The latest state report in Georgia found that student performance across both public schools and charter schools was stagnant, no doubt a reflection of the failure of test-based accountability. At some point, do you think policymakers will decide that all the time and money invested in testing has been wasted?
Georgia’s public schools took a step backward academically, an annual state report card released last week found, and many charter schools did not escape the lower marks.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of the data found about three of five charter school grade clusters had lower scores on the state education department’s 2013-14 College and Career-Ready Performance Index (CCRPI) than they did the prior school year. Grade clusters are separated by the elementary, middle and high school levels.
The index shows several charter high schools are in trouble or need improvement. Three charter high schools were 50 percent or more below the statewide high school average for academic achievement. Academic achievement — how students fared on state end-of-course and standardized tests — accounts for up to 60 points, more than half the CCRPI score. In all, 15 of the 24 charter high schools reviewed by the AJC had academic achievement scores that were below the statewide high school average….
There was some encouraging news from the recent CCRPI findings for charter schools. Middle schools with data available were four points better than the state average. Elementary charter schools were on average five-tenths of a point better.
The data reviewed by the AJC showed charter high schools were on average three-tenths of a point below the statewide average.
Conversion charter schools, schools that began as traditional public schools, fared about as well as startup charter schools, the AJC’s review of available data found.
Is this why the Waltons and other billionaires poured money into Georgia’s state referendum on charters? Is this the education revolution they expected? A four-point gain in middle school; five-tenths of a point better in elementary schools; three-tenths of a point below the state average in high school?
Much ado about nothing, other than destroying the public’s belief that public schools belong to the public and providing opportunities for entrepreneurs to cash in.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No. This entire “movement” is about union busting, firing teachers and hiring cheaper ones, and unmitigated greed.
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Public school parents have to start asking ed reform politicians how ed reform is improving public schools.
Not opening charter schools. They’re good at that.
The promise made to the public was “our market-based approach will improve public schools”. They shouldn’t be permitted to move the goalposts to “open charter schools”. That’s a bait and switch and an accountability dodge.
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If charters are not getting substantially better results, they should have to return the students to the public schools. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for a failed experiment that is less efficient than what public schools offer? With charter schools, residents often pay for a total new staff including administration, utilities, building lease, materials, etc., while many of these costs could be more efficiently rolled into existing public budgets. Why pay for duplicated services? For all this inefficiency, taxpayers have no say over curricula and budget, and they have lost a democratic right to a voice in establishing policies.
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On a different note, I’ll be very interested to find whether the 4 points improvement in middle school will hold water when the students progress to secondary school.
The parallels we see in Australia suggest that once students reach a ceiling in visual processing capacity they hit a brick wall IF they are “context dependent whole word guessers”, that is, they have limited decoding skills and therefore rely on context & whole word guessing.
To see a video dealing with this go to http://vasblog.com and watch VAS Theory – Eve’s Story.
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Yet Alabama’s state legislators are determined to allow for charter schools in their upcoming session.
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