Today’s K-W-H-L Chart

by Robert Pondiscio
January 7th, 2009

Posted in Education News | 3 Comments »

What We Know

Maryland narrowly edged out Massachusetts in “key indicators of student success” in this year’s Quality Counts report from Education Week, which focuses on ELLs….L.A. schools could lay off 2,300 teachers due to a budget gap of $250 million….A six-year-old boy in Virginia wanted to go to school so badly Monday that when he missed the bus, he drove himself in his mother’s car.  Over ten miles, in heavy traffic, at high speeds.  He finally crashed but was unhurt, and started walking to school after the cops pulled him out of the car.

What We Want to Find Out

How will Michelle Rhee’s proposal to have more students suspensions served in school be received?  She’s scheduled a series of public meetings….A study has demonstrated that people feel better when they watch TV, notes blogger Stephen Broyles. Can the same thing be true of reading?….”Helicopter parents” are to America as WHAT are to Japan?….Remember in third grade when the smart-alecky kid next to you offered you a piece of “ABC gum?”  A British company is selling ABC pencils, supposedly as a way to enhance student concentration.  They’re joking, right?

What We Learned

Pittsburgh school officials will not walk away from their policy of giving no grade lower than 50 on classwork, homework or grading periods….Kelly Vaughan, web editrix at Gotham School, has decided to return to the classroom. She’s teaching 8th grade earth science at a Harlem, NY charter school….D-Ed Reckoning is back! After nearly two months of radio silence, Ken DeRosa’s blog has good posts on problems with gifted education and “21st Century skills.”…Bridging Diferences is also back from hiatus.  Diane Ravitch says colleges are “hooked on remediation.”

How We Can Learn More

This week’s Carnival of Education, a compilation of the best ed blog posts of the past week, is up.

Charter School Achievement: Case Closed?

by Robert Pondiscio
January 7th, 2009

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Education News, Research and Reports | 16 Comments »

Charter schools in Boston are “significantly outperforming” both traditional public schools and the city’s “pilot schools,” according to new data from researchers at Harvard and MIT.  The study, conducted for the Boston Foundation, examined state standardized test scores for students of similar backgrounds over a four-year period at three kinds of schools — charters, public schools and so-called pilot schools, which embrace innovative practices like charters, but are still within the public school system.  “The findings could present a setback for Governor Deval Patrick’s education overhaul,” the Boston Globe notes, ”which seeks to emulate pilot schools around the state while resisting calls for more charter schools.”  But here’s the real grabber:

The study stands apart from volumes of other research produced over the more than decadelong debate over charter schools by including a section that compared the performance of students at the charter and pilot schools to students who entered the lottery to attend those schools but did not get in. This was an attempt to dispel the perception that charter schools perform well in comparative studies because they generally attract more academically-motivated students and parents – not necessarily because they have better teaching methods.

Paging Jennifer Jennings!  Last month, Eduwonkette foresaw a new round of “Charter Wars” over data.  “The only defensible approach here is to compare students who entered the charter lottery and won with those who entered the lottery and lost,” she wrote.  Case closed?  Like Jennings, I’ve long believed that charters benefit from a selection advantage (and I have no problem with that whatsoever), attracting students from more motivated families, regardless of their achievement level.  This study appears to indicate that even when you account for that selection bias, charters still outperform other kinds of schools. 

Nelson Smith, head of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, used the data to call on Governor Deval Patrick and Massachusetts legislators, “in the strongest possible terms, to lift the caps on public charter schools this coming legislative session.”

Update:  Eduwonkette answers the Batphone.  She sees ”enough positive evidence here to support the creation of more charter schools in Boston,” but with two caveats.