Data and thoughts on public and private school funding in the U.S.
UARK Study Shamelessly (& Knowingly) Uses Bogus Measures to Make Charter Productivity Claims
Posted on July 22, 2014
Any good study of the relative productivity and efficiency of charter schools compared to other schools (if such comparisons were worthwhile to begin with) would require precise estimates of comparable financial inputs and outcomes as well as the conditions under which those inputs are expected to yield outcomes.
The University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform has just produced a follow up to theirprevious analysis in which they proclaimed boldly that charter schools are desperately uniformly everywhere and anywhere deprived of thousands of dollars per pupil when compared with their bloated overfunded public district counterparts (yes… that’s a bit of a mis-characterization of their claims… but closer than their bizarre characterization of my critique).
I wrote a critique of that report pointing out how they had made numerous bogus assumptions and ill-conceived, technically inept comparisons which in most cases dramatically overstated their predetermined, handsomely paid for, but shamelessly wrong claims.
That critique is here: http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/ttruarkcharterfunding.pdf
The previous report proclaiming dreadful underfunding of charter schools leads to the low hanging fruit opportunity to point out that even if charter schools have close to the same test scores as district schools – and do so for so00000 much less money – they are therefore far more efficient. And thus, the nifty new follow up report on charter school productivity – or on how it’s plainly obvious that policymakers get far more for the buck from charters than from those bloated, UARK Study Shamelessly (& Knowingly) Uses Bogus Measures to Make Charter Productivity Claims | School Finance 101:
