Teaching Profession

AFT Charter School Study Sparks Heated National Debate

By Debra Viadero — October 02, 2004 6 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

A national report suggesting that charter school students lag behind their counterparts in regular public schools touched off a late-summer tempest among proponents and critics of charter schools.

The study, produced by the American Federation of Teachers and the subject of the lead story in The New York Times on Aug. 18, was made more controversial by its implicit suggestion that the U.S. Department of Education had tried to bury federal test data that reflect poorly on such schools.

See Also

Enrolling 800,000-plus children in 38 states, charter schools are public schools that operate outside the bounds of school district authority—often in exchange for guarantees of improved academic achievement. They are a favored education improvement strategy of the Bush administration, which supports them with grants and a Web site. The federal No Child Left Behind Act also points to charter schools—now numbering about 3,000—as an important option for children in schools that fail to improve test scores.

Federal education officials, for their part, denied they had held back any data on charter schools, and they joined in a barrage of criticism of the AFT report.

In addition, an ad hoc group of 31 academics last week signed on to a full-page advertisement in The New York Times disputing the union’s report. The Aug. 25 ad was paid for by the Center on Education Reform, a Washington-based group that supports the charter movement.

Read the full report “Charter School Achievement on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress,” from the American Federation of Teachers.

See also the North Carolina study, “The Impacts of Charter Schools on Student Achievement,” from Professor Helen F. Ladd at Duke University. (Both reports require Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.)

But there was no denying that the study, the first to assess children’s progress in charter schools nationally on a common set of tests, had made a splash in the continuing national policy debate over alternatives to traditional public education.

“The yellow light is up for charter schools now,” said Priscilla Wohlstetter, a researcher from the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, who has studied the startup schools. The study, she said, is “certainly a reason to make sure authorizers [of charter schools] use caution in doing their job.”

Other longtime observers of charter schools saw in the findings a harsher indictment of the rhetoric that has helped fuel the nationwide movement.

“This was all based on how market forces would improve education, and now we know we really have no evidence of that,” said Amy Stuart Wells, a sociology professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Delays Prompt Study

Once welcoming of charter schools, the AFT has grown critical of them in recent years. Its new analysis draws on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a barometer of student achievement that is mandated by Congress. In 2003, for the first time, federal officials collected data on a nationally representative sample of 167 such schools as part of that assessment. They put the scores online in November, along with the regular state-by-state results.

But the Education Department never advertised the figures’ availability. In reports to the national board that sets policy for NAEP, officials said they planned instead to do a more finely grained analysis of the data and publish the findings in January 2004—a date that has since been moved to the end of this year.

The delay prompted union analysts to mine the data themselves. They found that 4th graders attending charter schools performed about half a year behind students in other public schools in reading and mathematics. In 8th grade, charter school students trailed in math, but for reading, the differences were not statistically significant.

Those patterns remained when researchers adjusted the numbers to account for the higher proportions of poor students who attend charter schools and for the fact that the schools are clumped in inner cities, where achievement is generally lower.

Students in charters and regular public schools scored about the same, however, after researchers controlled for differences in the racial makeups of the schools. Likewise, achievement gaps between poor students and their better-off peers were wide in both charter and traditional public schools, the report says.

“Once everyone quiets down and takes a good, hard look at this, I hope they’ll say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to do better here for the sake of the kids,’ ” said Bella Rosenberg, a co-author of the study and a special assistant to the president of the AFT.

Critics Fire Back

Criticism of the report came swiftly, though, from many quarters.

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, three national groups that support charter schools, various state charter school associations, and the Republicans who chair both of the congressional committees that oversee education called the findings misleading.

In addition, an ad hoc group of 31 academics last week signed on to a full-page advertisement in The New York Times disputing the union’s report. The Aug. 25 ad was paid for by the Center on Education Reform, a Washington-based group that supports the charter movement.

But another, more sophisticated study released amid the furor over the AFT report reinforced some of the union’s conclusions. That analysis, based on six years of test-score data gathered on 6,000 North Carolina schoolchildren who had been enrolled in both regular public schools and charter schools, concludes that the academic gains that those students made in charter schools were smaller than the gains they made in regular schools.

The study is being reviewed for publication in a peer-reviewed economics journal, but the authors, Robert F. Bifulco of the University of Connecticut in West Hartford and Helen F. Ladd of Duke University in Durham, N.C., released it last week to weigh in on the national debate.

The problem with the union study, its critics said, meanwhile, is that charter schools may start out with lower achievement because they attract students who are unhappy in their regular schools.

They also said the study drew on a too-small sample of schools—enrolling only about 1 percent of charter school students nationwide—and failed to distinguish long-standing charter schools from startups or to account for variations among charter schools.

“It’s wrong to think of charter schools as a monolith,” Secretary Paige said in a statement to the press. “There are schools for dropouts, schools for students who’ve been expelled, schools serving the most economically disadvantaged families.”

“For this to have taken on a life of its own,” Jeanne Allen, the Center for Education Reform’s president, said of the AFT study, “tells me there are politics at play, and some people are looking for bad news.”

A better way to measure charter schools’ impact may be to look at the gains students make, said Tom Loveless, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington who has also studied such schools. His own 2003 study, looking at 569 schools in 10 states, suggests that, even though charter school students start out behind their peers in other public schools, their test scores rise faster.

“That’s a terrific argument to make,” countered Ms. Rosenberg of the AFT, “but I don’t hear anyone making it when the results come out for regular public schools.”

She also noted that the NAEP state-by-state assessments do not include special analyses to account for demographic and socioeconomic differences among states.

Still, Darvin M. Winick, the chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the national assessment, said he questions whether the AFT researchers should have based their conclusions on raw data from a limited pilot study.

In addition, he said he had no reason to suspect that the Education Department had held back findings.

Even so, he said, “you could argue—and I would not quarrel with you—that it would be better if all these reports [from the department] were more prompt.”

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the September 01, 2004 edition of Education Week as AFT Charter School Study Sparks Heated National Debate

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Science Webinar
Making Science Stick: The Engaging Power of Hands-On Learning
How can you make science class the highlight of your students’ day while
achieving learning outcomes? Find out in this session.
Content provided by LEGO Education
Teaching Profession Key Insights to Elevate and Inspire Today’s Teachers
Join this free half day virtual event to energize your teaching and cultivate a positive learning experience for students.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Student Achievement Webinar
Student Success Strategies: Flexibility, Recovery & More
Join us for Student Success Strategies to explore flexibility, credit recovery & more. Learn how districts keep students on track.
Content provided by Pearson

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Teaching Profession How Can Schools Get More Men to Be Teachers? Look to Nursing for What Works
More men are becoming nurses—offering some lessons for K-12 education.
6 min read
Male teacher figures winding their way down a career path to the entrance of a school.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week + iStock/Getty Images
Teaching Profession Three Tips to Help Mentors Work Better With Teachers
A great mentor can help novice teachers progress in their first year and prevent burnout. Here's how to boost their relationships.
3 min read
Illustration of a diverse group of 7 professionals helping one another climb a succession of large bars with some using a ladder.
iStock/Getty
Teaching Profession Opinion The One Quality That Every Great Teacher Shares
A lot has changed during my two decades as a teacher, but one thing is just as true as it was on my first day.
Eduardo Barreto
3 min read
A man carrying a big stone. Concept art of problem solution and hardness. surreal painting. conceptual artwork. 3d illustration
Jorm Sangsorn/iStock
Teaching Profession What the Research Says Want Novices to Keep Teaching? Focus on Their Classroom-Management Skills
Some skills matter more than others for educator at the start of their careers.
3 min read
A black female teacher cheerfully answers questions and provides assistance to her curious and diverse group of adolescent students as they work on an assignment in class.
E+/Getty