That choking sound you hear is me writing the headline for this post.

Just when you thought the charter advocates could not sink any lower in seeking rationalizations for privatization, they go lower yet again.

Writing for the National Education Policy Center, Julian Vasquez Heilig critiqued a University of Arkansas study that purports to show that charter schools are more productive and profoppduce a higher return on investment than public schools. The study under review is called “Bigger Bang, Fewer Bucks.”

What would you care about when comparing two sectors, one of which is staffed by professional educators, the other staffed mainly by TFA temps? Would you care about test scores? Parent satisfaction? Teacher turnover? Student projects? Graduation rates? College acceptance rates? Would you consider how the creation of a second sector affects the health and vitality of the first sector? Would you Permit the Second sector to cripple the first sector?

How about return on investment?

This is a mode of thinking with which I am not compatible. I’m reminded of reading I did in the 1990s, when I learned about efficiency experts who studied the curriculum. I was writing a book called “Left Back,” published in 2000. These scientific curriculum experts worked out a way to compare the cost and value of different subjects. They concluded that Latin was not worth teaching because the unit cost was too high. They would understand this new Arkansas study.

Heilig writes the abstract of his critique:

“A report released by the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform contends that charter schools produce more achievement per dollar invested, as compared to public schools. This newest report is focused on city-level analyses in eight US cities (Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York City, San Antonio, and Washington D.C.) and uses cost effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) ratios. It concludes that charter schools deliver a weighted average of an additional 4.34 NAEP reading points and 4.73 NAEP math points per $1000 invested. The report also argues that that charter schools offer an advantage of $1.77 in lifetime earnings for each dollar invested, representing a ROI benefit of 38%. However, there are a variety of methodological choices made by the authors that threaten the validity of the results. For example, the report uses revenues rather than actual expenditures – despite well-established critiques of this approach. The report also fails to account for the non-comparability of the student populations in charter and comparison public schools. Three other problems also undercut the report’s claims. First, even though the think tank’s earlier productivity report included a caveat saying that causal claims would not be appropriate, the new report omits that caution. Second, the report’s lack of specificity plagues the accuracy and validity of its calculations; e.g., using state-level data in city-level analyses and completely excluding race and gender. Finally, the authors again fail to reconcile their report with the extensive literature of contrary findings.“