Despite the best efforts of the Florida legislature to give every possible financial and regulatory break to charter school operators, the charter industry is having many problems.
Charters in Duval County are not doing well at all. The legislators and former Governor Jeb Bush have promised again and again that the move to private control would unleash a new era of excellence and innovation, but it hasn’t happened.
Duval’s charter schools performed worse than the district’s public schools on state tests.
Recently released results from the annual Florida Standards Assessments and from state end-of-course exams reveal that in 17 out of 22 tests on reading, math, science, history and civics, charter schools averaged fewer students passing the tests than those in district schools.
In some tests and subjects, far fewer. The biggest differences were in science.
Nearly three out of four Duval students taking biology last year passed its end-of-course exam, compared to less than half, 48.4 percent, of charter school students. Fifty-two percent of Duval’s fifth-graders passed that grade’s science test, compared to 41 percent of their charter school peers.
In every tested grade except sixth, Duval students’ English language arts passing rates and math passing rates exceeded charters.’
“You can see that our schools are improving at a faster clip,” said Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti.
There were exceptions, where charters decisively outperformed district schools.
In sixth grade, 48 percent of charter school students passed math, compared to nearly 40 percent at district schools.
In algebra 1, charter schools passed 53 percent of students, 5 percentage points more than the district’s 48 percent. In Florida, high school students need to pass algebra 1 to graduate.
Also, in geometry, the difference between charter and district schools was about 19 percentage points; nearly 56 percent of charter school students passed compared to 37 percent of district students.
(The comparisons are estimates, because Florida obscures scores in grades with few students to protect their identities. That affects charter schools more than district school data.)
Charter schools are independently operated schools that compete with the district for students as well as state and federal tax dollars. Charter school students take the same tests as students in traditional public schools.
Charter advocates will leap to celebrate the grades and subjects where charters got higher scores than public schools, but it should be remembered that charters (unlike public schools) are free to choose the students they want and free to throw out the students they don’t want. They should be superior across the board, but they are not.
This is one of the few articles I have read that acknowledges that charters “compete with the district for students as well as state and federal tax dollars.” Many people do not realize that charters–even low-performing charters–drain money from the public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, it doesn’t matter. They don’t want to compare schools anymore 🙂
“I don’t like to compare schools sometimes because it’s not apples-to-apples,” Norman-Teck said.”
They did the same thing in Ohio. First it was about “excellence” and then when that didn’t pan out they moved briskly to it being about “choice”.
They can’t lose, Diane. They always have “choice” as a back-up justification.
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“There’s no doubt that the basis for a strong working middle class is under attack in this country.” — Mike Williams, President of the Florida AFL-CIO.
A recent school board talk I gave:
https://youtu.be/Ph-HR0ORh24
Transcript:
Good evening. My name is Andy Goldstein. I’m a teacher at Omni Middle School and the proud parent of an eight-year-old daughter who successfully completed second grade this year.
My wife and I would like to thank my daughter’s teacher, Mrs. Adlerstein, for all her dedication and patience with teaching our daughter and we’d like to thank her Principal, Mrs. Coletto and her Assistant Principal, Mrs. Boone, for all their support. Thank you, we very much appreciate it!
With school out, my wife and I wanted our daughter to continue to develop a life-long love of reading. Would she continue to read? She was reluctant to read.
We went to the public library, looking for just the right book—something that would pique her interest. Thank God for Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney! Our daughter has been reading every day since for her own enjoyment.
This weekend, I attended, with other members of our teacher’s union, the AFL-CIO COPE convention in which we work on endorsing candidates for the upcoming elections.
“There’s no doubt that the basis for a strong working middle class is under attack in this country,” Mike Williams, the President of the Florida AFL-CIO, told the labor delegates to the convention.
As a teacher, I feel myself and my family being squeezed. On the one hand, we teachers have dedicated our lives and our careers to teaching the children of our community. Yet we find ourselves, as far as salary, in a dead-end profession. As one teacher told me, the death of the Steps was the death of hope. We have nothing to look forward to.” Our school board and our school district have never addressed this problem, applying patches year after year, as we find our selves struggling more and more to make ends meet. There is no doubt that the middle class in our country—and in our state and in our county is under attack.
We are in an election year. An election is a way of saying what we stand for—our hopes for the future—for our families, our communities, our country and our world.
I urge our school district and school board to help get out the vote so that we can have strong public schools that serve our children and provide windows of opportunity and doorways to lifelong success.
And I urge our school district to start negotiations now for a salary structure that will help our teachers and make teaching a valued profession, rather than just another job.
Thank you.
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If one wanted to do a real analysis of charter v public in a given state, one wouldn’t look at the per student funding number from the state, but instead look at what each school spends per student.
KIPP is mentioned in the piece and I don’t know how national charters allocate funds. When KIPP gets a huge federal grant does that go to A KIPP charter or SOME KIPP charters? Does it go to certain KIPP schools or to a national management company?
With public schools (in Ohio anyway) one can track funding IN and funding OUT. I can’t do that with national charter chains. I don’t even know if they keep state funding in-state.
If you don’t know how much they take in and how it’s distributed, the state share of funding is an incomplete picture. It doesn’t mean anything.
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