Blowback on charter schools

Diana Jean Schemo’s New York Times front-pager on Tuesday about an American Federation of Teachers report claiming that charter schools are underperformers compared to public schools has caused Laura at the (newly moved) Apartment 11D to despair:

I am disappointed. I could easily imagine that alternative schools would attract some talented, younger teachers. What is going wrong? Are these alternative schools just attracting faculty who don’t like supervision?

One possibility is that — contrary to the fears of skeptics — it turns out that charter schools do not merely skim the public student body’s cream of the crop. As Harvard researchers Will Howell, Paul Peterson, and Martin West point out in their Wall Street Journal op-ed: “These results could easily indicate nothing other than the simple fact that charter schools are typically asked to serve problematic students in low-performing districts with many poor, minority children.” Here’s the graphical presentation:

Another problem with the AFT study — it provides only a snapshot of performance, without any trend line. Even the Times story observes:

One previous study, however, suggests that tracking students over time might present findings more favorable to the charter movement. Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, who conducted a two-year study of 569 charter schools in 10 states found that while charter school students typically score lower on state tests, over time they progress at faster rates than students in traditional public schools.

Here’s a link to an extract from that report. For more links/critiques of the AFT study, see Mickey Kaus, Matthew Yglesias, Stuart Buck, and Andy Rotherham(here, here, and here). Shame on the Times — and its editorial board, for that matter — for buying the AFT spin hook, line and sinker. One interesting puzzle, however. The Times story says the American Federation of Teachers “has historically supported charter schools.” Rotherham says, “how long can the AFT continue to trade on the notion that all this is more in sorrow than anger? They just don’t like charter schools….” My instinct is to side with Rotterham, but I really don’t know which assertion is correct. UPDATE: Robert Tagorda provides some clues. ANOTHER UPDATE: Brennan Stout tips me to yesterday’s Chicago Tribune editorial, which has some issues with the AFT study:

Much of the previous research on charter schools, which operate free of most of the regulations governing neighborhood schools, suggests that charters tend to attract lower-performing students in the first place. These data only seem to support that. “Any parent who has a kid in a school who’s doing great and is learning a lot, is happy and is scoring high on standardized tests probably isn’t going to take him out of his regular school and put him in a charter school,” says Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, who has conducted several studies on charter schools. The AFT analysis unfortunately glosses over a central difference between charter and neighborhood schools: their missions. In Chicago, for instance, North Lawndale College Prep posts lousy standardized test scores; yet because its focus is on college attendance, an astonishing 85 percent of graduates go on to higher education. Triumphant Charter School was created specifically to educate failing middle school children. The most difficult students are recruited from neighborhood schools, and teachers there are only too happy to hand them over. So of course Triumphant students also post dismal test scores, compared to state averages. But their overall gains in reading and math usually exceed those of the neighborhood schools that sent them, and attendance is better, too…. Some of the most intriguing data about charter schools can’t be measured by standardized tests. It’s the number of children on waiting lists, hoping to get into charter schools. In Chicago, that list has gotten so long most charters have stopped actively recruiting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chester Finn, the charter school advocate quoted in the Times piece bemoaning the low scores of chater schools, blasts the underlying story line here.