Los Angeles Daily News
August 17, 2004

Charters lagging behind?

U.S. data show low marks; state's schools see success
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2339235,00.html#

By Staff and Wire Services

The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.

But in California, where one in 40 students is educated in charter schools -- including more than a dozen campuses in the San Fernando Valley -- supporters said they've seen only success.

"Every study that has looked at student achievement in California has shown that despite less funding, charter schools are keeping pace with -- and in many cases outperforming -- the broader school system," said Gary Larson, a spokesman for the California Charter Schools Association, a membership organization for the state's 460 charter schools.

Student achievement comes ecven while California's charter schools are educating a higher percentage of lower-income pupils and those with learning problems than public schools.

In fact, results from California's High School Exit Exam released Monday showed sophomores from Granada Hills and Palisades charter high schools well outpacing their peers in the Los Angeles Unified School District and across the state.

"Clearly we're onto something here in California," Larson said. "When educators are given freedom to implement real reforms, and a little bit of time to serve their students ... positive results happen and student achievement improves."

The state will see 70 new charter schools open this fall.

The national findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, deals a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

The data shows fourth-graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math. Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth-graders attending charters were proficient in reading and math, compared with 30 percent who were proficient in reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools.

Because charter schools are concentrated in cities, often in poor neighborhoods, the researchers also compared urban charters to traditional schools in cities. They looked at low-income children in both settings, and broke down the results by race and ethnicity as well. In virtually all instances, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular public schools.

Charters are expected to grow exponentially under the new federal education law, No Child Left Behind, which holds out conversion to charter schools as one solution for chronically failing traditional schools.

"The scores are low, dismayingly low," said Chester E. Finn Jr., a supporter of charters and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, who was among those who asked the administration to do the comparison.

Finn, a former assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration, said the quality of charter schools across the country varies widely, and he predicted that the results would make those overseeing charters demand more in the way of performance.

"A little more tough love is needed for these schools," Finn said. "Somebody needs to be watching over their shoulders."

Finn and other backers of charter schools contended, however, that the findings should be considered as "baseline data," and could reflect the predominance of children in these schools who turned to charters after having had severe problems at their neighborhood schools.

The results, based on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as the nation's report card, were unearthed from online data by researchers at the American Federation of Teachers -- which has historically supported charter schools but has produced research in recent years raising doubts about the expansion of charter schools -- who provided them to The New York Times.

Federal officials said they did not intend to hide the performance of charter schools, and denied any political motivation for failing to publicly disclose that the data were available. "I guess that was poor publicity on our part," said Robert Lerner, commissioner of the federal Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. Lerner said further analysis was needed to put the data in its proper context.

But others were skeptical, saying the results proved that such schools were not a cure-all. "There's just a huge distance between the sunny claims of the charter school advocates and the reality," said Bella Rosenberg, a special assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers, which has supported charter schools in the past. "There's a very strong accountability issue here."

Charters currently educate more than 600,000 students at 3,000 of the nation's 88,000 public schools; they have grown tremendously over the past decade and appear likely to grow even more as No Child Left Behind identifies thousands of schools across the country for possible closure because of poor test scores. Charters are self-governing public schools, sometimes run by private companies, which operate outside the authority of local school boards, and have greater flexibility than traditional public schools in areas of policy, hiring and teaching techniques.

Once hailed as a kind of free-market solution offering parents an escape from moribund public schools, elements of the charter school movement have prompted growing concern in recent years. Around the country, more than 80 charter schools were forced to close, largely because of questionable financial dealings and poor performance, said Luis Huerta, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College.