Who wins this contest?
It depends on how you look at it, but it’s definitely NOT a slam-dunk for either side.
The results vary a lot by grade level.
At the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade levels, the regular public schools had higher percentages of students meeting AYP in reading in 2009 – and the advantage for the regular school students was especially large in the 3rd and 4th grades.
At the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade levels, the charter school students had higher percentages of students meeing AYP, and the difference is particularly large in the 7th and 8th grade.
At the 10th grade level, the charter school students have a slightly higher percentage of students meeting AYP in reading, but only by about 1.4 percentage points.
Here is the graph and the accompanying table:
In any case, this data definitely disproves the wide-spread lie that public schools always do worse than charter schools, therefore we need to close down public schools and open up more charter schools. However, it also shows that the District of Columbia public schools have a lot of improvement to do in 7th, 8th, and 10th grades.
Any thoughts?
A quick reaction, questions more than comments.
In the 3rd and 4th grades, how long have students been in the charters? Is it possible that they might have been there only a year or two, because parents pulled them from (underperforming? dangerous?) public schools after a year or two, perhaps because entrance to many charters is by lottery and you can’t get in the first time? It would be interesting to see how long the charter students have been in the charters, on average.
For the 7th and 8th grades, how long have they been in the charters? Do the better scores represent that the charters have had the kids for several years, and that is what it took to get them above average? Or is there another reason, or reasons?
Tom, you appear to assume that charter schools inherently are better-run than regular public schools, and that all they need is time. Having talked to teacher colleagues who have fled from charter schools to go teach in public schools, and having tutored students in DC public, private, religious, and charter I assure you that this is definitely not necessarily the case. There are good teachers, students, parents, and administrators in all of these schools, and there are those who are not. Some public and charter schools are well-run, and some are not.
One truly remarkable thing is that, given that charter schools have the ability to permanently expel students for various infractions, and public schools basically are forbidden even to suspend anybody except in cases of murder or maiming, how is it that the charter schools haven’t even managed to “stack their decks” by weeding out the weaker students, and produce apparently wonderful average test scores?
GFB
But to answer your specific questions, unfortunately I do not have any data to answer most of them. I have no way of knowing which students have stayed the longest, or the least, time in which schools. About the only thing I might be able to do is to correlate length of time in business versus average achievement scores.
Good point about expelling students. Can we get numbers of expulsions? If charters expelled, say, 4% of students and the DC public schools expelled close to zero, and if we assume such students are underperformers, then we might be able to explain the differences in 7th and 8th grade performance mostly on the basis of expelling bad performers. If expulsions from charters are, say, less than 1%, then probably that explanation wouldn’t work.
But there is also the opposite effect, as you showed on your website (DC Charter Schools Less Diverse than DC Public Schools). That is, the public schools have more white kids, who on average outperform black and hispanic kids. So charters in this sense have the decks stacked against them, so isn’t their outperformance therefore more notable?
You are right that I think that the on average charters are more well run than regular public schools.
Part of this might be that the worst charters fold within a few years, leaving better ones.
But I tend to think of it as having to do with the charters themselves, the way they are run. I asked Lisa Raymond when she was running for school board why she was leaving the Chavez charter school, which had such great results, partly as a result of her efforts. She said that she wanted to apply the lessons she had learned at charters to the DC public schools, since the latter still had about 3X
the number of kids charters had. Inherent in her answer, of course, was the sense that charters are better run than regular public schools.
I visited the SEED school (a charter boarding school, which to be fair isn’t representative of all charters). I asked a 9th grader what the main difference was between SEED and her old public school. She said that SEED was all over her, every night, to get her homework done — but the public school didn’t seem to care if she did it or not.
I could be wrong, of course — but these are among the reasons I think charters in DC on average are better than the public schools.
Thanks for your reply — I learn best when my ideas are challenged and I have to defend them!
Tom