A Warning Sign for the Charter School Movement
CREDO report co-author Kenneth Surratt and Bob Peterson, founding editor of Rethinking Schools and 5th grade teacher, talked on Democracy Now! about CREDO's latest report on charter schools. The report that found that, on average, students in charter schools were not faring as well as students in traditional public schools - particularly black and latin@ students.
Independent studies of charter schools show that they might not be quite the silver bullet people think they are.
A report just released by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University analyzed data from more than 2,400 charter schools in 16 states, including Georgia. The CREDO report found that students in charter schools, as a whole, are "not faring as well as students in traditional public schools."
Only one in six charter schools - 17 percent - had academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their public school counterparts. Nearly half of the charter schools - 46 percent - showed no significant difference between the performance of their students and public school students.
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Other studies have shown similar results for charter school performance.
An analysis of test data by the U.S. Education Department during the administration of George W. Bush showed that charter school students generally did not perform as well as those in regular public schools. The federal study said charter students scored significantly lower than regular public school students in math, while in reading there was no statistically significant difference.
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