Flawed Research To Discredit Success by Charter Schools

Brace yourselves for another bullshit study that knocks charter schools -- but only really tells us about the students who attend them, not how well charter schools are doing to educate them.  On that front, as I referenced in an attachment to an email a few days ago, the great majority of the 20 studies of year-over-year progress show that charters are doing a much better job.  Below is the Center for Education Reform's press release on it.

-----------------------

Flawed Research To Discredit Success by Charter Schools

Study to be Released Tomorrow by National Center for Education Statistics Should be Viewed with Great Skepticism by Media

 

Washington, D.C., August 21, 2006 – An education research study scheduled for release tomorrow relies on bad data about students attending charter schools, according to the Center for Education Reform (CER).  Studies using raw data collected in 2004 by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) include seriously flawed poverty indicators among charter school students, a problem NCES acknowledges.  The problem is compounded when researchers apply various assumptions about poverty to assess and compare academic achievement between charter school students and those attending conventional public schools.

 

"This problem is at the heart of the ongoing research wars," said CER President Jeanne Allen.  "The education establishment – teachers, unions, school boards associations, and more – tout these flawed studies in an attempt to discredit new school opportunities for parents.  My message to parents, especially those with children attending charter schools, is to look at state-level assessments and get a real picture of student achievement.  It's there that charter school students shine like the true stars they are."...

 

The problem is that many charter schools, for a number of reasons, either do not participate in the school lunch program or do not expend limited resources monitoring the number of participants.

 

Since 1997, CER has regularly surveyed charter schools and receives unprecedented, first-hand information that is not available from any other source.  The 2005 survey found that 63 percent of the students in a typical charter school qualify for the free and reduced lunch program.  New data from charter schools revealed that nearly half of all respondents to a CER survey qualify for the federal lunch program but choose not to participate for a variety of reasons. 

 

Analysis of the NCES data will also reportedly claim that school-district-based charter schools are more successful than independent charter schools that are authorized by public entities other than school boards.  This is based on flawed survey questions that do not accurately address the variations from state to state in authorizing and operational independence, regardless of sponsors.

 

"This latest interpretation of government data adds nothing to the question of how well students perform in charters compared to other schools," said CER's Allen.  "As more than a million children go off to charter schools over the next month, how they learn will best be answered by local and state measures that have more depth and validity, and not by sloppy analyses of complex statistics."