following Op-Ed p and the study results are very interesting. These
school performance indicators are typically trumpeted by the
administration and typically the release of such data are put in a
very prominent location on the Dept of Education's web site.
Not so with the results of this study. It was buried in the depts of
the dept's web site and no mention was made of it. Its almost as if
the administration is attempting the same sort of dodge they tried to
do for abstiance education research. However that is not the most
important part.
What the research study shows is very interesting. In a nutshell when
charter schools are compared to regular public schools, on every
objective measure required by the NCLB act the public schools did
significantly better. This difference was retained even when the
effects of poverty, the number of diabled or disciplinary problems
(which btw the charter schools handled fewer of each), ethnicity, and
geographic location were controlled for. What these research results
mean is that they significantly undermine some of the central
assumptions of the Bush educational policy.
Just another nail in the coffin for a bad law.
larry
>From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/18/opinion/18wed1.html
August 18, 2004
Bad News on the Charter Front
The Bush administration's education program received a devastating
setback this week when long-awaited federal data showed that children
in charter schools were performing worse on math and reading tests
than their counterparts in regular public schools. Among other things,
the data casts doubt on a central provision of the No Child Left
Behind Act that encourages the states to hand over failing schools to
commercial companies and nonprofit community groups that want to run
them as charter schools.
Such schools can circumvent some union rules and customary management
methods while operating outside the influence of school boards and
state authorities.
The new data is consistent with what states like Michigan and
California have already learned about the pitfalls of the charter
process. There have been individual success stories among the charter
schools, but no one seems to have found the key to replicating them on
a wider basis. And eliminating the much-criticized educational
bureaucracy seems to have created at least as many problems as it has
solved.
In addition to poor academic performance, there have been many cases
of financial and administrative failures. Some charter schools have
been forced to close after being cited for financial irregularities
that resulted from a lack of oversight by the states and the local
school boards. In some cases, charter schools that boasted about high
student achievement have been unwilling to share test data that would
support their claims. Others have been accused of generating better
scores by screening out the disabled and dumping weaker students back
into the public system.
The new data that came to public attention this week was unearthed
from a mound of federal reports, where it seemed to have been buried.
While government officials denied that they were trying to hide the
report, there's no denying that it casts a cloud on the gospel of
privatization pushed by the Bush administration.
The report shows that there is nothing magical about the charter
system when it comes to rebuilding failing schools. Instead of
encouraging the states to set up thousands of unsupervised charter
schools, the education secretary, Rod Paige, and his associates should
concentrate on the No Child Left Behind provisions that require the
states to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and make sure
that all of the country's children are being held to the same high
standards. That means more oversight and more scrutiny by the states,
not less.
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