The National Education Policy Center commissioned a review of the 2013 CREDO charter study, the one that allegedly discovered big gains for charters. In its 2009 study, CREDO found that only 17% of charters outperformed public schools. Now, reviewers concluded that the differences between charter schools and public schools are “significantly insignificant.”
The reviewers were Andrew Maul and Abby McClelland. Maul is an assistant professor in the Research and Evaluation Methodology (REM) program at CU Boulder. His work focuses on measurement theory, validity, and generalized latent variable modeling. McClelland is a Ph.D. student in the REM program. The National Education Policy Center is housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.
The review found:
“Even if concerns over the study’s analytic methods are set side, however, Maul and McClelland point out that the study itself shows only a tiny real impact on the part of charter schools: “less than one hundredth of one percent of the variation in test performance is explainable by charter school enrollment,” they write. Specifically, students in charter schools were estimated to score approximately 0.01 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.005 standard deviations lower on math tests than their peers in traditional public schools.
“With a very large sample size, nearly any effect will be statistically significant,” the reviewers conclude, “but in practical terms these effects are so small as to be regarded, without hyperbole, as trivial.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That’s remarkable, considering the selective nature of charters. If you let me select students, I will produce amazing stats. That the charters cannot do this speaks to their abject incompetence. In fact, it strongly suggests they are nothing if not inferior to schools like mine, which simply take in everyone.
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The 2013 CREDO study concluded that 3/4 of charters are worse than or no better than local public schools, and this despite the tremendous advantages they enjoy with regard to selectivity, skimmimg, and pushing out the kids they don’t want. Charters are clearly a boondoggle and a not too subtle drive to wreck public education. See Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine’s book, Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What’s at Stake (Teachers College Press). — Edd Doerr (arlinc.org)
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In Utah, 41% of students in charter schools do worse in math than in public schools. The pro-voucher local newspaper even had that in a chart next to the CREDO study article. The headline of that article? “Charter schools in Utah make gains.”
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Of course charters, choice and private are no better than public because they do the same thing. When will we ever learn that kids cannot be standardized. And when the assessment of schools is based on a standardized kid, it will always fail. Even more scary is that if it succeeds, kids will drawn completely away from real learning like lemmings to the sea.
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Arthur is correct. When you have two different systems you must have a “Correction Factor.” Charter schools do not have to follow most state ed code or local regulations. Also, the cherry pick parents and students, do not deal with behavioral problems, ESL or special education especially moderate to severe. When you allow for all their special benefits that regular public schools do not have and factor that in charter schools do much worse when properly compared. These studies do not allow for these special priviledges. Therefore, they are not fair and objective to the reality of the real differences. I do not believe that they could defend this lack in their methodology and conclusions. It is worse than they state in a fair comparison straight up. It would be interesting to have a discussion in public on just this point. Bring both sides. Do it in the open. Let the public watch and record it for all to see. Now you have the real deal. How could the other side argue that they do not have special priviledges and as such that there has to be a correction factor to make up for that? I would like to hear and see that argument that you do not need to allow for special priviledges. That is like trying to directly compare where the Obama’s send their daughters to the worse D.C. public school. They are schools aren’t they? Why not directly compare them as the same?
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Is anyone planning on regulating what charters spend on advertising?
Ohio charters seem to be advertising more and more.
When people were sold charters, were they aware that public funds would go to add campaigns?
How much of the positive media attention charters receive is due to the fact that they’re a new stream of revenue for commercial media companies?
Some of the claims they’re making seem questionable. Cybercharters in Ohio are terrible schools. They perform poorly across the board. Yet they advertise using huge, bold numbers like “94%”that appear to refer to “parent satisfaction” in the “small print”.
It’s terrifying. Is my public district expected to advertise and compete with these commercial.operations? How much money are we planning on skimming off the top before it gets to students with this marketing?
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