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DECEMBER 2005

Review of The Charter School Dust-Up
Reviewed By Merri Rosenberg

The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining The Evidence On Enrollment & Achievement
by Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein.
Economic Policy Institute (Washington, D.C.) and Teachers College Press (New York, NY). 2005: 186 pp

There is more than a touch of Schadenfreude in this seemingly objective, scholarly book analyzing the relative effectiveness of charter schools compared to regular public schools.

And honestly, why shouldn’t there be?

When charter schools came onto the national educational scene, critics of neighborhood public schools hailed charter schools for their innovative potential and liberation from bureaucratic inefficiencies. Charter schools were seen as the savior for those students most at risk. Politicians, especially those whose agenda supported school vouchers, eagerly embraced charter schools as a shining alternative to the benighted public schools that were often held in scorn.

Guess what? Charter schools, according to a provocative report released in the summer of 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers, using test results from the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), aren’t better than public schools at improving student performance and raising student achievement.  Not surprisingly, passionate advocates of the charter school movement immediately responded, challenging the methodology of the NAEP study and—in an irony not lost on the authors of this book—questioning the very validity of testing accountability being applied to charter schools. (They, of course, had no problem using accountability for regular public schools.)

This book, then, is a systematic, scholarly attempt to discover whether in fact the charter school advocates’ complaints are justified—or whether, indeed, charter schools aren’t living up to their hype. It’s not meant for the casual reader, but for those educational leaders–school superintendents, principals, advisers and analysts to political figures–who have to grapple with these issues.

Although this book focuses on the charter school versus public school debate, many of the issues it raises have serious implications for those concerned with the relentless focus on accountability that drives No Child Left Behind. Recognizing the limits of data is important—for example, the authors agree that it’s simplistic to look at relatively crude indicators of student and family socio-economic status. Far better, they suggest, to closely examine the complexities of a student’s family background, and to recognize that it is a complex variable. Similarly, the authors urge that changes in test scores matter when the same students are observed year-to-year, not when different groups of students are measured on a standardized test.

Charter school advocates have often claimed that these schools educate the “disadvantaged of the disadvantaged.” Not so, say these authors: “At least for states for which data have been analyzed, charter school students from racial or ethnic minority groups are probably at least as advantaged as regular public school students from the same racial or ethnic groups and, in many cases, probably more so.” Which, logically, should translate into better performance from the charter schools–but doesn’t, according to these authors’ careful analysis.

In a fascinating discussion of the KIPP schools, the authors found through interviews with regular public school teachers who recommended students for these particular charter school programs, the students tended to go into the charter school with  “better-than-average test scores and parents who cared, motivated parents.”  That flies in the face of arguments made by many charter school advocates who insist that charter schools attract students who are less adept academically.

In fact, say these authors, there is “no consistent anecdotal or systematic evidence to support the claim than, on average, charter schools recruit students who are more challenged academically than those in traditional public schools serving the same student pool.”

At best, charter schools’ student performance is about the same as public school students’ performance on standardized tests (there are, as always, some exceptions)–but usually it’s lower. And the authors think “the real question that charter school supporters should confront is...whether the underperformance of some charter schools is a price worth paying for the overperformance of others. This is a much trickier public policy issue, and there is no easy answer to it.”

Ultimately, the authors conclude that, “It seems, therefore, that charter schools are not, and likely will not be, able to play a large role in reforming public education as a whole.”

 Provocative stuff...and well worth reading carefully.#

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