The Walton Family Foundation, which is the second largest funder of privately-run charter schools (first is the U.S. Department of Education, which dispenses $400 million a year to charters), wanted to create positive press about charter schools in Alaska. So they commissioned a study by two charter advocates, who produced the positive results Walton wanted.
Beth Zirbes teaches math and statistics in a high school in Fairbanks, Alaska. With her friend Mike Bronson, she reviewed the data in the state records and reached a different conclusion: charter schools are no better than neighborhood public schools, even though the charter students are more advantaged. Their article, with a link to their study, was published by the Anchorage Daily News.
What’s impressive about this study is that a high school math teacher bested a Harvard professor of political science. It just goes to show: Don’t be overly impressed by the author’s academic credentials. And, never believe any charter or voucher research funded by foundations that fund charters and vouchers.
Would you believe a study claiming that cigarettes do not cause cancer if the study was funded by Philip Morris or some other tobacco vendor?
Zirbes and Bronson wrote:
The governor has claimed in several newspaper pieces that Alaska charter schools are more effective than neighborhood schools, and that the charters should be modeled more widely. He’d seen reports by Paul E. Peterson and M. Danish Shakeel, sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation, showing that Alaska charter schools held top rank academically among other states on a federal test.
We value the good performance of many charter school students, but we were skeptical that charter schools were necessarily more effective at lifting students up. So we looked at state data to find out how much of the charter schools’ better scores might be attributed to the schools themselves versus what the students bring to the schools. Read our full report here.
The state’s data showed the governor’s takeaway was incorrect. He was wrong that Peterson’s study showed the superior effectiveness of Alaskan charter schools over neighborhood schools. First, Peterson’s study did not even look at neighborhood schools. Second, after we accounted for numbers of students poor enough to be eligible for reduced-price or free lunches, we found that charter schools and neighborhood schools did not statistically differ in their English language proficiency scores. Instead, the percentage of proficient students in both charter and neighborhood schools was closely related to family income.
Alaska charter schools, on average, are distinguished by high proportions of white students, higher family income and fewer English language learners. Alaska charter school student bodies, in general, don’t even resemble Lower 48 charter schools, let alone Alaskan neighborhood schools. Unfortunately, Alaskan charter students do resemble other Alaskan public schools in that a majority of them score below the state standards in reading and math.
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The graph shows a decline in percentages of third to ninth-grade participating students who scored proficient or better on the state’s 2019 PEAKS assessment of English language arts with increasing school percentages of students poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch, in other words economically disadvantaged. Each point shows a public school in Alaska school districts having charter schools. Neighborhood schools are considered non-charter, brick-and-mortar schools including alternative and lottery schools managed by a school district. Data are from the Department of Education and Early Development.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
FINANCIAL FRAUD COMMITTED BY CHARTER SCHOOLS IS STEALING TAXPAYER MONEY FROM GENUINE PUBLIC SCHOOLS and undermining children’s education: The impartial, non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away from America’s genuine public schools and pocketed by private corporate “school choice” charter school operators that the IG investigation declared: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals.”
In the 1990’s, Wall Street hedge fund billionaires discovered that they could profit from the “school choice” movement and so they took over by founding corporate chains of charter schools that have reaped billions of dollars since then through various mechanisms, such as REITs that collect exorbitant lease and rental profits from charter schools…as the expense of public schools.
Charter schools claim to be non-profit. And yet, There are numerous schemes for running a non-profit for profit. For example, in two reports — “Chartered for Profit” and “Chartered for Profit II” — The Network for Public Education explains the most common schemes: Some charters lease their buildings back from related businesses. In one New York case, a chartering organization leased a space from the diocese, then leased that space to its own charter school for over TEN TIMES the amount it was actually paying.
Then there are “sweeps” contracts, where a non-profit charter hires a for-profit management organization to handle everything, in return for nearly every dollar the charter takes in. As one contract cited in the report states, the management organization receives “as remuneration for its services an amount equal to the total revenue received” by the school “from all revenue sources.”
In many cases, a non-profit charter school simply serves as a pass through for money headed to a for-profit business.
THE MOST EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR DISMANTLING THE CHARTER SCHOOL MOVEMENT is to simply require that charter schools file THE SAME, EXACT PUBLIC DOMAIN QUARTERLY AND ANNUAL BUDGET REPORTS THAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE REQUIRED TO FILE.
Every state in our nation should have that same common sense accountability requirement for charter schools.
THERE’S NO SUCH THING as a “public charter school”. Charter school operators spend a lot of taxpayer money telling taxpayers that charter schools are “public” schools — but they are not. As the Supreme Courts of Washington State and New York State have ruled, charter schools are actually private schools because THEY FAIL TO PASS THE MINIMUM TEST for being genuine public schools; that is — They aren’t run by school boards who are elected by, and therefore under the control of and accountable to voting taxpayers, that is, THE PUBLIC. All — ALL — charter schools are corporations run by private parties or are religious organizations. Taxpayers have no say in how their tax dollars are spent in charter schools.
CHARTER STUDENTS LOSE GROUND: The Stanford University Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) — which is funded by pro-charter organizations — has reported that in the case of popular online charter schools, students actually lose ground in both reading and math — but online charter schools are the fastest-growing type of charter school because they make it easiest to skim away public tax dollars. CREDO has been conducting years-long research into the educational quality of charter schools and yet even this charter-school-funded research center’s findings are that in general charter schools don’t do any better academically than genuine public schools.
“SCHOOL CHOICE”: The catch-phrase “school choice” was concocted by racists following the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that required racial integration in public schools. After that, racist organizations used racist politicians to conduct a decades-long attack that underfunded public schools and crippled their ability to provide the full measure of education and to “prove” that public schools were “failing”. That public school “failure” is an issue manufactured by racists organizations and politicians is well-documented in the book “The Manufactured Crisis”.
RACIAL RESEGREGATION of America’s school systems by the private charter school industry is so blatant and illegal that both the NAACP and ACLU have called for a stop to the formation of any more charter schools. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA summed it up, stating that charter schools are “a civil rights failure.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/03/29/report-the-department-of-education-has-spent-1-billion-on-charter-school-waste-and-fraud/#ab1fbdb27b64
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The charter lobby and billionaire advocates continue to spin their web of lies about public schools because they want access to public school dollars so they can undermine the schools that most working families rely on. Biased right wing leadership gives credence to their false claims. These false claims have been unleashed in other red led states as well. It is all part of their scheme to transfer public dollars into private pockets at the expense of the state’s young people.
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Yes. The hype about charters and vouchers is intended to undermine public schools and transfer public funds to private hands.
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Enjoyed this post! The [real] scholars’ analysis was straightforward—a model of a user-friendly yet statistically thorough analysis. Sounds like the governor’s misinterpretation was due to a less-than-user-friendly report by the Walton-funded researchers.
Speaking of faulty interpretations of ed reports, yesterday press secretary Leavitt parroted the typical media misquote implying that 70% of the nation’s children perform poorly in Reading and Math “per NAEP.” This is what happens when you choose to cite NAEP’s “proficient and above” stat in lieu of “basic and above.” It eliminates entirely the prox 35% of nation’s students who perform AT grade level– roughly equivalent to “NAEP Basic,” which is roughly equivalent to scoring in the C- to C+ range. (Only in Lake Wobegon are “all children above average.”) This time that whopper was given as justification for dismantling/ closing the Dept of Ed.
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Ginny,
You are exactly right.
Proficient is A level performance.
Not grade level.
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