Education Research Report: Most studies of charter schools use unsophisticated methods that tell us little

Education Research Report: Most studies of charter schools use unsophisticated methods that tell us little:

Most studies of charter schools use unsophisticated methods that tell us little

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Some two decades into the grand national experiment with charter schools, how much do we really know about them? Not all that much. And not nearly as much as we easily could, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego Division of Social Sciences.

Writing in the journal Science, UC San Diego educational economist JuIian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, find that most studies of charter schools "use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal effects."

The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, as well as many members of the general public (not to mention the makers of the popular 2010 education documentary "Waiting for Superman") have all embraced charter schools as the saviors of a broken educational system. But does going to a charter school improve student outcomes? We don't really know, argue Atkinson and Betts. Which charter schools, or even types of charter