Sub-par options: Charter schools as a class don't measure up
Now that the test scores for Pennsylvania charter schools have been recalculated, parents and taxpayers will be able to make more of an apples-to-apples comparison with the performance of traditional public schools.
Until the U.S. Department of Education stepped in last year, charter schools in the state were evaluated under a less rigorous method, as if they were school districts and not individual schools. With that formula, 77 of the 144 brick-and-mortar charter schools, 53 percent, achieved Adequate Yearly Progress on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests in 2012. One of the 12 online charters, 8 percent, reached the same standard.
But the Pennsylvania School Boards Association filed a formal objection, justifiably, to DOE in October, arguing that the state Education Department should calculate charter schools' compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act the same way it does for traditional schools. The PSBA won the case, and after Pennsylvania re-ran the numbers using the other formula the
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