You’re forgiven if you found it hard to get a complete take on last week’s hearing on charter schools before the House education subcommittee.
You’re forgiven if you found it hard to get a complete take on last week’s hearing on charter schools before the House education subcommittee.
As Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss writes in a recent Answer Sheet post, Republicans and Democrats had “such different takes on the session that it doesn’t sound like they were in the same room during the proceedings.”
For their part, the Democrats’ release was critical about charters, raising concerns about accountability and the growing number of charters run by for-profit operations.
“The privatization of public schools under the guise of charter operators is very troubling to me and I intend to keep a close eye on this issue,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller of California, in reference to the nearly one-third of charter schools that are now operated by private management organizations.
And with only four percent of public school students attending charter schools, most communities, parents and educators are far more concerned about the need for real and meaningful systemic school reform.
For their part, the Republicans who lead the committee showered praise on charters. In fact, their press release had nothing but praise for charters, which are given regulatory leeway to try new strategies from which other public schools can learn.
One quote in their release even called charters’ focus on performance “a brilliant marriage between business and education.” Given what we’ve seen from large businesses in recent years, we’re not sure if that’s such a good marriage. But that’s fodder for another piece.
Missing from the GOP account was the testimony from Western Michigan University researcher Gary Miron, who noted that a growing body of independent research on charters finds that “charter schools are not achieving the goals that were once envisioned for them.”
An important piece of research on this is a report from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University called“Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States”.
That 2009 study found that of the 2,403 charter schools studied, 46 percent schools had math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among the traditional public schools with which they were compared.
Charters whose math growth exceeded their traditional public schools equivalent growth by a significant amount accounted for just17 percent of the total. The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.
We clearly haven’t heard the last word from Congress on charter schools. We just hope the next words are a bit more honest and complete while fully reflecting the needs of all students – not just the handful that continue to be part of an education experiment with mixed results.