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Diane Ravitch -- Wrong on Charter Schools

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

Diane Ravitch has a new post full of criticisms of charter schools. Unfortunately, the arguments are unsupportable and contradictory.1. Ravitch has gone to the NAEP website and downloaded snapshots of how students in public charter schools scored compared to students in other public schools. She then concludes, "Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools."No, no, no. You cannot tell anything about how a given type of school is "performing" just by looking at a cross-section of its students' test scores -- without even attempting to take into account the students' backgrounds and previous test scores. And as I point out below, charter school students tend to arrive with somewhat lower test scores than average.2. Immediately after having praised other public schools for supposedly outperforming charters in student test scores, Ravitch pivots 180 degrees and criticizes charter schools for drawing off the "most successful" students and "disabl[ing]" the public schools!My beef with charter schools is that most skim the most motivated students out of the poorest communities, and many have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on November 28, 2009 (boomark / email).