New from CREDO: Charter Schools are No Better than Public Schools, and Don't Expect Them to Change

A slightly different version of this post appears at Common Dreams.

A new analysis of charter schools in the U. S. is out from CREDO, the Stanford-based outfit that found in 2009, when there were 4,700 charters across 40 states, that 17 percent of the nation’s charter schools were scoring better on standardized tests than the public schools they were created to replace:

While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.

Thanks to billions poured into the segregated charter effort over the years from the federal treasury and from corporate foundations ($312 million from the Walton Foundation, alone), those peer-reviewed findings in 2009 were summarily ignored, so that now in 2013, there are 6,000+ charters in 42 states.  This may be referred to as the Fill-the-Hole-with-Money Strategy.

This new 2013 research from CREDO differs from the 2009 research piece by focusing primarily on charters that are part of charter management organizations (CMOs), which are corporate chains such as KIPP, Inc. or White Hat Management, Inc. This most recent study examined performance among 1,372 schools that belong to 167 CMOs. So independent charters were not a part of the most recent study.

There are a number of interesting takeaways from this CMO study, but the one that stands out is stated thusly in the Press Release:

In the aggregate, CMOs perform about the same as traditional public schools (TPS), but the aggregate masks the more interesting and important story of the distribution of performance around the average.

So with the exceptions of segregated chains like KIPP and Uncommon Schools, which can attribute their high scores to 1) creaming of top performers, 2) shoving out of low performers and discipline problems, 3) huge $$ advantages, 4) 10 hour school days, 5) laser focused test prep, etc., the rest of the CMOs can only say they are no better than the struggling public schools they were designed to replace. From the Executive Summary (all bolds in original):

Across the 25 states in the study, a sample of 167 operating CMOs were identified for the years 2007 - 2011. CMOs on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning. The difference in learning compared to the Traditional Public school alternatives for CMOs is -.005 standard deviations in Math and .005 in reading; both these values are statistically significant, but obviously not materially different from the comparison (p. 6)

But let’s look a little closer. 

The real story of CMOs is found in their range of quality. The measures of aggregate performance, however, mask considerable variation across CMOs in terms of their overall quality and impact. Across the 167 CMOs, 43 percent outpace the learning gains of their local TPS in reading; 37 percent of CMOs do so in math. These proportions are more positive than was seen for charter schools as a whole, where 17 percent posted better results. However, about a third (37%) of CMOs have portfolio average learning gains that are significantly worse in reading, and half lag their TPS counterparts in math (pp. 5-6).

Translation: Over a third of segregated CMOs are doing worse in reading, and 43% are doing better; over a third of CMOs are doing better in math, but 50 percent are doing worse in math. 

If these numbers reflected the results of trials for a new drug, would these trials lead to approval by the FDA?  Is this the best we can expect from charters after billions poured into this new hole in the ground that is being mined by ideologues, tax-evaders, corporate welfare schemers, profiteers, sold-out politicians, and hedge fund operators?

In fact, it is the best we may expect, for if there is another big takeaway that should cause Duncan and Gates to look the other way quickly, it is this, from the Press Release, that concludes that, like bad wine, low scoring segregated charters don’t get better with time:

“This report’s findings challenge the conventional wisdom that a young underperforming school will improve if given time. Our research shows that if you start wobbly, chances are you’ll stay wobbly,” said Dr. Margaret Raymond, CREDO’s director and the study’s lead author. “Similarly, if a school is successful in producing strong academic progress from the start, our analysis shows it will remain a strong and successful school.”

“We have solid evidence that high quality is possible from the outset,” Dr. Raymond said. “Since the study also shows that the majority of charter management organizations produce consistent quality through their portfolios – regardless of the actual level of quality – policy makers will want to assure that charter schools that replicate have proven models of success.”

What the study found, however, is that the unproven segregated models are replicating faster than the high flyers like KIPP:

. . .the lowest third of CMOs replicate more rapidly than middling or high-performing CMOs. Of the 245 new schools that were started by CMOs over the course of this study, 121 (or 49 percent) were begun by Organizations whose average performance was in the bottom third of the range. Another 19 percent (47 schools) were started by CMOs in the middle third of the quality distribution. The final 77 new schools (31 percent) were opened by CMOs in the top third of the distribution. This finding highlights the need to be vigilant about which CMOs replicate; CMOs with high average learning gains remain high performers as they grow and CMOs with poor results remain inferior.

The new Report concludes, too, that the RTTT policy of planning miracle turnarounds among the lowest performing schools to be another fanciful bit of public relations from ED.  Wonder how Kevin Huffman will respond to this.  After all, he has set TN with the task of making the state’s worst schools the best in five years!

The lessons of this study also include the notion of authorizer triage. Most authorizers have limited resources, so deploying them where they have the highest impact is desirable. The temptation to focus on the lowest performing schools is not supported by this analysis, but attention to the schools in quintile two (or quintiles 1 and 2 for elementary schools) holds out more promising effects (p. 8).

Globe Joins NYTimes and WaPo in Avoiding Facts about Charter Schools

I am sometimes dizzied by the irony that Massachusetts, the birthplace of modern public education and the home of Horace Mann, is now leading the way toward the establishment of segregated corporate charter schools that resemble apartheid minimum security prisons more than they do schools funded with public dollars for the common good.  


Rather than education functioning as the "balance wheel of the social machinery," as Mann envisioned, the present day segregated charter chain gangs serve to isolate, contain, and intellectually sterilize those whose economic disadvantages have been disguised by the corporate tanks of deficit thinking as  defective cultural traits.  


And so it is that a black President and black Governor now lead the resegregation effort in Massachusetts, and in the process, entirely ignore the poverty and lack of opportunity that once provided the focus for a real, rather than a really phony, civil rights agenda.  As the whores, hoodlums, and banksters of American capitalism are put in total charge of the "equity" agenda and the education purse strings, you may kiss your diminishing dreams of democracy goodbye.


This letter below shows up in the Letters page of the Globe, even though the Globe continues to ignore the latest research on the corporate welfare charters:

RE “JOHNSON to name nonprofit as partner’’ (Metro, June 30): It is true that a growing chorus of politicians are impressed with charter schools. They disregard a growing chorus of parents, teachers, and researchers who are not.

Last week, Education Week reported on a new national study of charter middle schools. The headline: “Study finds no clear edge for charter schools.’’ This is just the latest in a series of studies that conclude most charters perform similarly or worse than traditional public schools, with a minority posting high test scores.

There is also solid evidence that charters do not serve the most challenging students and find ways to encourage struggling students to leave. These include holding students back a grade, a practice shown to increase the risk of dropping out. These claims were reported as the opinion of teachers unions and “hotly contested by charter schools,’’ but why couldn’t the Globe investigate and find out the truth?

If politicians are going to blindly push us on the path to private management of our public schools, and away from the mission of public education including all kinds of students, it seems critical for the public and the voters to know about what is actually happening in these schools.

Lisa Guisbond

Brookline

Major Newspapers Ignore National Study Showing Charters No Better Than Public Schools

It took the Washington Post almost 6 months and the New York Times 10 months to report any news of the national study in 2009 that showed the Obama charter solution as a policy loser even before it got steamrolling.  It has rolled on, anyway.  It will be interesting to see how long it will take the most recent large-scale research to get reported, another that shows again charters no better than the public schools.

So far, the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Times are the only papers of any national prominence to print anything on the findings. From WT:

A study of middle school students in charter schools in 15 states has found that they generally performed no better in math and reading than other public school students. . . .

. . . .This study adds to a growing body of evidence on this important policy issue," said John Q. Easton, director of the Institute of Education Sciences in the Department of Education, which commissioned the study.

"This report helps us make sense of previous charter school studies that have generated a wide range of findings," said Philip M. Gleason, senior fellow at Mathematica and lead author of the study.

The findings, the first of their kind on such a scale, involved 2,330 middle school students at 36 charter schools in 15 states. The charter schools were popular enough to use lotteries to decide which students would be admitted.

The study compared outcomes of students who attended the schools (lottery winners) and children who applied but were not admitted (lottery losers) and typically went back to their neighborhood schools.

"We found that the average charter school did not have positive impacts on students' math or reading achievement," Mr. Gleason said. . . .

 

New Research Finds Over-Subscribed Charter Schools with More Negative than Positive Effects

The "gold standard" for research that the corporate charter reformers like to point to involves comparisons of lottery winners and losers in charters that are over-subscribed, i.e., more student apply than are accepted.  These are the high flyers of the corporate charters, and the new study by the Feds compared lottery winners with lottery losers who attend public schools.  These new finding have just quashed any remaining delusion that these test prep chain gangs can serve as replacements for public education, for either high performers or low performers. It should be noted that the research team include some rabid supporters of charters, including Paul Hill.


 
The one positive note for Team Charter in terms of test score comparisons comes with math score comparisons for charters with lower achieving students, while reading scores were a wash.  In charters with higher achieving students, the results are demonstrably awful in both reading and math (click chart above to enlarge).

Below are the key findings from the Executive Summary:

Key findings from the evaluation include: 

• On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior, and school progress. Participating schools had no significant impacts on math or reading test scores either a year or two years after students applied, other measures of academic progress (such as attendance or grade promotion), or student conduct within or outside of school. Being admitted to a study charter school did significantly and consistently improve both students’ and parents’ satisfaction with school.

• The impact of charter middle schools on student achievement varies significantly across schools. Across 28 sites (covering 32 schools), the effects on reading scores after two years were estimated to be greater than zero in 11 sites and less zero in 17 sites (with magnitudes ranging from -0.43 to +0.33 standard deviation units), with 4 of the individual site estimates statistically significant. The estimated effects on math scores were greater than zero in 10 sites and less than zero in 18 of the 28 sites (-0.78 to +0.65 standard deviation units), with 10 of the site estimates statistically significant.  

• In our exploratory analysis, for example, we found that study charter schools serving more low income or low achieving students had statistically significant positive effects on math test scores, while charter schools serving more advantaged students—those with higher income and prior achievement—had 

significant negative effects on math test scores. Charter middle schools in large 

urban areas also had significant positive impacts on math achievement compared to 

negative impacts in other locales, although urbanicity was no longer an influential factor 

once such characteristics as students’ demographics and income levels were controlled 

for. There were also differential effects on reading achievement, with negative and 

significant impacts for study charter schools serving more advantaged students and no 

impacts for study charter schools serving fewer advantaged students.

• Some operational features of charter middle schools are associated with more 

positive (or less negative) impacts on achievement. These features include smaller 

enrollments and the use of ability grouping in math or English classes. Although impacts 

differed for study charter schools with longer- versus shorter- hours of operations or

higher versus lower revenue per student, these features were no longer significant once 

other school and student characteristics were controlled for. We found no statistically 

significant relationships between achievement impacts and the charter schools’ policy 

environment, including the extent of its decision-making autonomy, the type of 

authorizer and how the authorizer held the school accountable, and whether it was 

operated by a private organization. 

The Bloomberg Spin Reported by Bloomberg News for Bloomberg Schools

The charter school crusaders and spin merchants at Larson Communications were sending out multiple emails to the media to set the spin on the release of the a CREDO report that shows some very mixed results for NYC charter schools. That fact, however, did not deter Larson and Bertelli from concocting this whopper as the first sentence in their media advisory on January 1:

A new report by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University commissioned by the New York City Department of Education found that charter schools in New York City are demonstrating significantly better results for their students in reading and in math than their traditional public school counterparts.

First, note who commissioned this study and who, I would imagine, is paying Mr. Larson and Mr. Bertelli for their dissembling PR. The last part of that sentence is, in fact, simply a lie that was repeated in the intro to the press release and that was negated a few sentences later in the press release, itself:

On a school-by-school comparison, the report found that 51 percent of New York City charter schools are showing academic growth in math that is statistically larger than students would have achieved in regular public schools, with 33 percent with no significant difference and 16 percent with significantly lower learning. In reading, the report found that 29 percent of charter schools are showing statistically better gains, with 59 percent with no significant difference and only 12 percent significantly lower.

Just to translate here for the Bloomberg reporters, the previous sentence from the findings makes Mr. Larson and Mr. Bertelli liars. Get it? NYC charters squeaked out an edge over the publics by ONE PERCENT in math, i.e., 51%. That means, Bloomberg reporters, that 49% of NYC charters did either no better or worse on math tests than the public schools. On reading, now pay close attention, Mr. Staley and Mr. Kaufman, your boss's schools in NYC did better in reading in only 29 PERCENT. That means, Mr. Staley and Kaufman, that 71% of Bloomberg schools did worse or no better in reading than the public schools. Got it?

Not yet, apparently. Here is the way that Bloomberg's boy, Oliver Staley, is reporting it, beginning with the Larson and Bertelli same lie from the earlier spin lit:

Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Students in New York City charter schools outperformed their public school counterparts in reading and math, according to a Stanford University study.

Fifty-one percent of charter school students showed gains in math that are “statistically larger” than they would have achieved in conventional public schools, according to the report released today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which is based at Stanford, near Palo Alto, California. The study, which analyzed six years of data at 49 charter schools from 2003 through 2009, also found that 29 percent of charter schools students showed greater gains than their public-school counterparts in reading.

Charter schools are publicly funded institutions that are privately managed under contracts with school districts and may be exempt from certain state and local regulations. The report follows a June study of charter schools in 16 states from the same Stanford center, which found nearly half did not perform better than local public options. . . .

Lastly, have a look at that final sentence just above for some fine, fine dissembling. Could that last sentence be intended to mean that, since "nearly half did not perform better than local public options," then just over half did perform better than local public schools? I think I figured it out!

Unfortunately, this, too, is a lie by Mr. Staley and his editor, Mr. Kaufman. Here is what can be found on page 3 of the National Charter School Study - Full Report:

The Quality Curve results are sobering:

• 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 [traditional public school] 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.

New CREDO Study Shows No Charter School Miracles for NYC

New York City's charter schools have plenty of advantages over NYC's red-headed stepchild, the public schools. Most of the charters are in renovated spaces with new equipment and furniture, spiffy new signage, and fresh paint. They enroll smaller percentages of poor students, fewer special education students, and fewer English language learners:

. . . charter schools in New York City have significantly less students eligible for free lunch than public schools. Similarly, charter schools enroll less than 4 percent of English language learners, while public schools enroll a number almost three times more. In North-Central Brooklyn, charter schools enroll 1.3 percent of English language learners, compared with 11.2 percent in public schools. As for special education students, charter schools are enrolling 9.5 percent, while public schools enroll 16.4 percent.

Given these advantages that only Bloomberg's stacked deck and deep pockets can assure, we might expect test scores more in line with the propaganda machine the Joel Klein manages as Schools Overseer. However, a brand new study will be released tomorrow morning showing only 29% of NYC charters outperform the public schools in reading, and barely half of NYC charters outscore the public schools in math. With New York City representing the top of the charter heap, how long will it take for the thrill to be gone on this corporate distraction and waste of public money that continues to block the way to real public school renewal. From the Press Release at Stanford U's CREDO Center:

The CREDO at Stanford report was commissioned at the request of the New York City Department of Education in July 2009, following CREDO’s national report released in June 2009, entitled, “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States.” That report was the first detailed national assessment of charter school impacts. Its longitudinal, student-level analysis covered more than 70 percent of the nation’s students attending charter schools.

Entitled, “Charter School Performance in New York City,” this report drew upon the same methodological approach used for the pooled national study used to measure the effects of charter schooling on student academic performance.

On a school-by-school comparison, the report found that 51 percent of New York City charter schools are showing academic growth in math that is statistically larger than students would have achieved in regular public schools, with 33 percent with no significant difference and 16 percent with significantly lower learning. In reading, the report found that 29 percent of charter schools are showing statistically better gains, with 59 percent with no significant difference and only 12 percent significantly lower. . . . .

Hoxby Charter Study Turns Hoaxby

I was at Substance News this morning enjoying the work of the Schmidt Team when I came across some important news I had missed. No doubt I would still be missing it if it were not for Substance News, for the research review by EPIC and EPRU announced below remains ignored by corporate editorial boards everywhere.

Jennifer Medina did have a brief, buried blog post in the NYTimes Saturday regional news, but you can be sure that the deflation of the gaseous Hoxby hoax will not be reported as news anywhere--it simply does not conform to the corporate education reform narrative, particularly since it is, yet, another loud smackdown to the anti-scientific approach to education policy being taken by Team Obama/Gates/Broad.

When the history is written on this sad episode of American educational policy, Arne Duncan will, no doubt, make Margaret Spellings seem, well, 99.44% pure.

The Press Release from EPIC at the University of Colorado:

Headline-Grabbing Charter School Study Doesn’t Hold Up To Scrutiny
Reviewer finds serious statistical flaws in research on NYC charter schools

Contact: Sean Reardon, (650) 736-8517 (office); (617) 251-4782 (cell); sean.reardon@stanford.edu
Kevin Welner, (303) 492-8370; kevin.welner@colorado.edu
Gary Miron, (269) 599-7965; gary.miron@wmich.edu

BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (November 12, 2009) -- A recent report on New York City charter schools found achievement results at the charters to be better than comparison traditional schools. But that report relies on a flawed statistical analysis, according to a new review.

The report is How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achievement and was written by Caroline Hoxby, Sonali Murarka, and Jenny Kang. When it was released in late September, it was enthusiastically and uncritically embraced by charter advocates as well as media outlets. The Washington Post offered an editorial titled, "Charter Success. Poor children learn. Teachers unions are not pleased." The editorial's first paragraph reads:

"Opponents of charter schools are going to have to come up with a new excuse: They can't claim any longer that these non-traditional public schools don't succeed. A rigorous new study of charter schools in New York City demolishes the argument that charter schools outperform traditional public schools only because they get the 'best students.' This evidence should spur states to change policies that inhibit charter-school growth. It also should cause traditional schools to emulate practices that produce these remarkable results."

The editorial argues throughout that the study provides unquestionable evidence that charters result in improved student achievement. It ends, "Now the facts are in."

The New York Daily News was no less effusive: "It's official. From this day forward, those who battle New York's charter school movement stand conclusively on notice that they are fighting to block thousands of children from getting superior educations."

Because of the declared importance of the new report, we asked Professor Sean Reardon to carefully examine the report's strengths and weaknesses for the Think Tank Review Project and write a review that would help others use the study in a sensible way. Reardon, like the report's lead author Hoxby, is a professor at Stanford University. He is an expert on research methodology.

The Hoxby report estimates the effects on student achievement of attending a New York City charter school rather than a traditional public school. A key finding, repeated in press reports throughout the U.S., compares the cumulative effect of attending a New York City charter school for nine years (from kindergarten through eighth grade) to the magnitude of average test score differences between students in Harlem and the wealthy New York community of Scarsdale. The report estimates this cumulative effect at roughly 66% of the "Scarsdale-Harlem gap" in English and roughly 86% of the gap in math.

In his review, Reardon observes that the report "has the potential to add usefully to the growing body of evidence regarding the effectiveness of charter schools." New York charter schools' use of randomized lotteries to admit students to charter schools offers the possibility that the study of those schools can roughly approximate laboratory conditions.

But Reardon points out that the report's key findings are grounded in an unsound analysis -- an inappropriate set of statistical models -- and that the report's authors never provide crucial information that would allow readers to more thoroughly evaluate "its methods, results, or generalizability."

Reardon's review notes these shortcomings in the report:

• In measuring the effects of charter schooling on students in grades 4 through 12, the study relies on statistical models that include test scores from the previous year, measured after the admission lotteries take place. Yet because of that timing, those scores could be affected by whether students attend a charter school. As a consequence, the statistical models "destroy the benefits of the randomization" that is a strength of the study's design. (The use of a different model makes the results for students in grades K-3 more credible, he notes.)

• The report's claims regarding the cumulative effects of attending a New York City charter school from kindergarten through eighth grade are based on an inappropriate extrapolation.

• It uses a weaker criterion for statistical significance than is conventionally used in social science research (0.05), referring to p-values of roughly 0.15 as "marginally statistically significant".

• The report describes the variation in charter school effects across schools in a way that may distort the true distribution of effects by omitting many ineffective charter schools from the distribution.

Reardon explains that, as a result of the flaws in the report's statistical analysis, the report "likely overstates the effects of New York City charter schools on students' cumulative achievement, though it is not possible -- given the information missing from the report -- to precisely quantify the extent of overestimation." This, as well as the lack of detailed information in the report to assess the extent of that bias, make it impossible for readers to know whether the report's estimated charter school effects are in fact valid.

"Policymakers, educators, and parents should therefore not rely on these estimates until the bias issues have been fully investigated and the analysis has undergone rigorous peer review."

According to Professor Kevin Welner, director of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC): "Readers of this review will understand that, while Hoxby's charter school study is a contribution, it has significant flaws and limitations. Unfortunately, the editorial reaction of otherwise-respectable media outlets trumpeted the New York City findings as the final and faultless word on charter school performance. In fact, the study used inappropriate methods that overstate the performance of the charter schools it studied."

Welner notes that the Think Tank Review Project also recently reviewed another charter school study, released in June by Stanford's CREDO policy center. That study encompassed 65-70% of the nation's charter schools. "Our review pointed out a number of limitations but also noted the relative strength and comprehensiveness of the data set, the solid analytic approaches of the CREDO researchers, and the important fact that the CREDO results were consistent with a large body of research showing charter schools overall to be performing no better than (and perhaps worse than) traditional public schools," Welner says. But he added that "the CREDO and Hoxby reports used different designs and covered different schools. They are not directly comparable, nor are we able to say which is 'better.' Neither report is definitive or without notable weaknesses."

Welner concludes, "the important thing to understand is that if, after an appropriate reanalysis of the data, we still find that New York City's charter schools are in fact bucking the national trend, the sensible next step is for researchers to explore the causes rather than to jump to broad conclusions that fly in the face of the overall research base. It would be irresponsible to use the NYC results -- even if they were valid and reliable -- to drive policy in places throughout the U.S. where charters are apparently underperforming their competition."

Find Sean Reardon's review on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-How-New-York-City-Charter

Find the NYC report by Hoxby and her colleagues at:
http://www.nber.org/~schools/charterschoolseval/

CONTACT:
Sean F. Reardon
Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology
Stanford University
(650) 736-8517 (office); (617) 251-4782 (cell)
sean.reardon@stanford.edu

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@colorado.edu

Gary Miron, Professor of Education
Western Michigan University
(269) 599-7965
gary.miron@wmich.edu

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the University of Colorado at Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) and the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

EPIC and EPRU collaborate to produce policy briefs in addition to think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

EPIC and EPRU are members of the Education Policy Alliance
(http://educationpolicyalliance.org).

DC Charters' Selective Admissions: Special Ed Students Need Not Apply

Several years ago historian James Anderson suggested that if charters and vouchers continued to eat away at the public schools that we would likely see a remaining public system of children that no one wants, from low performers to handicapped to the mentally impaired. It would seem that the rush toward corporate charters is creating just such a reality, even though the most reliable research available shows charters doing more harm than good, even when it comes to academic achievement. As Jerry Bracey noted in a HuffPo post the other day:

. . . . if the CREDO results are true, Arne, why are you blackmailing states with threats to withhold stimulus money unless they permit charters or lift charter caps? The logic here is astonishing. Suppose I invent a medicine and find it helps 17% of people, doesn't do anything for 46% and hurts 37%. Would the FDA approve and tout my medicine? CREDO is a Stanford University-based think tank and its findings were that kids in charters did better than matched peers in publics in 17% of the cases, worse in 37% and neither better nor worse 46% of the time. As I closed my chapter on charters in Setting the Record Straight (second edition), "Charter schools were born of perceived failures in public schools. So, if the charters are doing worse than the publics, where is the outrage about them?" Where indeed, Arne?

Now WaPo, in its Saturday edition that most people don't read, has the story on a new report showing a continuation of Rhee's corporate charter school creaming of the most able students:

Some D.C. public charter schools continue selective admissions practices that discourage special-needs students from enrolling, and students citywide with possible disabilities still face delays in special education evaluations, a federal court monitor said this week.

"Charter schools . . . generally have not enrolled students with significant disabilities who required extensive hours of special services or education," the monitor, Amy Totenberg, wrote in a report prepared for a court hearing yesterday.

The report casts a somewhat harsh light on a fast-growing sector of public education in the city. Charter schools, which receive public funding but are independently operated, have siphoned many students from the city's troubled public school system and have posted somewhat higher test scores than regular schools in recent years.. . .

But Totenberg said some charter schools explicitly limit the number of hours of special education they will provide and counsel parents to enroll their children at regular public schools or at private or other public charter schools that focus on students with disabilities. D.C. law prohibits charter schools from asking about learning disabilities or emotional problems during the admission process.

First National Peer-Reviewed Charter School Study Describes Results as "Sobering"

Stanford University's prestigious Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has just released the first national peer-reviewed study of charter schools in fifteen states and DC (National Charter School Study - Press Release). Note that this study looks at test scores and does not consider charter school shortcomings related to school libraries, curricular offerings, sports, facilities, or other extracurricular activities. Hopefully, someone on Duncan's staff who can read will read this report to him. Or at least start with these findings found on page 3 of the National Charter School Study - Full Report .

The Quality Curve results are sobering:

• 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 [traditional public school] 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.
  

The Most Recent Research on the Charter School Solution

The following clips are from the 2009 Rand study (funded by charter champion, Bill Gates) of charter schools in eight states: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and California. With results like these, it is hard to find any pedogical reason to embrace Oligarchs' solution for urban charter reform schooling. Plenty of ideological reasons and economic reasons, but no test score advantage. Notice, in particular, the results from Chicago, where the Dunc's charter performamce miracles were enough to get him appointed as the Oligarchs' Secretary. Right.

What Effect Do Charter Schools Have on Test-Score Gains for Students Who Transfer Between Traditional Public Schools and Charter Schools?

. . . .In five out of seven locales, these nonprimary charter schools are producing achievement gains that are, on average, neither substantially better nor substantially worse than those of local TPSs. In Chicago (in reading) and in Texas (in both reading and math), charter middle schools appear to be falling short of traditional public middle schools. Results that include charter schools at every tested grade level (i.e., those that start in kindergarten as well as those that serve exclusively middle- and high-school grades) are, in most cases, similar to the results that are limited to nonprimary charter schools, providing no evidence that charter-school performance varies systematically by grade level.

The inclusion of kindergarten-entry charter schools in the analysis makes a substantial difference to our estimate of their achievement impacts in only one location. In Ohio, as in most of the other sites, the average performance of nonprimary charter schools is indistinguishable from that of nonprimary TPSs. But when the K-entry charter schools are included in the analysis, the estimated impact of Ohio’s charter schools is significantly and substantially negative. The dramatically lower estimated performance of Ohio’s K-entry charter schools appears to be attributable not to grade level per se but to virtual charter schools that use technology to deliver education to students in their homes. Virtual schools constitute a large part of the enrollment of K-entry charter schools in Ohio, and students have significantly and substantially lower achievement gains while attending virtual charter schools than they experience in TPSs. This result should be interpreted cautiously, because students who enroll in virtual charter schools may be quite unusual, and their prior achievement trajectories may not be good predictors of their future achievement trajectories (pp. xiii-xiv).

. . . .

Randomized experiments are often considered the gold standard in research because, by assigning subjects randomly to the treatment condition or control condition, they ensure that differences observed later are the result of treatment rather than the result of background differences between the subject groups. A few studies are beginning to examine oversubscribed charter schools that randomly admit students through lotteries. For instance, Hoxby and Rockoff (2004) found that four Chicago charter schools that admitted students by lottery were outperforming TPSs as measured by students’ subsequent achievement. Later, Hoxby and Murarka (2007) used a similar design to evaluate 47 charter schools in New York City and likewise found a small positive achievement effect for students attending charter schools. Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2009) found that a subset of charter middle and high schools in Boston that used admission lotteries also found positive impacts (sometimes large). And Mathematica Policy Research is engaged in a federally funded national study of oversubscribed charter middle schools that admit students by lottery; results are not yet available (see Mathematica Policy Research, undated).

These lottery-based studies have strong internal validity: Researchers can be confident that the participating charter schools caused the achievement advantages for the students who were admitted in their lotteries. But although the studies should produce internally valid and reliable results for the set of charter schools and students examined, they may have limited implications for charter schools that lack lengthy waiting lists and do not use lotteries to admit students. In other words, these studies have weak external validity. Charter schools with lengthy waiting lists might well be those that are better than average. Indeed, the only study that has begun to examine the issue found that charter schools using admission lotteries appeared to be more effective than charter schools that were not oversubscribed (Abdulkadiroglu et al., 2009) (p. 22).

Comment: In other words, charter chains like KIPP that have an unending national advertising campaign and that open one or two stores in urban areas where there are many crumbling schools, have an easier time keeping their desks full, even as 40-60% of students who enter KIPP in 5th grade do not make it to 8th grade at KIPP. Low performers or perpetual "miscreants" can be dumped, allowing in others with parents who are willing to subject themselves and their children to the KIPP treatment. A concentration of high performers become the survivors with the miraculous test scores, and the PR machine starts all over again.

. . . .

Table 3.3 presents estimated impacts for nonprimary charter schools in each of the sites. Of the 14 estimates across the seven locales, 11 suggest charter-school impacts that are indistinguishable from those of TPSs. Three of the estimates are significantly negative, for middle schools in Chicago in reading (at 0.01) and middle schools in Texas in both subjects (at 0.01 in reading and 0.05 in math). High schools are not included in this analysis in Chicago and Texas because test data are unavailable in successive high-school grades in those sites. (Chicago’s high schools are analyzed using a different method in Chapter Four.)

Interestingly, the results for nonprimary schools in Table 3.3 for many of the sites are quite consistent with the results in Table 3.1 that included elementary schools. All of the results that are statistically indistinguishable from 0 in Table 3.1 remain so in Table 3.3. In Milwaukee, the small positive result in math in Table 3.1 declines slightly and loses statistical significance in Table 3.3, but the point estimate does not change much. Similarly, Denver’s positive math effect reduces in magnitude and becomes statistically insignificant. The significantly
negative results in Chicago (reading) and Texas (both subjects) remain significantly negative in Table 3.3.
Ohio, however, presents a different story. The substantial negative results suggested in Table 3.1 disappear when focusing on the subset of nonprimary charter schools. For Ohio’s charter middle schools (our test data in Ohio end at eighth grade, so high schools are not included), estimated achievement impacts are indistinguishable from those of TPSs (pp. 37-38).

. . . .

Those results suggest that the performance of nonprimary charter schools is approximately on par with that of TPSs in most of the sites, though middle schools in Texas and Chicago appear to be falling behind (p. 39.)

. . . .

The analysis suggests that nonprimary charter schools are producing achievement gains that are approximately equivalent to those of TPSs in most locations, with moderately negative effects in math and reading in Texas middle schools and in reading in Chicago middle schools. While our results for Ohio’s virtual charter schools should be viewed with a level of caution because of the uniqueness of the students who attend these schools and because much of the analysis relies on charter schools with primary grades, they suggest that these schools should be examined more carefully because of the poor achievement results. We find support for the conclusion that, in most locations, charter schools do not do well in their first year of operation but subsequently improve (though sometimes this improvement is sufficient only to produce a result that is somewhat less negative than in the first year of operation). Finally, we find that charter schools in most locales have marginally greater variation in performance than TPSs, as measured by the achievement-impact estimate for each school. Ohio is a notable exception: Its charter schools have a much wider range of variation in performance than its TPSs (p. 51).

Reference:
Zimmer, R., Gill, B., Booker, K., Lavertu, S., Sass, T., Witte, J. (2009). Charter schools in eight states: Effects on achievement, attainment, integration, and competition. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.

White Hat's Charter Propaganda Outgunned

With Ohio's Strickland Administration ready to send out the posse on the White Hat Management's charter school profiteering outfit that drains the state of $70,000,000 every year, White Hat's CEO and chief tax dollar wrangler, David Brennan, set out to rustle up some research showing he has done good for Ohio. He turned to some sissy boys at the local "think" tank, the Buckeye Institute, where researchers and such, some of them with Masters degrees, "have made inroads in. . . demonstrating the benefits of market-based education reforms." Only trouble is, them thar books has been cooked, goldarn it.

From the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice:

Dropout Report Uses Inaccurate Data

Reviewer finds that Buckeye’s case for “dropout recovery” charter schools is made with inflated numbers

Contact: Teri Battaglieri (517) 203-2940; greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org
Sherman Dorn (813) 205-6143; sherman.dorn@gmail.com

EAST LANSING, Mi., (March 4, 2009)—A February report from the Buckeye Institute offers up “dropout recovery” charter schools as a solution for reducing Ohio’s dropout rate. But a new review of the report finds that it makes its case by relying on charter school graduation data that are inconsistent with state figures, “resulting in a dramatic overstatement of the graduation rates at the charters.”

The report, The High Cost of High School Dropouts in Ohio was written by Matthew Carr for the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions. It was reviewed for the Think Twice project by Sherman Dorn of the University of South Florida, a national expert on dropout data and policies.

The Buckeye report points out that Ohio’s drop out rate is too high and that there are large social costs associated with low levels of high school graduation including lower tax revenues and higher costs for medical care and incarceration. It suggests that enrolling high-risk teenagers in last-chance charter schools can increase the graduation rate and recommends that the state expand investment in such charter schools to increase the graduation rate and save resources.

The report borrows its formula from six previous reports by the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation on graduation rates in various states. Dorn observes that the Buckeye report, like the Friedman reports it emulates, “uses the existing literature on dropping out and school competition in a superficial way”—comparing the relative earnings and social burdens of high school graduates and dropouts, while ignoring extensive debate over the real costs of dropping out.

The report also ignores “a large body of useful research” on charter schools, even as it posits “dropout recovery” charter schools as the best solution to the so-called dropout problem.

The most glaring problem identified by Dorn’s review is that Ohio state data contradict the report’s exaggerated claims about the number of students graduating from the charter schools that the Buckeye report holds up as the solution, most run by a controversial for-profit education management company called White Hat Management. For example, one school that Ohio reports had fewer than 10 graduates in 2004-05 is asserted in the report to have graduated 145; another with 42 is claimed to have graduated 338.

“Overall, for 18 schools for which Ohio reported a specific number of graduates, the report claimed 1,610 more graduates in 2004-05 than what the state reported,” Dorn writes. “This documented exaggeration represents approximately half of the total graduates that the report claims for the 23 schools.” The Buckeye report doesn’t explain the source of its graduation data or discuss the discrepancy between its counts and those reported by the state.

Dorn recommends that state policymakers interested in increasing graduation rates choose not to rely on the Buckeye report, but instead, “seek out the available well-researched scholarship on the topic.”

Find Sherman Dorn’s review and a link to the Buckeye report at: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

New Charter School Study: Will the Obama Team Read It?

Minnesota has been doing charter schools for a long time. They were first in the nation to pass a charter school law in 1991. So a new study by the University of Minnesota's Institute on Race and Poverty, editorialized yesterday in the Star-Tribune, carries with it some weight. It cannot be dismissed by the edu-entrepreneurs and charter corporations as a swipe at a new phenomenon that has not had time to mature. This study was conducted at ground zero of the charter movement, where nearly two decades of experimentation with an idea and an institution offer compelling reasons to stop digging, come back to ground level, and try to fill in the hole.

The study, “Failed Promises: Assessing Charter Schools in Twin Cities,” offers compelling data to cause the Obama folks to rethink their rationale for supporting charters, i. e., they will make public schools stronger through competition:

The study finds that rather than encouraging a race to the top, charter school competition in fact promotes a race to the bottom in the traditional public school system.

And charters achieve this feat while "intensifying racial and economic segregation" and underperforming the regular public schools on test scores.

Here is the link to the pdf for Failed Promises: Assessing Charter Schools in the Twin Cities.

And here is the summary from IRP:

After two decades of experience, most charter schools in the Twin Cities still underperform comparable traditional public schools and intensify racial and economic segregation in the Twin Cities schools. This is the conclusion of a new report issued today by the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Entitled “Failed Promises: Assessing Charter Schools in Twin Cities,” the new study evaluates the record of charter schools in terms of academic achievement, racial and economic segregation, and their competitive impact on traditional public schools. The study finds that rather than encouraging a race to the top, charter school competition in fact promotes a race to the bottom in the traditional public school system.

“The Twin Cities is the birthplace of charter schools. Education reformers look up to Minnesota as the state with the longest track record with charter schools. But before they rush into expanding the charter sector in their states, they should take a closer look at the Twin Cities experience,” said Myron Orfield, Director of the Institute on Race and Poverty. “Rather than being a solution to the educational problems faced by low-income students and students of color, charter schools are deepening these problems.”

This reexamination of charter schools is timely. It comes as the next administration considers charter schools among the many alternatives to reform K-12 education. The study is one of very few to evaluate the academic performance of charter schools and their competitive impact on traditional public school systems within the context of racial and economic segregation.

“Research shows that students in segregated poor schools do worse than students in low-poverty schools,” said Tom Luce, one of the authors of the study and Research Director at the Institute. “Because of this, the way charter schools sort students racially and economically is likely to affect how students perform academically. This is why the report is careful to account for school characteristics when comparing achievement rates in traditional and charter schools.”

The study shows that although a few charter schools perform well on standardized tests, most offer low income parents and parents of color an inferior choice—a choice between low-performing traditional public schools and charter schools that perform even worse. The Institute’s analysis of proficiency rates in elementary schools finds that in both reading and math, a lower percentage of charter school students reached proficiency compared to students who attended comparable traditional public schools. For reading proficiency, the average difference is nearly 9 percentage points and for math it is nearly 10 percentage points.

Charter schools also perform worse than the schools participating in another public school choice program—The Choice is Yours Program. The program is based on the principle of moving low-income students to effective middle-class public schools in the suburbs. The report shows that, all else equal, suburban schools participating in the Choice is Yours Program outperform other comparable traditional public schools as well as charter schools. The clear implication is that the Choice is Yours Program provides better alternative schools than the charter system does.

“The poor performance of charter schools should not come as a surprise given how segregated they are,” said Baris Gűműş-Dawes, one of the authors of the study and a Research Fellow at the Institute. “Racially segregated schools have high concentrations of poverty. The average poverty rate in segregated schools in the Twin Cities metro is 81 percent, compared to 14 percent in predominantly white schools. Research shows that high-poverty schools are associated with a wide range of negative educational and life outcomes. Low test scores is only one of these negative outcomes. Racially-segregated schools with high student poverty rates lead to high dropout rates, low college attendance rates, low earnings later in life, and greater risk of being poor as adults.”

Racial and economic segregation in charter schools intensifies these problems in the Twin Cities. Students of color are much more likely to be in segregated settings in charter schools than in traditional schools. In 2008, 89 percent of black charter students attend school in segregated settings compared to just 38 percent of black traditional public school students in the Twin Cities metro. Similarly, Hispanics and other students of color are more than twice as likely to be in segregated settings in charter schools as in traditional public schools. Charter schools also have higher poverty rates than traditional schools—50 percent versus 22 percent in 2008; and they are more likely to be intensely poor—60 percent of them have poverty rates above 40 percent, compared to 31 percent of traditional public schools.

Even when compared to the highly segregated traditional public schools in the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts, charter schools are still more segregated than their traditional public school counterparts. In Minneapolis, for instance, 96 percent of all students of color who attended charter schools did so in segregated settings compared to 80 percent in traditional public schools in 2008.

In St. Paul, 88 percent of all students of color in charter schools attended segregated schools in 2008 compared to 73 percent of students of color in traditional public schools.
The presence of predominantly white charter schools with low poverty rates in St. Paul’s racially diverse school district also suggests the possibility that charter schools are facilitating white flight. Eleven percent of the district’s white students attend predominantly white charter schools in a district where there are no predominantly white traditional schools.

Charter schools in the Twin Cities metro perform worse than comparable public schools academically—measured by test scores— and socially—measured by segregation rates. “But the problem is not only with the academic and social performance of charter schools;” said Orfield “charter schools also hurt traditional public schools by triggering further segregation in the traditional public school system.”

Charter schools can compete with public schools in many ways, including areas of interest, ethnicity, risk factors or other characteristics. However, many charter schools in the Twin Cities choose to compete in ethnic niches by offering “ethno-centric” or “culture-specific” programs to their students. “We find that some school districts, in turn, are creating ‘ethno-centric’ schools and programs of their own to compete with these charter programs and to protect their ‘market share,’” said Orfield. “This is a real problem because when the niche that schools choose to compete in is an ethnic niche, it deepens segregation in the overall public school system.”

The study finds that charter school competition has deepened segregation in the traditional public school system in two important ways. First, school districts have responded to charter competition by sponsoring racially segregated and in some cases “ethno-centric” charter schools of their own. Second, districts have initiated “ethno-centric” programs within traditional public schools and have promoted “ethno-centric” magnet schools in their districts. The study concludes that “Overall, charter school competition in ethnic niches has been particularly detrimental for students of color and low-income students because this type of competition intensifies racial and economic segregation in metro schools and exiles these students to low-performing schools.”

For more information about the report, contact Barış Gűműş-Dawes:
(612) 625 2872 or bdawes@umn.edu