Characteristics of Students Enrolling in High-Performing Charter High Schools
Listening to the pundits and current crop of education reformers, one would assume that high-performing charter chains such as KIPP, YES, and IDEA (among others) enroll low-performing poor students and save their academic careers by providing requiring extra time and effort as well as holding a “no excuses” attitude. Indeed, those promoting High-Performing (HP) charter schools constantly remind us that these HP charter schools enroll very high percentages of poor students who are often years behind their peers. Yet, what we don’t ever hear about is the details about the performance of the students entering such schools.
Fortunately, the Texas Business and Education Coalition (www.tbec.org) has a courageous leader in Ken Zornes who wants to know the truth about education and education reform. He has provided funding for me to examine charter schools in Texas using data on students and schools. Rather than looking for a prescribed outcome, Ken instructed me to report on whatever the data show.
Below is a slice of the upcoming report.
Table 1 includes the 8th grade TAKS scores for incoming 9th graders in all Texas schools with at l;east 50% economically disadvantaged students. The schools are disaggregated into high-performing charter schools (KIPP, YES, and IDEA), other charter schools, and non-charter schools.
As we see in the table, incoming 9th grade students at the HP charter schools have a slightly greater average
