Friday, January 13, 2012
Charter schools How to assess charter school success
Posted by Max Brantley on Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 10:53 AM
I took a most unscientific stab at this topic in my column this week. I noted the shortcomings in a University of Arkansas ranking published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that assigned a number score to every school in Arkansas based on the national Iowa Test. I took it a step further by looking at additional UA research assessing those test scores according to income level of the schools' students. Cherry picking, I found that the eStem charter schools in Little Rock and the KIPP charters in the Delta didn't stand out to the extent you might gather given the publicity they receive in the daily newspaper. eStem, particularly, was well behind the average scores of schools in its economic group.
I didn't intend to take that farther than being an example of being wary of using a one-size-fits-all number to measure charter school success against other schools.
Now comes some experts, writing in Science, from a more learned perspective but drawing some similar conclusions.
Writing in the journal Science, UC San Diego educational economist JuIian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, find that most studies of charter schools "use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal effects."
The data just isn't there to make comparisons many have made.
Most studies take a simple snapshot of achievement at a charter school, reading and math scores in the spring, say, and compare these to scores at a nearby traditional public school. A study of this sort, Betts said, is "naïve and essentially meaningless." [Little Rock charter schools and their cheerleaders do this all the time.]
The researchers find some value in studies of students in highly prized charter schools that use lotteries for admission where those students are compared with students who didn't draw into the schools. But even these studies have not been very representative, the writers say. They urge so-called "value-added" testing that can measure progression of students. This, among others, would require routine access to student data. Note, please, that Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and the state Education Department continue to fight to the death to release such data to the Little Rock School District in its federal court effort to determine the impact open enrollment charter schools have had on draining better students from the Little Rock School District.
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April 16, 2012The University of Texas reports on a new study that says urban school districts in Texas do a better job of retaining and graduating black students than the privately operated charter schools, some with more money to spend. /more/
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Comments (4)
Showing 1-4 of 4
These polemics are never ending. If we just stack the deck this way then we can prove that charter schools are no good and the LRSD is better. If we figure test scores this way then we can prove that charter schools are not a better alternative. If we can gerrymander the school zones to keep the better students in a particular school. If we can stop charter schools then patrons will have only one option---continue with the failing LRSD. If, if, if, ad nauseum. How about the flight of your best students from the LRSD all together? How about the flight of whites from the LRSD? How about the fact that patrons want a charter school choice in the first place?
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No, Holmes, if we get rid of charter schools, we will return to the way that most of us were educated and which was the grand leveler of kids. You wouldn't have kids who, as rising senior, at advanced courses suddenly find they have a roommate of another color and don't know what to do.
You pull those with the most money, maybe two parents, and maybe even one of them at home, and transportation and the opportunity to go to summer courses, suddenly, you have a school systemn where every parent has a role in its success.
Pull out the rich, the connected, those who are better at sports, those who can drive the kids to school and you leave a minority behind that lack the advantages that the rest have and, wow, some of them don't succeed in life and we use that as a club.
No other city I have lived in (and I have lived in 7 states) do you have the business community and realtors and Chamber, not only not supporting the schools but actively and aggressively working against them. And this will insure that the industrial park doesn't succeed as no one who is a minority will want to relocate to an area where race and income are the great determiner of outcomes.
Why did Wallyworld have to locate part of its IT operation in the Atlanta area, rather than scenic Bentonville? It is all about reputation and Little Rock and Arkansas already have a blot with 1957 and those that were the backers of that issue (or their kids) continue to screw up Little Rock and you don't have the commonsense of the Gazette to show that there are alternatives to what the city leaders are doing. We have a state-wide paper without a conscience!
I think transportation (or the lack of) is the secret weapon for Charter Schools. Those in the charter school business know the parents that can afford to make arrangements to get their kids to and from school everyday most often are going to be of a higher income level. Furthermore it also weeds out the parents that could care less about their child's education as long as the child gets on the bus every morning, so they can go back to bed.
I'm still waiting for the Dem-Gaz to recognize all the public schools that out perform charters especially those with higher Free/Reduced lunch rate, and these schools do it with shorter school days /school year.
Indeed, workers lacking high school diplomas saw their unemployment rate jump 6.6 percentage points in June vs. a 2.3 point increase for college grads who has their degree from one of the High Speed Universities
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