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Report: Close bad charters, expand good ones

March 18, 2013 by

Urban charter schools outperform traditional public schools in five cities, concludes Searching for Excellence, a Fordham report conducted by Public Impact. However, urban charter students trail students in their home states, who are much less likely to be living in poverty.

The study looked at charter performance in Albany, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and Indianapolis. In each city, charter quality varied greatly from school to school.

 . . . there are deeply troubled charters—some whose academic results can’t even match up with their long-suffering district peers. but on the other hand, there are fantastic charters—some whose academic performance competes with the best schools in their states.

Fordham calls for closing the worst-performing 10 percent of charters and expanding the top 10 percent.

In Cleveland, the policy of closure and aggressive replication of high-performing schools would, Public Impact estimates, result in charter schools vastly outperforming the district schools in five years. Moreover, this policy would put Cleveland’s charters on track to perform on par with the state average by year five.

Charter schools educate 30+ percent of public school students in seven cities — New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, DC,  Kansas City, Flint, Gary; and St. Louis — and 20+ percent in 18 cities.

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CREDO: Indiana charter students do well

December 24, 2012 by

Students at Indiana charter schools outperformed similar students at traditional public schools in math and reading, concludes a new report from Stanford’s CREDO. Indianapolis charter students did especially well, reports Ed Week.

The study tracked 15,297 charter school students at 64 schools from grades 3-8. On average, students in charter schools ended the year having made the equivalent of 1.5 more months of learning gains in both reading and math than their traditional public school counterparts did. Students in charter schools in Indianapolis ended the year ahead of their traditional public school counterparts by two months in reading and three months in math.

Charter students and the control group were matched by  demographic and performance data (gender, race/ethnicity, special education status, English language proficiency, free-or-reduced lunch participation, grade level, and prior test scores on state achievement tests).

In Indiana, 58 percent of charter students are black, compared to 11 percent of the state’s students. Eleven percent of charter students are in special education compared to 15 percent in traditional public schools.

In a wrap-up on education research in 2012, Matthew Di Carlo notes that CREDO’s research on charter gains in Indiana and New Jersey show most of the progress comes in big cities, Indianapolis and Newark. By contrast, rural charter students tend to underperform similar students.

One contentious variation on this question is whether charter schools “cream” higher-performing students, and/or “push out” lower-performing students, in order to boost their results. Yet another Mathematica supplement to their 2010 report examining around 20 KIPP middle schools was released, addressing criticisms that KIPP admits students with comparatively high achievement levels, and that the students who leave are lower-performing than those who stay. This report found little evidence to support either claim (also take a look at our post on attrition and charters).

An another analysis, presented in a conference paper, “found that low-performing students in a large anonymous district did not exit charters at a discernibly higher rate than their counterparts in regular public schools,” DiCarlo adds.

On the flip side of the entry/exit equation, this working paper found that students who won charter school lotteries (but had not yet attended the charter) saw immediate “benefits” in the form of reduced truancy rates, an interesting demonstration of the importance of student motivation.

Di Carlo has more on the research this year on charter management organizations, merit pay and teacher evaluations using value-added and growth measures.

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Teacher Dumpster-dives for supplies

September 18, 2010 by

In some schools, parents buy their children’s school supplies. In other schools, children show up with empty backpacks. Katie Nave, who teaches fifth grade in Indianapolis, goes Dumpster-diving for school supplies at schools in suburban Carmel, reports the Indianapolis Star. With the help of teachers and custodians, Nave has salvaged “gallon bags of pencils, tubs of crayons, stacks of spiral notebooks and baskets of erasers,” supplementing donations by going through the trash.

“I guess I’m grateful that they don’t want it,” Nave said. “This is my first year when I’ve been able to give every single one of my kids every supply they would need during the school year.”

. . . Some items were still in their original plastic shrink-wrap. Others looked barely touched — former students’ names written on the front of empty notebooks. Even the used supplies were hardly worn: already sharpened pencils or slightly blackened erasers.

Carmel school officials say they don’t know why supplies are being thrown away.  Indianapolis Superintendent Eugene White says IPS, which receives more money per student than neighboring districts, gives schools money for supplies that teachers may not know about. So what does that mean? Are principals buying themselves lavish pencil holders and refusing to pass on money to the teachers?

I once helped a school in a low-income neighborhood organize the supply closet, which was filled with miscellaneous donations and many giant tubs of paste.

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