Why U-Ark's Charter School Philanthropy Study Is Just Wrong
One of the more annoying things about discussing and debating education policy is seeing how misconceptions are born. You can often trace an incorrect notion from a think tank's brief to a reformy "analyst" who only read the press release and wouldn't understand the methods section (if there is one) anyway. That supposed "expert" than passes it to the larger punditocracy, who think it's a good idea to write about many things shallowly, rather than regularly inviting actual experts to opine in their stead.
People like me then bang our heads against our keyboards when we read something in the media that's just not true. If we're obsessive (*ahem*), we trace the idea back to its origin (which often requires detective work, as pundits love to spew "facts" without actually saying where they came from), where it's either found to be the product of misinterpretation, or just plain wrong at the source.
Case in point:
We got a few stories last month about how charter schools don't really get all that much philanthropic revenue. "Analysts" tell their readers that people like me are just blowing smoke when we point out that philanthropic giving is a great help to certain charter operators and should be taken into account when ill-informed pundits decide to write stories about those charters' jewel-like shine.
The genesis of this notion that charitable giving to charters doesn't matter is a report by the University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform (yes, there really is such a thing, I swear). "Buckets of Water Into The Ocean: Non-Public Revenue in Public Charter and Traditional Public Schools" is the latest in a series of briefs from U-Ark that purport to show that, compared to public district schools, charters are barely scratching by on a fraction of the revenue their host districts rake in.
When U-Ark released an updated report on this topic in 2014, Bruce Baker* took it apart in a definitive brief for the National Education Policy Center. Baker's work speaks for itself, and I won't try to encapsulate it all. But there are, according to his brief, at least three big problems with U-Ark's methods:
1) U-Ark compares per pupil revenue in charters with per pupil revenue in districts -- statewide. This is just plain old dumb. Charters are largely clustered in urban areas, and schools there should not be compared to schools across an entire state, including suburban and rural schools. The student populations are not the same, and the revenues are not the - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-u-arks-charter-philanthropy-study.html#sthash.4Yk7xCbI.dpuf