The Import of the CREDO Charter School Study
by Frederick M. Hess • Jul 8, 2013 at 11:08 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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The new national charter school study by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has attracted enormous, well-deserved attention. It provides by far the most comprehensive look to date at charter school outcomes. Representing a heroic effort to wrestle with the enormous complexities of studying charter school performance across more than two dozen states, the CREDO team has drawn notice for its remarkable effort and even-handed presentation of the data. That presentation, of course, notes that charter school performance has improved dramatically since CREDO's previous 2009 study.
In 2009, CREDO reported that charter students performed somewhat worse in reading and substantially worse in math than their district school counterparts. Now, in 2013, CREDO finds that charter students perform somewhat better in reading and about the same in math as their district counterparts. CREDO finds this remarkable shift to be due both to improvement in existing charter schools and to the fact that the poorest-performing charters are being systematically shuttered. This points to the critical role of charter school authorizers and the tremendous work that Greg Richmond, head of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), has done in carrying the banner for more rigorous charter accountability (full disclosure: I sit on the NACSA board of directors).
But I'll let others wade into the details of the CREDO analysis. The point I want to emphasize is a broader
