As reported on Education Week’s online site, the Rand Corporation has released a study that analyzed hundreds of charter schools in eight states. According to Education Week:
Contrary to critics’ fears, charter schools are not more racially segregated on average than nearby public schools in their communities, according to the study being released today by the RAND Corp., a research group based in Santa Monica, Calif. The study also says that the publicly funded but independently run schools don’t appear to be skimming the best students from local public systems. And in Florida and Chicago, at least, the research finds that charter school students seem to be more likely than public school students to graduate from high school and enroll in college.
But the researchers still found it difficult to determine whether charter school students on the whole were learning more, as measured by their test scores, than they would have in their regular public schools. That’s because most of the elementary schools lacked any base-line data for the kindergarten students they enrolled. When researchers looked at charter secondary schools, they found few differences in learning gains between students in charters and regular public schools.
While hardly conclusive the report raises some important questions. If it is true that there is little difference in the “learning” of students in charters versus public school, what is the purpose of charters? Is the purpose of charters to give choice to parents? If charters are not skimming the best students, a major criticism of charters, then what is the problem with charters?
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Charters allow greater freedom to succeed or fail. It is no surprise to me that charters do no worse or better than district managed schools. It’s only a governance/accountability structure….charters are not a design for instruction or success. I’m guessing that these charters, like the charters in CO have a wider bell curve in terms of quality than compared to other public schools. The best and worst schools in CO are charters. The challenge for the charter movement lies with getting rid of the low-performers, doing better authorizing and having better new school development pipelines. The school quality movement is version 2.0 of the charter movement.
[...] says charter schools aren’t skimming, but it’s unclear whether kids learn [...]
Van says: “The challenge for the charter movement lies with getting rid of the low-performers, doing better authorizing and having better new school development pipelines.” Is not this the same challenge as public schools?
Good question, Mark. Yes, I would agree…this is the challenge for ALL schools. Here’s the difference, though… when it comes to “new school development,” where is there energy, vision, capacity, and leadership to ramp up that new school development? Right now it primarily rests with successful charter school leaders and models. That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be developed within traditional districts…but with so many other things needing attention within districts, and with potentially quality charters ready for expansion & replication, why wouldn’t we look there? What I want to see is good models (of whatever kind of school) being developed, replicated, expanded… that is how we can accelerate the achievement of all students. Open to any school willing to step up and get the job done…As a district, we need to become better at supporting all schools in finding their right pathway to success.