Don’t Trust Charters More than a Sweaty Used Car Salesman (A Citizen Research Template)
Recently I have noticed a new snare from charter cheerleaders. Their approach is for them to ask you to tell them which charters school you love/like. This is a clever trap. My response is, “Why don’t you tell me the worst offenders on the issues of equity and access and tell me which ones we should close?” Then wait for the pregnant silence.
How do you evaluate a charter school? Should the only consideration be test scores?… or a school’s marketing brochures?… self-reported college application and acceptance rate? Or maybe we should be okay with a particular corporate charter they are just the “it” school in the media and for foundations this year. In most states there is data readily available to assess charter schools. In fact, this blog was created two years ago to respond to KIPP press release about a peer reviewed study that took issue with African American student attrition out of KIPP and other charters in Texas. Someone recently brought to my attention that back in March KIPP again responded to the study due to this editorial that was eventually published in the San Antonio Express News. Their response was that it was “biased” data. How data provided by the state of Texas via a public information request can be “biased” is still eluding me. But data is power, and so I hope to encourage citizens via this blog post to do their homework.
In the 2014 NEPC Teach For America (TFA) brief we created a citizen research template to empower communities to study and evaluate TFA in each community. Because I often received requests from across Texas and the nation about various charters, I wanted to create a citizen research template to assess charter schools. This will be a work in progress— I don’t expect that this post will get it perfectly right. However, as a first draft I want to put together a list of research questions that citizens can ask to obtain qualitative and quantitative data to assess any charter school. Your can collect personally and obtain from federal and state data that may or may not contradict a charter schools’ “internal” data. Similar to the TFA research template, I believe it is important to verify charters’ “internal” data independently via federal or state data sources that are typically readily available online or via Freedom of Information requests. Because I loved his piece so much, many of the equity and access questions are based onKevin Welner’s Dirty Dozen.
Charter Citizen Research Template
Achievement
- What is the college success rate of graduates? (not applications or entrance, but completion of first year and Don’t Trust Charters More than a Sweaty Used Car Salesman (A Citizen Research Template) | Cloaking Inequity: