Charter schools: Don’t reports show they are no different from regular public schools?

The opponents of charter schools can point to studies that show charters have little or no advantages over regular public schools.

However, those opponents of charters don’t tell us that there often are major problems with those negative studies.

In fact, many charter school opponents have badly exposed their lack of objectivity in regards to one, specific report from a group at Stanford University known as the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO).

CREDO released a report in 2009 titled “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States” that does list findings such as:

• Of the 2403 charter schools reflected on the curve, 46 percent of charter schools have math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their TPS comparisons.

• Charters whose math growth exceeded their TPS equivalent growth by a significant amount account for 17 percent of the total.

• The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.

However, these findings are based on a dubious student matching system that attempts to fabricate “virtual” public school students to use in the charter school comparison.

Even more important, these findings are largely drawn from charter school samples that include many students who spent only limited time in charter schools. As mentioned yesterday (and to be reinforced tomorrow), that can lead to very inaccurate conclusions about charter schools.

The way to overcome the problem is to examine student performance as they spend more time in charter schools.

Surprisingly (because charter school critics always ignore this when they cite the CREDO study), CREDO did look at the performance of students who spent more time in charters. However, the report largely buries this very important finding.

Here is how that appears in the Summary of Findings section of the report (largely downplayed by being listed as the very last finding).

• Students do better in charter schools over time. First year charter students on average experience a decline in learning, which may reflect a combination of mobility effects and the experience of a charter school in its early years. Second and third years in charter schools see a significant reversal to positive gains.

Many charter school critics in Kentucky, including union heads and certain legislators, have selectively publicly cited results from this CREDO study to support their contentions. Those critics have never acknowledged the key CREDO finding that charters do out perform after students have spent some time in them.