(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
After the release of the 2017 AzMerit, the Arizona Charter School Association reported that 97% of the top 100 Local Education Agencies (LEAs) in terms of percentage passing the English Language Arts AzMerit exams were charters. I decided to check out the data for myself.
This however may actually be “too much winning” given that most of the charter LEAs are individual schools, whereas a school district like Catalina Foothills is a multi-school district. I’ll let you ponder that holy mystery for yourself, but I ran the same numbers for individual campuses. The top 100 individual campuses were almost evenly split between districts and charters-51 district schools and 49 charters.
In 2012-13 (the last time NAPCS had data) charters only made up 24.5% of Arizona public schools, so it is plenty of winning to make up almost half of the top schools by ELA passing rate. I’m thrilled that scores continue to improve for both district and charter schools.
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