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.
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