NAEP and Charter Schools

We always experience some cognitive dissonance when talking about NAEP results for charter schools, brought on once again by Diane Ravitch’s latest post in Ed Week.

Of course when the results are good we want to trumpet them. We look at the same data as Ravitch and see that among disadvantaged 8th graders, kids in charters have gained faster than their peers since 2005 and closed the gap to within one point on the scale score. Or among Black 8th graders, there was an 11-point gain over that same period, compared to a 5-point gain by their district peers and putting them near parity.

We don’t ignore the bad or indifferent news either. Fourth grade reading scores have stagnated (on both sides) although in charters they’re more mixed, improving a bit for Black kids and falling a few points for Hispanic kids.

Most important:  None of these scores, charter or district, Black, White, or Hispanic, are where we want to see them.

But then as we’re mucking about in these numbers, we remember that:

• NAEP is a snapshot; even though we all talk about a particular group improving over time, the 8th graders tested in 2009 are a totally different group of kids from those tested in 2005. Given that charters typically enroll kids who are behind their peers academically (documented in statewide studies in CA, TX, and FL, as well as Hoxby’s NY research), it’s almost inevitable that in any given year charters will do worse as a group than district schools.
• And it’s a sample, not a comprehensive test, including just 3% of charters nationwide (which is an undercount since we account for about 5% of public schools). So for all the care NAEP exercises in creating its test group, these broad averages may not reflect the whole charter population -- and most certainly ignore the range of results among charter schools from phenomenal to dismal, which renders moot any predictive power that these numbers might have.

Any particular set of NAEP results can be fodder for folks who want to reinforce their particular agenda -- us included – so it should be remembered that NAEP was never designed to measure a particular set of schools such as charters.

By the way, I hope Ravitch’s forthcoming book at least attempts to offer some evidence about charters ‘creaming,’ because all that’s offered in this blog and other recent writings is assertions. The known research doesn’t support that allegation, whether you look at racial composition or prior achievement.