(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Regular Jayblog readers may recall the tizzy that some worked themselves into about Michigan charter schools after Betsy DeVos was nominated to serve as Secretary of Education. Oh they are horrible, terrible, no good, “Wild West” etc. Max Eden and others attempted to set the record straight, noting Credo studies and other evidence showing stronger performance for Michigan charters. Not everyone much cared to consider any of that evidence business, and rumors of horrible Michigan charter school performance linger on to this day.
Well it turns out that NAEP cohort gains reinforce the conclusions of the Credo study and two other studies finding positive charter results. Those look like respectable math gains and very strong reading gains for “the biggest school reform disaster in the country” to these eyes. NAEP cohort gains are not perfect or infallible measures, but they are pointing in the same direction as the studies. Moreover, cohort gains rank above merely looking at raw scores as measures of school quality, which is **ahem** precisely one of the mistakes that critics made.
If Michigan charters are a catastrophic failure, what are we to make of the majority of state education systems (aka the blue dots)? Maryland is getting nervous with all of this disaster talk. If Michigan charters are a reform disaster then the Maryland school system just might qualify as a non-reform post-nuclear zombie apocalypse extinction event.
Maryland need brainnnns…and SPF 50,000 sunscreen!
If Michigan’s charter school skeptics would like to take a crack at explaining the above data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the three studies showing positive results the comment section courteously awaits your visit. Otherwise the line to offer an apology to educators running Michigan charters and the students making academic progress in them forms to the left.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
I am neither proponent or opponent of charter schools. Simply trying to understand the comments.
As I recall, one criticism of BDV was that her money did nothing via charters for Detroit kids. So, if there are charges/countercharges, readers need to see the list of Detroit charters in a study or in all studies under discussion (not the number of all Michigan charters or a random/selected subset) and the comparison with district scores (which districts?) in reading and math (not percentages) in the same years for which NAEP test scores are given. If methodologies for selecting comparison schools are critical to understand, that comes afterwards. We also need to know how many kids are in these studies in the grades examined, and at what grade level.
http://educationnext.org/the-data-on-detroit/
I have nothing against charter schools, but I take serious offense to anyone who accepts their actual student achievement as acceptable by any means.
The Credo report does show Detroit charters having better student achievement than the traditional public schools. But the charter school
Kids lose only 9 months per year compared to their peers, versus 12 months loss in the traditional public schools.
Charter schools are NOT teaching Detroit kids to read, write and do math anywhere close to grade level.
Shame on everyone arguing in favor or against charter schools. Start arguing for kids.
Michigan should pass HB 4192 modeled after MA pre-Common Core where ALL kids, black-white, Rich-poor, boy-girl started learning.
So states have been busily revising their standards and tests and Michigan is free to do as much of that as they want. I’m not sure which Credo study you are making reference to, but Max Eden’s review stated: “Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that ‘charter students in Detroit gain over three months per year more than their counterparts at traditional public schools.’ This means that the charter school students were learning at a faster rate, not by my reading that they were declining at a slower rate. This interpretation would also square with the NAEP data.
I have not claimed that Detroit charters have acceptable levels of academic achievement, but rather that cohort NAEP gains are a better indicator of school quality than raw scores and that the most recent data shows that they perform relatively well by that measure, and that this data is consistent with the findings of three empirical studies of state scores.
Shame on everyone arguing in favor or against charter schools. Start arguing for kids.
Shame on everyone arguing for or against roads. Argue for good transportation!
Shame on everyone arguing for or against penicillin. Argue for good health!
Shame on everyone arguing for or against the telephone. Argue for good communication!
By the way, Michigan has Common Core, still. Ms DeVos did Support Common Core and her advocacy group, GLEP, were active lobbyists in Support. She has done nothing to help Michigan get rid of CC or the absurd CC aligned onerous aligned State assessments.
This post misses some important things. On thing is that MI schools are pretty near the bottom of the barrel when compared to other states. Another thing is, if the charts included here are correct, the improvements in math are hardly on the scale, and for reading are still extremely small, relatively speaking. Given how charter schools operate, I would expect the performance to BLOW traditional public school performance out of the water. Not happening. Maybe one problem is because charter schools are still public schools operating under the poor standards, tests and policies forced on them from the Feds and the State. We need to pass HB 4192 NOW so we can have proven educational methods and local control.
Michigan’s NAEP scores are available here:
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile/overview/MI?cti=PgTab_OT&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=MI&fs=Grade&st=MN&year=2015R3&sg=Gender%3A+Male+vs.+Female&sgv=Difference&ts=Single+Year&tss=2015R3-2015R3&sfj=NP
I would not describe these results as near the bottom of the barrel, but they are certainly not as good as you would hope. As for the chart in the post, the math gains look pretty typical and the reading gains look strong compared to state gains. If the Credo conclusion of an extra three months of gains per year does not strike you as good enough, I’m wondering just how many extra months per year it takes-6, 12, 24?
If it’s not a panacea, it’s worthless. Didn’t you get the memo?