KY Ed. Secretary gets it right about Maryland charter schools — The Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions

KET’s Kentucky Tonight discussion on charter schools yesterday was nothing if not lively. With Kentucky’s Secretary of Education Hal Heiner and “Old Guard” Kentucky Senator Gerald Neal on the panel along with our own Jim Waters and executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Superintendents Tom Shelton, things were bound to be interesting.

However, perhaps most interesting of all for me was a Heiner/Neal back-and-forth about the value of Maryland’s charter schools as a model to build a charter program for Kentucky.

Neal kept pushing Maryland throughout the broadcast until Heiner finally shut him down, saying that Maryland’s charters perform near the bottom.

Wow, I thought. I have not seen anything on that. How do Maryland’s charter schools perform?

Sadly, as Dr. Joseph Waddington, Assistant Professor, Educational Policy Studies & Evaluation, University of Kentucky pointed out to the Kentucky Board of Education last week,

“Not every study meets important thresholds of methodological rigor.” In fact, a lot of charter research is of poor quality. The iffy quality of the data on charters even extends to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Thanks in part to inadequate student sampling of charter schools, this federal assessment isn’t a very useful tool for charter research. Too often, NAEP scores are not even reported for some states' charter schools. For example, Indiana and Massachusetts scores for charter schools are not available from the 2015 NAEP.

Still, I decided to take a look at what the NAEP does report for eighth grade reading and math in charters in Maryland and other states. I got a mild surprise when I did that.

It turns out that while many charter states such as Indiana and Massachusetts were missing score information, Maryland and a number of other states did have scores both for their total charter school population and for their black students. When I ranked those scores using the NAEP Data Explorer’s Statistical Significance testing tools, Maryland did indeed wind up consistently around the bottom end of the NAEP stack for both math and reading in Grade 8 testing for all students.

g8-reading-all-students-naep-rank-for-maryland

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I also took a look at how Maryland’s charters performed when we only look at black or Hispanic students. Maryland’s Hispanic scores were missing, but the state did have scores for blacks. However, the very large sampling errors in the black scores rendered the results mostly a statistical blur of non-significance. NAEP just isn’t sensitive enough to really tell us much about results for blacks in charter schools in the various states, but I did note that the reported scores for Maryland’s blacks, while essentially statistically tied with the other states, do appear at the bottom end of the stack in the Data Explorer’s statistical significance tests.

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Clearly, at least as far as the NAEP can tell us, Kentucky would do well to look elsewhere than Maryland for models to shape our coming charter school law.

While I am not about to say the NAEP provides the last word on charter school performance, I think Sen. Neal would do well to take another look at his proposal for Maryland. Whoever he is listening to isn’t giving him very supportable information.

As for other policymakers, I suggest we put Maryland aside in discussions going forward. After all, at last week’s rather objective school board meeting on charter schools, I don’t recall Maryland ever being mentioned as a possible go-to role model. Maybe that’s because a lot of other knowledgeable people think it isn’t.

One more note: KY Tonight host Bill Goodman is apparently about to close out his very long running and successful career with Kentucky Educational Television. I want to add my good wishes to those Jim Waters expressed on air for Bill’s many outstanding years of service to the people of Kentucky. Bill, you set a standard that will extraordinarily hard for your successor to match.