By Rick

September 21, 2006 5:54 PM | Link to this

A new report from the Buckeye Institute, Using the Ohio Proficiency Test to Analyze the Academic Achievement of Charter School Students: 2002-2004, found, when schools are judged by how much children actually add to their knowledge base, students in charter schools learn more, and at a faster rate, than those in traditional public schools. Our evaluation of traditional and charter schools used the Ohio Proficiency Test (OPT). The test: how well did each type of school do in improving the percentage of its students who passed all or part of the OPT? By asking this question, we were able to identify how much value charter schools added to the educational achievements of their students. While media reports that charter schools are not performing well may be consistent with the anti-charter bias of teacher unions and government school superintendents, they are incomplete and even inaccurate. That’s because defenders of the status quo have committed an analytical error. They compare raw passage rates of community and traditional schools, disconnected from the context of changes over time. This kind of analysis is wrong. Such raw comparisons provide no useful insight into the success—or failure— of either charter schools or traditional public schools. Many charter schools only serve high school dropouts and other targeted groups with special needs. Of course these schools are more likely to have low passing rates and therefore show up on the Academic Emergency list. Remember, they serve kids who face the greatest struggles of all, some great enough to force them from traditional public schools. Certainly, we want to hold charter schools accountable for performance. But simply looking at pass rates on proficiency tests for a given year is a dubious exercise at best. We analyzed the gains in passing rates on the OPT for both traditional schools and charter schools located in the Big Eight urban districts. Looking at OPT results between 2002 and 2004, and controlling for demographic factors in the student populations, we found that: Ohio’s charter schools made greater gains than traditional, government-run schools on five subsections of the Ohio Proficiency Test: 4th grade Citizenship, Math, Reading, and Writing, and 6th grade Writing. There were no statistically significant differences between traditional and charter schools on five other tests: 4th grade Science and 6th grade Citizenship, Math, Reading, and Science. In all cases charter schools performed as well or better than traditional public schools.