Review Finds Studies of Charter Schools Flawed, Problematic
Most studies of charter schools use unsophisticated methods and are flawed in ways that prevent researchers from accurately gauging those institutions' impact on student achievement, a new review concludes.
And while researchers have options for collecting more accurate information about charter school performance, they also face obstacles along the way—some of them related to the unwillingness among states and schools to provide crucial data, the analysis finds.
A meta-analysis of charter school studies revealed that about 75 percent of them do not meet rigorous research standards because they don't account for the differences in academic background and academic histories of students attending charters, when comparing them with those attending traditional public schools, according to the review, published in the renowned journal Science. Those studies typically fail to "disentangle school quality from the preexisting achievement level," or student self-selection of schools, the article says.
The article was written by Julian R. Betts, a professor of economics at the University of
