The “rest of the story” on what the teachers union says about charter schools: Part 1

We’ve heard a lot of criticism of charter schools from teachers’ union folks and their allies recently. You need to know that there is a lot more to the discussion that Kentuckians deserve to hear, but the unions are not saying.

If you want to find out what the teachers’ union folks don’t want you to know about charter schools, click the “Read more” link.

Selective bias in union information was certainly evident at a discussion forum on charter schools I participated in last week in Louisville. This event was sponsored by the Bluegrass Institute’s good friends at the Kentucky chapter of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).Also participating at this forum was Jefferson Count Teachers Association (JCTA) president, Brent McKim. He made a number of comments and presented a bullet paper with still more allegations similar to those he recently provided to the Courier-Journal and Herald-Leader.

One of McKim’s first comments to the forum concerned a 2009 report by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) research group at Stanford University.

McKim also refers to this study in the newspaper articles.

McKim gleefully quoted findings in CREDO’s report that claim only 17 percent of the charter schools in the study outperformed their traditional public school counterparts while 37 percent provided notably worse performance. The remaining 46 percent of the schools, nearly half, were not notably different from the traditional public schools.

That sounds pretty bad for charter schools.

But, with apologies to the late Paul Harvey, here is the “rest of the story.”

CREDO’s report seriously downplays its most important finding, burying the discussion on pages 32 and 33. There the report says that across the study group, once students have spent three years in charter schools, they DO outperform their traditional public school peers.

This finding, which is replicated in studies using better methodologies than CREDO employs (Hoxby in New York City Charters, and The Boston Foundation on that city’s charters), means that studies which don’t examine how students perform over a sufficient period of time in charter schools cannot provide accurate insight into true charter school performance.

The finding also undermines the credibility of the 17/37/46 percent ‘stuff’ in the same CREDO report. In the page 32-33 discussion, CREDO admits that the data used to generate the 17/37/46 percent finding is based on a charter school sample where more than 50 percent of the students included are first-year charter school students. Thus, this finding, and most of the findings in the CREDO report, rely on a database of students who have not been in charters long enough to benefit from them.

In reality, McKim’s shocking 17 percent figure is more representative of the quality of students the charters received from the traditional public school system rather than what charters are capable of doing for students who remain in charters long enough to benefit. The fact, established by CREDO and others, is that that once charters have enough time with these students, they do outperform.

Now, you know the rest of this story. Stay tuned for more.