Kentucky Tonight Follow-Up – Rest of the story on CREDO charter school studies — The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions

I was pleased to participate in last night’s Kentucky Tonight broadcast on KET along with Kentucky Senator Mike Wilson, Kentucky Representative Derrick Graham, incumbent head of the Prichard Committee Brigitte Blom Ramsey and guest show host Renee Shaw (show online here).

We had a lively discussion about many education issues that are likely to come up in the 2016 session of the Kentucky legislature, including the issue of charter schools. However, when so many topics are covered in only one hour, a lot was left unsaid. So, I’ll be following up with some blogs about things you might want to know more about.

For this first Follow-Up, I’ll discuss perhaps the biggest controversy that came up on the show, which involves reports from the Stanford University’s CREDO research team. I only had a moment on air to inject some of the “Rest of the Story,” as the late Paul Harvey liked to put it and I think Kentuckians deserve to know more.

As is almost inevitable when charter schools are discussed – one of the other guests on the show started to discuss findings from CREDO (actually The Center for Research on Education Outcomes). However, the person who brought up the CREDO reports didn’t provide the full story, which I tried to quickly inject into the conversation.

For “The Rest of the Story” about what got left out of the discussion of CREDO last night, click the “Read more” link.

The first CREDO report on charter schools was issued in June of 2009 and its general findings immediately created a stir. The report said only 17 percent of the charter schools in the 15 states and Washington, DC included in the study outperformed their traditional public school counterparts. This astonishingly surprising finding was quickly seized upon by charter school critics.

However, buried in this first CREDO report – and included in many more CREDO reports that followed – is an incredibly important finding about charter schools. The discussion of this finding is found in the 2009 report’s section on “CHARTER SCHOOL EFFECT OVER TIME,” which begins on Page 32. As this graph from Page 33 in the report shows, across all the states CREDO studied in 2009, by the time students had spent three years in charter schools, they were outperforming their public school counterparts.

FROM CREDO’S 2009 REPORT

Applying a rule of thumb that CREDO published in later reports to convert standard deviations into days of learning, this graph shows students in the third year in a charter school were about 14 days of learning ahead in reading and about 22 days of learning ahead in math.

However, students who had only spend one year in charters were well behind their traditional public school counterparts, about 43 days behind in reading and around 65 days behind in math.

There is no surprise here. CREDO’s 2009 report simply shows that charter schools cannot instantly improve the performance of students who on average come to charters well behind their public school counterparts. It takes a couple of years for charter schools to really benefit students.

By the way, this same section of the 2009 report also admits that over half of all the students included in that 17-percent statistic charter school critics love to cite were only first-year charter school students. Thus, CREDO’s findings about charter effects over time show that CREDO’s 17-percent number does not provide a fair evaluation of what charter schools are capable of delivering.

In fact, many of the CREDO report’s findings suffer from the same issue – in most cases the statistics are heavily weighted with students who had not been in charter schools long enough to benefit. That biases the results unfairly against charter schools.

In any event, it isn’t 2009 anymore. We also know that charter school laws vary greatly in quality. So, what has CREDO shown in more recent studies for effects over time for a state that is well-known for its dramatic increase in charter schools – Louisiana?

A significant part of South Louisiana, especially in New Orleans, suffered dramatic damage from Hurricane Katrina. Much of the traditional school infrastructure had to be rebuilt. In many cases, that rebuilding was accomplished by opening new charter schools instead of trying to restart traditional schools, many of which had been under-performers before the storm.

This second graph comes from Page 21 in CREDO’s 2013 report on Louisiana. It shows the dramatic impact that charters in Louisiana have on students who spend enough time in the charter to benefit.

Notice that by the time students have spent four or more years in a Louisiana charter school, their learning has absolutely walked away from their traditional public school counterparts’ performance. In general, in both math and reading the charter school students are 180 days of learning ahead. That is about a full school year of difference!

Even if we look at CREDO’s overall “national report” for 2013, which includes some states with weak charter school programs, across the country once students have spent four or more years in charter schools, their reading performance is about 50 days ahead of traditional public school students and the math differential is 43 days in favor of charter school students.

But, why should Kentucky settle for a weak charter school law? Why can’t we duplicate better laws like those in Massachusetts and Louisiana? If we create strong charter schools, they can help cut into the dramatic achievement gap currently suffered by our minority and under-privileged students in Kentucky.

I know self-serving interests in our teachers’ union won’t see it that way. And, I don’t know if any amount of research can ever convert some of the fanatic traditional public school supporters who have sway in some state groups, either.

But, we don’t run our schools to benefit those adults. And, right now the schools those special interests control are not producing well-enough for our kids. So, Kentucky needs to join what I just learned are now 43 other states that have figured out charter schools. Every year that we delay just means too many kids will go through their public school experience without getting the knowledge and skills needed to survive and thrive in the 21st Century.