Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, reports on a new federal analysis comparing charter schools and public schools.
She writes:
A recent report on school choice commissioned by the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) documented what we already know–the performance of students who attend charter schools is no better than the academic performance of those who attend true public schools.
The report based its findings on 4th and 8th grade NAEP scores. No school, public or charter, can test prep students for success on the NAEP, thus it is considered by many to be the most reliable measure of student achievement.
In addition to a simple comparison of results, the researchers who prepared the report used regression analysis to control for the influence of parental education level on student achievement on the NAEP. This is important because it contradicts those who claim that charters do a better job at educating disadvantaged students, and that the equal academic performance between the two sectors is because public schools educate a more privileged population. Parental education level has been shown repeatedly to have a significant effect on student achievement, even when controlling for SES.
The report also told us that the percentage of students in private schools has dropped to 9% and homeschool enrollment has risen to 3%. Of the remaining 88%, 94% of all students are enrolled in true public schools, while 6% are enrolled in charter schools.
The charter school sector can produce as many biased studies not subject to peer review as they like, but studies from objective sources consistently produce the same results–charters, despite their creaming of students and “freedom” do no better than true public schools. Ironically, this one was commissioned by the US Department of Education led by Betsy DeVos.
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Carol Burris
Executive Director
Network for Public Education
Good to have confirmation of a logic based assumption.
However, privatization’s goals remain grifting, funding for Catholic schools and social Darwinism rooted with anti-black bias.
You should include “Protestant & Protestant Evangelical schools” in your “funding for schools” motivations. A look at this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_school suggests those groups aggregated educate about the same no of studs as Catholic schs, which squares roughly w/stats showing Prot Evangelists are a similar-sized voting bloc as Catholics. While I recognize that a fair no of Evangelist schools may be in biz due to “social Darwinist/ anti-black bias,” they can’t all be categorized that way.
Another guarantee of American decline
Thank you Bethree for acknowledging the Catholic school part of privatization. Media has just begun to report on DeVos visits at the invitation of dioceses and about the amount of voucher money going to Catholic Schools (in many midwestern states, the overwhelming amount goes to Catholic schools).
In the linked article, the numbers are elusive. Churches other than Episcopal, Lutheran and Catholic are bundled and students are referenced in international terms and not limited to K-12.
Current total Catholic enrollment is reported at at 1.8 mil. Your linked article cites a combined 315,000 students for Lutheran and Episcopal combined.
Two points are relevant (1) number of students receiving vouchers and the denominational school they attend (2) source of political influence on education policy by religion.
This year, Bellwether, in a report about education in the south recommended ed reformers reach out to churches, presumably evangelical, as well as others. Clearly in other parts of the country, powerful ed reformers are driven by their Catholic beliefs e.g. Sean Fieler and Frank Hanna III.
Bethree
A point about overlap of the 3 goals could be made but, I didn’t make it.
I’ll add a subset (a) for the social Darwinist goal and, grifting goal – to eliminate teacher pensions.
I agree, clarification may be needed for “funding for Catholic schools”, if evangelical, Muslim, etc. schools receive voucher funding that is statistically significant.
A subset of “funding for Catholic schools and other religious schools”
should be added based on the privatization goals of wealthy conservative Catholics, evangelicals, etc.- to control women through imposition of a 1950’s culture.
Now if we could only move toward the goal of rejecting the idea of evaluating school results with data. That way the data manipulation that produced this reform movement would cease to be a part of the education conversation.
We need to go back in time in education before privatization entered the picture when teachers taught, students learned, and teachers evaluated students’ work without feeding a data machine.
We need to go back to a time when an umbrella of Catholic respectability didn’t cloak prosperity Catholics who are destroying public education and threatening local communities’ survival and women and labor’s rights.
Schools Matter wrote about Sean Fieler, “big honcho in the school privatization movement in the Hoosier state”. Fieler wrote an op ed at The Hill that used the phrase the “tyranny of moderation” relative to the abortion issue. The title of his article is, “How Trump Became the Pro-Life Leader Republicans Always Wanted.” In conniving justification, Fieler says Trump’s personal history (a womanizer, children with 3 different women) made him impervious to a charge that morality backed his anti-abortion stance. BTW, this fall the Fieler-linked Chiaroscura organization became a donor advised fund administered by the Knights of Columbus. Fieler is the main funder of the Femm Fertility App.
Frank Hanna III advances school choice initiatives in Atlanta and he worked for the passage of charter school legislation in Georgia. He’s linked to the Acton Institute and Federalist Society.
Prosperity Catholics embrace a history in which their church supported unbridled capitalism, resulting in 1,000,000 Irish starved to death. They are re-creating the Irish holocaust in the U.S.
The projection is 95% GOP men in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.
The degree to which faux Catholic [“prosperity Catholic”] pols are successful in their attempts to spread their cynical religious justification for neoliberalism in the US will directly reflect the degree to which America is becoming a banana republic. The movement is minor among US Catholics at this point. But it’s piggybacked onto the prosperity gospel of the Protestant-evangelical Bible Belt, whose history in part is a repulsive apologia for slave-owners, and finds its greatest success among the poor and the poorly educated, just as in Africa and Latin America.
Will the 60% of white Catholics who voted for Trump vote Republican in 2020?
Is their motivation similar to the evangelicals who vote GOP seeking continued entitlement/privilege?
Re: “piggybacking”, is it possible evangelicals are emulating prosperity Catholics? Media and citizens haven’t seemed as eager to aim arrows in that direction. But, men like Robert George appear to have had great political influence as have Leonard Leo and Paul Weyrich.
Linda, it may be about abortion, not school choice.
The development of abortion as an issue (its chronology) used to congeal tribes of the Catholics and evangelicals was the subject of an article that convinced me it was contrived.
Since the religious abandoned Christ’s teachings about lying, theft, compassion, etc., abortion was the last, best go-to to make Christians feel that that they had moral authority.
It’s a pipe dream in this era where economists’ data determines policy on, well, every social thing. I expect we will move beyond that php sooner rather than later. But meanwhile, it’s very helpful to show that by their own measurements, ed-deformers’ concept that free-market school-choice raises all boats is simply wrong. Step 2 is to demonstrate the increased cost to public [both monetary & in terms of voter control over $ spent, i.e., democracy, not to mention inequity & increased segregation] of running 2- & 3-tier publicly-funded schsystem. Then we’re in position to isolate the multiple increased costs of school choice & ask why the public is expected to foot the bill for an airy-fairy concept that produces only ill effects.
Ohio as example- Fordham funded a study that showed no educational improvement from Ohio vouchers. The chair of the Ohio senate education committee said vouchers make no sense. Ohio increased the amount spent on vouchers which primarily go to Catholic schools. Both Fordham and, Koch-linked think tanks praise Catholic schools.
The objective of reform has never been better education.
Theocracy used to destroy democracy and grifting, most of it to rob Main Street and make Silicon Valley and Wall Street flush, are the goals.
BTW- we still have trickle down economics despite all economic review data.
Actually I wasn’t aware “schools” perform at all! I know students do so.
Exactly. And when we talk about this “performance” all we’re talking about is scores on a BS Test.
Schools achieving is quite the interesting concept. One can only assume that since charters claim to offer high quality seats, it’s the chairs doing the middling performing. It can’t be the whiteboards. I can’t imagine handball courts getting even mediocre test scores.
High-quality seats are really really important. It doesn’t matter who sits in them or who teaches. The seats matter. If only we could buy millions of high -quality seats.
Magical miracle seats!!
In seat performance rating, musical chairs is the game. Every time the music stops, someone is out.
Thank you Carol for the rapid response to the IES/NCES report. The charter loud speakers were working hard to spin this report, notably the Walton funded 74 Million.
I also think your phrase “true public schools” is a simple and well-chosen way to assert that charter schools are not really “public.”
It is worth noting that this report is about achievement in schools of “choice” (religious schools, homeschools, private schools, charter schools, assigned public schools and public schools within a choice system).
The “no gap” also refers only to 8th grade NAEP scores in reading and mathematics for public versus charter schools, even though there were also results in these two subjects from the 4th grade. Why the difference in grade-level reporting?
“In 2017, no measurable differences in average 8th-grade reading and mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were observed between students in traditional public and public charter schools. This pattern persisted after taking into account how differences in parents’ educational attainment were related to the assessment scores.”
Here are a few caveats:
1. These are average test scores in two grades in two subjects.
2. Some “analyses were not possible for 4th-grade scores because students did not report on their parents’ educational attainment.” So, students were relied upon as it they are reliable sources of information about the educational attainment of their parents.
3. “More complex relationships cannot be reported, and the available data do not allow controls for other student and school characteristics that research has shown are substantively correlated with student assessment scores and school type.”
Among these are: parental or household income, geographic location of state and funding for education, district size and character (e.g. urban, rural), gender, and more.
Although Carol is correct that the NAEP is “considered by many to be the most reliable measure of student achievement” there is a lot more “fuzz” around this report than is obvious from headlines and spin factories.
The only “claim to fame” for private charters is enhanced segregation. In our current climate we need to bring diverse people together so they can learn to get along and respect each other. This is the healing message that our whole country needs. One of my greatest joys in teaching was watching my poor, minority ELLs make friends with students that were different from them. This is another reason why integrated schools work well.
It’s up at opED https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Carol-Burris-Federal-Anal-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Education_Public-Education-190928-935.html
It’s very informative, but too bad NAEP isn’t also sampling at privschs, as they rep nearly double the # of studs in charters. This would be very interesting, as the report says 76% of privschs are religious– surely some proportion of them are publicly-funded, given the expansion in some states’ voucher programs.
A quotable factoid here: as of 2017, we are down to 83% in traditional pubschs [94% of the 88% remaining after privschs & homeschooling accounted for.]
This guarantees the decline of American creativity and technological leadership.
What is being said here is let’s play football but not keep score. Even in socialist states, education is competitive. Only in America does anyone, mainly teachers, deny that education is like a sport or like a capitalist business. Why is that? Seriously.
Years ago school districts gave one standardized test every other year as a litmus test to see how districts were performing. However, testing has taken over due to the high stakes attached to them. Some of the consequences are students being retained, teachers getting fired, loss of funding or closing down schools. These tests are supposed to inform parents and teachers, but they are being misused to punish mostly poor districts.
Education is not like a sport or a business, especially when the “score” or the “revenues” are measured on standardized tests. You were miseducated.
So, there were surely some problems with the early reports from Stanford, Harvard etc.
Studies depend on sample size, methodology and other variables. The NCES study is a national sample based on NAEP. With other studies, there may be confirmation bias or, in some cases, follow the funding.
Even if a university researcher who gets funding from education oligarchs, reports the dismaying, honest finding that voucher/charter school propaganda is proven to be nothing but hype, the system is gamed. The researcher allows the foreword to be written by the funding organization and the findings are misrepresented. The oligarch lackeys tell the media the false finding. The research is cited and the “finding” attributed to it is false.
Oligarchs and their minions are creative in dispensing with ethics as are all grifters.