Crazy Crawfish’s Attack on Sci Academy is All Talk, No Claw

I generally refrain from challenging the absurd claims of the anti-progress Ravitchite fringe, since their pathological obsession with “proving” that education reform is part of a sinister corporate plot is clearly delusional, if not mildly amusing. However, now that long-time anti-edreform blogger and conspiracy theorist Jason “Crazy Crawfish” France has decided to smear Sci Academy – the highest-performing open-enrollment school in the Recovery School District and a school with which I am well-acquainted – I am happy to respond in kind. As I demonstrate below, France’s broadside against Sci Academy is filled with the half-truths and logical fallacies that would be expected from someone with zero experience working in public schools, and thus, lacks the context needed to draw informed conclusions.

In his screed, France claims that unnamed “sources” asked him to investigate Sci Academy’s graduation rate, which he claims the school has manipulated in order to make it appear that they are outperforming “traditional” public schools. The following is a direct quote from his post that lays out his evidence:

My investigation showed that while they can claim 92% of their students graduated that they had enrolled in 12^th grade, many of their students left over the course of the 4 years. Sci Academy started with a ninth grade enrollment of 83 students. By 12^th grade they had 50 of which I’m told 46 graduated. That means that students enrolling in Sci academy in 9^th grade in 2008 only had a 55% chance of graduating from this school or a 45% chance of not graduating.  I’m told many of these kids went on to colleges, but you must consider that Sci Academy shed nearly half their students before achieving a near perfect graduation rate – a rate that was based solely on the students that were left in 12th grade.

First of all, although I have no basis with which to assess the validity of the data used to arrive at these conclusions, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of his grasp of the facts. For example, at another point in his post, he claims Sci Academy is “also known as New Orleans Charter and Science Academy,” which is most certainly incorrect. Furthermore, his claim that only 46 students graduated in 2012 is in direct conflict with figures noted elsewhere.

The second and most obvious problem here is that France is confusing Sci Academy’s graduation rate with its cohort graduation rate which are two totally different measures. It is already well-established that graduation rate is an imperfect measure of school performance. In any event, at no point has Sci Academy maintained that 92% of the students that entered 9th grade in 2008 went on to graduate in 2012. In fact, the opposite is true. As Morgan Carter, president of Collegiate Academies (Sci Academy’s CMO) admitted to the Times-Picayune, “We’re trying to distill why it is that kids are leaving…We’re going to start valuing retention the way we value academics.”

Questions of accuracy aside, a more relevant point of contention is that France is making these claims without placing them within the greater context of the challenges common to RSD schools. While he casts aspersions from behind the “firewall” of his middle-class life in Baton Rouge, those of us who have actually worked in New Orleans’ public schools know that a high rate of student mobility is unfortunately a fact-of-life for both charters and traditional schools alike (and not only in the RSD). Given the tenuous economic circumstances of the families that schools like Sci Academy serve, students frequently find it necessary to switch schools, often several times over the course of their academic careers. Nevertheless, at no point does France concede that the changes in Sci Academy’s enrollment, at least in part, could be explained by this overall trend.

MFP data from the SY 2012-2013 school year provides a good illustration of the widespread and often unpredictable nature of student mobility in the RSD. Official enrollment numbers are reported to LDOE twice a year, in October and again in February. As the data below demonstrates, enrollment in RSD schools can change – sometimes dramatically – even within the short timespan of five months. [N.B.: Ironically, enrollment at Sci Academy actually increased 9.26% over this period.]

Later in his diatribe, France makes another ignorant statement saying, “as far as impacting the community, Sci Academy only graduated half their students and only prepared half of [sic] less for college.  That’s the thing with numbers, in the wrong hands they can be used to mislead and lie very convincingly.” Again, if France had any understanding of the New Orleans public education context (or could simply get his facts straight) he would recognize how absolutely ludicrous this statement sounds. Here’s a significant point he overlooked:  49 of the 52 members of the Class of 2012 were accepted to a four-year college or university; for 46 of those students, they were the first member of their family to enter college. Furthermore, over 90% of Sci Academy graduates have been accepted at four-year colleges and universities, including top institutions like Barnard, Swarthmore, Smith, and Amherst, among others. Also, in SY 2011-2012, Sci Academy –  a school where 94% of students are African American and 92% are eligible for free/reduced lunch – outperformed both the RSD and state on the Algebra I, English II, and Geometry end-of-course exams. If France thinks that Sci Academy is failing to impact the community, he’s clearly looking at the wrong data. Moreover, it seems France is unaware that “traditional” pre-Katrina NOPS schools didn’t send low-income, African-American students to top-tier colleges and universities; in fact, they struggled to just to graduate a fraction of their students from high school.

At the end of the day, Sci Academy doesn’t need to mislead and lie about the incredible success they have achieved with their students. There is no trick formula they’re using to achieve their results. As anyone who knows the educators at Sci Academy can tell you, the secret is just a lot of hard work and an unbending commitment to improving the lives of students – something that France, and cynical mudslingers like him, would know nothing about. It’s disgraceful that critics like Jason France, who have never gotten up from behind their computer screens to actually do something about the inequities in our public schools, would have the audacity to denigrate those engaged in this important work.

Perhaps that’s the lesson in all of this: before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. France and other education reform critics like him have only a superficial understanding of the facts, issues, and questions involved in the effort to improve our public schools. Until Crazy Crawfish & Co. are ready to roll up their sleeves and grapple with the challenges faced by real-life heroes like those at Sci Academy, they should do the rest of us a favor and quietly crawl back into their mud holes.