CREDO Reconsidered - How The Strongly Positive Results Were Missed

On Monday the Alliance immediately raised questions about the methodology of the CREDO report (http://www.publiccharters.org/node/964). Not wanting to shoot first and ask questons later, though, we put a lot of effort into understanding the methodology the past several days and have come to discover some pretty startling things about how the strongly positive results were missed...

Contrary to the report's basic finding that "in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their TPS (traditional public school) counterparts," and the negative pick-up in the press, the news is actually quite good. It's all here in this memo from Alliance President and CEO Nelson Smith. We're not trying to hide the fact that there are too many underperforming charters - and we'll continue to fight to fix them or shut them - but in the main the CREDO data on charters is better than we'd been led to believe.