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.”

A reader explains the appeal of charters to communities fearful for their children in a world fraught with danger:

“Perhaps this site can be a venue for discussing the manner in which racial segregation and military discipline are packaged so as to market charter schools to families legitimately concerned with the dangers their children face growing up in communities that lack good jobs, good health care, and adequate housing, and other resources available to more privileged sectors of society. One should not underestimate the short-term appeal that such “discipline” has for people who are besieged, worried about the temptations their kids may succumb to and have, in the present moment, relatively little power. Many of the charters have lifted a page, not from the civil rights or radical Black power movements, but rather from the cultural conservatism of Booker T. Washington and Elijah Muhammad. This time, however, the executioners of the “plan” are largely, though not exclusively, upper middle class whites.”