Posted on 08/22/2004 5:09:13 AM PDT by TaxRelief
"Our estimates imply that students in North Carolina do less well in charter schools than they would have done in traditional public schools and that the negative effects of attending a charter school are large," the study's authors wrote.
DURHAM, N.C. -- State exam results indicate that most students at North Carolina's charter schools would perform better if they stayed in traditional public schools.
The data is compiled in a new study co-authored by a Duke professor. It argues that, on average, students who attend charter schools are being academically harmed.
"Our estimates imply that students in North Carolina do less well in charter schools than they would have done in traditional public schools and that the negative effects of attending a charter school are large," the study's authors wrote.
The study compares year-to-year gains on state exams by students who attended charter schools to those the same students made when they attended traditional public schools.
Charter schools are public schools that receive state and local funding but are run by independent boards of directors rather than local school boards. They are subject to the same testing requirements as traditional public schools.
The Legislature gave permission in 1996 for them to be created in North Carolina.
A similar study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, showed charter students faring considerably worse on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam than their counterparts in similar traditional public schools.
That study was criticized for not taking into account the academic deficiencies that charter school students often bring with them.
Duke public policy professor Helen Ladd said her research avoids that problem by measuring how both types of schools do with the same students.
"We're comparing the students to themselves," she said.
She said her research doesn't mean all charter schools are bad, but that most are. Ladd's husband, Ted Fiske, was among the founders of Durham's Central Park School for Children charter school.
She and study co-author Robert Bifulco, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, are working on a follow-up study to determine which charter schools are working.
Ladd recommended that, for now, the state stick with its decision to cap the number of charter schools at 100.
"We think charter schools are a good thing, but we think they should stay on the fringe," she said.
Durham has eight charter schools, the state's highest concentration for its population size.
Last school year, about 1,800 Durham students attended charter schools -- about 5 percent of all Durham public school students. Durham Public Schools planners expect that number to rise this year.
Yvette Walker, director of Durham's Omuteko Gwamaziima charter school, was reluctant to discuss the Duke study without having read it, but she questioned how anyone could indict charter schools on academics, considering the deficiencies in the traditional public schools.
"If there is any weakness in academics in our charter school, it is because of the lack of proficiency children carry from the traditional public schools," she said.
Wanna guess Prof. Ladd's party affiliation?
As soon as I saw that the person who made these claims was a Professor, I knew then that this article was full of hooey and not worth my time.
Professors are (imho) lying scum that are only out for their own political interests.
See this is what I call JUNK SCIENCE....they have a preconceived notion as to what the answer should be and skew the stats to "prove it". The only true metric is to measure what each child did in a public school and then compare it to what the SAME child did in the charter school setting.....DOn't ya just love it when people pretend to be scientific?
Isn't that what they did?
"The study compares year-to-year gains on state exams by students who attended charter schools to those the same students made when they attended traditional public schools."
I'm not saying that I'm convinced that the study means that charter schools are not equal to, or better than, public schools, just that they do seem to have done what you said.
Only parents provide that better opportunity.
The truth of this article makes the argument a moot point.
Hold the phone everyone. Based on the article, this professor is using the same methodology that Paul Peterson used in his study revealing the positive impact of school choice.
Prof. Ladd appears to be comparing achievement scores of similar types of kids in schools of similar SES levels. Sounds like a reasonable study to me. Note that charter schools are still 100% defendable on the sheer basis of promoting parents' freedom to send their kids to the school of their choosing.
But of course the same child can't be in both places at the same time, so most rigorous studies would have pairs of children the same ages and from similar backgrounds to compare the results between the charter schools and regular public schools.
Nah that's not what the study really does...that is what the newspaper article says it did but not what was done....All that was done was the numbers for the charter schools were compared to comparable public schools in the same area...These test ( and I am very familiar with them here in CAlifornia) have one section of the test that actually has a student identifier and that is sent home. The total test is reported in broad terms for various statewide measuring and comparison. What was reported in the study was a comparison of how public schools did vs how charter schools did. State and federal law prohibit test information on a single student to be used in these types of reports so there is NO way that they could have compared John Doe's scores last year to John DOe's scores this year....
Look I am all in favor of choice for parents when it comes to schooling of their children....Read the article and then read the report. This is JUNK science it extrapolates based on nothing, it estimates based on nothing, and it draws conclusions that are designed to promote the AFT and the NEA....That ain't what real measurements are used for...True science takes the measurements and does not try and fit the data to a preconceived notion...True science looks at the data and if the results don't support the hypotesis then that is admited and one's thinking is redirected
You have proved my point exactly....to say that student A did not do better in a charter school can only be stated truthfully if the student's test scores from previous years were available for this study...The only available data for this study are generalized scores for particular schools in particular economic, immigrant status, language limited divisions that allow for the observation of "somolar" schools...As usual the educrat establishment has used smoke and mirrors to prove that they still don't know what they are doing
Based on what I read, the researchers first hypothesized that charter kids would outscore regular school kids. They then tried to test this by comparing kids from similar backgrounds in both kinds of schools. They appear to have tried to control for differences in background. This seems like "normal science" to me.
...but it's certainly possible I may have missed something. (By the way, I do education research for a living--but that's not to claim any superior knowledge or anything!)
If the study was reasonable, these children would not only be compared to themselves, but they would also be compared to a comparable samples of reasonable size in various school career paths.
All this researcher did was look through test scores for something, anything that would present a media-acceptable case claiming that charter schools were worse than public schools.
that's a left-wing gang bang!
i saw rev. flake's editorial in the nyt last week. it was a response to a similarly-biased article in the paper.
for one thing, charter schools accept students who have been mis-educated in the union schools.
Nah that's what the soft sciences calls science ( you know psychology and education and a few other types of researchers)...It plays with stats to suggest that when one measures human performance that somehow you can devise ways to normalize" for individual responses...And you and I both know that can't be done. True science ( oh things like thermodynamics,physics,chemistry) measures something, repeats the experiment a number of times, and then tries to understand what the measurements actually mean. The problem with the soft sciences is that none of them seem to understadn that correlation is NOT causation...If they were better at mathematics they would understand that
Yeah and I do real science for a living ( but that's not to claim any superior knowledge or anything)...
Read carefully the reports comments..."Our ESTIMATES...." that says it all...extrapolation and stupidty all at once
I don't have the full study to know for sure, but usually the word "estimates" refers to effects inferred from multiple regression coefficients. Because we don't really know much about the representativeness of their, we can't generalize from these results to all students in all charter schools.
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