News: Study Finds No Clear Edge for Charter Schools

The following appeared in my Twitter stream sometime last week and I wanted to sit on it for a few days so I could read the report and take a look at the issue a little more closely.

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I wanted to sit on this because it is an issue that I’ve written about in this space, many times, in the past (see More Blind Leading The Blind, Problem With Cyber Charter Schools – PA & NJ Edition, Problem With Cyber Charter Schools – Part One, Georgia Virtual Academy: Taking A Measured Approach to Cyber Schooling,  Charter School Studies,  Idaho Charter Schools: 10-Year Report Card, Report: Ohio E-Schools Show Superior Results, Data: Academic And Cost Effectiveness, CREDO National Charter School Study, Selective Conclusions About Charters and Cyber Charter School Research for just some of the more recent entries).

The actual report in this news item indicates findings that one would expect to find – that students in charter schools did no better than students attending regular public schools.  I say what “one would expect to find” because the reality of the situation is that there are good charter schools and bad charter schools, in the same way that there are good public schools and bad public schools.  One of the interesting findings from this study, that hasn’t really been explored in other studies included:

They found, for instance, that the charter middle schools serving the most economically disadvantaged students—especially those in urban areas—were more successful than their counterparts serving higher-achieving, more affluent students in producing gains in mathematics.

For other student subgroups—those defined by race, ethnicity, and gender—the new study found that the charters made no significant impacts on achievement.

The problem I generally find with charter school proponents is that they will point to the first finding and use that as a rallying call for the abolition of traditional public schools serving that subset of students because charters obviously do a better job.  That is the biggest problem I find with most charter school proponents – a blind faith in the status of the school being the real issue.  For example, in Problem With Cyber Charter Schools – Part One I outlined one example where several charter school proponents posted Twitter messages that expressed disappointment with the State of Maine for not including charter schools in their Race to the Top application.  The actual Twitter message posted included a link to a press release from the Government of Maine entitled, “Maine to Apply for Race to the Top Funds” and if you actually looked at the actual press release, it indicated that the Maine Race to the Top proposal would:

• Providing flexibility to innovative public schools similar to the kind of flexibility found in charter school legislation (but that would not enable charter schools) to encourage education reforms.

So the State was willing to create a class of schools that had flexibility from standards, state-mandated testing, teacher unions, etc. to provide an innovative alternative, but because the State of Maine weren’t willing to use charter schooling as the mechanism to accomplish this feat these charter school proponent opposed the idea (or at least expressed their dissatisfaction).

I mention this because later in the Education Week article, one faculty member is quoted as saying:

“I think on the overall balance scale, this study adds weight to the side that is suggesting that simply talking about charters versus noncharters is a distraction. There needs to be much more nuance.”

While the author of an earlier charter school study indicated:

“This is another layer of evidence that points to the wide variations in the charter school community and highlights, once again, that policy and context really matter, I think what we really have to do now is get under the hood and find out more about how charters differ and why they differ. We are really just at the front gates of a large body of research that needs to be done.”

If I could summarize these two points…  What is it about the specific charter schools included in this study that allows economically disadvantaged students, especially those in urban areas, to be more successful?

That’s the issue!!!  It isn’t whether charter schools are more effective or not.  To paraphrase a former Democratic Party political operative, “It’s about the design, delivery and support of the instruction, stupid!”  How did these charter schools design, deliver and support the instructional process for students that was different than the traditional public schools who catered to the same subset of students?  Once you answer that question, which requires a research-based response and not simply more union basing and school choice rhetoric from the right, than you can examine whether those pedagogical aspects can be implemented in other schools – both charter and traditional public schools.

While not completely related, I believe that Practical Theory is asking similar questions in his entries on The Other Thirteen and Urban Prep and The Whole Story – both of which I saved months ago and never got around to commenting on.