CHARTER SCHOOL SCORES STUMBLE: NCLB HOPES DIM

By Bob Liftig

The same Education Department that pinned its hopes on the Charter Schools provision of its NCLB legislation found it had to wait until the Dog Days of August before it could safely release the dismal results of its first national comparison of charter school students to comparable students in the public schools

The New York Times reported in Diana Schemo’s lead story, “Charter Schools Trail In Results, U.S. Data Reveals,” (Aug. 14, 2004) that the Education Department’s study was “buried in mountains of data” released “without public announcement” and that this “dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.” Charter School fourth graders scored six months behind other public schools in both reading and math. According to The Times, only 25 percent of the fourth graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, while almost a third of those attending non-Charters were proficient under the traditional public school format

Chester E. Finn, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a former Assistant Secretary of Education, and one of those who led the team that conducted the study, was quoted by The Times as saying, “The scores are low, dismayingly low... A little more ‘tough love’ is needed for these schools.” Finn’s study group compared the scores of urban fourth graders in both Charter and non-Charter schools

Low-income inner city school children have traditionally been the target clientele of the privately run/ publicly funded Charter Schools movement. Testing results were broken down by ethnicity as well as race in both school settings

Considering the high hopes the Bush administration had for Charter Schools, Mr. Finn is perhaps to be forgiven for trying to put the test results in the best light possible when he said it was his hope they would only be considered as “baseline data” for future comparisons

Even so, the former Assistant Secretary concluded that. “Somebody needs to be watching over their (the Charter Schools’) shoulders.” It’s at least ironic, if not unfortunate that, that “somebody” is the very Department of Education that continues to press for more private industry involvement in the public sector

Neither Charter School nor traditional public school advocates should rejoice over the central findings, however, as at least two thirds of urban fourth graders in the study were concluded to be non-proficient in both math and reading. Obviously, the root causes of these failures have yet to be addressed. The results so far suggest that the origins may not be systemic