Arkansas charter schools are not producing the same gains in reading and math as charter schools in other states, a new study from researchers at Stanford University shows.
The results surprised the researchers because in a similar 2009 study, Arkansas charter-school students showed gains in reading and math when the national trend showed that charter-school students did not perform as well in reading and math as their peers in traditional public schools.
State Board of Education Chairman Brenda Gullett said charters are intended as a laboratory to test educational strategies that traditional public schools can use. Instead, most charter schools in Arkansas show similar performance as the schools around them.
“I’ve been very disappointed,” she said. “We feel like for all of the trouble and expense of a charter, we were hoping to see much more dramatic results.”
Arkansas is undergoing changes in the process for awarding, amending and revoking charters. In the spring,state lawmakers passed Act 509, making the Arkansas Department of Education the primary authority for charter schools, instead of the state Board of Education, said Mary Perry, coordinator of the department’s charter and home-school office. The law goes into effect in August.
The law directs Commissioner Tom Kimbrell to establish a panel to make decisions about charter schools, but the decisions can be appealed to the state board, Perry said.
Perry said the Stanford University report provide some perspective of the performance of charter schools in the state, but a larger examination is needed using more sources of data. The state currently has 18 open-enrollment charter schools.
The National Charter School Study for 2013 shows that charter schools nationwide advanced the learning gains of students more than traditional public schools in reading and that learning gains of charter-school students were similar in math.
“The charter sector is improving,” said Margaret “Macke” Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford, which does the study. “The level of improvement is noteworthy given that it’s only been a few years.”
State policies affect the achievement of charter schools, Raymond said. In 2009, the study focused on charter schools in 16 states. Part of this year’s study included analysis of how those 16 states fared, and showed that 8 percent of charters evaluated in 2009 closed.
A summary of the findings states that the charter sector’s improvement is not because existing schools have made dramatic gains, but because higher-performing charter schools have opened and under performing charter schools have closed.
“The ability to close schools is an important feature of charter school authorization,” Raymond said.
READING, MATH
A majority of the states on average showed significantly stronger growth in reading, but 11 states, including Arkansas, showed weaker or similar growth.
In math, 12 states showed stronger growth than traditional public schools, while 13 states, including Arkansas, showed weaker growth and two states showed similar growth.
Raymond said the center has not done a study focused solely on Arkansas charter schools, but she hopes to do more research this year.
Charter-school students are still learning, but overall in Arkansas, they are not learning as much as their peers in traditional public schools, said James “Lynn” Woodworth, a quantitative research analyst for the Center for Research on Education Outcomes.
Woodworth is a native of Harrison and taught in Mansfield for 11 years. He received a doctorate from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in May. He began working for the center in August.
Scores from low-performing charter schools that closed within the past several years would have factored into the overall results for Arkansas, Woodworth said.
“The reality is not all charter schools are good,” he said. “Not all charter schools are bad. There’s a lot of variation in quality. When charters are low-performing, they get closed. When traditional public schools are low-performing, they don’t get closed.”
1.5 MILLION STUDENTS
For the study, researchers analyzed the demographics and math and reading scores on state tests for more than 1.5 million charter-school students in 25 states, plus the District of Columbia and New York City, which were treated as separate states, according to a summary of the report.
Researchers matched individual charter students with multiple students attending traditional public schools with similar observable characteristics and beginning test scores, Woodworth said. The matching process provided for a larger sample size and lessens the effect of other factors in student progress, such as poverty or individual motivation.
The center has gotten some criticism of its research methods from the Center for Education Reform in Washington, D.C. The Center for Education Reform in a written response to the report said the comparisons of student success across state lines ignores the reality of varying state tests.
The Center for Education Reform also questioned the Stanford study’s claim that closure of low-performing schools leads to better academic gains for the entire charter sector. School closure should not be a long term strategy, it said.
Gary Ritter, director of the Off ice of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said his office has found some charter schools, such as the LISA Academy charter schools and KIPP Delta Public Schools, do as well or better than nearby traditional public schools.
“Many of our charter schools compared to like students are doing as good if not better than schools within the state,” Ritter said. “We’d like to see the state as a whole make leaps.”
Raymond advises parents to weigh the academic performance of charter schools when they are considering a switch.
“There has been a big focus in the last few years on the importance of quality in the charter-school sector,” Raymond said. “Funders, authorizers and charter-school operators are more sensitized to the need for quality in the sector.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 06/26/2013