The Charter Blog
September 28 2007
New Haven schools still see segregation
Comment »Money for Nothing
Comment »A Law Best Left Behind
Comment »Legislators want more scrutiny of charter schools, especially funding
Comment »September 27 2007
Some school districts see gains, others losses in important student count
Comment »President Bush Discusses No Child Left Behind Reauthorization
Comment »Don't cheat charter schools
Comment »26 Sep 2007
So, how did charters do on the NAEP?
Good national NAEP gains reported yesterday, with math performance outstripping reading. The Feds didn't report charter performance, but Alliance sleuths have dug into the NAEP data base and unearthed the conclusions. Bottom line: a little slippage at fourth grade but strong gains at eighth. And Latino charter students are outperforming their non-charter counterparts in reading and math across the board, while African-American charter 8th-graders are now leading their peers in district-run schools in reading. But does NAEP matter? Read on....
If you've already clicked to the Alliance release you'll see it salted through with caveats about using NAEP to gauge the performance of our schools. NAEP was designed to be a broad barometer of national education trends, and they do large enough state samples to give a decent picture at that level as well.
But NAEP's charter data are based on a slice of a slice, which raises questions about generalizability (external validity). More important, NAEP is a snapshot – and it doesn't tell you anything about the prior performance of kids tested. In a big national pool that issue washes out -- but in a much smaller sample, the baggage (or, um, balloons?) kids bring to school can be powerful influences, negative or positive, on the results.
You can make weak arguments about trying to track performance over time, but NAEP, alas, isn't set up to do that. I personally would love to point out that at 4th grade, charter reading was lagging in 2003, and that four years later the 8th-graders are doing much better – but as Richard Nixon would say, "that would be wrong." They're different groups of kids. (Which is why we so ardently support "growth models" based on actual longitudinal data that tracks the same kids over time.)
So in releasing these results we're giving what we think is a pretty straightforward and honest depiction of the scores and trying not to over-extrapolate. We use the term "gains" to contrast where a given group is with respect to where that same group was in the last NAEP -- which is how the press and public understand most NAEP data even if it is not student-level. (Methodology mavens, save your emails!)
Finally, all other issues aside, we do think it's pretty cool that Latino kids who attend charters now have a distinct advantage, in terms of the NAEP scale scores, over their peers in other public schools – with that advantage now also seen for African-Americans in 8th grade reading. This suggests that charters are indeed fulfilling their mission of closing achievement gaps.
Hooray for the kids and their teachers who are making this difference!
NS
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