The New York Times > Education > Nation's Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal:
The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.
The data shows fourth graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math. Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, against 30 percent who were proficient in reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools.
Because charter schools are concentrated in cities, often in poor neighborhoods, the researchers also compared urban charters to traditional schools in cities. They looked at low-income children in both settings, and broke down the results by race and ethnicity as well. In virtually all instances, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular public schools.
Charters are expected to grow exponentially under the new federal education law, No Child Left Behind, which holds out conversion to charter schools as one solution for chronically failing traditional schools.
I have to wonder if the people in support of charter schools actually spend any time in any schools or if their beliefs are driven by ideology (hmm, initiatives driven by faith rather than facts: that’s a new one). As someone who does spend time in schools, it’s clear to me that the weak link isn’t the school in most cases. If the parents who work on these charter schools spent as much time and effort on working with their current school — not with the bureaucrats or district staff but with the classroom teachers and the kids — perhaps they’d realize that setting up an additional school isn’t the solution.
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