CREDO, the organization at Stanford University that analyzes charter performance, released the results of its latest national study.
Its earlier report (2009) showed disappointing results for charter schools, with only 17% outperforming traditional public schools. This was especially disappointing for the Walton Family Foundation, one of the main backers of CREDO.
The new study shows that charters are doing better than in 2009. They typically get about the same results as public schools, with some performing better, others performing worse.
I will do my own analysis later but meanwhile this is the best review I have seen, by Stephanie Simon of Reuters.
Key quote: “25 percent of charters outperformed nearby schools at teaching reading, while 19 percent did worse, and 56 percent were about the same. In math, 29 percent of charters did better, 31 percent did worse, and 40 percent were on par.”
The report raises many questions, implicitly, to a critical reader. Why is it that charter schools are not vastly outperforming public schools? They have the ability to skim and exclude. They have the benefit of “peer effects,” since they can expel troublesome students and send them back to their public school. Nearly 90% are non-union. They can fire teachers at any time and offer performance bonuses if they wish. They do everything that “reformers” dream of, yet they are hardly different in test scores overall from public schools, which typically must take all children and do not have the support of the Obama administration, major corporations, big media, big foundations, and hedge fund managers. The fact that charters serve large numbers of black, Hispanic, and poor students does not mean they serve a representative sample of students with disabilities and English language learners (they don’t). To compare a school that can select its student body with one that cannot is inherently unfair. The fact that the public schools do as well as the charter schools, despite their advantages, is remarkable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
Can you check the link to Simon’s article? Thanks.
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Link to Simon: http://ow.ly/mmHmi
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Charterbaggers Are The New Carpetbaggers
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I think it’s safe to say that the education reform movement could not go forward without attacks on the teaching profession. Ironically, the only possible explanation for the failure of charter schools to outperform traditional schools despite the differences in demographics and the ability to “counsel” out selected students, points to one thing, and one thing only……..the quality of the teacher!!!!!!!
If the true goal of charters and vouchers is to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, then they would spend their money on hiring the most qualified teachers and offer them contracts that would give them the autonomy and support they deserve.
Charters love to advertise their lower class size. The problem is, that has no positive effect if the teacher in that class is unprepared, inexperienced, or simply incompetent. Thanks to state websites, such as in California, it’s easy to track the experience level of teachers in individual schools. Turnover in charters is horrendous. As long as charters can fill their seats through aggressive advertising, and the authorizer takes no steps to hold the school accountable for its outcomes, this trend will continue. And all the while, the charters will rake in the cash with the savings they enjoy by hiring a short term and inexperienced workforce.
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Educator: with all due respect [I am not being sarcastic], I would cast this a bit differently.
I would lay the majority of responsibility on those who run the charters, not on the teachers in them. That is, who hires—and fires—good, bad and indifferent teachers in those Most EduExcellent Centres of Compliance for Commoners? Who makes the decision to fire the fierce advocate for special needs kids and who the decision to keep an, er, posterior kissing incompetent subordinate that hangs on your every whim and wish? Who the decision to forego an experienced teacher for a Teach For Awhile?
The leading charterites/privatizers—along with their allies engaged in the ‘creative destruction’ of public schools from within—are stern proponents of a rigorous management style that puts all wisdom and confidence in “Teflon Leaders.” Which is precisely why the owner of this blog posted an entry yesterday that read: “Leonie Haimson filed a Freedom of Information Act request for fairly simple information: she asked for the accountability reports on the top officials at the NYC Department of Education. The bad news: there are none. No one at the top is held accountable. Their performance doesn’t matter. It is not measured. They have no growth scores..”
Link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/06/24/haimson-no-accountability-at-the-top-and-i-can-prove-it/
I want to make it clear that I make “no excuses” for anyone on a school’s staff who doesn’t do right by their coworkers, their students and their community.
But credit, er, responsibility where the buck stops. Stops on the bosses’ desks. They want all the credit—let them also take all the blame.
Perhaps someone will object that they don’t like the picture I paint of management. Hey, ArneRhee&Co., don’t blame me if when you look in the mirror and, well, Nikolai Gogol said it better:
“It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.”
🙂
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Let’s leave aside for the moment the inherent inequity of schools competing for students and parents competing with each other for coveted seats in schools. Let’s leave aside that such a system leaves remaining schools at a competitive disadvantage. Let’s leave aside that the arbiter of quality is scores on tests that do not measure many of the educational outcomes we value most. What I suspect we would find, if we dig into what explains variation in educational outcomes across schools, after demographic factors are considered, is not whether they are charter or regular public schools, but rather the quality of leadership and teaching, whether there is a professional culture that balances reflection, autonomy and responsibility, whether kids feel known and valued, and whether the schools demonstrate respect for students and their families. These comparative studies are important because they demonstrate that there is nothing inherently better about charter schools, but the unfortunately necessary debate deflects needed attention from a better way to go about school reform for all.
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Could it be that the entire “Education Reform Movement” (beginning with NCLB) is not now, nor has it ever been, about improving student achievement or providing a “superior educational experience” for our children? Rather, it has always had as its three main goals:
1. Dissolution of the National Education Association through the eradication of our public school system
2. Gaining control of, and thus, profiting from the tax dollars earmarked for the education of our youth
3. Removing control of our public schools, including curriculum and its delivery methods, from local School Boards to corporate executives whose only goals are profit and control
Parents, grandparents, and anyone who has a vested interest in the youth of this nation (which should be all adults) need to be cognizant of the true goals of this movement. All Americans should understand they have been victims of a mass propaganda effort which, under the guise of “educational reform” maintained only the above goals as its true mission.
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here! here! 🙂
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And the excellent points your make in your post, Diane, do not even take into account that CREDO’s methodology — the Virtual Control Record (VCR) — conceals the performance of as much as half of the charter school population.
The recent CREDO study in Massachusetts only examined charter students who remained enrolled for the entire four years included in the study. Once you understand that more than half of all ninth graders enrolled in Boston charters schools will leave before twelfth grade, this jumps out as a startling omission. Exclusively examining students who are successful enough in charter schools to remain enrolled until graduation is profound selection bias. Boston Public Schools would show impressive test scores indeed if we only evaluated the top 50% of their students.
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“Boston Public Schools would show impressive test scores . . . ”
I can’t and don’t give a damn about test scores as the whole process is so rife with error that any conclusions drawn are invalid. To understand why see Noel Wilson’s Noel Wilson in “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
But I do “Give a Damn” about my fellow man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifLc4oSXa0Q
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Mike. This is exactly what Louisiana and our charters do to impress parents with their “performance”
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The charter playbook is the same everywhere. Fortunately, the Massachusetts Department of Ed values transparency enough to publish enrollment figures for every public and charter school in the state on their website, so that anyone who bothers to check can see the astonishing charter attrition going on here. I’m sorry to see that you’ve had to fight for every scrap of data from the Louisiana DOE.
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Charters do more harm than good, that’s the bottom line. People are beginning to see through the smoke screen of corporate lies, even here in Baltimore, where most of us are struggling to dig out of over a decade of recession. Here’s a link to our reality – finally, the Sun decides to show some backbone – http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-henderson-hopkins-school-20130621,0,7176474.story
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“Why is it that charter schools are not vastly outperforming public schools?”
Because half the charter students in the study live in poverty, ‘and poverty, in turn, is correlated to student attendance, to family support, and to the school’s resources’ as someone said.
From the study…
“Students in poverty, for instance, receive the equivalent of an extra 14 days in reading and an extra 21 days in math compared with their traditional public school counterparts”
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No excuses!
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CREDO’s methodology controls for poverty (at least somewhat; it compares the fortunes of charter school students who receive a free or reduced lunch with a statistical aggregate of public school students in similar circumstances). According to CREDO, charter schools generally do just a smidge better than traditional public schools in educating impoverished children. (But they do significantly worse with English language learners!)
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They don’t even attempt to educate the entire spectrum of special ed. students. Your analysis is correct. The student turnover at charters is tremendous. The students drift from school to school seeking something better etc. The courses offered are so narrow that a person in the suburbs would never enroll their child there. The people at the top are making so much money and the teachers are underpaid. Thanks for pointing out the part about they only measured those that had stayed for yrs. Typically that would be a student who actually follows the rules and works in school. No miracles in charters. They are junk!
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Another aspect is that the charter teachers overall—I said, “overall” as there are exceptions both in terms of individual teachers and charter schools—are simply of a lower quality.
They are often uncredentialed, as they’re not required to be, or only a threshold percentage of teachers at a charter school are required to be, according to most charter rules.
Often, they are short-timers with little or no experience or training. They’re amateurs who, however enthusiastic, are lacking in quality compared to those seasoned public school veterans with a rigorous training in a university ed. program, and then followed be a decade or decades of experience.
And yes, they are not union members, or they belong to a toothless, company union controlled by the charter leaders. Whether their charter schools are for-profit, or non-profit, the honchos at charters don’t want to pay for quality, or deal with the accompanying demands for respect, collaborative governance, job protections, salary, benefits, etc. that unionized workforce demands. This is in spite of the fact that the states—and countries—with the highest union participation and job protections are those with the highest academic achievement. Conversely, those states with weak or no unions are at the bottom in academic achievement.
The charters think they can compensate for this lack of teacher quality by cherry-picking the brightest and easiest-to-educate kids from involved parents at the front end, and kicking out those hard-to-educate kids who manage to slip through the initial filtering process. Of course, often this is AFTER they’ve received a full-year of funding for these kids and/or just prior to testing, so as to skew the results. This works, but only to a degree. With this “creaming” advantage, they should be kicking the public schools’ ass, and they’re not.
Or they simply cheat through opening up the test booklets and teaching to the test. If that fails there’s also the route of having wrong-to-right erasures of the kids’ answer sheets.
Because of all of this, the turnover of teaching staffs at charter schools is sky-high, and that’s how most of their leaders want it. Check out the highest achieving schools in the public sphere. In addition to having the advantages of having students from higher-income, college-educated parents, these schools have almost no turnover in their teaching staff. These long-timer teachers have taught not just multiple siblings, but multiple generations from the same families in the school’s attendance area. Such stability tends toward higher achievement.
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My take is that charter schools’ “improvement” is marginal at best. If kids are being pushed out of neighborhood schools to attend charters when 75% of the charters are no better or, in many cases, WORSE than the schools they left, how is that better for them? For more thoughts on the reporting on this by the NYTimes see:
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The story I read in Huffington Post describing the study mentioned that Hispanic and black charter students improved significantly more than “average” (including white, I assume) students. Does the study assume “poverty”=minority students? What is the validity of this finding about minority students?
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If the students in charter schools benefit from positive “peer effects”, wont they get a worse education if the charter schools are closed and the students have to go back to the traditional school?
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I think you are assuming positive peer effects. I saw nothing in this study regarding research on that. And, BTW, there is a lot of research regarding positive peer effects when special education students are included in general education classrooms with typically developing children, so segregated classes are far from being the only way to promote positive peer effects.
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I was picking up on Dr. Ravitch’s statement that charter school students have the benefit of “peer effects” in the sixth paragraph of her post. Do you believe she is mistaken?
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If I may rant . . .
Whatever happened to “if X is so great, why don’t the elite private schools do it”?
People don’t send their kids to Dalton because they want large class sizes, annual standardized testing, teachers without academic degrees, inadequate facilities, and narrow curricula. And they don’t send their kids there because they want positive peer effects from special education students. They just don’t, and they don’t care whether there’s “a lot of research” showing that any of those things they don’t want are, in fact, good things.
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Flerp: That’s like saying parents don’t send their kids to private schools because they want positive peer effects from minority students.” It might be the case, but that is discriminatory and elitist and should not be a model for public education.
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The missing ingredient here is that the beneficial peer effects of charter schools are not free — there is a cost, and the cost is borne by the public school system that is burdened by a student population that is more difficult to educate, as the least challenging students have been skimmed by the charter schools.
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Eliminating the charters also has a cost: those students do not benefit from the positive peer effect. Which students should pay?
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That is an extremely dishonest way to frame the situation and I suspect you know it. The beneficial peer effects of charter schools — which are quite modest — come at the expense of traditional public school students.
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If they are modest, than perhaps Dr. Ravitch is wrong to look at them as an explanation for the higher scores for charter schools.
It is not a dishonest way to,frame the question, but it is an uncomfortable one. It suggests that any way we change education policy will benefit some students and hurt others. I think acknowledging that is an important step in the discussion.
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What this article conveniently left out was some of the statistics from failed charter schools who’s doors have closed. Ergo, the results are skewed from the get-go. But hey, you can have your statistics. Me? I’ll stick with facts.
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Why were charters able to make this slight improvement? And how great is the actual difference in performance between the best charters and the average of public schools? Based on the anecdotal evidence I have seen, the only practice the charters have changed in any significant way since the first CREDO study is their improved skill at getting rid of students that pull their numbers down, kids that are then counted on the public side. In answer to “teaching” economist. your assumption that good peer affects only happen in charters due to their selectivity is a rather poor one, as is the assumption implicit in your question that charters have no bad peer effects. I also hope you realize that peer effects pertaining to student achievement do not occur solely within the school environment.
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That is Dr Ravitch’s assumption, not mine.
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From the press release: “charters in the original 16 states have made modest progress in raising student performance in both reading and mathematics, caused in part by the closure of 8 percent of the charters in those states in the intervening years since the 2009 report”
So charter measurements the 8% of schools that had presumably worst outcomes??? Did the study do anything to compensate for this massive survivorship bias?
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Further on survivorship bias. From the study:
Results for charter students in new schools mirror the 2009 findings: students
at new schools have significantly lower learning gains in reading than their TPS peers.
[…]
The new charter school results in math follow the
pattern seen for reading – the performance of the newcharter schools mirrors the 2009 results.
[…]
*New* charter schools continue to perform worse than public schools!! It seems clear that all of the improvement is the result of pure and simple survivor bias. You start a lot of charters. Some do worse, some do better, but overall they do somewhat worse than public schools. You shut down the bad ones (and kick the poor kids back to the public schools -lest we forget). You repeat the analysis with the non-terrible ones. Voila! You have improved!
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Diane, you *must* read the scenario analysis that starts in page 89.
They actually think the survivorship bias is a *feature*, not a bug! They run a bunch of scenarios detailing the dramatic improvement that you get in results if you eliminate from the study different kinds of underperforming charters (in addition to the ones that were closed down, of course), and theyconclude:
“The purpose of these simulations is not to advocate for any particular approach. Rather, the different scenarios make obvious the fact that the impact on quality that accompanies closure is more dramatic and enduring than efforts to improve the current stock of schools. The glimpse of what the future holds provided by these scenarios should quicken the collective resolve to use closure policies where charter schools are clearly underperforming. If the commitment to quality is to be fully realized, everyone
needs to put the interest of students first and use all the resources at their disposal to ensure the best possible student outcomes.”
Hey! Why not close *every* charter school except the top 10%? Why stop there? Shut down every high school in the country except Stuyvesant and Bronx Science! Everyone will be doing calculus in polar coordinates by the time they turn 16 then!
This is demented. What’s going on? What am I missing?
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If I may rant again . . .
I really don’t know why charter school opponents even bother to act like they care about the substance of reports like this.
If charter schools “under-perform” public schools, that proves charter schools are absolutely awful, because they’d have to be absolutely awful if they can’t out-perform public schools despite the fact that charter schools are skimming better students, or benefiting from positive peer effects, or fudging their numbers, or buying off CREDO.
If charter schools perform the same as public schools, that proves charter schools are no good, because they should be *outperforming* public schools given all the skimming, positive peer effects, and number-fudging.
If charter schools outperform public schools, that proves nothing, because charter schools are skimming better students, or benefiting from positive peer effects, or fudging their numbers, so why *wouldn’t* they outperform public schools?
Is there any chance whatsoever that anyone here is going to pick up the latest CREDO report and say: “Well, would you look at that. Charter schools are performing significantly better than public schools. That’s really meaningful. I now conclude that there should be more charter schools.”
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Not to mention that this CREDO study (and another CREDO study before it) show that charter schools significantly outperform traditional public schools in NYC, Diane’s home city. (They also outperform in many of the other usual suspect “reform” locations, e.g. Louisiana.) I doubt that Diane will call for more charter schools in NYC.
I suspect that anti-charter people will continue to cherry pick whatever stats they can. Unfortunately for the anti-charter movement, they will have to change their line from “charter schools underperform traditional public schools” to “charter schools perform the same as traditional public schools”.
“They can’t even beat traditional public schools” is an odd rallying cry for traditional public school supporters, although I appreciate the sentiment of how unimpressive this might seem.
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Quit the hedgefund gig and become a teacher, Ken. You know so much about education and you fit the TFA profile so you will be a hot commodity. Come on….be on the front lines..walk the walk.
Call Eva or Dacia…I’m sure they will only give you the top performers who won’t step out of line and will always worship you. Report back on your experiences once you are in the classroom. Time to pony up!
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Linda! I thought you promised to ignore my comments!
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I skimmed, and then I wanted to invite you to join us. You can do it! We will help you.
But you have to manage on $45,000, give or take a few thousand, in NYC…what do you think?
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The $45,000 is the bottom of the pay scale. If the city counted my higher ed teaching experience, I would get a 33% raise teaching in NYC (to just over $100,000).
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I know and Ken would be a starting teacher, a beginner….so that’s about what he would earn. You don’t get a big boost because you were once a hedgefund guy.
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The advocates of charter schools have long made this claim and have avoided careful scrutiny of their results. By their own metrics and standards they fall short. That is precisely the point critics make. They claim their superiority, but in actuality they are not. If they are subjected to the same stipulations as the public schools and have to abide by the same rules they tend to perform worse. No one claims the tests are valuable, but rather, our opponents tout this as the ultimate measure of success and fall short by it. The substance of reports like this show that even a sympathetic reading of the data does not support the alleged superiority of charters. Parents choosing whom their children will be with has been brought up, perhaps inadvertently, by the likes if Petrelli as a justification for charters. That was not their original claim. They can desire a new definition of their success, but that was not their original argument. In other words, in response to your last paragraph, yes, people are in fact advocating for more charters based on such weak and slanted data.
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Yes, I understand that some people are advocating for that. Just not any people here, and that would be true no matter what the latest CREDO study said.
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They’re missionaries. Reform is a religion. Facts don’t matter. School reform can’t fail, it can only be failed.
That’s why Arne Duncan has to constantly deliver stern lectures to parents and teachers about how we aren’t meeting his expectations. He can’t sell this snake oil positively, so he has to threaten and insult and bribe. He sounds petulant and bitter lately. Not a great approach when dealing with the borader public who aren’t in the reform club. People aren’t going to know what they’ve done to make him so angry.
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IF they even care what he thinks. I certainly don’t. He looks more and more incompetent each day.
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