Dive Brief:

• A ProPublica investigation has found that many states allow high schools to send students to alternative programs if they have low test scores or attendance rates, or are at high risk of dropping out, artificially inflating graduation and achievement rates in their original traditional school.
• In Orlando, a charter school managed by for-profit Accelerated Learning Solutions, Sunshine High, recruits low-performers from area high schools and classifies hundreds of students who end up leaving as withdrawing to enter adult education, further obscuring true performance data.
• The ProPublica analysis found roughly 500,000 of the nation’s most vulnerable students attend alternative schools, disproportionately those who are black, Latino and low-income; almost one-third of alternative school students attend a school that spends $500 less per pupil than traditional schools in the same district; and alternative school enrollment has seen some spikes when new accountability policies have kicked in.

Dive Insight:

Punitive accountability policies from the federal level have been widely criticized for creating a high-pressure, desperate culture that opens the door to cheating. A massive cheating scandal in Atlanta resulted in the conviction of 11 teachers on charges of racketeering after they were accused of changing the answers on their students’ standardized tests.

Charter schools, as a sector, have been accused of pushing students out to improve overall average test scores and graduation rates, but this ProPublica investigation sheds light on a widespread practice among traditional district schools that has been around for a long time. In some cases, as it turns out, charters are on the receiving end of the hardest-to-reach students.