thats great but what about the athens of america? ma

Don't forget, if you are a smart business person, there are lots of clever and discrete ways to alter the test data in your favor. How many "disruptive" students are dismissed each year from Sabis' school? What are the percentages of students with special needs, English language learners and students who have, for various reasons, not consistently been in school? Socioeconomic status is one component that affects performance but there are others. Charter schools can dismiss a student for any reason. Charter school can decide not to provide services for classically low-performing student populations. Imagine you have a child with a speech issue or a learning issue. The school says we "don't believe" in these services, so we don't provide them. Are you going to put your child in the school lottery? If your child has a discipline issue - bye-bye in the middle of the yeat back to public school - who by law must educate everyone. The results of a lottery may be by chance but the outcome is assured either by controlling who applies in the first place or encouraging the "difficult" kids to leave. By the way, up until this year, charter schools were paid the FULL reimbursement on Oct. 15th of each year. That means they kick a kid out and keep the money. THink before you believe the surface story.

For profit schools are generally a bad idea. Thank you Sedgirl for listing some of the major reasons why. There's another. Schools like SABIS are essentially and specifically 10th grade MCAS factories. As a student the experience you receive is an intensive and daily drilling on MCAS memorization and bubble test skills. Once you pass you are allowed to drift and "chill" until graduation day. Everyone gets paid but the education is very superficial.

swedgirl asks some important questions about the ways in which Sabis and the Globe choose which data to include and which to leave out. It seems Sabis and other charter school operators achieve impressive-looking MCAS results by excluding and/or dismissing students who don't tend to add to the test score bottom line. My letter to the editor fills in some of the blanks: Selectively reporting data works well if you want to promote charter schools, but it gives Globe readers a distorted picture of public education ("Proving themselves by performing," Feb. 16). How can we determine which approaches are succeeding if we ignore how many and what kinds of students fall, or get pushed, through the cracks? Researchers have consistently found that charter schools (whether "nonprofit" or for-profit) have ways to avoid taking in, or keeping, students with the greatest learning challenges: limited English proficient students and students with disabilities, for example. Sabis's Springfield school reflects this practice, enrolling just 2.5% students with limited English proficiency (LEP). Meanwhile, the district as a whole's LEP enrollment is more than six times that (15.7%). For students with disabilities, the school enrolls 13% to the district's 20.7%. A new study from the Center for Law and Education also found charters typically enroll those with milder learning disabilities, while traditional public schools educate a full spectrum, from mild to severe. Though Sabis excludes children with greater learning needs, they suffer significant attrition, losing more than a quarter (28%) of their enrollment between 8th and 12th grade. This is no model for public schools, which must educate all our children. Lisa Guisbond Citizens for Public Schools