Are charter schools succeeding nationally?
Posted at 9:05 AM on February 24, 2012 by Emily Kaiser (0 Comments)
Filed under: News & Trends
From The Daily Circuit's Tom Weber:
Reporter Tim Post brought us the story during Morning Edition about a new study that finds charter schools in the Twin Cities metro area underperform academically in comparison to their traditional public counterparts and are more racially segregated.
The report is from the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School.
"If you look at the total group, they're underperforming the public schools significantly and a lot of the ones who are serving the poorest kids are not only doing very badly, but not lasting very long," said Myron Orfield, the institute's director.
In all, the Twin Cities' 30,000 charter school students score 7.5 percentage points lower on math testing and 4.4 percent lower on reading tests than students at traditional public schools. But as Tim Post reported, charter school advocates weren't fazed all that much by the data because they believe their schools provide an important education alternative, especially to students who have long struggled academically.
