CURMUDGUCATION: AEI: Comparing Public and Charter Schools

CURMUDGUCATION: AEI: Comparing Public and Charter Schools:

AEI: Comparing Public and Charter Schools

The folks at the American Enterprise Institute have released a study comparing charter schools to public schools. "Difference on Balance: National Comparisons of Charter and Traditional Public Schools" announces in its title that AEI continues to support the modern charter school industry (charter schools are not public schools in any meaningful way except their willingness to accept public tax dollars).

That said, a quick scan of the end notes shows a broad assortment of articles and even some studies not from the usual suspects. So this could be interesting. We should never pretend that AEI is anything but a huge fan of charter schools as a tool in the invisible hand of free market economics, but AEI is also, on the whole, one of the more intellectually rigorous thinky tanks in the biz. They may be working to sell reformster PR, but at least its not flimsy thin baloney PR, and after you've read a hundred or so of these things, you start to appreciate people who at least do a little homework and don't just base their "research" on five "reports" from their own organization.

At any rate, let's take a look at this thirty-two page paper. Once again (I believe this is the closest thing I have to a bloggy slogan) I've read it so that you don't have to. Here we go.

Our Author 

The paper is by Nat Malkus, a senior research analyst with AEI. From 2009 to 2015 he worked withAmerican Institutes for Research, the outfit that sounds like a research organization but is in the CURMUDGUCATION: AEI: Comparing Public and Charter Schools: