The Other Shoe: The US DOE Studies Public and Charter School Performance

The second shoe of the study the US Department of Education wishes desperately it had never commissioned fell earlier this week, with the publication of the section comparing the performance of public district schools and charter schools. One knew well in advance what it would say, since the Department has been madly leaking the results to its allies among charter school advocates — some of whom spent the better part of August launching pre-emptive missles. But for those who don’t live and die on reading the tea leaves of edu-blogs, the bottom line of the report is this: when controlled for demographic categories such as poverty, race and ethnicity, gender and English language learners, students in public district schools significantly outperformed students in charter schools on NAEP English Language Arts and Mathematics assessments. A bit anti-climatic, after all of the pre-release prognostication, but no less significant for it.

If you wonder why folks like Eduwonk are spinning like there is no tomorrow about this study, it is because they asked for it. To understand how this came to be, one needs to go back to the infamous ‘charter school dust up,’ when the AFT released the raw NAEP data the US DOE had been hiding, which showed that public district school students were doing better on the NAEP assessments than charter school students. At that time, the charter partisans argued that it was an unfair comparison, since in their opinion, charter schools served a student population which was poorer, with more students of color and English Language Learners, than that of the public district schools. While the underlying premise — that charter schools served more student living in poverty, more students of color and more English Language Leaders — was highly questionable, the argument that we should be comparing student apples with student apples and student oranges with student oranges was valid. In fact, it was the same argument that public school advocates had often made when public schools were unfairly compared to private schools, a practice not unknown among charter school partisans like Checker Finn and Jeannie Allen. So it was largely because of the urging of charter school partisans that the US DOE commissioned this study — this is one of those classic “be careful what you ask for, because you might actually get it” moments.

Some might take schadenfreude in these events, and in the mad spinning, but it is really a sad development. This is a critical moment in the emergence of charter schools. The movement is desperately in need of voices that eshew the escalation of rhetoric, the name calling and the circling of the wagons, voices that refuse the transparent arguments of diversion, voices that say it is time for self-reflection, and for a focus on improving the quality of charter schools. Now, more than ever, we need to figure out why a movement established to provide more good public schools, especially for students in poor communities, has fallen far short of that promise. And we need to set it right.

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