Billions of private dollars have forced journalists and lawmakers to take seriously the school choice movement, be it voucher programs and tax credits, charter schools and reforms to teachers contracts within traditional public schools. Their money is highly strategic as well, with funds being poured into non-profits and research facilities that pursue the educational conceptions these wealthy donors promote.
So what happens when a study determines the success of charter schools have no correlation with the money they receive from education philanthropists? On Monday,Andrew Coulson of CATO published a report (PDF) that found the above to be mostly true.
The takeaway shouldn’t be that wealthy funders are throwing their money away; the implications are perhaps much more severe.
Despite big donor money trying to identify the top performing schools for the purpose of scaling these institutions up, that is, spread their top-rated standards across a wider plain of geography, the schools trumpeted as paragons of academic consistency are middling or worse.
Coulson and his team isolated California, the state with the most charter schools and
