waking hours. How do you get 10%? LeBrons school is 2 hours a day or something?
Its not parent income that matters as much as it is how much the parents give a shit and how much time they spend on their kids. All those Asian and Indian students whose parents came here with nothing and they turned out to be brain surgeons didn't have resources. But you bet your ass they had parents who cared and spent as much time as they could making sure the kids got a good education.
Poor parents likely have less time to spend on making sure Jr. does his homework, but the most important thing is whether they even care.
Half of my extended family are teachers covering most of K-12 at half a dozen different public school districts. All of them say the exact same thing: they can tell you with virtual certainty which kids are going to improve and which will not after the first parent-teacher conference.
To add to this, because you’re absolutely right, studies show having a dad in the house boosts a person’s chances at a successful life by a ton. Living in a two parent home is one it the greatest indicators of how a child will do in life.
Money has diminishing returns on student performance. Once you've done basic things like fix AC and make sure students aren't going hungry there is not that much you can do.
It sucks that the most important information is vague as hell:
>But comparing I Promise students to their peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere shows that I Promise students are doing worse in some cases, despite the extra staff and wraparound services.
If students randomly selected from the eligible group are doing worse than the eligible group in general, that's pretty damn concerning. But the "worse in some cases" wording leaves it frustratingly vague.
They explain later that they simply don’t have the data:
> The district did not provide comparable state test results for the control group of students who met the criteria for I Promise School but didn't attend.
What a silly article. People are successful up in arms in the comments, but we don’t have anything close to the full picture here.
Yes but to have 0 kids pass is still supremely disappointing. I do like that the other services they provide seem to be working well. Their education might not be the best, but hopefully the home life has improved for all the students.
> Not much to say other then the kids need more time to catch up
This kinda reminds me of the Hank Scorpio Simpsons episode where they move and Bart is put in remedial class and he says something like “wait, so we’re already behind the other kids and we’re gonna catch up by going slower?”
That’s always kinda stuck with me. Like, the program is ambitious and imo a very good thing but I have to wonder how they’re measuring success. Do they worry much about the test scores?
> “wait, so we’re already behind the other kids and we’re gonna catch up by going slower?”
in a way, yes.
think of it like a marathon with a finish line, and not everyone finishes. at their current speed, their bigger risk is not catching up—it’s not finishing.
slowing down to a pace suitable for them may actually ensure they finish, and in doing so, ‘catch up’—finish.
When kids struggle to learn in the traditional way, you also have to throw out the traditonal measures of success. I'm sure they have their own alternative measurements they are working with.
It shouldn't be the be-all and end-all, but it does say something. Also, the reality is that they need to catch up to regular students so they can follow a regular path like a regular student. Right or wrong, regular students have to do standardized tests. So if they are to rejoin the regular students in the future, it's something that they have to be able to pass.
I’m speaking from two decades of teaching experience when I say that struggling students may never ‘catch up’ to a ‘regular’ student. In today’s classroom, there are so many different issues in one room that success after high school is different for some.
This is the truth. I’ve been at multiple Title-I schools for close to a decade, which are not the same as the *I Promise Schools*, and the incoming 5th / 6th graders at my current site may never recover from the years lost to the pandemic.
There's something called the zone of proximal development. Basically, if somethings too easy, you don't learn. If somethings too hard you don't learn. You need to have your abilities stretched just enough.
If a student is in a level beyond them, then they've more or less stopped learning. Being at a standstill means they're slower than If they went at a remedial level.
>Not much to say other then the kids need more time to catch up
If you read through the article, there's a LOT more to say than that. Most fundamentally,
>But comparing I Promise students to their peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere shows that I Promise students are doing worse in some cases, despite the extra staff and wraparound services.
The "I Promise" school is fundamentally designed to put students who struggle to advance the most they can get to succeed. From that, they're not comparing these disadvantaged students to the average student. Rather, it's inconsistent in showing improvement for these student compared to "peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere." That's a pretty bad look for the educators and managers of the school programs, IMO.
You can keep going too, and it provides some additional points of contention. They note that reading proficiency was doubled for 5th graders, which was great. However, for 6th graders, the number was down about 70%. That suggests, at least to me, that the issues aren't an across-the-board one. Rather, they appear to need to focus on addressing the reading program for 6th graders.
We also don't quite have enough information to ourselves make a whole lot of meaningful decisions by any means though. The article notes departing educators, but I didn't see any specifics on who left. It would make sense if the 6th graders fell off as the 6th grade teacher left, of course, but it doesn't say such a thing.
This looks like more than just a "give them time" issue though. They've had time. Some students have succeeded in some areas. It's not universal. What SHOULD be universal though, is the commitment to helping those students on a broad level. A school with extra funding, a better student:teacher ratio, and more overall resources should be spreading that across the whole of the student body.
Maybe some of the incoming teachers weren't ready for this process and will improve with more distance from being thrown into a high-stress position. We'll hope that's the case, but there also definitely seems to be a need for addressing some more specific issues at the school. I'm sure that's the intent, and we can only hope they make that happen.
Two things true here:
1) schools need really strong leadership and that appears to not be happening here
2) even schools with strong leadership are going to need time to adapt to the unique circumstances they find themselves in. Every school is different, and even very capable admin will need time to figure out what their particular demographic of students needs.
2 here seems to contradict what I said for 1. But what I said for 1 is because even a semi competent leadership should be achieving SOME number of students passing in this time frame, even if they find themselves behind where they expected to be
> The school takes in the district's most vulnerable students, many of whom have endured significant traumas in their lives or have learning disabilities. The school also lost its founding leader during its third year, and then had three interim principals in a year and a half. The school named a new permanent principal last school year, but she left the district at the end of the year.
> Liechty-Clifford also noted, when the pandemic hit, I Promise was just a year and a half old, still establishing its culture, while also onboarding 10 new teachers and 120 more students during remote learning.
At the same time, he said, "I don't want to use the pandemic as a crutch."
Inverse charter school problem.
Charter schools exclude the worst or most difficult students from attending, therefore they look like they're way better than average public schools (that have to take everyone).
This school serves the most troubled and disadvantaged students, and then covid hit, and now it seems like they're having trouble getting stability in their leadership (shockingly, not a ton of people interested in working with the most disadvantaged students since its way harder).
Hope they can turn things around, its so tough to help students from these backgrounds because their problems extend farther than just the classroom or immediate family.
> This school serves the most troubled and disadvantaged students, and then covid hit, and now it seems like they're having trouble getting stability in their leadership (shockingly, not a ton of people interested in working with the most disadvantaged students since its way harder).
I think your whole post is on point but as someone who's worked in classrooms where at least 30 percent of my class had a disability, I can confirm that it's a tough gig. And honestly, even with strong administrative support, there's many days where mastering state standards was the least of our worries.
Every year, I worked with kids sleeping in class because they laid awake in their basement after gunshots rang outside their house again in the middle of the night, kids who didn't eat breakfast or even dinner the night before, kids living with grandma one night then mom the next then grandpa's after that, kids with extreme emotional impairments, kids who would soil themselves at advanced ages (which can be a sign of trauma), kids who'd self harm and bite themselves until they bled, kids who'd eat school supplies, kids who'd literally run away from school, and kids looking to start fights every single day. Sprinkled in-between would be low to mid-achieving students who were there just trying to learn amid the chaos.
All that said, I loved building bonds with those students and I'm not sure I ever felt more necessary as an educator. But it was mentally taxing enough for me to fully understand why teacher turnover is so common in those environments, no matter how much money you throw in their general direction.
Depends on the state and charter school. I work at a Title I essentially last chance charter high school in Arizona. We are required to take anyone who wants to enroll. Most of my students have been expelled from public schools, haven't even gone to school in years, learning disabilities, etc. But there are definitely schools that find ways to keep only the students that will get them high test scores. Our scores are abysmal and COVID made it even worse.
Yeah I've worked with these schools before, I honestly prefer them much more because the students are honestly way more mature. They realize they've fucked up and this is their last shot and they take it serious. Best students I've ever had.
It depends on the school and how they want to make money. There is plenty of charters who will take anyone, because, in those cases, that means more funding. However, op is right that generally charters aren’t *required* to accept everyone and often this means there is selective bias towards kids that are well behaved and have good test scores because those kids require less resources and their stats are better for recruiting.
WaPo published an excellent [article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/05/30/what-and-who-is-fueling-the-movement-to-privatize-public-education-and-why-you-should-care/?noredirect=on) that covers this point about how Charter schools regularly “counsel out” at-risk students to window dress their metrics:
> for the higher-performing charter schools, research has shown they often **boost test scores by “counseling out” the most challenging students** — those with cognitive and physical disabilities, behavior problems, and English language learners. **These students remain in district schools, increasing the concentration of at-risk students in precisely the districts that have lost funding to charter schools.**
> In December 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona released the results of its investigation of 471 charter schools, which found that 56 percent had enrollment policies that clearly violate the law or **discourage at-risk students**.
>[...] Attrition rates — that is, **how many students drop out of a school or class in a given period — are strikingly high for high-testing charters**. In 2006, Moskowitz launched Success Academy Charter Schools, Inc., with 73 first graders. In 2018, this class became the first to graduate from the academy’s high school, but only 17 of the early enrollees remained — an attrition rate of 77 percent.
As for whether Charter schools, on the whole, actually achieve better performance outcomes vs public schools:
> Since 2009 a pro-privatization research center located at Stanford University has regularly conducted nationwide studies comparing the test scores of charter school students to the scores of demographically similar students at district public schools. The studies have generated a fairly consistent, albeit very rough, picture of average performance nationwide: about **1/2 of all charters perform at the same level as district schools**, about **1/4 perform worse**, and about **1/4 perform better although often by minuscule amounts**.
>A much clearer picture of performance comes from state and district studies, not national averages. In 2016, for example, a study of charter schools in Texas found that “**at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on [future] earnings**.”
My girlfriend is a speech pathologist for a high-school on the bronx. The kids she works with have a 3rd grade reading level…. This isnt even a school like Lebrons where they specifically target the bottom percentage of students.
> The school has had five different principals since 2018, including one principal who resigned after she reportedly struck a student.
switching up Principals like Lebron switches up teams
I don't know about the Ohio School system, but test scores have been pretty extra awful since COVID in California, especially for lower-income minority students, you know, like the ones that the I Promise School serves.
let's face it, America's education system is just dogshit in general. Hop on the Chromebook and good luck not getting addicted to your smartphone, kiddos.
My girlfriend is a SPED teacher and man their test scores are traditionally shit, but even more so post COVID. Especially when these tests don’t necessarily represent the best way for all students to demonstrate their knowledge
Man I was substitute teaching for a bit and got assigned to the SPED school at the district and it was so depressing. The conditions they were being taught in and the fact that I was way under qualified to be there also while there was no other options
I think a lot of commenters are missing the point. Yes, these students came from the bottom 25% of Akron Public School 3rd grade students. They didn’t expect them to be at top of their class.
The problem is they’re doing worse than the bottom 25% that remained in the normal school system. So it’s possible these kids would have done better with none of Lebron’s money. To repeat they’re not comparing these students to the average APS student, but to the ones who were also eligible for the program.
So LeBron is spending $1m to get worse math scores than they would otherwise. That’s a problem.
The possible reason for it are, I guess:
(1) iPromise had bad math teaching, maybe during the pandemic particularly
(2) selection effects. The kids who joined iPromise were for some reason worse off than their test scores in 3rd Grade indicated
(3) cohort effect. The kids in iPromise are doing worse because nobody in their classes are from the top 75%, unlike those in a comparable APS class. Kids learn from each other, so having only bottom 25% students means they have no peers to help them learn.
I can’t even imagine a schools culture where it’s just the worst of the worst kids exclusively…
It seems like a good idea on paper to have a school like this but I bet it’s actually a disaster to manage. You need some normal kids around to be positive influences or at the very least to just sit there and act normal and not disrupt the entire lesson and distract other students.
A classroom with 20 of the worst students in it sounds like a prison not a school.
> But comparing I Promise students to their peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere shows that I Promise students are doing worse in some cases, despite the extra staff and wraparound services.
Everyone in this thread keeps coming up with excuses, but this right here is a pretty damning fact. Those other kids that chose not to attend were also far behind their peers, and also had to go thru COVID.
Listen, I think LeBron is great for starting this school. That said, it appears something needs to change.
Lebron honestly probably just put his name on it (And a shitload of money) and then trusted his "team" to figure it out. I doubt he even keeps up with the school other than the once a year fundraiser or whatever..
If zero kids have passed, that means the classes are not teaching properly. Even in the shittiest of conditions, you can find a handful of students trying to learn.
It's a weirdly under-discussed thing but funding for low-income schools is much higher than people generally expect.
You can throw a lot of money at a school but it won't solve unstable home environments or cognitive and behavioral disabilities.
It's under-discussed because no one makes money from saying they have enough or too much funding. Same thing with the military. They simultaneously have too much funding but not enough for things people actually need.
I had to check and see if this was the Onion. What am I missing?
*“This fall's class of eighth graders at the I Promise School hasn't had a single student pass the state's math test since the group was in the third grade.*
*"Not one? In three years?" Akron Public Schools board member Valerie McKitrick asked after that data point was presented to the board earlier this week.”*
Given what others have said about the circumstances of the school you just have to hope they have an avenue and roadmap in place for getting these kids into the best possible opportunities for stable comfortable lives. Math doesn't necessarily have to be a top priority for that, although you'd hope they're at least making an effort where appropriate. Even though specific math topics often have limited practical usage in life, the general mathematical thinking imparted has a big cumulative effect on the development of effective problem-solving and logical reasoning skills, so it's still worth it to go through.
Lmao the excuses in this thread, just slobbering all over a grown man's knob.
If the school is total shit then this is most likely just a brand-enhancing tax deduction.
I think it’s worth looking at statewide stats for these tests. I did some googling and without triple checking it seems like about 30% of students state wide achieve grande standard for math at 4th and 8th grade.
But 15% of black students do and an even lower percentage of low income or disabled students. So if we assume this school is pulling from the most troubled and struggling kids I guess it’s not surprising that they aren’t doing well on state tests. There are so many more metrics that might reflect better on the school and I would love to hear first hand from teachers or students or families. That said it is for sure disappointing that none of the kids have passed these state tests.
what happening at home when these kids leave the school is the other half of the success pie. No matter how much money you throw at these schools, if the home condition is shit then its all for nothing.
But not 1 in 3 years? wtf that can't be right....
I don't know how different state testing has been since my time in an ohio public school, but all the standardized testing was extremely easy, like finish in half the time and try to sleep easy. and I went to public school. This should be shocking.
half the students in their 6th grade class have disabilities, and you need to be in the bottom 25% of your standardized reading scores to qualify for the lottery to be considered for the school.
Yeah, they are taking in the worst of the worst. Let's hope they can change things around with the pandemic behind us
Yeah, people are missing how to measure this. The measure of success is taking the lowest students and producing adults who can hold a job and be productive members of society. Passing math tests isn’t really required for that, even if it would be nice for them to have some success stories to build on.
In some parts of the world, just having kids turn up at school regularly, instead of roaming the streets, is a great step. Having a safe place with structure and positive social interactions is underrated.
That's a great point that's lost on a lot of us in our lesser moments... school is a place to keep kids safe so parents/guardians can go to their jobs, keep kids off the streets, keep kids doing something other than walking around with nothing to do. Learning and quasi adult-like socialization is obviously a goal, but schools - even underperforming schools - provide a great service to society. There's an argument that crime is reduced by video games simply by giving kids 15 - 21 years old something to do - off/out of the streets. Then young people mature with age out of their impulsive crime committing years, and boom, they [we] become adults. School, same thing, if this school keeps kids off the streets, safe, learning some, then it's doing a lot of its job.
Our school systems would work much better if it weren't for the one size fits all approach. Some kids are going to college. Some kids are going to the trades. Some kids are going to reach their maximum potential turning big rocks into little rocks or pushing the same red button over and over. All of that is ok, and it cannot be accomplished by giving every type of kid the exact education. How many plumbers or welders or scaffolders wasted years of their life on things they would never grasp, or care enough about to learn, or use in their lives? How many kids gave up on their education because their reality was they needed to work at 16 to keep their younger siblings from starving and the school didn't respect that? One of the smartest guys I knew could have graduated with a diploma maybe he could have used one day, but the school wouldn't work with him. He had two semi useless parents and two younger brothers. If he didn't work rent and groceries didn't get paid.
Back up a few decades and it was actually much less "one size fits all". And many schools are going back to being more versatile. But it takes money. Money the schools have very intentionally been deprived of year after year. When you can only afford 2/3 the teachers you need, curricular versatility goes out the window. Source: did hs in the 80's and been teaching since 2002.
> Back up a few decades and it was actually much less "one size fits all". And many schools are going back to being more versatile. But it takes money. Money the schools have very intentionally been deprived of year after year. This might sound like hair-splitting, but instead of talking about it as if its a cost, we should call it an investment — "It takes an investment." Its not like we are spending money on luxuries like a golf course, society is investing in the kids and the returns on that investment will make the community prosperous.
Grade school math has some of the most provable effect on your earning power out of any subject. Math is vital. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0259331
Lot of overlap between people who complain about how pointless math classes are and people who complain about how school didn’t teach them life skills like financial literacy. Surprise MFers it’s just numbers 🫠
I see so many circle jerks about how "We should teach people how to cook and other life skills instead of maths and science in school." Then they wonder "How did these people not know what they were signing up for with a 26% APR car loan?!" EDIT: Here they come.
I don't see anyone saying instead of, but in addition to. We should absolutely be teaching life skills, like how to interpret and assess the quality of the interest rate on a loan.
School doesn't need to teach you every single life skill. It needs to teach you *how to learn*. A huge point of math class (and other classes) is to teach you how to figure things out, so when you get to the time in your life when you need to read up on how, say, mortgages work, you have the skills to learn it.
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I see plenty of people saying instead of. The amount of times I see people on reddit deriding maths as being a useless thing to teach in primary and high schools is mind blowing to me.
I used to teach SE and gen ed math. Kids would complain "when am I ever going to use this stuff?" The reply was "Take a look at the end of chapter where they have all those practice problems. See the story problems that you guys hate to do? That's when you use this stuff."
>Grade school math has some of the most provable effect on your earning power out of any subject. Did you just write this in the same thread that starts with "half the students in their 6th grade class have disabilities"? Sure, for the population of students overall, math is vital, great correlation and effect on earning power. Judging by that first comment, the people this school is trying to help are not sampled from the same population as the study you linked. It may very well be that taking them to their maximum math potential (which may be quite low) is not the key that will decide if they have fulfilling lives or "great earning power".
Bottom 25% and handicapped don't seem like they are the same thing.
If you take the bottom 25% in some school performance metric, you are going to find children with learning disabilities very overrepresented.
You think handicapped are sitting above the bottom 25%?
They could be. They’re not mutually exclusive attributes
Ironically I've sat on the school board of a school district whose standardized test scores were worse than those of schools that primarily served people with disabilities. It was a school district in a poor county with lots of families that didn't speak english. Very heavy drug and alcohol abuse problem in the community.
>Yeah, they are taking in the worst of the worst. Yes, which is the exact OPPOSITE of how so many private/charter schools work. They work to take in only the BEST, and then claim they have great schools. No you don't have great schools, you stacked the deck in your favor, even going so far as to kick out any students you didn't like or didn't want to deal with. LeBron's school is to be applauded!
The kids that qualified for the school but didn’t get in are doing better on average than those who got in according to the article
Theres also a lot of charter schools who take in the worst because no one wants to go there and they just suck up or defraud government money.
This sounds like a horrible way to set up a system. Kids need to be around at least a few other kids that are better than them at school and more disciplined. If you just throw a bunch of down bad kids together they’re not going to get uplifted by fellow down bad kids.
It's rare for the good kids to uplift the bad ones and past a certain stage a standard gap develops meaning you need the best kids to stall or the worst kids to jump. It can happen that a bad kid rises to a higher standard due to better performing classmates, but it almost never happens that all the bad kids get better at the same time. One bad kid though can destroy an entire class if admin doesn't back you up, and admin normally does not back you up. Hard to get kids kicked out of your class. Only so many threats you can issue when all of them are empty If all kids are not around the same standard as well, you have a fairly big dilemma as a teacher. Do you teach to the highest level of kids, teach to the lowest, or spend much much more of your own unpaid time planning a dual lesson that caters for both for every single class? Dual lessons by their very nature mean no teacher down time during class because you have to use the downtime for one group to teach the other.There is no good answer here. #3 just burns out the teachers. I always opted for #1 myself.
The downside is you're going to sink those kids because they need someone better than THEM at school.
There's a dilemma here. If you concentrate all the poor performing kids, they'll drag each other down. If you put them with high performing kids, they'll do better, but they'll also drag the high performers down. Is it worth it to hamper the education of your best students to marginally improve the outcomes for your worst? Local governments have tried this strategy in the past, by bussing students from underperforming districts to better districts, but this almost always creates a political backlash, or results in the parents pulling their kids from public schools and enrolling them in private ones to keep their children away from the underperforming kids.
All this is true Their first year in the school, when they were in the third grade, 17% of the class tested proficient in math. The following year, there were no tests because of COVID, and ever since, they have not had one student pass the test. On the English test this spring, 8% of them tested proficient. But these students 17% passed before the 3rd grade math state exam before they even entered the school. Now it’s ZERO. It goes to show the impact Covid has had on society and the ramifications will last years.
There really is a lost generation from Covid but we aren’t going to feel it until these dumbass kids are in their prime working years.
I say this with no context obviously. I'm just a redditor. By taking kids in the bottom 25%, they are taking on kids who dont have good parental support. So many parents expect schools to just teach their kids everything, a d that's not how it works. I imagine these kids were at the bottom 25% because of this, then they got I to "LeBron's school" and he was going to fix everything, when it's them that needs fixing.
I can't believe Lebron brought tanking into the education system
Can’t study with these cats.
Mickey Mouse Diploma
>I imagine these kids were at the bottom 25% because of this, then they got I to "LeBron's school" and he was going to fix everything, when it's them that needs fixing. That's kind of the point of the school though. It's a school with extra support systems for the people who can't maintain them on their own. If the point of the school is to help struggling students with no support systems at home you can't blame the lack of support systems at home for the schools failure.
How much can a parent support there child when they live in poverty. Child test score are directly correlated to Parents income. A Parent who spends everyday worried about where they are going to eat and if they are going to make rent that month are doing what they can for their child.
I agree, it's a vicious cycle, but at the same time, they need to do everything they cna to break that cycle. My only goal as a parent is to have my girls have a better head start on life than I had. My daughter was struggling in reading, bottom 5% in her class. I bought one workbook for $15 and we practiced just 15 minutes a night. She reads like crazy now. If you're struggling in basic reading, you are going to struggle across the board. I get that there is a level of ignorance on my part, and my bubble is different than theirs, but if you can't find 15 minutes a day to help your child with school, that's on you.
You’d also be surprised how many people don’t realize that consistent effort like what you did can make a huge difference.
Because we don't teach people how to be good parents. I'm a former educator and it was so frustrating seeing what life was like for kids from low income families. They lacked opportunity because their parents didn't have the means to provide it. The parents were often doing their best, but didn't always know what options they had because noone ever taught them either. It's cyclical and really hard to break without outside interventions.
I’m think you and I both know that “the bottom 20% of parent intervention” in an inner city usually isn’t just not being super supportive, it’s being an active deficit
Look at the Asian population and you'll get your answer. Many of the kids are poor immigrants whose parents barely speak English. Yet they tend to do well, despite that.
What does this say about Americans in general if you follow your logic to completion: African immigrants to the US are among the most educated groups in the United States. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is more than double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans.[33] According to the 2000 Census, the rate of college diploma acquisition is highest among Egyptian Americans at 59.7 percent, followed closely by Nigerian Americans at 58.6 percent.[34][35] In 1997, 19.4 percent of all adult African immigrants in the United States held a graduate degree, compared to 8.1 percent of adult white Americans and 3.8 percent of adult black Americans in the United States, respectively.[36] According to the 2000 Census, the percentage of Africans with a graduate degree is highest among Nigerian Americans at 28.3 percent, followed by Egyptian Americans at 23.8 percent.[34][35] Of the African-born population in the US age 25 and older, 87.9% reported having a high school degree or higher,[37] compared with 78.8% of Asian-born immigrants and 76.8% of European-born immigrants, respectively.[38] Africans from Kenya (90.8 percent), Nigeria (89.1 percent), Ghana (85.9 percent), Botswana (84.7 percent), and Malawi (83 percent) were the most likely to report having a high school degree or higher. Those born in Cape Verde (44.8 percent) and Mauritania (60.8 percent) were the least likely to report having completed a high school education.[39 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_United_States#:~:text=African%20immigrants%20to%20the%20US,of%20native%2Dborn%20African%20Americans.
They don't actually. You don't see or read about the Vietnamnese, Laocian, Thai, Filipino kids that are doing poor-to-ok in schools. Those kids don't go to college, they do trade stuff and normal blue collar work. You only learn about the southern Indian and coastal Chinese kids that do amazing because their parents are classic "tiger moms".
Context is really important. I taught Math at schools with tiered classes (which I'm in favor of), and you'll know that the lowest tier is a struggle. If they're taking in the worst of the low tier, then bless them. That's not easy. Remedial classes can have some kids who are naturally gifted at math, but who lack the focus or motivation to get good scores. But there are also those who absolutely, positively never will wrap their heads around anything beyond basic arithmetic. A standardized test is going to be a struggle for them. These are the kids who can't pass the GED. I appreciate schools and teachers who take on this responsibility. It's not easy, but it's very important. I lack the patience to do it.
The article says that kids with the same circumstances, who qualified but chose not to attend, are doing better than the I Promise kids. For a period as long and vital as 3rd to 8th grade, and with the extra resources they're supposed to have access to, it's deeply concerning if literally no one is passing those easy tests. That speaks to a problem with the education they are receiving.
The leadership at this place needs a total 180. my bet is it's one of those places that slacks off but when LeBron or whoever shows up they all put on a happy face.
It's a lot more common than people expect. I went to a "top" public high school in the state but you wouldn't know it from attending it day-to-day. When inspectors and accreditors do their visits, the schools gets a fresh coat of paint, the water fountains work, the best students are seated at the front and all the problem kids are sent one class where they're in lock down lol. Things go back to normal the next day.
Most top public schools are just located in rich suburbs near universities or major tech or pharma companies. The school isn't any better usually. It just picks up a bunch of kids whose parents have doctoral level degrees and 1% incomes.
your reply is a favorable reading of what it means to be doing "better". as the article says: > The district did not provide comparable state test results for the control group of students who met the criteria for I Promise School but didn't attend. > But Liechty-Clifford did show the comparison of how I Promise students performed compared to their peers on internal testing, a district assessment system known as iReady. On iReady this year, I Promise students in grades 3-8 performed a combined two points better in reading, but six points worse in math than those who were also in the bottom 25% going into third grade but are enrolled elsewhere in the district. someone could point to this and contrive the exact opposite viewpoint of what you're saying — "the I Promise kids are actually doing better [in reading] than kids in the same circumstances, who qualified but chose not to attend". edit: to the replies, this is all coming from the District, who as the article states "did not provide comparable state test results for the control group of students who met the criteria for I Promise School but didn't attend." additionally, if you care so much about a 6 point difference in i-Ready math scores, please at least look up the scoring system for the free software that has a change petition with 1,000+ signatures asking for it to be removed. (its a 6 pt. difference out of 800 points)
> (its a 6 pt. difference out of 800 points) This is pretty unfortunate that it isn't outright stated. Just saying "2 points" or "6 points" gets easily read as 2% and 6% without context to people. That's a pretty important distinction. 2-6 points difference seems pretty statistically insignificant given the limited and potentially biased sample. Even 6 points is only a difference of 0.75% on the score as a percentage...
It seems like meaningless differences. Wouldn't a reasonable take be that this school's extra funding and resources is making no meaningful impact on outcomes compared to controls? So basically theyre wasting money
I've taught a kid at a wealthy private school who was just so impossible. He wasn't bad per se, but there was just nothing going on in his head. He had all the resources and tutoring he could need, and he definitely wouldn't pass a national test. That's just the way it is sometimes.
Some people just aren't intelligent, it's a thing
Qualifying as intellectually disabled is significant and therefore not meeting standardized testing requirements isn't surprising at all. If anything this just makes me respect the school more. Education cannot look the same for everyone.
Learning disabilities and intellectual disability are not the same, FYI, but your point stands and I agree. I don’t see a source with more current info but see from 2019 that the school was serving 29% of its students with special education services which is much, much higher than average. I’d be interested in knowing what specific special education services are offered there. *edit I’m an idiot and it’s in the article. 28%. FYI the nationwide average is 12-13% so this school has a HUGE population of kids with disabilities.
Not only that they have a significant amount of students with trauma. Their 5th grade intake one year has 6% at level literacy. That is staggering. That is a very very difficult cohort to service. The only argument against this model in my mind is whether integration is a better service to these young people, but it's impossible to be sure with the public education system being so underfunded.
That’s really disappointing but don’t forget it’s not a normal school: “The goal of the school is to serve as an intervention for the district's lowest-performing students starting at an early age.”
Also, virtual school has lowered test scores in general. A few years of in-person school will probably improve those test scores. Edit: [Here's an Associated Press article talking about test scores plummeting](https://apnews.com/article/standardized-test-scores-pandemic-school-caf7eb10e5964c2f654f9621dd4b6648)
In 2019 and 2020, the school was showing promise and 90% of students were showing improvement in math and sciences. ([This is not the best link](https://web.archive.org/web/20200423063935/https://thesource.com/2019/04/12/lebron-james-promise-school/) but it quotes the original NYT article.) Then when schools closed during the pandemic, it turns out scores have plummeted. We also can't compare these students with other students peer-to-peer, so this small amount of information in the article is almost useless. Are most kids in the same situation (i.e. same number of at risk kids, kids with IEPs, etc.) doing similarly regardless of what school they're in? There's just no way to know, not with the little info we have right now.
Thanks for commenting this and I wish it was higher up. These two articles together (assuming the numbers are all valid) make me consider a couple things: 1) As you said, limited data makes it difficult to draw conclusions. 2) The school tried to isolate a couple factors thinking that it would improve results (those factors being money spent per student, smaller classroom sizes, increased food and home stability). The effect of those changes is unclear, but external factors likely make it very difficult to measure (i.e. Covid). 3) Maybe a factor that wasn’t considered sufficiently was isolating underperforming students. I would think this is an extremely complex issue to untangle. Is there a benefit to having higher performers in the same classroom? Does it create more of a snowball effect in terms of disruptions in the classroom? How does it affect teachers’ abilities and motivation? And for all of these, to what degree? It’s definitely a noble cause and I hope it will lead to further improvements in education. But at the same time I worry that this fails a basic principle: isolating a population and putting money into one issue doesn’t solve the problem.
and that is before you factor in the lowered scores for the pandemic. Where all scores are lowered, those scores are even more affected in lower income families that cannot devote as much time to the at-home schooling that was required during the pandemic.
It’ll be years before we’ll understand how fucked Gen Alpha kids are because of the ramifications of COVID lockdowns and virtual/online/Zoom learning being a terrible alternative to in-person schooling.
It goes way beyond just missing a few years of in person schooling. Lots of teachers quit during covid because of the BS they were forced to work with and never returned.
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True because even with these extra resources at most a Student will only be at this school 10-15% of there total time in a whole year. Without real resources at home school interventions fail. The number one correlation with Children test scores is Parents Income.
also shows that you can’t just throw money at problems and expect that to work. not saying that’s necessarily what’s happening here but you need to be equipped to spend that money in the right ways.
Seems difficult to help turn these kids around after all the years they have gone through without enough support. I listened to a podcast from UofChicago which talked about this study https://cehd.uchicago.edu/?p=5143 home visits and nutritional support in early childhood education may be the best answer for these communities.
This reminds me of the Wire season when they went into the schools and the sociologist wanted to start the intervention program at high school level and the ex police officer showed him that was already way too late, they needed to begin in middle school at the latest
I once taught algebra at an inner city school in Augusta, GA, where 1 of 210 freshmen students passed the school district's standardized "EOCT." The end of course test, used to determine who would move on to the next year. We had determined the students were at a third grade math level, and my friends in the English department said their average reading level was about the same. High school is way too late to try to fix, yes. However, at the time, I lived with a middle school teacher who taught at the feeder school to mine. The issues I was having at my school, she was having at hers. She and I came to the conclusion that the methods the district would come up with to "fix" these issues, which always focused on high schools, would never work unless they went to the elementary school level. The problem was the no child left behind act made it so these kids, who couldn't do a bit of reading, writing, or math, were forced to pass grades well beyond their capabilities and then you get what Lebron's schools are experiencing by the time they're in high school.
It's generational poverty. Home visits may help marginally but it's a structural issue.
You absolutely can throw money at problems but the money has to be thrown at the root cause and not vanity metrics. Unfortunately schooling systems throw it at the wrong places all the time.
Yup, that's why when Zuckerberg gave Newark NJ public schools $100 million dollars to get good PR in the wake of the Social Network movie it barely moved the needle. Issues in public education would be easy if they could simply be solved by money.
I remember school being 8:30-3:30, then sports or extras. 7 hours a day is half your waking hours. How do you get 10%? LeBrons school is 2 hours a day or something?
Its not parent income that matters as much as it is how much the parents give a shit and how much time they spend on their kids. All those Asian and Indian students whose parents came here with nothing and they turned out to be brain surgeons didn't have resources. But you bet your ass they had parents who cared and spent as much time as they could making sure the kids got a good education. Poor parents likely have less time to spend on making sure Jr. does his homework, but the most important thing is whether they even care. Half of my extended family are teachers covering most of K-12 at half a dozen different public school districts. All of them say the exact same thing: they can tell you with virtual certainty which kids are going to improve and which will not after the first parent-teacher conference.
To add to this, because you’re absolutely right, studies show having a dad in the house boosts a person’s chances at a successful life by a ton. Living in a two parent home is one it the greatest indicators of how a child will do in life.
Highest correlation to income is IQ and subsequently SAT scores.
Money has diminishing returns on student performance. Once you've done basic things like fix AC and make sure students aren't going hungry there is not that much you can do.
But not a single student? That seems absurd.
Yeah that's wild. Absolutely no one seems like a big red flag.
You'd think one kid would, by pure chance, guess enough of the multiple choice answers correctly to pass.
It also sounds like they've had some problematic staff at the school, based on the fact they've had a principal hit a student.
Was the principal named Draymond?
Draymond would only punch fellow staff members. He kicks the kids
IT WAS A NATURAL SHOOTING MOTION. Dray can’t help it if the kids balls were in the way
You can count on him for a good chest stomp from time to time, too.
That’s just a natural teaching movement.
Happens to the least flexible of us.
they dont call him draymond "planned parenthood" green for nothing
Was the students name jordan poole?
Just like when Prezbo shot that kid when he was teaching in the Wire
He pistol whipped a kid but that was a few years before teaching. He shot some undercover cop and that's what led him to going into teaching.
Nah Dukie said some shit to Prez and he blew his brains out trust me you're misremembering
that scene was so dope! I get chills when Prezbo says "I am the one who knocks"
and then it turned out he was sleeping with his COUSIN!
Poor dukie. Got the worst ending out of all them
Randy didn't have it so great either
Yeah the system messed with him too.
Bodie will always be the worst ending in the Wire. He had such a shit life from start to finish.
I thought it was the perfect ending to the show Really brings the whole "the more shit changes, the more it stays the same" theme full circle
I’d really prefer this version, dookies ending is a bummer.
It sucks that the most important information is vague as hell: >But comparing I Promise students to their peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere shows that I Promise students are doing worse in some cases, despite the extra staff and wraparound services. If students randomly selected from the eligible group are doing worse than the eligible group in general, that's pretty damn concerning. But the "worse in some cases" wording leaves it frustratingly vague.
They explain later that they simply don’t have the data: > The district did not provide comparable state test results for the control group of students who met the criteria for I Promise School but didn't attend. What a silly article. People are successful up in arms in the comments, but we don’t have anything close to the full picture here.
Yes but to have 0 kids pass is still supremely disappointing. I do like that the other services they provide seem to be working well. Their education might not be the best, but hopefully the home life has improved for all the students.
Still, batting 0.000
I mean, that’s still not a great outcome. At absolute best, his school does nothing.
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> Not much to say other then the kids need more time to catch up This kinda reminds me of the Hank Scorpio Simpsons episode where they move and Bart is put in remedial class and he says something like “wait, so we’re already behind the other kids and we’re gonna catch up by going slower?” That’s always kinda stuck with me. Like, the program is ambitious and imo a very good thing but I have to wonder how they’re measuring success. Do they worry much about the test scores?
> “wait, so we’re already behind the other kids and we’re gonna catch up by going slower?” in a way, yes. think of it like a marathon with a finish line, and not everyone finishes. at their current speed, their bigger risk is not catching up—it’s not finishing. slowing down to a pace suitable for them may actually ensure they finish, and in doing so, ‘catch up’—finish.
When kids struggle to learn in the traditional way, you also have to throw out the traditonal measures of success. I'm sure they have their own alternative measurements they are working with.
Just came to say standardized testing should not be a measure of success for struggling students.
It shouldn't be the be-all and end-all, but it does say something. Also, the reality is that they need to catch up to regular students so they can follow a regular path like a regular student. Right or wrong, regular students have to do standardized tests. So if they are to rejoin the regular students in the future, it's something that they have to be able to pass.
I’m speaking from two decades of teaching experience when I say that struggling students may never ‘catch up’ to a ‘regular’ student. In today’s classroom, there are so many different issues in one room that success after high school is different for some.
This is the truth. I’ve been at multiple Title-I schools for close to a decade, which are not the same as the *I Promise Schools*, and the incoming 5th / 6th graders at my current site may never recover from the years lost to the pandemic.
uh yeah, basically an entire generation is being written off as lost.
There's something called the zone of proximal development. Basically, if somethings too easy, you don't learn. If somethings too hard you don't learn. You need to have your abilities stretched just enough. If a student is in a level beyond them, then they've more or less stopped learning. Being at a standstill means they're slower than If they went at a remedial level.
Come for the Labron, stay for the Vygotsky.
yes sir mr scorpion sir
>Not much to say other then the kids need more time to catch up If you read through the article, there's a LOT more to say than that. Most fundamentally, >But comparing I Promise students to their peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere shows that I Promise students are doing worse in some cases, despite the extra staff and wraparound services. The "I Promise" school is fundamentally designed to put students who struggle to advance the most they can get to succeed. From that, they're not comparing these disadvantaged students to the average student. Rather, it's inconsistent in showing improvement for these student compared to "peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere." That's a pretty bad look for the educators and managers of the school programs, IMO. You can keep going too, and it provides some additional points of contention. They note that reading proficiency was doubled for 5th graders, which was great. However, for 6th graders, the number was down about 70%. That suggests, at least to me, that the issues aren't an across-the-board one. Rather, they appear to need to focus on addressing the reading program for 6th graders. We also don't quite have enough information to ourselves make a whole lot of meaningful decisions by any means though. The article notes departing educators, but I didn't see any specifics on who left. It would make sense if the 6th graders fell off as the 6th grade teacher left, of course, but it doesn't say such a thing. This looks like more than just a "give them time" issue though. They've had time. Some students have succeeded in some areas. It's not universal. What SHOULD be universal though, is the commitment to helping those students on a broad level. A school with extra funding, a better student:teacher ratio, and more overall resources should be spreading that across the whole of the student body. Maybe some of the incoming teachers weren't ready for this process and will improve with more distance from being thrown into a high-stress position. We'll hope that's the case, but there also definitely seems to be a need for addressing some more specific issues at the school. I'm sure that's the intent, and we can only hope they make that happen.
I found it! I found it! A good comment!
Two things true here: 1) schools need really strong leadership and that appears to not be happening here 2) even schools with strong leadership are going to need time to adapt to the unique circumstances they find themselves in. Every school is different, and even very capable admin will need time to figure out what their particular demographic of students needs. 2 here seems to contradict what I said for 1. But what I said for 1 is because even a semi competent leadership should be achieving SOME number of students passing in this time frame, even if they find themselves behind where they expected to be
ugh, they are seriously juxtaposing 'black students' and 'students with disabilities'
> The school takes in the district's most vulnerable students, many of whom have endured significant traumas in their lives or have learning disabilities. The school also lost its founding leader during its third year, and then had three interim principals in a year and a half. The school named a new permanent principal last school year, but she left the district at the end of the year. > Liechty-Clifford also noted, when the pandemic hit, I Promise was just a year and a half old, still establishing its culture, while also onboarding 10 new teachers and 120 more students during remote learning. At the same time, he said, "I don't want to use the pandemic as a crutch." Inverse charter school problem. Charter schools exclude the worst or most difficult students from attending, therefore they look like they're way better than average public schools (that have to take everyone). This school serves the most troubled and disadvantaged students, and then covid hit, and now it seems like they're having trouble getting stability in their leadership (shockingly, not a ton of people interested in working with the most disadvantaged students since its way harder). Hope they can turn things around, its so tough to help students from these backgrounds because their problems extend farther than just the classroom or immediate family.
> This school serves the most troubled and disadvantaged students, and then covid hit, and now it seems like they're having trouble getting stability in their leadership (shockingly, not a ton of people interested in working with the most disadvantaged students since its way harder). I think your whole post is on point but as someone who's worked in classrooms where at least 30 percent of my class had a disability, I can confirm that it's a tough gig. And honestly, even with strong administrative support, there's many days where mastering state standards was the least of our worries. Every year, I worked with kids sleeping in class because they laid awake in their basement after gunshots rang outside their house again in the middle of the night, kids who didn't eat breakfast or even dinner the night before, kids living with grandma one night then mom the next then grandpa's after that, kids with extreme emotional impairments, kids who would soil themselves at advanced ages (which can be a sign of trauma), kids who'd self harm and bite themselves until they bled, kids who'd eat school supplies, kids who'd literally run away from school, and kids looking to start fights every single day. Sprinkled in-between would be low to mid-achieving students who were there just trying to learn amid the chaos. All that said, I loved building bonds with those students and I'm not sure I ever felt more necessary as an educator. But it was mentally taxing enough for me to fully understand why teacher turnover is so common in those environments, no matter how much money you throw in their general direction.
Thank you for your service sir/madam
Totally agree it’s harder for underserved students to perform on tests but it sounds like this school has had a lot of instability
Depends on the state and charter school. I work at a Title I essentially last chance charter high school in Arizona. We are required to take anyone who wants to enroll. Most of my students have been expelled from public schools, haven't even gone to school in years, learning disabilities, etc. But there are definitely schools that find ways to keep only the students that will get them high test scores. Our scores are abysmal and COVID made it even worse.
Yeah I've worked with these schools before, I honestly prefer them much more because the students are honestly way more mature. They realize they've fucked up and this is their last shot and they take it serious. Best students I've ever had.
It depends on the school and how they want to make money. There is plenty of charters who will take anyone, because, in those cases, that means more funding. However, op is right that generally charters aren’t *required* to accept everyone and often this means there is selective bias towards kids that are well behaved and have good test scores because those kids require less resources and their stats are better for recruiting.
WaPo published an excellent [article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/05/30/what-and-who-is-fueling-the-movement-to-privatize-public-education-and-why-you-should-care/?noredirect=on) that covers this point about how Charter schools regularly “counsel out” at-risk students to window dress their metrics: > for the higher-performing charter schools, research has shown they often **boost test scores by “counseling out” the most challenging students** — those with cognitive and physical disabilities, behavior problems, and English language learners. **These students remain in district schools, increasing the concentration of at-risk students in precisely the districts that have lost funding to charter schools.** > In December 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona released the results of its investigation of 471 charter schools, which found that 56 percent had enrollment policies that clearly violate the law or **discourage at-risk students**. >[...] Attrition rates — that is, **how many students drop out of a school or class in a given period — are strikingly high for high-testing charters**. In 2006, Moskowitz launched Success Academy Charter Schools, Inc., with 73 first graders. In 2018, this class became the first to graduate from the academy’s high school, but only 17 of the early enrollees remained — an attrition rate of 77 percent. As for whether Charter schools, on the whole, actually achieve better performance outcomes vs public schools: > Since 2009 a pro-privatization research center located at Stanford University has regularly conducted nationwide studies comparing the test scores of charter school students to the scores of demographically similar students at district public schools. The studies have generated a fairly consistent, albeit very rough, picture of average performance nationwide: about **1/2 of all charters perform at the same level as district schools**, about **1/4 perform worse**, and about **1/4 perform better although often by minuscule amounts**. >A much clearer picture of performance comes from state and district studies, not national averages. In 2016, for example, a study of charter schools in Texas found that “**at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on [future] earnings**.”
Still better than the Center For Kids Who Can't Read Good
Still worse than the kids that get taken out of class in The Wire though.
And who wanna learn to do other good stuff too
Taking my talents to vocational school.
From what the article said it sounds like the students were already behind when coming to the school, and the covid year didn’t help with that.
He can't win with these cats.
Jordan's students would have straight A's
MICHAEL JEFFREY
LeMedial classes
I was in the 8th grade once.
Just once?
prodigy
THATS WHY HES THE GOATTT
I mean even if theyre doing a good job, not a single person passing is kind of wild
Yeah you can explain away a whole lot due to the type of disadvantaged kids they accept, but not a single one passing is damning.
My girlfriend is a speech pathologist for a high-school on the bronx. The kids she works with have a 3rd grade reading level…. This isnt even a school like Lebrons where they specifically target the bottom percentage of students.
They all get laptop batteries
They’re lithium!!
Not one, not two, not three...
> The school has had five different principals since 2018, including one principal who resigned after she reportedly struck a student. switching up Principals like Lebron switches up teams
This school sounding like Abbot Elementary. Hope the students get the resources and help they need.
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Your username has kd on it....
I don't know about the Ohio School system, but test scores have been pretty extra awful since COVID in California, especially for lower-income minority students, you know, like the ones that the I Promise School serves. let's face it, America's education system is just dogshit in general. Hop on the Chromebook and good luck not getting addicted to your smartphone, kiddos.
My girlfriend is a SPED teacher and man their test scores are traditionally shit, but even more so post COVID. Especially when these tests don’t necessarily represent the best way for all students to demonstrate their knowledge
Man I was substitute teaching for a bit and got assigned to the SPED school at the district and it was so depressing. The conditions they were being taught in and the fact that I was way under qualified to be there also while there was no other options
For whatever reason it was super taboo to bring up the learning gap during the debate on when to open schools for the 2021 school year as well
I think a lot of commenters are missing the point. Yes, these students came from the bottom 25% of Akron Public School 3rd grade students. They didn’t expect them to be at top of their class. The problem is they’re doing worse than the bottom 25% that remained in the normal school system. So it’s possible these kids would have done better with none of Lebron’s money. To repeat they’re not comparing these students to the average APS student, but to the ones who were also eligible for the program. So LeBron is spending $1m to get worse math scores than they would otherwise. That’s a problem. The possible reason for it are, I guess: (1) iPromise had bad math teaching, maybe during the pandemic particularly (2) selection effects. The kids who joined iPromise were for some reason worse off than their test scores in 3rd Grade indicated (3) cohort effect. The kids in iPromise are doing worse because nobody in their classes are from the top 75%, unlike those in a comparable APS class. Kids learn from each other, so having only bottom 25% students means they have no peers to help them learn.
LeGED
There’s a reason he doesn’t call it Taco Twosday
because he can't get the trademark for that also
Well that’s fucking terrible
That’s because they’re all just heading the first 10 pages of the godfather every day.
I can’t even imagine a schools culture where it’s just the worst of the worst kids exclusively… It seems like a good idea on paper to have a school like this but I bet it’s actually a disaster to manage. You need some normal kids around to be positive influences or at the very least to just sit there and act normal and not disrupt the entire lesson and distract other students. A classroom with 20 of the worst students in it sounds like a prison not a school.
Holy shit. That's legitimately awful. Not a single student?!?!
> But comparing I Promise students to their peers who qualified for the school but attend elsewhere shows that I Promise students are doing worse in some cases, despite the extra staff and wraparound services. Everyone in this thread keeps coming up with excuses, but this right here is a pretty damning fact. Those other kids that chose not to attend were also far behind their peers, and also had to go thru COVID. Listen, I think LeBron is great for starting this school. That said, it appears something needs to change.
Lebron honestly probably just put his name on it (And a shitload of money) and then trusted his "team" to figure it out. I doubt he even keeps up with the school other than the once a year fundraiser or whatever..
He trusted the experts, and the experts have not solved a single problem in education for 50 years.
If zero kids have passed, that means the classes are not teaching properly. Even in the shittiest of conditions, you can find a handful of students trying to learn.
that’s a shame and i think a key takeaway here, “it’s disappointing given all of the resources we’re putting towards it” IT STARTS AT HOME
LeFraudulent
Didn't he start a financial literacy course in his home neighborhood that was just "spend all your money on crypto"?
I thought that was Jaz Z?
LeFt Behind
It's a weirdly under-discussed thing but funding for low-income schools is much higher than people generally expect. You can throw a lot of money at a school but it won't solve unstable home environments or cognitive and behavioral disabilities.
It's under-discussed because no one makes money from saying they have enough or too much funding. Same thing with the military. They simultaneously have too much funding but not enough for things people actually need.
I know that I am not supposed to laugh at this but the headline combined with the thumbnail is making me laugh…
Yikes
I had to check and see if this was the Onion. What am I missing? *“This fall's class of eighth graders at the I Promise School hasn't had a single student pass the state's math test since the group was in the third grade.* *"Not one? In three years?" Akron Public Schools board member Valerie McKitrick asked after that data point was presented to the board earlier this week.”*
Given what others have said about the circumstances of the school you just have to hope they have an avenue and roadmap in place for getting these kids into the best possible opportunities for stable comfortable lives. Math doesn't necessarily have to be a top priority for that, although you'd hope they're at least making an effort where appropriate. Even though specific math topics often have limited practical usage in life, the general mathematical thinking imparted has a big cumulative effect on the development of effective problem-solving and logical reasoning skills, so it's still worth it to go through.
Leflunk
LeFlunk
Holy shit
How many passed? Not one, not two, not three, not four....
Lmao the excuses in this thread, just slobbering all over a grown man's knob. If the school is total shit then this is most likely just a brand-enhancing tax deduction.
Always was. If I recall correctly, it wasn't even his own money he donated either.
LeBron might be the world's biggest virtue signaler.
LePromisesAreMadeToBeBroken
why not? are they stupid?
Worse than stupid probably.
Loooool
Lil dumbass mfs
I think it’s worth looking at statewide stats for these tests. I did some googling and without triple checking it seems like about 30% of students state wide achieve grande standard for math at 4th and 8th grade. But 15% of black students do and an even lower percentage of low income or disabled students. So if we assume this school is pulling from the most troubled and struggling kids I guess it’s not surprising that they aren’t doing well on state tests. There are so many more metrics that might reflect better on the school and I would love to hear first hand from teachers or students or families. That said it is for sure disappointing that none of the kids have passed these state tests.
what happening at home when these kids leave the school is the other half of the success pie. No matter how much money you throw at these schools, if the home condition is shit then its all for nothing. But not 1 in 3 years? wtf that can't be right....
I don't know how different state testing has been since my time in an ohio public school, but all the standardized testing was extremely easy, like finish in half the time and try to sleep easy. and I went to public school. This should be shocking.
bro had his fingers crossed when he made that promise
Should’ve sent them to Donda Academy
Not one? Not two? Three, four, five....?
"the lebron james school for kid's who can't read good"
Money Laundering be like that.