Jersey Jazzman: Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part II

Jersey Jazzman: Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part II:

Charter Schools, An Exchange: Part II

In Part I of this series, I invited Dmitri Mehlhorn, a well-known advocate for charter schools and other education "reforms," to comment on charter schools and make the case for his point of view. What follows is my reply; I'd urge you to read Dmitri's essay first to get the full context of my reply.


First of all, Dmitri, thank you for agreeing to this exchange. I'm going to try to keep the tone civil here -- but I'm afraid I'm also going to be rather blunt.

Your essay is, in many ways, a perfect example of "reform" thinking. Almost everything you say is factually correct; however, you are so selective in your citations, and so lacking in context when discussing them, that you arrive at conclusions that simply are not warranted.

These are the points I'm going to address from your essay:

• The CREDO studies provide little evidence of a practical positive effect of charter schools on student learning in the aggregate. They also provide little evidence that the charter sector as a whole has been improving over the last six years.
• There is little evidence to support any contention that the limited econometric research into a few charter school chains can be generalized to the entire sector.
• The lottery study you cite (I assume Angrist, Cohodes, Dynarski, Pathak, & Walters, 2013), like all charter lottery studies, is limited to the population of students who enter the lottery. Further, "being a charter school" is NOT the only treatment.
• The research I assume you cite from Mathematica on Achievement First and Uncommon shows they serve different student populations than their feeder schools, with fewer students with special needs (SWSN) and fewer Limited

- See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/10/charter-schools-exchange-part-ii.html#sthash.1g8wSKgF.dpuf