Is Race to the Top Prompting a Rush to Judgment on Charter Schools?

Aug 10, 2010

Authors: admin

Publisher(s): The Century Foundation

New Report Released by TCF and EPI Reviews Evidence of a Flawed Study and other Mixed Results on Charter School Effectiveness.

Six of the 19 finalists announced in the second round of the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top competition raised or eliminated caps on charter schools in order to improve their chances of winning up to $700 million through the controversial competition for federal money to help states overhaul their education systems. The Obama administration strongly supports expanding charter schools, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made clear at the beginning of the process a year ago when he said that states that limited the growth of charter schools would jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top Fund. But is the race to increase charter schools prompting a rush to judgment about their effectiveness?

A new issue brief released today by The Century Foundation and the Economic Policy Institute reviews a critical analysis of one study that appears to show remarkable results of charter school education, and points to other studies that would call into question the broad claims of success by charter school advocates. “False Impressions: How a Widely Cited Study Vastly Overstates the Benefits of Charter Schools” summarizes a critique of a study of New York charter schools conducted by Stanford University professor Caroline Hoxby and her colleagues Sonali Murarka and Jenny Kang, published in 2009.

In the study, “How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement,” Hoxby and her colleagues make the headline-grabbing assertion that, on average, for students that attended from kindergarten through grade eight, New York City charter schools could close the “Scarsdale-Harlem gap”—that is, the achievement gap between students in Harlem and students in the much more affluent suburb of Scarsdale—by 66 percent in English and 86 percent in math. But Hoxby’s colleague at Stanford, Sean Reardon, an education researcher and expert in social sciences methodology, scrutinized Hoxby’s report and uncovered serious design flaws in the study. Reardon’s analysis largely undercuts the claims of dramatic gains that have attracted so much media attention.

Reardon found that there was a flaw in the way the study was designed that destroyed the randomization of its sample of students who attended charter schools versus regular public schools. He also found that the annual achievement gains were not totaled properly, which could lead to an overestimation of the academic gains observed between fourth and eighth grades by as much as 50 percent. Other concerns with the study are as follows:

• It is likely that several ineffective charter schools are not included in the study’s findings.
• The model used by Hoxby would give more weight in its estimations to the academic performance of students in heavily oversubscribed—and, therefore, most effective—charter schools.
• The study lacks key factors, such as sufficiently detailed information about the students who participated in the lotteries that served as Hoxby’s sample, the schools that charter students would have attended if not lotteried-in, and the proportions at which lotteried-in and lotteried-out students remain in their respective schools. Without more information about the sources of Hoxby’s data, it remains unclear what conclusions these data suggest.

The issue brief also points to other charter school studies that show mixed results for charter school effectiveness. It concludes that Reardon’s review of the Hoxby study and a survey of other charter school studies should serve as a warning to policy makers and educators about rushing to judgment about charter schools’ effects. More information and investigation is needed. And although it is likely that charter schools will still show a positive effect on student achievement, the estimated effect is likely to be much smaller and more ambiguous than studies such as Hoxby’s would suggest.

“False Impressions: How a Widely Cited Study Vastly Overstates the Benefits of Charter Schools,” was written by Marco Basile, a researcher at The Century Foundation. It is available for download on the websites of The Century Foundation and the Economic Policy Institute .