This is part 2 of Stephen Dyer’s series called “Charters Just Don’t Work.”
In this post, Dyer examines the excuses that charters offer for their poor performance relative to district public schools.
For example,
Claim: Charter schools struggle because their populations are so much more challenging than districts’.
Fact: While charter schools do have higher percentages of students in poverty and minorities, they have smaller percentages of special education children.
But here’s the deal: Charters do worse on the report cards than districts with greater challenges. So that means that while charters’ poor performance compared with districts overall can perhaps be explained by more challenging populations, districts with greater challenges are doing better. So charters are not, on the whole, doing a better job serving our state’s most challenging students than districts with more challenges than the charter faces.
There are other excuses, but as Dyer says, they don’t hold water.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Fact: While charter schools do have higher percentages of students in poverty and minorities….”
Is this true if you compare comparable districts? I mean, charters tend to specifically target poor and minority areas – you simply don’t find many charters in mostly white rural or suburban districts. If you compare urban district populations to charter populations, do you still find more minorities and greater poverty in charters? I don’t know about Ohio, but Jersey Jazzman has done extensive research all around New Jersey and found that the charters take the least poor of the poor.
Governor Kasich repeats this claim frequently. It’s a shame the governor isn’t interested enough in public schools to find out what’s really happening in his own state. His blindness won’t harm charter schools- it will harm public schools.
Charters MUST be better because they’re privately-owned and run and non-union.
President Obama doesn’t know either. The one urban district he chose to praise in Ohio is Cleveland, and the one and only reason he praised it is it has the charter “portfolio” system his administration prefers.
Toledo might have been interesting- their public school enrollment is actually up versus charters and they have a great new (local) superintendent, but Toledo doesn’t meet the ed reform template, so the President went with Cleveland.
“In addition, 45% of the children in Ohio charter schools do not come from the state’s urban core. So it is not really fair to compare overall charter performance, only 55% of which comes from the state’s urban core, with the overall performance in the state’s urban core.”
One would think this would be glaringly obvious to the data-driven crowd, all of whom are such math whizzes 🙂
When will they stop saying it? Never! My God, there are like 50 university studies a year on the wonderfullness of charters. How do you miss this?
They should “charter” a new course
bu t
where there is money to be made – forget the rest.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
http://www.philosophywithoutahome.com/blog/2010/01/22/public-or-private-school/
“…when students with the same background factors were considered, public school students preformed better than private school students.”
I see no reason why this would be different in charter vs public schools.