Unreasonable Doubt

Last week, the Boston Foundation released a study that indicates that Boston charter schools significantly outperform the city's traditional schools.  The study used the "gold standard" methodology known as "randomized assignment": they compared the performance of kids that got into charter schools via a lottery to those that lost the lottery and attended traditional public schools.  This experimental design should eliminate the non-observable differences between charter school kids and traditional public school kids.  The charter schools had much better results than traditional public schools.  Jay Greene wrote a good post on the study.

I reviewed the comments posted in response to the Boston Globe article on the study ("Charter schools grade highest").  Pro-charter comments outnumbered anti-charter comments by a 2 to 1 ratio.  The anti-charter comments focused on a few related claims (in order of frequency) in an effort to discount the results:

1. Charter schools have the ability to cherry-pick and/or expel students to lead to a more favorable population.
2. Charter schools have fewer special ed and/or ESL students.
3. Charter school parents are more involved in their child's education.

Of course, randomized assignment should eliminate the first-order effects of these claims.  The policy question, though, is whether or not to raise the charter cap in Boston which limits growth of these schools.  It seems unreasonable  to doubt the wisdom of such a move.  The Massachusetts Education Commissioner, not surprisingly, would prefer to ask more questions:

"The results of this study are both statistically significant and educationally important.  But they also open many further questions.  What is causing the differences in performance we see between Charters and Pilots?  What is it about Charter Schools that allows them to achieve such strong results, and how can their effective practices be more widely disseminated? ... When is more autonomy a good solution for improving student performance, and when might other strategies make more sense?"

Ridiculous.  Contact Governor Deval Patrick, " who has essentially put peace with the teachers unions over the proven potential of charters",  to let him know what you think.

Comments

[Macho]

I agree. What further proof does one need? The orginal charter schools were an experiment. The experiment worked. Allow more to be created. That simple.

But the only way that charter caps will be lifted is if we the voters get angry and express our anger to our elected state officials.