Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy. (Politics General)

I am a socialist; of course I am a socialist. To hold a vision that society can be fundamentally different, to believe that all people can be equal - that is not a new idea.
-Bernie Sanders

 

@Background Human
isn’t socialism what you guys want?

@Background Human
isn’t socialism what you guys want?

According to the Global Report Card, more than a third of the 30 school districts with the highest math achievement in the United States are actually charter schools

School districts or schools?

Schools for charters vs Districts for public schools.

This different treatment makes the comparison completely bogus. A much more accurate comparison would be to take the best performing single school in the Public School District and compare it to the Charter school.

It’s not as good as a RCT but it is probably available — if you could burrow into the public system’s data back to a comparable time period.

DCPS has a few excellent H.S. with scores that exceed the charter competition. Any comparison of NAEP scores DCPS vs. charters would need to control for socio-economic class which is driving the increase in high school (or middle & high school) charters.

The problem is that charter schools are not more consistently effective

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found in a 2009 report that 17% of charter schools outperformed their public school equivalents, while 37% of charter schools performed worse than regular local schools, and the rest were about the same. A 2010 study by Mathematica Policy Research found that, on average, charter middle schools that held lotteries were neither more nor less successful than regular middle schools in improving student achievement, behavior, or school progress. Among the charter schools considered in the study, more had statistically significant negative effects on student achievement than statistically significant positive effects. These findings are echoed in a number of other studies.

This is not a track record that says let’s throw money at anyone who wants to start a charter school in the name of “choice.”

As impressive and amazing as these results by charter schools may be, it would be wrong to conclude from this that charter schools improve student achievement. The only way to know with confidence whether charters cause better outcomes is to look at randomized control trials (RCTs) in which students are assigned by lottery to attending a charter school or a traditional public school. RCTs are like medical experiments where some subjects by chance get the treatment and others by chance do not. Since the two groups are on average identical, any difference observed in later outcomes can be attributed to the “treatment,” and not to some pre-existing and uncontrolled difference. We demand this type of evidence before we approve any drug, but the evidence used to justify how our children are educated is usually nowhere near as rigorous.