Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools
June 5, 2019
For immediate release: Statement of APPS Re CREDO study
The CREDO study released today presents more evidence that the charter experiment foisted upon the state’s children has been a resounding failure, especially considering the enormous amount of taxpayer dollars that have been spent on charter schools.
For many reasons, comparing charters to district schools is not an apples-to-apples exercise. Charter schools receive outside funding from private donors, including significant amounts every year from the Philadelphia School Partnership. PSP identifies as a non-profit funder of schools, but they have been strong financial and political advocates for privatization and charter expansion. The bulk of their corporate funding goes to non-district schools.
Charter schools have been cited over the years for unfair practices such as presenting barriers to enrollment, failure to inform students and parents of their due process rights when facing disciplinary action, and expelling students for trivial offenses including being out of uniform and lateness. Thus, many charters are able to exclude students with special needs, both behavioral and academic.
Studies done by both Philadelphia City Controller’s Office and the State Attorney General’s Office have documented fraud and questionable spending in some of the city’s largest charter organizations. Organizations including PCCY and the Education
Law Center have conducted in-depth studies that show charters do not outperform district schools in most categories. ELC’s recent report shows: 1) the population of economically disadvantaged students is much lower in Philadelphia’s charter schools—70% in the District, 56% in charters; 2) the percentage of English learners is nearly three times higher—11% in District, 4% in charters; 3) few of the special education students in the traditional charters are from the low-incidence disability categories, such as autism and intellectual disability, that are most expensive to serve.
The diversion of public funds to privately managed charters has made it more difficult for public schools to fund essential programs, but public schools still manage to outperform charters in most categories. Lack of oversight, both on the state and local level, has resulted in a lack of accountability in the charter sector.
The CREDO study confirms that the claim of charter investors and operators that charter schools are a better choice has never been true. Harrisburg must reform the PA Charter Law so that the voters in each district can have the means to fully fund and strengthen their public school systems.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
” Overall, CREDO researchers said the findings reflected “little to no progress” for Pennsylvania’s charter-school sector since 2013, when the state’s charters performed worse than the typical charter nationally, Raymond said.”
Pennsylvania should be asking why it is wasting money to establish sets of parallel schools for no better results. It would be more cost effective and efficient to adequately fund public schools.
“Yet some Pennsylvania charter schools are performing very well, researchers said, with 45 percent doing significantly better in reading than traditional public schools sending students to those charters. One-third of charters were not significantly different than those schools in reading, and 23 percent were significantly worse.”
If some charters perform better in reading, then more work should be done to disaggregate the data. Were these selective private charters? How do the socioeconomic levels of the high performing students compare to students in public schools? What are the attrition rates in the high performing private charters. It is unfair to draw sweeping conclusions without knowing what is being measured and compared. Experienced educational researchers should examine the results. However, overall the people of Pennsylvania are not getting much for their money, and they are diverting far too much money out of public schools. https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania-charter-school-performance-cyber-credo-stanford-20190604.html
The link that allows us to Reblog posts did not work for this post and one I wanted to share with my blog’s readers yesterday. For years, I never had this problem until recently.
Has WordPress screwed up again?
WordPress has peculiarities
are the democrats wary of answering questions about charters…..is there a difference between centrists those not so dedicated to being centrists. Does Biden have questions to answer related to being Obama’s vp?
oh that this very subject is a BIG one on early debate stages…
“For many reasons, comparing charters to district schools is not an apples-to-apples exercise.”
This is a critical point.
Apart from using test scores as a (fake) measure of quality, the (second) biggest problem with all the deformer fake studies that purport to show whatever it is they have decided ahead of time to show is that there are always critical factors (and data) that are (sometimes quite purposefully) left out that slant the scale toward the deformer claims at the getgo.
And watch out wherever economists claim that they have somehow (magically) “adjusted” with their “linear regression” for all these other factors that can affect the outcome. There is nothing economists love more than mathturbation.