[Vision2020] Charter Schools are No Magic Solution

[TIM RIGSBY]

Here is a great article on the effectiveness of Charter Schools.  This 
article was published in a journal called, The School Administrator.

http://www.aasa.org/publications/saarticledetail.cfm?ItemNumber=3148&snItemNumber=950

Punchback: Answering Critics
Charter Schools Are No Magic Solution
By Richard Rothstein

Convinced that bureaucracy and union contracts are responsible for poor 
achievement, some public school critics assumed that deregulated charter 
schools would certainly outperform regular schools. To prove this, the 
Charter School Leadership Council pressed the National Assessment of 
Educational Progress for a special 4th-grade sample of charter schools in 
2003.
When NAEP results were released last year, however, they showed average 
charter school test scores to be no better than those of regular schools in 
reading or math for students overall, for low-income students, for black 
students or for students living in central cities. Data for disadvantaged 
students were especially surprising because many charter school advocates 
have claimed they can overcome the persistent achievement gap.

In response, charter school advocates who had demanded the special sample 
reversed themselves and denounced NAEP as inadequate for measuring school 
performance. They wrote op-ed articles and took out a full-page 
advertisement in The New York Times calling the NAEP data untrustworthy and 
suggesting the results somehow reflected a union plot to discredit charter 
schools because the data, although available to the public on a government 
website, were first disclosed by researchers of the American Federation of 
Teachers.

Charter school partisans criticized NAEP demographic controls as inadequate 
because, for example, when comparing black students eligible for free lunch 
in charter and regular schools, NAEP could not detect that the 
lunch-eligible black students in charter schools were actually from poorer 
families than lunch-eligible black students in regular schools. As Jeanne 
Allen, head of the Center for Education Reform said, charter schools enroll 
"the disadvantaged of the disadvantaged." Because charter school students 
are so poor, their achievement should be expected to be lower, even in 
superior charter schools.

Another alleged flaw was that NAEP reports scores only from discrete points 
in time, in this case for 4th graders in 2003. Charter schools may have low 
4th-grade scores, the partisans said, but if their students previously 
failed in regular schools, the charter schools may be making more rapid 
gains. The gap might have been narrower in the 4th grade in 2003 than in the 
2nd grade in 2001.

NAEP’s Limits

Such criticism of NAEP's demographic controls and of its point-in-time 
(rather than value-added) scores was reasonable. But the criticism also was 
surprising, coming from charter school advocates who themselves have often 
used poorly controlled point-in-time scores to conclude that regular public 
schools are failing. Indeed, these advocates typically deem demographic 
explanations for regular schools’ low performance to be excuses. "No 
excuses" is a charter school movement motto.

The No Child Left Behind Act, which almost all these advocates vigorously 
support, uses the same demographic controls as NAEP (lunch eligibility and 
race) and does not permit value-added (the gains of low-scoring students 
from grade to grade) to replace point-in-time scores for meeting 
accountability targets.

Subsequent examination of NAEP and other test reports has confirmed that, 
notwithstanding data limitations, average charter school performance indeed 
falls at or below that of regular public schools. While it is true, for 
example, that charter schools overall have a higher percentage of black 
students than regular public schools, it is also true that black students 
are less likely to be lunch-eligible in charter than in regular schools, not 
more. In central cities, black students are also less likely to be 
lunch-eligible in charter than in regular schools. So a more disadvantaged 
population cannot explain lower black student test performance in charter 
schools.

Several studies in individual states have tracked, as NAEP cannot, the gain 
scores of charter and regular school students as they move from grade to 
grade. Here, too, evidence does not confirm the partisans' suppositions. 
Data from California, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas reveal 
that gains were the same as or lower in charter than in regular public 
schools. Only a study in Arizona found charter schools with greater 
value-added. These results suggest that school bureaucracy and union 
contracts are not the key factors limiting student achievement, as many 
charter advocates had contended.

Selective Evidence

With three colleagues from the Economic Policy Institute (Martin Carnoy, 
Rebecca Jacobsen and Lawrence Mishel), I've summarized these data in detail 
in our recent book, The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on 
Enrollment and Achievement (Teachers College Press).

Evidence that average charter school performance is no better than that of 
regular schools should not by itself be fatal to charter school advocacy. 
When public education is deregulated, some charter schools may develop 
better and more creative ways of doing things. But without regulation, some 
also may develop worse (and occasionally corrupt) ways. While some charter 
schools may hire well-prepared teachers without formal certification, many 
charter schools may not. Average teacher qualifications (for example, the 
percentage of secondary school teachers with majors or minors in subjects 
they teach) are actually lower in charter schools than in regular public 
schools.

Enthusiasts may point only to the better charter schools and ignore that 
these are not typical charter schools. In any field, experiments are likely 
to produce more failures than successes.

Richard Rothstein is a visiting professor at Teachers College, Columbia 
University, and a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. 
E-mail: rr2159 at columbia.edu







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