Whether charter schools have actually lived up to their initial promise is a hotly contested topic in the education reform debate. An entire field of education research aims to assess whether students are better off at charter schools than in the public system. The latest findings, based on six well-regarded charter schools in Boston, released Wednesday by the Boston Foundation and MIT’sSchool Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative , adds to the accumulating evidence that at least a subset of high-performing charters are measuring up to the movement’s early aspirations of giving disadvantaged kids a shot at a better life. The study shows that the Boston schools’ students did better on SAT and Advanced Placement tests and are vastly more likely to enroll at four year colleges—and to do so on scholarship—than otherwise identical students in the Boston public school system.
What makes a charter school different from other public schools? While they’re funded with public money, they generally operate outside of collective bargaining agreements (only about one-tenth of charter schools are unionized ) and other constraints that often prevent principals in public schools from innovating for the good of their students (so the argument goes). In exchange for this freedom, they generally get less funding than public schools (though they’re free to look for private donations, and many do) and have to prove that they are making good on the promises set out in their charters, which often means showing that they improve their students’ performance on statewide standardized tests.
It’s an idea that’s resonated with a surprisingly wide swath of American society, from free-marketeers who like the idea of reducing government involvement in education to anti-poverty activists frustrated by the slow rate of social progress.(Many charter schools focus on serving minority or low-income communities.) Carlson authorized eight charter schools in Minnesota; there are now nearly 6,000 nationwide.
Others are less sanguine about the charter approach. School unions, for example, have been cautious in their support, often seeing charters as drawing funds away from resource-starved public school districts and diverting the discussion from how to fix public schools, which continue to serve the vast majority of American students.
Let me get this straight. This article is arguing that because a handful of high-performing charter schools perform better than the public school average, this is supposed to be indicative of what exactly? Flawed methodology?
The study looked at six charter schools in Boston, leaving out two charter schools that closed during the same period due to poor performance. I’m sure if public schools had the advantage of being able to rule out the results of their poor-performing schools, they might produce better results as well.
Previous comprehensive studies of charter schools have found that on average, they produce similar reading scores to those of public schools, but lag in math and science. Somehow, looking at thousands of charter schools and not cherrypicking which ones are used in the study, seems like a better indicator of the overall value of charter schools than a study that compared six successful charter schools—purposely leaving out failures—to a much broader public school pool.