The bottom line on charter school studies
There has been a great deal written about the recent national study of charter schools by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, housed at Stanford University, but here’s the bottom line. This was written by Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center, located at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. He is the author of the 2008 book, “NeoVouchers: The Emergence of Tuition Tax Credits for Private Schooling.”
By Kevin Welner
Charter school policy is important. It’s worth arguing about. But those arguments can get a bit off-track and even ridiculous. Recently, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) released a national study of charter schools, the results of which suggest that less than one hundredth of one percent of the variation in test performance in reading is explainable by charter school enrollment. Yet based on this, CREDO issued a press release stating that “charter school students now have greater learning gains in reading than their peers in traditional public schools.” This conclusion was repeated in newspapers across the nation.
I hope that, upon reading such claims, readers immediately ask two questions: Is that