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The Charter Blog
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Wednesday, October 26, 2011
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Great and Still Striving
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Yesterday we wrote about positive results from the UCSD meta analysis of charter schools research. The results deserve applause; there is no doubt about that. Further, the results charter schools are experiencing in big cities are truly remarkable. In areas like NYC, Boston, and Chicago that have been the focus of studies, public charter schools are producing very large positive results, results that skeptics thought were unlikely.
But are any of these findings enough?
A recent study of charter schools in Massachusettsshowed urban charter schools outperformed other urban traditional public schools, consistent with the findings of the meta-analysis. But a back of the napkin estimate (it wasn’t specifically reported in the study) suggests that the large positive results in urban charter schools don’t quite diminish the urban/non-urban achievement gap. Many high performing charter schools are at a turning point. They are exceeding expectations, receiving accolades, and providing good educational options to students. The next hurdle is making these great schools the best schools in the district, state, and nation to make inroads on persistent achievement gaps. And the charter school movement as a whole has work to do in order to make sure that quality is more widespread.
The leaders of “no excuses” schools, like KIPP who was featured in the meta analysis, would likely agree that the findings aren’t enough. By all measures in the meta-analysis, KIPP schools are doing phenomenally well on standardized assessments, and the majority of KIPP students graduate from high school and attend college. Except KIPP isn’t satisfied, yet, because many students have faltered when it comes to college completion. KIPP is not trying to keep these facts secret. Instead, KIPP has identified the challenge and is working to make sure that KIPP schools excel on all measures of student success.
The meta-analysis should certainly be embraced as it highlights the great work of many charter schools, but we should also take a lesson from great charter schools—even with great results, great charter schools buckle down and strive to ensure that they are the best schools in the nation.
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Posted by:
Anna Nicotera, Director of Research and Evaluation
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6:00 AM
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Tuesday, October 25, 2011
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The Results Are In…
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As we approach the 20th anniversary of the opening of the first charter school, we’re at a critical moment for reflection. Many are understandably asking: are charters performing any better than their traditional public school counterparts? There have been a number of conflicting studies on charter school performance, with some receiving a fair share of attention over the past several years. Making sense of the often wide variation in findings can become quite overwhelming, given the differences in samples and locations, years studied, and research design strategies.
But now there is some clarity in the muddy charter school research waters. Researchers from the University of California San Diego just released a meta-analysis of studies on charter school achievement, a must read for folks who want to keep up with the growing charter school performance research base. Meta-analysis, which is a study of studies strategy popularized by the medical research field, pulls together the results from a body of research and analyzes the overall effect of the program. Consequently, the findings from a meta-analysis—in this case, the overall impact of charter schools on student outcomes—are stronger than results from any individual study.
The UCSD meta-analysis shows that public charter schools outperform traditional public schools in the following break-outs (drumroll please…): elementary reading and math, middle school math, and urban high school reading. Given the large number of studies on KIPP charter schools, the authors were able to break out the findings and found large, positive results for KIPP middle schools in reading and math. In sum, charters serving elementary and middle school grades by and large outperform traditional public schools.
The positive results are testimony to the constant efforts by all the students, parents, educators, and others in the charter world whose daily work makes these results a reality.
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Posted by:
Anna Nicotera, Director of Research and Evaluation
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6:00 AM
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Monday, October 17, 2011
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Record Breaking
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The Guinness World Records was founded on the premise that collecting the superlative facts of the world would help us understand our place within it. Today, the NAPCS releases its annual report of the public school districts with the biggest and fastest growth in the charter school sector. A Growing Movement: American’s Largest Charter School Communities finds that a record number of public school districts—six—have at least 30 percent of their public school students enrolled in public charter schools. In addition, an all-time high of 18 school districts have more than 20 percent of their public school students enrolled in charter schools. Los Angeles, the Robert Wadlow of districts with the highest number of public charter school students enrolled, again tops the list with 79,385 students. To provide a sense of scale, the number of students enrolled in public charter schools in Los Angeles, alone, would place the city’s charter schools in the top 45 of the 100 largest school districts in the United States. For more exceptional findings from the report, including the “Top 10” districts with highest number, percentage and annual growth of public charter school students, click here.
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Posted by:
Nora Kern, Senior Manager Research and Analysis
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Thursday, October 06, 2011
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Chartering The Course: California Charter Schools Show Narrowing of African American Student Achievement Gap
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One of the most pressing issues of our time is the achievement gap between African American students and their White and Asian peers. There is hope however for African American families in California that their children can find quality educational options to meet their needs.
This week, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) released the Chartering and Choice as an Achievement Gap-Closing Reform research report, which details the performance and enrollment trends of African American students in both charter public and traditional public schools. The results show that African American students are enrolled at higher rates in charter public than traditional public schools at all grade levels, in some cases at close to twice the rate, and are experiencing better outcomes, in spite of having the same rates of parent education and student retention as their traditional public school peers.
In fact, charter public schools are effectively accelerating the performance of African American public school students, consistently earning higher Academic Performance Index (API) scores and proficiency rates statewide across subjects in many urban districts.
When using CCSA’s own performance metric, the Similar Students Measure (SSM), which eliminates the impact of student background on performance, charter public schools serving African American students were more than three times as likely as traditional public schools to consistently outperform their predicted performance in a single year and over time.
And, while charters make up only 9% of schools statewide, they represent 39% of highly effective schools for African American students.
The report also features case studies of highly effective charter schools in three major areas: Watts Learning Center in Los Angeles, KIPP Bridge in Oakland, and PS7 in Sacramento. While different, their methodology and approach to serving their students had common denominators from which all public schools can learn. In fact, most of the best practices implemented at these three charter schools have been well documented in scholarly literature, and are readily available.
As laboratories of innovation, California’s highly effective charter schools can demonstrate proven paths to success that should be replicated in all public schools, and at a national level.
To read the report, please visit www.calcharters.org/africanamericanreport.
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Posted by:
Jed Wallace, president and CEO, California Charter Schools Association
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6:00 AM
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