I am sure that test scores show that charter school students perform better than public school students, when raw scores are compared. But, in my opinion, those comparisons are close to meaningless. For a meaningful comparison, we would have to make sure that we are comparing charter schools to public schools that have similar demographics. There is no mention of the demographics in the admittedly limited media or other papers I have read.

This is why this issue is important. If two schools, one public and one charter, are opened in the same place, and it just turns out that the charter school attracts the better students, it is no wonder that the charter school will get better scores. How do we know that is not the explanation for what is happening?

And please don’t dismiss this thought by bringing up the fact that charter schools are legally required to accept anybody. Charter schools repeat this legal requirement, but they are silent about the real demographic facts, and that makes me think that probably they end up attracting the cream of the crop.

One possible explanation I have heard others give is that parents have to fill in application to be accepted to a charter school, and only parents who are supportive of their child’s education will do that, and hence charter schools are better because they end up attracting the students whose families are most supportive and hence are most likely to succeed.

Admittedly, this is all speculation. But if there is no real data about the demographics that charter schools end up attracting, talk about the superiority of the charter model is equally speculative. Enthusiastic and making for nice headlines, but speculative.

Do you know of any publication comparing the demographics of charter school and public schools? I would be interested in reading it. Like I said, I am a little ignorant of the topic and maybe I am barking at the wrong tree here.

I should also add that you referenced an interesting article on turnaround schools. I am close to a turnaround effort myself and I am very excited about all the new things we are going to do. I am also a big proponent of the use of data in education, and the data in the article was sobering. Thank you! I hope we can prove the conclusions of the article wrong.

Your point about aligning local curricula to state curricula is an important one, but I was a little disappointed that the data you bring up is quite old (for the period between 2003-2005). A lot of things have happened in education since then — 5 years in education is the equivalent of a whole geological era, though it would be hard to appreciate this point if you do not work in education. Plus, I don’t quite believe that in this day, 2010, districts are not aligning their curriculum anymore — they are too much under the gun not to do this. From what I see in my district, there is constant attention to this point, and from what I hear from colleagues in other districts they do likewise.